Politics & Current Affairs

Add to the Gladwellian oeuvre on talent, precocity and its discontents, a few notes on how practice can make perfect from another pretty smart guy, David Brooks. Brooks shies away […]

A system offering viable Political MicroTransaction (1 cent to legal limits) with Electoral/Geographic Networking DRIVE the natural growth of a Distributed Network for effective Speech & Association in the SCALED Commons. A For-Profit model with Exit Strategy by sale to the donor base then becomes a check on government and large private interests & is a neglected FUNDAMENTAL for scaling Political Speech. Prototype & FAQ https://www.Chagora.com/faq.aspx

Condi’s freak-out comes midway through a Q & A on American foreign policy under Bush in a Stanford University dorm. One contrarian student decides to replay a scene from Smackdown, […]

Biofuels are the poster children of such good intentions gone terribly awry. Rather than retard global warming, scientists (such as Holly Gibbs, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, Matt Struebig from Queen Mary, University of London, and Emily Fitzherbert from the Zoological Society of London and University of East Anglia) are now warning that they may enhance and accelerate it by encouraging deforestation in the tropics.

The pursuit of “energy security” has brought us to the brink. It is directly responsible for numerous wars, big and small; for unprecedented environmental degradation; for global financial imbalances and meltdowns; for growing income disparities; and for ubiquitous unsustainable development.

The 2008 Election Campaign provided the nation with an enormous amount of much need sunlight. Now, the Obama victory has completely altered the lexicon of race in American life.

Obama’s early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations. Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant (two years old). Pathological narcissism is a reaction to prolonged abuse and trauma in early childhood or early adolescence. The source of the abuse or trauma is immaterial: the perpetrators could be dysfunctional or absent parents, teachers, other adults, or peers.

After buying an emptied four-story hotel in London two years ago, British hedge funder Chris Rokos submitted plans to local authorities to convert the building into an eight-bedroom home complete […]

At a 102 days and counting, we mined the Big Think archives for campaign-era Obama vids. Here’s the gold we found. Last spring, Johns Hopkins Professor an Iran expert, Azar […]

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter was never quite a darling of the right, but his abandonment of the Republican Party—announced today—does more than raise the ire an already struggling conservative political […]

How does a president simultaneously extricate a country from myriad domestic crises, play a strong hand overseas to end inherited wars, stave off new wars, control a pandemic from swine, […]

A growing chorus of academics wants to count higher education along with health care and fossil fuel dependency as one item on the list of “big reforms of our time.” […]

Obama’s signed thousands of crusading volunteers into America’s failing classrooms this week with the stroke of a pen. The expansion of Americorps represents a key step in the president’s agenda […]

The game of basketball is one of absolutes, built on indisputable numbers. Either the ball went in the hoop or it didn’t. The game of diplomacy is very different. But […]

It started with a man in a piebald clown’s wig throwing his clown’s nose at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It ended with a walkout of all E.U. delegates to the […]

Yesterday, Obama met his first stage of exchanging ideas with 34 leaders of Latin American and Caribbean (Conference in Trinidad and Tobago)

This article, from 2009, laments the lack of popular US protest movements at the time. What would the author say now? 

Today, throughout America, modern-day revolutionaries are quiety scattering tea bags around state capitals in a mass protest more akin to weekend suburbanites mulching their front lawns than the Boston Tea […]

It makes sense that the world is currently in the midst of a board game boom. While America’s overall toy sales dropped 3% last year, board game sales actually increased […]

Perhaps it was a late arrival of American-style materialism that inspired dictators to cozy up with luxury and largess. So where have all the glam dictators gone? Hussein, Qadaffi, Mugabe […]

If there’s one asset that doesn’t need any further protections in this life or the next it’s the estate tax, according to the LA Times. An op-ed framed the non-issue […]

Big Think and the Berkman Center present a live stream debate on the future of digital monopolies.

Oenologists and discerning winos alike are looking at a disappointing vintage out of southwest France this year. Abnormal weather patterns, a currency imbalance and an increasingly shunned elitist tag are […]

My idea of a newly reformed educational system in America. The concept of a redesigned I.Q. and SAT tests to acknowledge the multiple intelligences.

Obama and Medvedev’s entente at the G-20 produced the most fruitful conversation in years on how to reduce the 24,000 nuclear weapons siloed in the US and Russia. Nuclear energy, […]

During the G20 meeting in London! Thought, Pre. Obama still does not have the flash as if the Oxford-debating club- trained British Politician in answering question, he has the oriental Zen power-he can speak like” I come to learn and listen not lecture!” This wisdom of Zen opens the mind of human being to dialogue.rnrn Luckily, we have him to lead us through this Recession. Yes! WE CAN!rn

The movement to harness technology to democratize American democracy is gaining traction. Is that a good thing? During the heated presidential campaign of 2008, the CNN/YouTube debate proved so popular […]

North Korea Central News Agency said Sunday’s launch of a Kwangmyongsong-2 satellite over the Sea of Japan was nothing more than an effort to broadcast patriotic songs from space to […]

Lines around the building, bodies asleep on their bags, staff looking frazzled and dazed. No, this is not the local Greyhound station, it’s the most recent iteration of your neighborhood […]

Lo siento mucho! Presidente Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner! Although, we may have a different views to the world! We respect you,love your country and your people! As citizens of America, we own you an apology!