I have only two regrets over the life I led in my twenties. I should have gone on that sailing trip to the South Pacific with a group of entomologists seeking to study the insects on the exotic Marquesas Islands, instead of rushing back to college after my year off. My other regret is once back at school, I failed to heed the advice of the fellow graduate student who told all of us in the biology department at the… more
Americans supported the war in Iraq not because Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator--we had known that for many years--but because President Bush had made the case that Saddam might hand off weapons of mass destruction to his terrorist allies to wreak havoc on the United States. As of this writing, there appears to be no evidence that Saddam had either weapons of mass destruction or significant ties to terrorist groups like al Qaeda. Yet the belief that Saddam posed… more
Alan Cropsey should be a trial lawyer's worst nightmare. A former schoolteacher and current state senator in Michigan, Cropsey is a devout evangelical Christian and conservative Republican who doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and doesn't lose elections. In his 25-year career, he's done two separate stints in both chambers of the state legislature, hung out his shingle in private practice, and was Michigan field director for the Republican Majority Issues Committee, a PAC affiliated with Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas). "I'm driven,"… more
Every two weeks or so, I pack up my Taylor acoustic guitar, fill my backpack with CDs of my music, and head down into the New York City subways to busk away. I make good money, and I get to watch and study people, too. For example, I can now tell from about 50 feet away whether a woman is likely to give me money.
If she's walking fast, wearing headphones, angrily porting a briefcase, or chasing down one… more
Not long ago, President Bush asked a federal agency for evidence to support a course of action that many believe he had already chosen to take on a matter of grave national importance that had divided the country. When the government experts didn't provide the information the president was looking for, the White House sent them back to hunt for more. The agency returned with additional raw and highly qualified information, which the president ran with, announcing his historic… more
Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMs, are a marvel of economy and engineering. Strap the $20,000 electronics kit onto the tail of a standard-issue dumb bomb, and you've created a deadly precision weapon that can be guided to its target by GPS satellites orbiting hundreds of miles above. The first generation of JDAMs are vastly cheaper than laser-guided missiles--price tag: $250,000 to $1 million apiece--yet are even more accurate than most of the munitions used during the first Gulf War.… more
For all the success of its battle plan in Iraq and the laser-guided missiles that obliterated their targets in Baghdad, it's hard not to think that America wins wars today as much because of the depth of its pockets as the sharpness of its minds. Iraq's annual gross national product is about $50 billion and our annual military budget is $400 billion. We spent about as much money destroying Iraq as that country spent building itself.
To get an idea of how wildly ineffective our health-care system is, consider this: The United States spends roughly $4,500 per person on health care each year. Costa Rica spends just $273. That small Central American country also has half as many doctors per capita as the United States. Yet the life expectancy of the average Costa Rican is virtually the same as the average American's: 76.1 years.
How can that be? According to public health researchers, the… more
It's a political tale as old as Capitol Hill: A lumbering industry selects a certain corporate-friendly party to be its Beltway patsy. In exchange for the requisite campaign donations and other perks, members of said party use their clout to push through the industry's legislative agenda--an agenda that would rip off consumers and harm the overall economy but enrich the corporate string-pullers immensely. Pundits and public-interest types grumble over the bald-faced cronyism, but as long as the money keeps flowing,… more
In 1989, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded a five-year, $30 million study of how dying patients and their caretakers make decisions about end-of-life care. The goal of the SUPPORT trial (for Study to Understand Prognoses and Preferences for Outcomes and Risks of Treatments) was to address the growing national concern over the loss of control that patients experience as death approaches, and to find ways to reduce the number of Americans who suffer prolonged and painful deaths. The first… more
