“Hope”: It’s Everywhere

Finally, those Shepard Fairey posters have some sort of use.

Why Sanjay Gupta Changed His Mind On Weed

The Article: Why I changed my mind on weed by Sanjay Gupta in CNN Online.

The Text: Over the last year, I have been working on a new documentary called “Weed.” The title “Weed” may sound cavalier, but the content is not.

I traveled around the world to interview medical leaders, experts, growers and patients. I spoke candidly to them, asking tough questions. What I found was stunning.

Long before I began this project, I had steadily reviewed the scientific literature on medical marijuana from the United States and thought it was fairly unimpressive. Reading these papers five years ago, it was hard to make a case for medicinal marijuana. I even wrote about this in a TIME magazine article, back in 2009, titled “Why I would Vote No on Pot.”

Well, I am here to apologize.

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Bill Nye: “Creationism Not Appropriate For Children”

Home to some of the world’s finest technological and scientific innovation, the United States’ future hinges on its ability to maintain that status and strengthen scientific literacy among its constituents. Force-feeding children with beliefs formed at a time when little was known about the world is hardly the way to go about developing anything beyond ignorance.

Eisenhower On The Danger Of Stupid Political Parties

Dwight Eisenhower: renown Army general, admirable Republican, and now, apparently, a soothsayer.

U.S. Companies Thrive As Workers Fall Behind

The Article: U.S. Companies Thrive as Workers Fall Behind by Floyd Norris in The New York Times.

The Text: AMERICAN companies are more profitable than ever — and more profitable than we thought they were before the government revised the national income accounts last week. Wage earners are making less than we thought, in part because the government now thinks it was overestimating the amount of income not reported by taxpayers.

The major change in the latest comprehensive revision of the national income and product accounts — known as NIPA to statistics aficionados — is to treat research and development spending as an investment, similar to the way the purchase of a new machine tool would be treated by a manufacturer, rather than as an expense. That investment is then written down over a number of years.

The result is to make the size of the economy, the gross domestic product, look bigger, and to appear to be growing faster, in years when new research spending is greater than the amount being written down from previous years. For the same reason, corporate profits also look better in those years.

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