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Last 20 Shows Blueprints for Governing
Although the Most Serene Republic of San Marino has an older, written, working constitution, among countries of any significance the United States of America has the oldest. By far. Unfortunately, it hasn't aged gracefully. We're driving a Model T but telling ourselves it's a Ferrari. We're delusional. And until we figure out that the system's rules deliver lousy results — that our political backwardness is not so much the fault of a deficient culture — we're stuck. To talk abo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Terrorism Safari
Come visit Yemen, where for a modest fee authorized security operatives can observe terrorists in their native habitat and — at special à la carte pricing — if desired, kill them. Trophies available. Limited to parties of six or fewer; no boots on the ground; some other restrictions apply. Well, nobody in officialdom would be quite so louche to say so but that's pretty much what it amounts to... For a look at Yemen from the back of a pickup truck I turned to the former U ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Kill the Bill
To ward off the Black Death, physicians in Europe donned bird masks fitted with red tinted lenses. Six hundred and seventy years later, when it comes to general-purpose health care in modern day America we prefer to deploy incense made out of money. The results are just about as good and the mentality is not much changed, either. To explore some of the pernicious superstition at the heart of our pending health care legislation I turned to Richard "R.J." Eskow, an expert who blogs frequentl ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Speeding Up Human Evolution
It's got to be the biggest detective story in the world: what are our human origins? And if we're continuing to evolve at an ever faster rate, as Dr. Henry C. Harpending suggests in The 10,000 Year Explosion, how differently, then, might we identify with the earliest historians, or even relatively recent ones? A lot to consider. Not directly related to politics (perhaps), but the ideas profoundly influence how we talk about it. Total runtime an hour and nine minutes. Caution! Contains poli ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Tolerance or Capitulation?
On the one hand, Muslims have every reason to feel aggrieved over U.S. military interventions around the world. On the other, many Muslim cultural practices run up against Western norms and don't — in my view — under the banner of religion deserve any special protections. Indeed, a danger exists the other way around when ecumenical tolerance, a bedrock liberal concept, gets circumscribed though undue deference to a fundamentalist world view. To explore some of these issues I tu ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Galactic Poachers
If we're being visited by aliens — and I absolutely believe that we are — it shouldn't seem all that surprising if some of them abduct humans. Why they might do it and the extent to which it may be happening, however, remain murky. To talk about such strangeness I turned to the celebrated artist Budd Hopkins, whose just published memoir ART, LIFE and UFOs has got to be one of the most unusual ever written. It was great fun exploring different ideas with Budd and I'll give him t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Climate Reality
Industry pays many Americans not to believe in anthropogenic climate change. Other skeptics, however, have an innate, almost theological aversion to "theory," to the point where they have a great deal of trouble understanding the difference between theory and facts. In the context of our American debate it's critical, therefore, to emphasize the facts, and so to consider some high-priority ones I turned to Orrin Pilkey, a leading expert on coastal environments. Orrin's most recent book, co ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Passenger Rail
Passenger trains. We're going to have to have more of them. But it would be folly to wait for the market to provide for our needs, because it won't. Passenger rail isn't profitable, anywhere. Let's be frank: it's socialized transportation. To talk about the virtues of train travel, and its politics, I turned to James McCommons, author of the most excellent and just published Waiting on a Train. Jim spent most of 2008 riding around on Amtrak and interviewing top people in the railroad indus ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Archy and Mehitabel
It's a truism — but no less true for that — we often can't get to reality except through literature. Or poetry. Or, in the case of Don Marquis, whatever it was, format-wise, that he wrote in his newspaper columns featuring Archy, the vers-libre poet reincarnated as a cockroach, and Mehitabel, the alley cat who fancied herself the reincarnation of Cleopatra. As Archy put it: "i see things from the under side now" and somehow he manages to explain the meaning of that perspective ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Big Pharma, Unleashed
In America, giant pharmaceutical corporations run roughshod over the public. They price gouge, charging 50% more than in civilized countries. They foist useless, often harmful — even deadly — drugs on the market. They profoundly corrupt the medical profession. Adding insult to injury, they pay unimaginable sums of money to get whatever they want from Congress. It's an outrageous situation. To learn the details of what's really going on I turned to Melody Petersen, who's been wr ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Baghdad Rumbled
