Is polygamy harmful?

Even when the mariages are between adults, if the community if polygamist, then the girls tend to be traded like cattle and low-status young men create problems for all. This is true across time and culture.

History suggests that it is. A new study out of the University of British Columbia documents how societies have [...]

Slots: Praying to the God of Chance. David V. Forrest

I’m not who casinos want walking in the door since I don’t drink, smoke, use, or gamble. (Those first three I learned the hard way and decided long ago to never give gambling a chance.) But I will go into Vegas casinos to eat their great, cheap food, marvel at the gaudiness of it [...]

Advertising now defining your identity and worth

“The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth.” Yale University Press

This review of Joseph Turow’s book The Daily You from Doug Weaver at The Drift caused me to download the first chapter (free) to my Kindle.

For Turow, the real issue is the digital caste system [...]

God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre

Adventurer Richard Grant decided to travel the length of the notoriously dangerous Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico even thought he’d been warned off. He wrote about it in God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre.

In the beginning it was rollicking fun, even as it had an edge to it. Many [...]

God’s Brothel: The extortion of sex for salvation in contemporary Mormon and Christian fundamentalist polygamy and the stories of 18 women who escaped

Andrea Moore-Emmett, who was raised Mormon, documents clearly in God’s Brothel how polygamy across time and multiple cultures has never and can never be anything but rank subjugation of women and girls. The women are never equals. They are treated like property, subject to spousal rape, degradation, forced poverty, and more. Girls as young [...]

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, by Misha Glenny

Global organized crime has grown exponentially the past few decades primarily due to globalization and the collapse of Communism. When states fail or weaken, it provides a huge opening for organized crime to flourish. Among other things, they like wars. Chaos provides cover, the troops want prostitutes, and smuggling abounds.

Over and over again [...]

The Long Emergency. Climate change

Global warming coincides quite exactly neatly with the use of petroleum-based products on a large scale, something which is hardly coincidence. Industrialization and globalization were literally fueled by oil, and an unexpected consequence of that is climate change. Melting ice caps, the spread of disease in now-warmer climates, and severe drought in some areas are [...]

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Risks of Financial Innovation

Author Richard Bookstaber, a hedge fund “rocket scientist”, presents a scary scenario in Demon of Our Own Design. Today’s financial markets are so complex and tightly coupled that a tremor in one area can have massive, unexpected fallout in another. The current subprime crisis which has triggered hedge fund implosions and cratered the housing [...]

Why Religious Militants Kill. Terror In The Name of God

The author of Why Religious Militants Kill, Jessica Stern, is no armchair analyst. She’s “the foremost U.S. expert on terrorist” and to research the book she traveled worldwide, and met with terrorists. She, a Jewish woman traveling alone, met with jihadi and mujahideen in Pakistan — something most would say is seriously dangerous.

Stern [...]

Review: Deer Hunting With Jesus

Joe Bageant grew up redneck in Winchester Virginia, escaped to the city, became a “godless commie,” moved back thirty years later, and wrote this book about it.

It’s subtitled “Dispatches from America’s Class War.” He looks at the people that he grew up with, and most are in debt way beyond their means, have [...]