Animals Like Us

by Madeleine Kando

Like most of us, I have an instinctive sense of ‘morality’. I know when something is clearly good and when something is really bad. I cannot explain it to you in one or two clear sentences, because my sense of morality is so much part of who I am. I wouldn’t be ‘me’ without it. I am not trying to sound saintly or anything, that’s just part of the human condition and it probably counts for most of us.

The fact that my sense of right and wrong is so deeply ingrained in me, is what makes it so difficult to put into practice. The devil is in the details, as they say. How do I decide how ‘bad’ it is to steal a five-dollar eyebrow pencil from the drug store? There is no chart posted at the entrance of CVS that gives the stealing of eyebrow pencils a ‘goodness/badness’ rating. It would be impractical because CVS would have to compare it to everything else that I potentially could do that qualifies as bad. And that is an infinite amount of things. In other words, if we gave every action a goodness/badness rating, morality would become so unmanageable that we would drown in a morass of dos and don’ts and we would soon throw the moral baby out with the bath water. Read more...

How America Is Falling Behind in High Speed Internet Access

by Madeleine Kando

The Internet was born in America. It was given to the world for free, but now, a handful of giant companies, together with ineffective government policy, have managed to place the US far down on the list of internet accessibility and affordability. We are in 16th place, behind countries like Sweden (in first place), Holland and Japan. Even Portugal has faster and cheaper internet connection than we do.

In her book 'Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the Gilded Age', Susan Crawford describes how the American Internet service is falling behind other nations due to an abundance of greed, but especially due to a lack of vision. Read more...

The Secret about Santa's Elves

by Madeleine Kando

Like most children, I believed in Santa while I was growing up. Although I was born in Hungary, we soon moved to France, where Santa goes by the name of 'Pere Noel'. Pere Noel wasn't very generous in those days, especially when he came down a poor refugee family's chimney, in the suburbs of Paris. But I was a kid and children are happy with what they get. They only become greedy when they grow up. I often wondered how Pere Noel would react if I caught him in the act. Would he wink at me, say 'ho, ho, ho' and leave me my one present? Or would he frown, do an about face as soon as he saw me staring at him in the middle of the living room?

When my family moved to Holland, I was introduced to the Dutch version of Santa. Over there, Santa plays second fiddle to a far less benevolent character named Sinterklaas. He is a bishop-like figure with a big pointy mitre and a staff. Every 5th of December, he arrives from Spain on a steam boat, accompanied by his 'helpers', all named Zwarte Piet. These are not your run of the mill elves, they are boys with dark skin, unmistakably of the Negroid race. One of these Black Peters is saddled with the difficult choice of selecting which children have been good and which ones have been bad. Candy for the goodie-two shoes and the rod for the baddies. If a child has been particularly bad, he gets stuffed in a canvas bag and shipped back to Spain. No wonder the Dutch are so stoic. Early on they are taught to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Read more...

The Right to Arm Bears

by Madeleine Kando

A lot of hunters these days are missing a much needed challenge in their sport, so I have taken the liberty of offering some suggestions to achieve greater equality and add some sorely needed leveling in the playing field of both the hunter and the hunted.

Not only would the following suggestions create more satisfaction amongst hunters, it would have the added benefit of creating a demand for new jobs.

Let’s face it: hunting is not what it used to be, when the hunter only had access to a bow and arrow or a knife. What’s so fun about shooting a deer or a bear from a long distance away? These days rifle technology has advanced to such a degree that I have heard of some hunters recline and smoke a cigarette while their fully automatic guns spotted a target, and boom! All they have to do is stroll over to the felled animal and hoist it onto their hummer. Read more...

The Bad Drives out the Good

by Tom Kando

The basic difference between my conservative friends and myself is that they all subscribe to maximum economic freedom, that is: classical liberalism. Here is a quick list of the chief “markers” of classical liberalism and American-style capitalism:

● The foundation of classical free-market economic theory was laid by Adam Smith (1723-1790).

● One metaphor used by Smith was that of the “invisible hand:” He used this image to describe the self-regulating behavior of the marketplace.

● According to classical liberal theory, the economy that works best is the economy that is left unregulated. To express this, classical liberals such as Adam Smith adopted the expression “laissez-faire” from earlier French economists with similar views.

