Do today’s soaring food prices and Third World food riots mean we’re headed for global famine?

The House passed two bills attempting to rehabilitate the housing and mortgage market this week. There doesn't seem to be any shortage of criticism and blame for the bad decisions, and rightly so. Lenders and banks do share much of the blame for the overheated market. Lending standards were relaxed, or even abandoned altogether, creating an exaggerated pool of homebuyers that led to ballooning home prices that many, especially real estate investors, expected to continue forever. Now that the bubble has burst, the losses are staggering.

“Trusting in the Rock of Israel we now place our signatures in witness to this proclamation, sitting as the Provisional State Council, on the soil of the homeland, in the city of Tel-Aviv, this day, Friday afternoon, the 5th of Iyar, 5708, the 14th of May, 1948.”

Because California, and Hollywood in particular, have been the punch line for so many jokes over the years, I suspect that people who don’t live out here assume we can’t possibly be that wacky. They don’t know the half of it.

In the past few months, American workers, consumers, and businesses have experienced a sudden and dramatic rise in gasoline prices. In some parts of the country, gasoline costs as much as $4 per gallon. Some politicians claim that the way to reduce gas prices is by expanding the government’s power to regulate prices and control the supply of gasoline.

The Bush Administration has directly defied, not only the will and intent of Congress, but it is now openly ignoring legislation that the President himself signed into law. As a result a Constitutional crisis is rapidly developing over a project to let Mexican trucks on U.S. roads. As a result, many are now calling for the firing of U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters.

The best person to talk with about your problems in life usually is a good friend. It has been said, "Therapists are expensive friends." Likewise, friends are inexpensive "therapists". Contrary to popular belief, and contrary to propaganda by mental health professionals, the training of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals does little or nothing to make them better equipped as counselors or "therapists".

David Yezzi is Executive Editor of The New Criterion and a well-known poet whose published collections include The Hidden Model and Sad Is Eros.

In late April, AccuWeather.com, led by Joe Bastardi, its chief meteorologist, issued a news release that was, to be kind, pure mush. The early warning forecast for 2008’s June to November hurricane season said that conditions like La Nina and a “continued warm water cycle in the Atlantic Basin” held forth the “chance for U.S. landfalling storms.”

Even though I’m embarrassed to have been a Democrat for so many years, I’m proud that even in my 20’s, I thought the 60’s was the worst decade in America’s history. Because I was born in 1940, I was at UCLA for some of those years and had a bird’s eye view of my fellow college students. It was not a pretty sight.

"Psychosurgery is the surgical intervention to sever fibers connecting one part of the brain with another or to remove, destroy, or stimulate brain tissue with the intent of modifying or altering disturbances of behavior, thought content, or mood for which no organic pathological cause can be demonstrated."

Having written about the energy industry and issues now for a long time, I hope I can be forgiven for being enraged by the comments by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) in response to President Bush’s press conference Tuesday morning. There is simply no way to describe them other than false.

Now it’s not just the sunspots that predict a 23-year global cooling. The new Jason oceanographic satellite shows that 2007 was a “cool” La Nina year—but Jason also says something more important is at work: The much larger and more persistent Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has turned into its cool phase, telling us to expect moderately lower global temperatures until 2030 or so.

What used to be called electroshock or electric shock treatment (EST) is now usually called "electroconvulsive therapy", often abbreviated ECT. The term is misleading, because ECT is not a form of therapy, despite the claims of its supporters. ECT causes brain damage, memory loss, and diminished intelligence.

K.K. Forss does not claim medical marijuana solves all his problems. His pain from a ruptured disc in his neck is debilitating. He is unable to go to work or to the First Baptist Church he used to attend because of the pain and muscle spasms. Taxpayers through Medicare spend over $18,000 a year on his various medications. Half of those drugs are strong narcotics. The other half address the various side-effects brought on by the first half, such as nausea, heartburn, heart palpitations, difficulty sleeping, and muscle spasms.

Psychiatric drugs are worthless, and most of them are harmful. Many cause permanent brain damage at the doses customarily given. Psychiatric drugs and the profession that promotes them are dangers to your health.

During Barack Obama’s tremendously overrated “speech on race”—delivered in Philadelphia on March 18th 2008—the media-gilded candidate referred to the resentment some whites feel in regards to welfare and affirmative action. He noted that “these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company.”

When the government of the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the fall was attributed to all kinds of reasons. There was the failed invasion of Afghanistan, the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and, after some desperate efforts by Mikhail Gorbechev, Communism as a guiding principle and economic system simply imploded. That’s the thumbnail version that passes for history, but Michael J. Economides and Donna Marie D’Aleo have another answer and it’s one you may not want to hear.