Alongside other notable dates in history such as May 1, July 4, and September 11, we might soon have to add December 16 to the canon of pivotal moments in the lexicon of civilization. While some of these seminal dates that we remember have been reduced to caricatures of their...

It's an interesting phenomenon to live in a town where the level of public vitriol over nearly every political question runs incredibly high. Here in "high Sonoran" Arizona, we enjoy an amazingly diverse and oftentimes starkly polarized topography -- you can go from snow-capped peaks to wind-blown deserts in very...

We have to give Team Obama credit for a truly historic and thoroughly incredible Nobel acceptance speech. Whereas the teachings and legacies of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi were recalled as admirable yet not "practical or possible in every circumstance," we were reminded that Ronald Reagan and Richard...

In what is rightly being viewed as a Bush Redux, we are yet again about to experience a military escalation of potentially tragic proportions. Somehow, the forlorn word surge has once more found itself bound up with perpetual warfare and an Orwellian phraseology of having been (in President Obama's...

In case you missed it, one of the most profound discoveries in decades was made a few weeks ago. NASA intentionally crashed a satellite into a shadowy cratered region of the moon, and the resultant debris contained what project scientists called "a significant amount" of that most precious of...

The news of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize coincidentally came to me last week during a Peace Studies Conference. As in many corners, people there were speculating about the motivations for giving this prestigious award to an untested president who has yet to create a legacy of peace in his...

In all of the invective thrown around during the healthcare dialogue, amidst the shouting of the neo-Brown Shirts and among the talking heads speaking out of both sides of their mouths, something fundamental to the entire issue has somehow been omitted. Lurking just beneath the subterranean rhetorical level of Death...

In two recent criminal cases in the United States, defendants received similar sentences for very different sorts of actions. In the first, a young man was convicted of negligent homicide for texting while driving and killing two scientists in the process. The New York Times reported on the case...

With the anniversaries of Woodstock (40 years) and the Geneva Convention (60 years) at hand, we are reminded of the pernicious nature of warfare and the generational duty to ameliorate (if not eliminate) it as much as we are able. The contexts in which these landmark events transpired both were...

Nearly half a billion people on the planet -- around one out of every fifteen individuals -- are afflicted with a condition that is largely unknown in the popular consciousness. While much time, angst, energy, and wealth is spent on diseases du jour such as the swine flu, there are...

Newsflash: It's the end of the world (again), and I feel ... aw, forget it. I guess at this point it's kind of a toss-up between bored, giddy, melancholy, and irate, in no particular order. Still, the most recent apocalyptic homage seems somehow more sobering this time, perhaps due to...

If we're truly looking for paths to economic stimulus -- which is about stimulating optimism as much as anything else -- then we ought to consider getting closer to the source and stop nibbling around the edges of corporate malfeasance. Instead, let's directly incentivize and bring relief to actual people,...

At long last, the plan is finally hatched to "save" the auto industry, or at least General Motors. President Obama's quasi-takeover blueprint is bold and intriguing, and could even become a template for managing the whole financial crisis itself. Indeed, in the spirit of the old axiom, perhaps what's good...

At the risk of throwing dirt on the fire of enthusiasm everyone seems to have for Jon Stewart's skewering of Jim Cramer, there's something troubling about the logic of how this very public tete-a-tete played out. Basically, while it was fun to watch Stewart barbecue the madman of money,...

I keep having these moments in which I attempt to write about some current event (you know, small stuff like economic collapse, an escalating war in Afghanistan, global climate change) but the news cycle has passed me by before I can reduce thought to keyboard. With the proliferation of infotainment...

Seriously, you've got to love Rush Limbaugh. The guy is an American institution -- like a major investment bank, nationwide mortgage company, or neocon think tank -- and we all know how well those have worked out. Aside from college professors, who else could make so much out of so...

Life here in the desert southwest is richly complex and oftentimes a great challenge. A hint of frontier culture remains even as rampant growth and homogenization take hold at breakneck speed. People love the landscapes and the history, but can still sit and watch both disappear in the name of...

President Obama recently revealed his foreclosure relief plan in a speech given at Dobson High School in Mesa, Arizona. The choice of locations was auspicious for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that Mesa sits in the sprawling outskirts of Phoenix and is characteristic of the...

By now the next phase of the "stimulus-bailout" plan is ready to be implemented. This version totals around $800 billion, plus interest that brings it to over a trillion dollars. Republicans stand aghast in near-unison, lambasting the plan variously as "closet socialism," "larded with pork," and insufficiently stimulative (arguing...

Conspiracy theorists long have mused about a "shadow government" working its machinations from a secret locale with a cloak-and-dagger ethos. But that's not the post-postmodern way of doing things anymore; in the age of hyper-spectacle, one puts it right out there in a manner reminiscent of what's known as...