● By the early and mid 20th century, classical liberal economics were mostly associated with the so-called Austrian school, notably Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992). The baton was then transferred to American economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006) and his disciple Alan Greenspan (1926- ), who served as chair of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006.
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What's So Great About Money?

by Tom Kando

 There is a new craze: Bitcoin. It’s a new online “currency.” You use it to pay for goods and services. You can buy bitcoins online, with real money, or you can create bitcoins through “mining.” Recently, one bitcoin was worth about $850 (Sacramento Bee, Jan. 17, 2014), but it is very volatile and insecure. While bitcoins are used for some regular transactions, this market is dominated by speculators and it is associated with criminal activity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin). Early users have reaped great rewards, reminiscent of Ponzi. In sum, Bitcoin is a new form of gambling, and it is therefore bad and immoral, as all gambling is. Why is gambling bad and immoral?

In the first place, when you gamble, you generally LOSE. After you are done gambling, you have less money than when you started. Secondly, you have nothing to show for your losses - no new clothes, no new car, no fine vacation.
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What's in a Face? The Power of Facial Expressions

by Madeleine Kando

The human face has about fifty muscles and can generate thousands of facial expressions. How do all these muscles know what to do? Compared to the human arm, the face in motion is like a congested traffic circle with just one traffic cop, the facial nerve, telling the nerve impulses which muscles to contract, to create a smile, a frown or a yawn.

The face has the hardest job of all our body parts. It has to keep us alive and maintain us in good social and emotional health. Without a face we couldn't eat, see, smell or hear, but we have also entrusted our face with the task of expressing our emotions, our desires and needs. It is the most important part of our body for communication.

Living creatures didn't always have a face. At first, it was just a mouth, when we were still happily swimming around in the primordial seas. Our current features took shape after we crawled on land and decided to stand upright instead of walk on all fours. We could now see a lot further and didn't have to rely on our nose so much. Ever since then, our face has become the primary focus of our attention. When we are introduced to someone at a party, we don’t bend down and scrutinize their knees to see what kind of person they are. Read more...

Where is all the Money?

by Tom Kando

I just looked up (again) per capita GDP in various countries.  This is  well-known stuff. Everyone knows that most of the rich countries are in Europe and North America, and that the  poorest countries are  in Africa. I don’t want to retread this familiar ground.

I want to show you the fallacy of measuring national well-being through this indicator - per capita GDP. First, here is a table that ranks some of the world’s 197 countries by mean/average per capita annual GDP

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The Troublesome Trio: Articles in the English Language

by Madeleine Kando

The word ‘the’ is the most commonly used word in the English language. We don’t give it a second thought; it’s there, like the air we breathe or the water we drink. Actually, it’s not really a word like ‘butter’ or ‘table’, since it can not even stand on its own two feet. If a ‘the’ walked through the door, you wouldn’t know what you were dealing with. At least with a ‘table’ or a ‘chair’, you know where you stand, but a ‘the’? You’d be waiting for the rest of the retinue to appear before you could make sense of the visitor.

The ‘the’, together with the ‘a’ and the ‘an’ make up the articles of the English language. Even though they are useless on their own, these little ‘function words’ pretty much ‘determine’ what people are talking about. If my husband came in and said ‘A guy just hit a car’ it might elicit a slight shoulder shrug, but if he said: ‘A guy just hit the car’, I would drop whatever I was doing and run outside to assess the damage.
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David and Goliath: The Power of the People

by Madeleine Kando

In a small corner of this big country, there is a battle going on. Unless you live in New England, you probably haven’t heard about this place, but the locals call it ‘the North Country’, a very rural and densely forested part of Northern New Hampshire. It is sparsely inhabited and because of its poverty level it gets federal assistance, like many Indian reservations. Mobile homes are aplenty and unemployment is high as the North Country’s traditional industries – paper mills and other wood products manufacturing – have largely collapsed.

For the past few years, this beautiful area has been the battleground for the establishment of a huge high-voltage transmission route, given the name "Northern Pass". The plan is to construct more than 1,100 visually jarring steel towers up to 155 feet tall through a 180-mile swath of the state in order to reach lucrative energy markets in Southern New England. Read more...