Author: Marc Jampole

In a New York Times Op/Ed column, Daniel Callahan, co-founder of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institution, questions the wisdom of extending human life. Callahan rightfully calls aging “a public issue with social consequences” and mentions two of the ramifications of more people living into old age: 1) More medical costs for society; 2) […]

Read More… from So-called bioethicist would rather see people die than change society

The latest statistics demonstrate that New York City’s Draconian stop-and-frisk policy has not been the cause for a precipitous drop in the rate of violent crime in the five boroughs. Even after NYC’s finest curtailed stop-and-frisk without cause, crime rates continued to plummet. I’ve been meaning for some time to analyze why crime rates have […]

Read More… from What is the biggest cause in the drop in crime rates?

Right-wing factotum Doug Altner, an analyst with the Ayn Rand Institute, poses a provocative question in a Forbes article: If Wal-Mart is such a crappy place to work, why do 1.4 million Americans work there and many more want to? It’s the type of question that extreme free-marketers love to ask, because it assumes that […]

Read More… from Ayn Rand Institute factotum tries to convince us Wal-Mart pays its employees enough

The amazing thing about the diversity of manufactured food offerings in food stores and restaurants is the degree to which the proliferation of new food products leaves everything tasting the same: half salty and half sweet. For one thing, there’s the sauce inflation at national chains for what is called “casual dining.”  You know, Applebees, […]

Read More… from Dunkin’ Donuts adds both extra sugar and salt to new hot chocolate-flavored concoction

In the past week, both Eduardo Porter, a left-leaning columnist from the New York Times and Hendrik Hertzberg, a centrist-looking-left columnist at the New Yorker have advocated nuclear power as the necessary bridge to solar and wind power. Both writers use the same arguments: We can’t produce enough energy—by which they mean electricity—by solar and […]

Read More… from Pro-nuclear journalists nuke mainstream news media; fall-out is wasted time in addressing global warming

Two stories floating around the news media lately both make me want to shake the principal actors and yell in their faces, “Raise wages and you’ll solve the problem.” The first story involves Wal-Mart’s latest embarrassment—employees in it Canton, Ohio store organized a Thanksgiving food drive for fellow workers.  This act of charity—by and for […]

Read More… from What do Wal-Mart and Arne Duncan have in common? Neither understands that it’s all about the wages

In the tsunami of stories about the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, no one yet has observed that JFK was one of the first and finest examples of manipulation of the mass media to elect a major candidate. In 1956, Kennedy was a back-bench Senator known for little else than […]

Read More… from In our adulation of the dead JFK, let’s not forget almost every myth about him is false

We’re seeing a very rare media trend this fall. Story after story in the style, living, home and even business sections of newspapers and websites are advising people to imitate individuals who aren’t famous and don’t earn a lot of money, maybe $30,000 to $57,000 a year. The envied group we’re supposed to imitate consists […]

Read More… from How often does mass media exhort public to imitate people who aren’t rich?

Michelle Goldberg puts a lot of facts together to reach her perceptive conclusions about Republican attitudes on American poverty in “Poverty Denialism,” in the latest Nation. Goldberg quotes the usual suspects—FOX commentators, Bobby Jindal, Tea Party Congressmen—to demonstrate that the GOP denies poverty exists, and instead proposes that there are only a bunch of people […]

Read More… from Nation’s Michelle Goldberg nails GOP for denying poverty exists

So far, the rollout of the health exchanges—the heart of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—has reminded me of the incompetence associated with the Bush II Administration. The interesting part of the Obama Administration’s bungling of the rollout is that the mistakes have not been made now in the heat of the moment, but months ago […]

Read More… from Rollout and communications snafus don’t invalidate good of Affordable Care Act