Category Archives: Coffee Break

Coffee Break: More on Our Lousy Diet and Recovery of the Iconic American Chestnut

Part the First: Ultra-Processed Foods and Addiction.  Big Ag and Big Food may finally have a problem with their big moneymaking products.  We have discussed UPFs here several times before.  They fill the center aisles of grocery stores in much of the Anglophone world.  This article in Scientific American adds to wave of information coming […]

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Coffee Break: Armed Madhouse – U.S. Militarism Comes Home

U.S. militarism has not remained confined to foreign battlefields. Over the past two decades, doctrines, technologies, and reflexes developed for war abroad have migrated into domestic governance. Immigration enforcement, protest policing, surveillance, and political investigations increasingly operate through militarized frameworks that treat civic life as a security problem—quietly reshaping democracy without declaring its suspension.

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Coffee Break: Boxing Day Miscellany

Part the First: No, This Is Not Another Bell Labs.  Bell Labs was justifiably renowned as the place to do high level physics and engineering.  It also supported Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in their research that identified the background cosmic microwave radiation that is the remnant of the Big Bang.  But Bell Labs worked […]

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Coffee Break: Armed Madhouse – The Unfortunate Philippines

For more than a century, the Philippines has been afflicted by recurring internal conflict—colonial rebellion, communist insurgency, separatist war, Islamist militancy. This article argues that these episodes are not discrete failures but manifestations of a persistent condition of managed instability, structurally conditioned by the country’s incorporation into U.S. grand strategy beginning in 1898. From counterinsurgency as governance to modern access agreements, the Philippines has been treated less as a sovereign project to be completed than as a strategic position to be held—an approach whose risks are now sharpening under renewed great-power competition.

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Coffee Break: Climate, Eugenics, and a Note on mRNA Vaccines

Part the First: Climate, “What, Me Worry?”  Once again Alfred E. Neuman comes to mind as “policy-based science” remains the order of the day in the Current Administration as Trump Administration Plans to Break Up Premier Weather and Climate Research Center. The Trump administration said it will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research […]

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Coffee Break: Armed Madhouse – Africa’s Enduring Wars

Since decolonization, Africa has experienced a succession of wars whose combined death toll likely reaches into the tens of millions—mostly from indirect causes such as displacement, famine, and state collapse rather than combat itself. This article surveys major post-1960 conflicts, argues against monocausal explanations, and examines how persistent misreading of African political dynamics has led to repeated and costly foreign policy failures, particularly by the United States.

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Coffee Break: Science Update, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good, Part the First: Basic Science Has the Answer, Once Again.  T cells of the immune system are responsible for the establishment of self-tolerance and adaptive immune function.  T cells come from the thymus, which is mammals basically disappears early in life in a process called involution. Understanding how the thymus might regenerate has […]

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