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It appears that there is a growing contingent  of marijuana users and people associated with the industry who are fighting against efforts to make it legal for all adults.

Nothing quite makes neoclassical economists go apoplectic than reading or hearing the argument that an increase in the minimum wage doesn't cause unemployment. Just ask David Card and Alan Krueger (here's one example, from Gary Becker).

Hansen's proposal makes use of market principles, by prodding the market to tell the truth about the costs of carbon-based energy through prices.

In a world of rapidly accelerating change, from iPads to eBooks to genetic mapping to MagLev trains, we can't help but wonder if technology is our servant or our master, and whether it is taking us in a healthy direction as a society.* What forces drive the steady march of innovation?* How can we build environments in our schools, our businesses, and in our private lives that encourage the creation of new ideas--ideas that build on the new technology platforms in socially responsible ways?Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson look at where technology is taking us. One of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, Kelly's new book, What Technology Wants, makes the argument that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Johnson's new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, explains why certain spaces, from 18th-century coffeehouses to the World Wide Web, have an uncanny talent for encouraging innovative thinking.

Fundamentally, without major government commitments to high-speed rail, America simply will not have a high-speed passenger rail network. This should probably be discomfiting, since every other economic superpower (the EU, Japan and China) does have a high-speed rail network. That makes America look a bit backward. The time horizon for building such a network is several decades, and it's interesting to think about what will happen in the middle decades of this century if air transport becomes unaffordable due to high fuel costs and America doesn't have an electric alternative for high-speed intercity transit.

Democrats should not give in to Republican blackmail on extending tax cuts.

The Transportation Security Administration is feeling public heat these days over its combination of whole-body-image scanners and heavy-handed pat-down searches, and deservedly so. There's no question that reform is needed to curtail TSA's excesses. We especially applaud the Electronic Privacy Information Center's efforts to increase public awareness about the body scanners. But will the heat now being generated produce the kind of light we really need? Consider, for instance, the all-too-common response that we need to accept the indignity and invasiveness of the body scanners and pat-down searches in order to be safer. That response assumes that body scanners actually make us safer - a dubious assumption that we explore below.

http://www.ted.com Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we're not as rational as we think when we make decisions.

Power does not rest with the electorate. It does not reside with either of the two major political parties. It is not represented by the press. It is not arbitrated by a judiciary that protects us from predators. Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war, even wars we have no chance of winning. All polite appeals to the formal systems of power will not end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must physically obstruct the war machine or accept a role as its accomplice. 

Yet another study has been released that proves that watching Fox News is detrimental to your intelligence. World Public Opinion, a project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, conducted a survey of American voters that shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. What's more, the study shows that greater exposure to Fox News increases misinformation.

We can have the kind of economy, government, environment, and country we want, if we keep pushing, organizing, building, and otherwise doing the work of democracy.

How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life.

The latest from a growing international movement to make corporate tax dodgers pay ... so public services don't have to.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 7, 2011) - Despite the fears of some, a new study suggests that use of the internet in general does not make people more likely to believe political rumors.

ook at the outrage in Madison, Wisconsin. Look at the crowds in DesMoines, Iowa. Look at the demonstrations in Indiana and Ohio and elsewhere around America. Hear what they're saying: Stop attacking unions. Stop making scapegoats out of public employees. Stop protecting the super-rich from paying their fair share of the taxes needed to keep our schools running.

http://www.mint.com | It's official, trillion is the new billion. No longer is government spending talked about in terms of a mere ten digits. With the recent flurry of government spending, we are going to need another three zeros to make sense of it all. One trillion dollars is a number that few people can comprehend, let alone your standard nine digit calculator. So what does one trillion dollars look like?

Research suggests that psychedelics may be better than antidepressants, which tend to dampen or suppress psychological problems without necessarily curing them.

Democrat or Republican, Libertarian or Socialist, politically active and not we are reaping the bitter reward of a political and legal system designed to maximize corporate profits at the expense of our environment, our livelihood, and our very lives. Our society is unraveling. We all know this. This is not idle conspiracy theory. These are well established facts. We are ruled by a headless beast that is no longer accountable to us. That it is headless makes it no less beastly. But there is a silver bullet. It's within our power to restore a functioning free market; to take back our democracy. We must end limited liability for corporations. Only when wealthy investors are no longer shielded from the costs that we collectively bear in their stead, only when they can no longer hide from the burden they have placed on us, only then can we expect the end of corporate plunder.   We are running out of time. Millions of Germans lost faith in the free market and capitalism during the Great Depression, and "with the failure of the left to provide a viable alternative, they became vulnerable to the rhetoric of a party that, once it came to power, combined Keynesian pump-priming measures that brought unemployment down to 3 percent with a devastating counterrevolutionary social and cultural program."

The 30-minute speech I gave last month at the Symphony Space in New York is now available on video, and is posted below in three YouTube segments (the first segment also contains the 4-minute introduction of my speech). The speech pertains to the evolution of my views on media criticism, the nature of media propaganda and what drives it, and what can be done to combat it. A DVD of the entire event -- featuring the three other speeches: from Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore -- is available at FAIR's website. I want to note one example, from today, that vividly illustrates many of the themes I discussed in that speech.  It is found in the following passage from this Reuters article on Obama's escalation of the covert war in Yemen and his targeting of U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki for assassination: A U.S. official confirmed to Reuters that a U.S. strike last Friday killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, a midlevel al Qaeda operative, which followed last month's attempted strike against Anwar al-Awlaki, the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Whether Awlaki has any operational role in Al Qaeda at all is a matter of intense controversy.  The U.S. Government has repeatedly asserted that he does, but has presented no verifiable evidence to support that accusation.  But what is not in dispute is the notion that Awlaki is "the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."  He unquestionably is not, and never has been, as multiple Yemen experts have repeatedly noted.  The Reuters claim is factually and entirely false. Whatever one's views are on Obama's assassination program, targeting U.S. citizens without due process obviously raises extraordinary and vitally important questions.  As The New York Times' Scott Shane put it when confirming Awlaki's inclusion on Obama's hit list: "The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen. . . . It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an America