Meg Whitman’s spending to win election as Governor of California is now up to $162 million, which the Associated Press reports is more than Al Gore spent on his 2000 election campaign for president of the entire country, not just its biggest state. When you do the math, it works out to an incredible $4.78 […]
Many people act as if they really believe the first line to St. John’s gospel, “In the beginning was the word.” They think by using a word or phrase they can create or deform the reality being described or make people look at it from a different perspective. For example, when corporations started using the […]
I’m guessing that by this point, a lot of OpEdge readers have seen the news that a new history book that the Virginia Department of Education has approved for use in 4th grade passes off the bold-faced lie that thousands of African-Americans fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. As the Washington Post […]
Once again, a news report tells a lie in the headline and first paragraph before giving the true story in the article. First let’s analyze the article in question, after which we’ll take a look at why such an approach is so perniciously manipulative. Last Friday, Associated Press released an AP-GfK study on the attitude of […]
I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of business ethics, and specifically about the actions that ethical business owners should and should not take in the course of running their businesses. I’m not talking about what’s legal, but instead about what’s right, which is something altogether different. For example, we know that it was mostly […]
On the front page of this Sunday’s New York Times, Martin Fackler strings together a series of anecdotes of decline and relative depravation to prove the point of his headline, “Japan Goes From Dynamic to Disheartened.” The time frame, of course, runs from the real estate bubble that dismantled Japan’s economy in the late ’80s […]
Growth is not always good. Sometimes it’s a malignant cancer that will kill an individual. Sometimes it leads to eradication of resources, which causes extinction of a species, or as we are seeing now, many species. Yet every economist whose views I can remember reading in the mass media takes population growth as one of […]
In a world in which a small-town preacher threatening to burn the Koran and accusations that a candidate hired an illegal alien get reported by tens of thousands of media outlets for days on end, how extensive do you think the coverage would be of the shocking news that a major national lobbying group may […]
Last week I wrote about an Associated Pres-GfK study that shows that the only racial-social group in which the majority prefers Republicans is the white working class. I pointed out that in supporting Republicans, working class whites act against their own best interests, and wondered why. I promised to return to the issue when I […]
The “cover story” in yesterday’s USA Today, which I read only when offered no other choice by a hotel in which I’m staying, was its poll that found that slightly more people are left of center than right of center. The middle of the front page of the paper is dominated by a pie chart […]