No Surprise In a recent Guardian column arguing that nominal socialist Bernie Sanders’ majority support among Democratic voters below the age of 50 shows that the United States is entering a new progressive politico-ideological phase, the liberal French economist Thomas Piketty notes that “Hillary Clinton… appears today as if she is defending the status quo, More

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster may go down as one of history’s boundless tragedies and not just because of a nuclear meltdown, but rather the tragic loss of a nation’s soul.

Imagine the following scenario: 207 million cardboard book boxes, end-to-end, circumnavigating Earth, like railroad tracks, going all the way around the planet. That’s a lot of book boxes. Now, fill the boxes with radioactive waste. Forthwith, that’s the amount of radioactive waste stored unsheltered in one-tonne black bags throughout Fukushima Prefecture, amounting to 9,000,000 cubic metres More

I have a lot of liberal friends who like the ideas of a single-payer healthcare system, a living minimum wage, and free higher education, but who support Clinton, rather than Sanders because they think she is more “realistic.” I’m talking about educated people, people who have spent time in countries that have these things and so have first-hand knowledge of their feasibility. Someday, these people tell me, someday we will have these things, but the country is not ready for them yet. They argue that they are being “realistic.” I would argue, however, that they’re not being realistic; they’re being idiotic. That is, their position isn’t even coherent.

Now the cynic, the cynic has a coherent position. It’s not one I like, but it’s coherent anyway. The cynic thinks everyone is stupid. The cynic says Americans will never be ready for such things because they’re mean spirited as well as stupid. They don’t want other people to have decent lives, they want people to suffer, they want it so much that they will allow that desire to override their own individual self-interest, if they only realized that the programs they opposed were in their interest. More