"Over the space of just 20 years a handful of big companies have taken over large swaths of our economy. Our banking system, diversified as recently as the 1990s, is now controlled a handful of big banks.... One-third of everything we buy online now comes from a single company. Many people are beginning to question the wisdom of this and they're changing where they shop and what they buy and where they do their banking. What I want to suggest to you today is that a purely consumer-based approach to this problem, on its own, is not likely to get us where we need to go. It can't get us where we need to go, in part, because it doesn't fully recognize how we got here in the first ...

Yes, election night was a heck of a party and it’s great that the really bad guys lost. Karl Rove and his reactionary ilk were defeated by a new American majority that is younger, more tolerant, rainbow colored and multilingual and one in which women now trump the depressing ignorance of so many older white men. But morning in America already feels too much like a hangover. The house is still a wreck, the family is dysfunctional and there are enormous bills to pay that are not about to go away.

All of us suddenly sobered folks, who voted for Barack Obama because the alternative was so horridly wrong, have got to accept the moral implications of that choice. We won but at what cost? Fool me once, shame on Obama, but fool me twice and I’m the one responsible. That goes for his promises to right the economy by leveling the playing field as well as to end what Obama termed in his victory speech “a decade of war.”

It is now our fingers on the video game buttons that order the drones to kill innocent civilians, and we bear responsibility if the president maintains the Guantanamo gulag and continues to vilify Bradley Manning and Julian Assange for confronting America with its war crimes. Will he make good on his promise to hold the line on the incessant demands of the congressional defense contractor caucus or will he find yet another “good war”?

What about our expectation that Obama will be more vigilant than his vulture capitalist opponent in reining in the greed of the Wall Street crowd that has caused so much economic turmoil? The good news is that Obama, and his party, are far less beholden to the titans of the financial industry than they were the first time around. His own funding from top Wall Street firms that favored him in 2008 was way down, and across the country voters rejected the deregulation and lower tax on high roller income that the finance industry thought it ...

A recent symposium on evolution in Montreal posed to high-school students and university professors the following question: “Do you think that humans are still evolving?” Approximately 80% of the audience answered “no.” Indeed, there is an almost universal belief that, with multifaceted cultures and intricate technology, humans have freed themselves from the pressures of natural selection.

Recent findings, however, show otherwise. Far from providing immunity against evolutionary pressures, culture often creates new ones. For example, the genes associated with digestion of lactose are more prevalent in populations that have traditionally bred cattle and consumed milk.

In scientific reviews in Nature Genetics and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Stearns and his colleagues set out to demonstrate that natural selection operates on contemporary humans. Supported by extensive genealogies, including centuries of church and national health registries, their argument is convincing.

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Indeed, contrary to the widely held assumption that evolution takes millennia to manifest itself, recent evidence ...

When Curiosity touched down on Mars, joy erupted at NASA's lab in Pasadena, Calif., and national pride swelled. America the Demoralized had briefly vanished. Our research instruments were going where no research instruments had gone before. America was back at its game.

The Mars landing cost a cool $2.5 billion. No doubt, the folks at NASA wanted this voyage to drum up interest in the space program at a time when budgets everywhere are under attack. They've done a good, convincing job of it.

In olden days, the loudest calls for slashing the space program came from the left. With so many human needs being unattended to here on Earth, the argument went, we should not be spending billions on space. Fortunately, those protests went unheeded. We are now harvesting the fruit of decades in which Americans were willing to pay for space exploration, even though their tax rates were a lot higher than they are currently.

Nowadays, the demands for radical budget chopping emerge chiefly from the right, except when it comes to military spending (though a few conservatives are looking there, as well). And so we see The Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Spending We Can Believe In complaining that the "sequester" requiring $500 billion in the defense spending cuts will be a jobs killer. "Military jobs are on the block," she writes, "but the bulk of the pink slips will come from private businesses — from giant defense companies on down to smaller businesses that are the economic mainstays of their communities."

I've always been intrigued by the notion, popular among big-spending Republicans, that when taxpayer dollars are sent to private companies, they magically turn into free-market investments. Anyhow, let's have a Time Out.