Forget Afghanistan for a moment. A lot of us, including me, have been worrying that the U.S. may be stuck in Iraq indefinitely. Quil Lawrence, however, says that that may not be the case. Quil, NPR's Baghdad bureau chief, has spent many recent years in Iraq, knows a great deal, has excellent judgment, and his reports must be taken seriously. Since I'm not there and he is, I defer to him despite my intellectual skepticism. I certainly hope he's right. It was great to talk again with Quil an ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Heartless Israel
It's crazy-making to watch the world's indifference to Israel's grinding destruction of the Palestinians. There isn't really even a word for it — either the indifference or the criminal assault, and particularly the latter. But like it or not, admit it or not, Israel has thoroughly implicated America. To talk about all this I turned to a former CIA analyst, Kathleen Christison, whose recent book Palestine in Pieces (with co-author husband Bill Christison) gets pretty much everything ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Free Running
Sometimes speaking truth to power, even when you're in power, means risking your life. That's why Abolhassan Banisadr, the first President of Iran following the 1979 revolution, fled in 1981 to take up political asylum in France. Nor has he seen eye to eye with the clerics ever since. What's surprising is that Mr. Banisadr's critique of the Iranian regime, of what's going on in Afghanistan, and of developments in the Islamic world generally, isn't pitched at particular contextual facts so ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
New Deal Reprise
It would be unfair, and incorrect (which is worse?), to say that everything about modern economic theory is based upon delusional thinking about human behavior and markets. Or that the theory has become merely a threadbare excuse to worship greed. Nevertheless, mainstream economists, a priori, are to be regarded with the deepest suspicion. And so it's always refreshing to hear an alternative economic worldview, particularly from a financial practitioner who knows whereof he speaks. Marshal ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Building SevenThe 9/11 truth movement keeps getting stronger. And the movement's assault on the establishment's preferred narrative, after eight years, has reduced it to a risible absurdity. An abundance of irrefutable scientific evidence exists. The problem remains, however, of getting people to turn their attention from special effects to reality. Many people, for many reasons, really want to believe that the wrong things are true. To help reawaken their critical faculties we have David Ray Griffin's l ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
Peace, a fundamental human right. ✓ Health care, a fundamental human right. ✓ An egalitarian society, a fundamental human right? Yes, let's add that last one, not because we're Communists, but because it makes sense — and not merely as a theoretical or an ethical fancy, but in hard-nosed pragmatic practice. Of course, it will take an historic political fight for the U.S. to get there... To explain the facts I turned to Richard Wilkinson, who is ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Forever From the Earth
Farmers are an endangered species. Farmers who fight back against what's happening to them by farming smarter, even more so. But without farmers who respect and love the land, who farm in a sustainable way, we're goners. Here are a few human scale stories, as told by Lisa M. Hamilton, from her marvelous book Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness. Also a few policy questions to ponder. It was great to talk with Lisa — even if the problems seem intractable, t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Ghosts in the Machine
Mysticism and science overlap more than people usually recognize as the former usually promises, in one way or another, adepts a means to enlightenment under their own steam. It's one reason — a pretty good reason — why the early Christian fathers decided the Gnostic gospels were heretical texts, too dangerous to include in the New Testament. Anyhow, it should be no surprise that certain mystical experiences can be shown to have a scientific grounding. Here, I talk with John Ge ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Ringmaster
At this point, to be brutally realistic about it, there isn't much good to be said for Mr. Obama except, perhaps, that he's better than a Republican. One can only hope that he's susceptible to being pinned down by determined opponents from the progressive side of things. Due to widespread public outcry, for example, there may yet be a small chance for real health care reform. Considering these circumstances, it makes sense to study Mr. Obama's weaknesses. And to get a thoughtful appraisal ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Whither Afghanistan?
What a tar baby. It's just not so simple to see how we get out of Afghanistan, either in the context of events over there or of politics here at home. One thing, though, is for sure: We won't win a military victory. To get a sense of how things are doing I turned to Wayne White, a former top intelligence analyst. We also talk about Iraq. I'm most grateful to Wayne for sharing his brilliant and exemplary insight. Anti-war arguments need all the help they can get! Total runtime an hour and t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
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