Joe Biden’s Oval Office speech Wednesday, July 24th, was more powerful than those who hate him may realize. It was powerful for a simple reason: it focused on the importance of four forgotten American virtues: truth, character, decency and democracy. It was a speech about what Joe Biden ran on in 2019, saving the soul of
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There is a sudden movement in the Western World to take smartphones away from kids. It started in the summer of 2022 when social psychologist Jonathan Haidt at New York University, the father of two adolescents, was writing a book about what he called “the pervasive negative effects of the internet and social media on
We are living in a radically different America than the one we lived in last week. On Monday, July 1st, the Supreme Court rewrote the constitution to say that a president who commits criminal acts while in office may be immune from prosecution. Meanwhile, for years, the right has said that Joe Biden is old,
The headline in a CNN story that appeared a little after noon on Wednesday, June 26th, was brutal: “Children are dying of starvation in their parents’ arms as famine spreads through Gaza.” The details were heartbreaking. One nine year old boy, said CNN, is “clearly wasted from severe malnutrition and suffering from dehydration. His blue
On Tuesday, June 18th, a new word showed up in the vocabulary of the Middle-East war: “inevitable.” Nearly every expert in Israel from the country’s military leaders to its newsletter writers said that an all-out war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah was inevitable. And who is Hezbollah? Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah is a part of Iran’s “Axis
On Wednesday June 12th something frightening happened. The Russian Northern Fleet naval group completed “precision missile weapons” drills East of the Florida Keys, within easy nuclear missile distance of the United States. Then the four ships of mass destruction sailed to Cuba, only 106 miles from the beaches of Florida, anchored at Havana Harbor and were
In the wake of Covid, are Americans losing their minds? Sort of. We are going crazy for animal stories. Why? It could be because stories of insanity among humans are just too hard for us to take. In the Associated Press’s list of the 31 oddest stories of the week, fully 16—more than half—were tales about
Hamas’ strategy of using civilians as human shields is working. The biggest stories in Gaza War news in the last few days have centered on two purported Israeli strikes in Rafah killing civilians. On Sunday May 26th Israel dropped two small 37-pound bombs to kill two Hamas leaders. These pinpoint bombs killed precisely the leaders they were
The Internet has been under constant attack for the last 20 years as the source of all of our emotional woes, from depression, cyberbullying, and suicide to negative body image. The anti-Internet attack has been so fierce that nine states have tried to ban social media access for kids under sixteen or to require the
The standard story in the Western media right now is that Israel has proposed a ceasefire deal that American Secretary of State Anthony Blinken calls “extraordinarily generous.” And that is true. The Israeli deal proposes to give up over a thousand Palestinian prisoners—in many cases men who have murdered Israelis—in exchange for only 40 hostages. For
A story broke in Newsweek magazine April 10th claiming that a study in a high prestige medical journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA Psychiatry, revealed that teenagers who spend a lot of time playing video games and who use their computers heavily are more likely to have a psychotic episode. In the study Newsweek was reporting on, seven researchers in
What started as a marketing gimmick may have revealed something important about your happiness. True Lemon is a product created in Baltimore in 2003 to put the flavor of a lemon slice into a powder that you can pour into your drink. True Lemon is what its creator, David Schleider, calls a “water enhancer.” To
Taiwan’s defense chief, Chiu Kuo-cheng, has revealed that American troops are permanently stationed in Taiwan. Our soldiers are there to train Taiwan’s military in the use of things like drones. However, some of those troops are less than two miles from China’s border. A headline in London’s The Express warns that this puts the “world”
The TikTok issue is one of the biggest damned if you do, damned if you don’t problems on America’s agenda. On April 14, 2023, nearly a year ago, Montana became the first state to try to ban TikTok, but a US District Judge put a temporary halt to the ban, saying it “oversteps state power,”
Nikki Haley competed against Donald Trump in primaries in 29 states and territories over the last five months and won only in two—Vermont and Washington, DC. So, Wednesday morning, March 6th, Haley gave a speech suspending her campaign. Haley’s words mark a profound change in the Republican party and in America’s kind of politics. In her
There is a fight in America between those who want Russia to win its loathsome war in Ukraine and those who want Russia to lose. The top cheer leader for a Russian victory is former President Donald Trump. Mr. Trump controls the Republicans in Congress. A bill to give $38 billion to Ukraine has passed
On Tuesday, February 20, at 1:54 pm, an American Airlines flight took off from Albuquerque’s International Sunport headed for Chicago, a three-hour flight away. Roughly half an hour into the flight, a passenger, Emma Ritz, says that a man whose seat was next to the emergency exit “cracked open the window that was protecting the
CNN announced on Wednesday January 24th in a headline that “The US and Iran are dangerously close to confrontation in the Middle East.” To support their point, CNN listed where America and Iran operate. First they focused on areas where Iran’s proxy armies are on the attack. The list of these nations is disturbing: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen,
“The Korean peninsula is dashing toward the cliff of a nuclear war,” says the North Korean government publication Rodong Sinmun. Here’s why. For 73 years, the goal of North Korea has been to swallow South Korea in a “peaceful reunification.” On Monday, January 15th, that changed. Forty-year-old North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un gave a speech
England’s Morrisons, a 470-store British supermarket chain, has tried something innovative but disturbing. In a few of its stores over the Christmas season, it installed a robotic intrusion detector designed to act as a night watchman on construction sites, in mines, and on farms. Morrisons tried this machine to detect, not trespassers, but shoplifters. The robotic