Is popularity of Dr. Oz magazine covers sign that we want real heroes or that we embrace politics of selfishness?

One measure of celebrity hotness is the increase in the sales of magazines that bear their faces on the cover. Putting some celebs on the cover can increase newsstand sales by tens of thousands. That explains why hot celebrities end up on so many covers and also why we can use covers as a measure […]

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16 museums dedicated to teaching creationism pockmark the American landscape

Secular humanist that I am, I couldn’t contain a squeaky chortle of glee when reading that the Creation Museum in a Kentucky suburb of Cincinnati is in financial distress. Attendance is down more than 30% from its opening year of 2007. It’s having trouble raising the $20 million it needs to build a giant Noah’s Ark […]

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By rejecting state health insurance exchange, GOP governors increase the scope of federal government

These past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about my brother’s death at the age of 49.  When he fell from a ladder and smashed his brains on the concrete below, he was worth about $100.  Yet he got the finest, most high-tech treatment available by first class specialists who respected and maintained his […]

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Roberts did what he always does: support interests of big business, which likes the healthcare act

I didn’t make a prediction in print on whether the Supreme Court would rule that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional or not, but I told several friends that I thought the vote would be 6-3 in favor of the law. I figured that Roberts always votes for the best interests of large corporations, and […]

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Court backs clean air and science in ruling that EPA can regulate against global warming

Whatever the Supreme Court  announces later this week related to the Affordable Care Act, another court in the land has made a landmark decision that will improve the health and well-being of everyone in the United States, if not the world. A federal court has upheld a finding by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that […]

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Values.com says that all of us can live our dreams, and uses as its example a fictional frog

Four months ago I thought I dispensed with the Values.com website, a hodgepodge of feel-good slogans and stories, funded by billionaire Phillip Anschutz through The Foundation for a Better Life. At that time I wrote about the following about the 88 values touted on Values.com: These values can apply to anything. A dictatorship or state […]

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Art experts refuse to stand up to forgeries and mislabeled art for fear of being sued

An article in today’s New York Times details a very disturbing trend: curators, scholars and other art experts are refusing to have an opinion on whether a work of art is genuine or not. By genuine, what the article and all the art experts quoted mean to say is that the art was created by […]

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OMG! sinks to new low in anti-intellectualism: celebs who never graduated from high school

OMG!, Yahoo!’s online celebrity magazine, has commemorated the fact that third-rate actor Mark Wahlberg finally earned his G.E.D. by giving us a list of 11 actors and models who never finished high school. The photo-story consists of a list that unfolds over 11 web pages (to make it easier for the reader to see all […]

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Opponents to minimum wage use illogical assumptions and imaginary anecdotes as their arguments

I have rarely received as negative a reaction as when I lambasted Professor Thomas Sowell the other day for, among other things, his opposition to the minimum wage—any minimum wage. The number of negative comments rivaled what I received when I said that no comic book could be a mature work of art, as a […]

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Writer’s dream of retirement assumes that no one likes city living

I was going to ignore the silly article by Tom Sightings titled “Dreams of the Ideal Retirement Home” in the latest U.S. News & World Report, but it hasn’t left the home and news pages of the major Internet news portals since it was first posted last Wednesday. With such media penetration, I feel as […]

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