Special Reports

The Benefits of Climate Change

Do you remember Al Gore? He was not the first prophet of the alleged imminent environmental disaster. The first was James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Space Center. Like Gore, Hansen sounded the alarms of anthropogenic climate change in 2003. During an interview, I asked him if he could rule out that uncontrollable forces, such as solar cycles, were more influential in climate change than human activity. His answer was ...Read full article...

Most oxygen comes from oceans, not forests

The abundance of animal life in the ocean has provided an enormous variety of services from the beginning of time. From food to adventure and leisure. None of this would be possible without the unicellular organisms of phytoplankton, which float by the thousands in each drop of water in the upper layers of the sea. The phytoplankton comprises two main groups: photosynthetic cyanobacteria and unicellular algae that move near ...Read full article...

Is the Digital Revolution a failure?

Would you consider it a success if while cooking lunch for your family you burned half of the food? Would your personal life be successful if while trying to end a fight between your children you make them more hostile to each other? Would it be a success for you if a discovery of yours endangered your neighbors and friends? What good is innovation or growth if it does ...Read full article...

Do we need a new Social Contract?

The existing social contract is an implicit agreement that has been widely accepted, though not often fulfilled, for centuries and among the members of societies to cooperate for social benefits. The social contract includes the sacrifice of some individual freedoms in exchange for State protection. The agreement entails that all individuals in society are subjects of the State with the sole intention to collectively enforce social arrangements. Theories of ...Read full article...

Climate Change impending disaster

Is the Climate Change obsession turning into the greatest scientific blunder in human history? A few terms come to mind when describing the so-called impending disaster that awaits humanity “if something is not done” about climate change. One of those terms is Consensus. Consensus means a general agreement, not an absolute agreement. In other words, having consensus in science does not mean that those who agree with something hold ...Read full article...

Google spying is multilingual

Last week, we learned how Google helped Hillary Clinton sway anywhere between 2.6 and 10 million votes. Google’s parent company was Clinton’s strongest financial supporter in 2016. Since his public testimony before a Senate Committee, Dr. Robert Epstein‘s report titled “A Method for Detecting Bias in Search Rankings, with Evidence of Systematic Bias Related to the 2016 Presidential Election” where he explained how Google used search manipulation, suggestion manipulation in ...Read full article...

Western historic, deliberate lies

ropaganda is a means of spreading ideas, whether they be true or false. But lying to ourselves is nothing other than refusing to admit our faults, attempting to convince ourselves that we are perfect – running away. Turkey illustrates the paroxysm of this attitude. It persists in denying that it tried to get rid of the non-Muslim minorities, in several waves, during the space of a generation, from 1894 ...Read full article...

The Great Human Behavior Laboratory

Human behavior is one of the most studied subjects in the history of mankind. Plato gave us a very clear picture of what human behavior is about. He said that it stems from three main sources: desire, emotion and knowledge. The question is, why are scientists so interested in learning how human behavior works? The study of human behavior, that is, the study of human desire, emotions and the ...Read full article...

Diabetes and obesity in bread

In the food industry, the conservant is known as E-280, E-281, E-282 and E-283. Bread manufacturers use it habitually in the preparation of mold bread and pastries, and its utility is beyond doubt, because its presence prevents the appearance of mold and the proliferation of bacteria. Its name is propionate, a common food additive approved by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), whose safety has ironically been questioned by ...Read full article...

Internet: It’s all about Surveillance and little about Democracy

The Internet was, from its inception, financed and promoted by the Pentagon and Wall Street. One is tempted to miss the simpler and optimistic times before the internet was out of control, or perhaps, too much under the control of so few. In a manifesto published in September 2018, Tim Berners-Lee himself recognized that “despite all the good that we have achieved, the Internet has become an engine division ...Read full article...

Omni Surveillance: Artificial Intelligence stores consumer data to manipulate their choices

Companies turn to neurologists to get our attention on the Internet. The commercial giant Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world, has a patent that discovers the mood of its customers simply by studying their faces. In this way, it aims to locate disgruntled buyers to present them with special attention. The Australian bank Westpac has a similar system, although it is focused on its staff so that the ...Read full article...

No society is free without Freedom of Speech

The US First Amendment affirms fundamental speech and media rights without which all others are threatened. No society is free without them. Eliminating them assures totalitarian rule. In her 1951 book, titled “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt said it’s “never content to rule by external means (alone)…(T)otalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.” She called it dictatorship based on: “(1) an elaborate ...Read full article...

These are the causes for which men die earlier than women

When you hear someone talking about gender equality, they almost never talk about the risks men face just for the fact of being men. These risks are real, not a made-up illusion, as some people are inclined to think. In fact, men live fewer years than women. That is the reality. The question is: why? According to the World Health Organization, there is a combination of biological and social reasons ...Read full article...

NGOs decry strong opposition by National Governments

Repression is fashionable. It’s a trend. More and more countries pass laws that limit or impede the activity of organizations that defend human rights. Only in the last two years, the procedures have been started and at least 40 standards have been approved in this regard. This is what Amnesty International warns in the report Laws Designed to Silence, published this Thursday, of “a global attack against NGOs”. In ...Read full article...

Iran is cornered

The United States is preparing to organise the Greater Middle East without their troops. They will probably capitalise on the errors committed over the last five years by Iran in order to create a Judeo-Sunni military alliance, dubbed the « Arab NATO » by the Press, who will be sent to fight the Shiites. While the Pentagon is withdrawing from the « Greater Middle East » to invest in ...Read full article...