Blog #54, August 1, 2026 The U.S. is a big nation, with the most obesity of any large country. Why? Economic historian John Komlos has come up with a comprehensive explanation looking at long-term trends that takes into account food industry practices and the major re-tooling of society. Sizing down will be a huge challenge. While our growing wider became quite visible in

In his 1961 inaugural address President John F. Kennedy (JFK) said, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” What was the reason for this effort to inspire a redirection of America and its political thinking? During the roaring twenties, a hundred years ago, the country allowed a few people

There has been a rapid shift in today’s media landscape due to the large volume of media—and now AI-generated content—bombarding us with too much information (TMI), which can lead to passivity and tuning out and even great misconceptions. This increases the pace of life and decreases face-to-face social interaction. Loneliness has become very common. Isolation from real human interaction has

As we get ready to celebrate Mother’s Day on May 10, we need to take a closer look at some of the realities of motherhood in the United States. We are all here because of motherhood. Test tube babies, namely those raised without any mother rather than those arising from In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), haven’t made the scene and likely

Consider war as armed conflict carried out collectively by a political entity, with deadly force and deaths of others envisioned. Warring emerged with the development of agriculture and resulting inequality some ten thousand years ago and has been common since, including more recently linked to fossil fuels and other resources. By contrast forager hunter societies had an equity ethic, and carried

Ways of communicating have profoundly changed since humans have been on Earth, especially in the last 1000 years. The transformations over the last decade or two have produced challenges in solving problems together, contradicting earlier predictions that things would be better and even strengthen democracy. With the acquisition of language the predominant method of communication was face-to-face with story-telling a

Many people sense something is wrong in the world, in the United States, and in other places. Call it a sickness if you will, maybe even a new epidemic. What would the diagnosis be? One approach would be to look at various measures to see what the problem is. Consider these tests like one might do with a sick individual.

We live in an era of increasing violence world-wide that requires a coordinated global response. Begin with the ultimate mass violent event — a nuclear bombing. This threat requires immense technological capabilities together with specific nuclear resources to make a device that can’t be done by a few individuals. The U.S. is the only nation that has demonstrated using such

In Blog # 24 on human carrying capacity on planet Earth I mentioned Donella Meadows’ places to intervene in a system that I first came across in a Whole Earth Review 1997 issue. She worked with Jay Forrester who developed systems theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At an American Public Health Association meeting in 1994 I heard Forrester

Robert Sapolsky, the neuroscientist and Stanford sage has come out with a new book: Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.He argues that we have no free will because of our individual histories that go back milliseconds, to seconds, to hours, to days, to years, to preconception, and beyond to the arrival of humans on the planet. Our actions are