Miscellaneous Short Subjects

*Majority of Minorities - "By the year 2044 whites will no longer be a majority in our county. Latinos, Africans, Asians, indigenous people and others will be the majority face of America." "America in 2016 is in the midst of a demographic overhaul." According to Paul Taylor from the Pew Research Center, "Huge generation gaps have opened up in our political and social values. Our economic well-being, our family structures, our racial and ethnic identity, our gender norms and religious affiliations, and out technology use are changing." (Source: Moises Vanegas, "Majority of minorities in our future," The Albuquerque Journal, January 16, 2016.)

*Environmental Defense Fund Goals - 1.) Slash carbon pollution from America's dirtiest power plants -- implement EPA's Clean Power Plan; 23.) Limit fertilizer -- extra fertilizer can convert to nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide; 3.) Support national limits on industrial methane pollution -- over the first 20 years in the atmosphere, methane is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide and is responsible for about 25 percent of the warming we are currently experiencing; 4.) Expand a global climate action -- working in Brazil to provide incentives to stop deforestation, and design and implement pilot carbon trading programs.

*Fighting ISIS and Its Funding - Outside of Kurdistan, much of the fighting against ISIS has been done by the Popular Mobilization Forces, a federation of militias that  initially rallied to defend the country's cities after the collapse of the army and police in Mosul. Turkey has a history of interfering in Mosul's affairs.

The U.S. Treasury Department estimates that illicit oil exports generate almost half a billion dollars a year for ISIS. (Source: Luke Mogelson, "The Front Lines," The New Yorker, January 18, 2016.)

*Quoting and Depicting Henry Kissinger - (Quoting Kissinger) "The Soviets have made us look like monkeys, weak monkeys, and we can't wait to demonstrate our masochism by crawling back and begging them please to negotiate, so that we can give up something else to them." (Depicting Kissinger) "The responses he [Kissinger] counseled as Nixon's national security adviser helped to create catastrophes in each of the regions they affected..." It was about demonstrating American power to the world, absent a moral core and a sense of proportion." "During the Kennedy years, he [Kissinger[ counseled reckless escalation on Berlin, which could have led to a very dark place.. He was a public supporter of the Americanization of the Vietnam war."  (Source: William Appleman Williams, quoted in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, published in 1959.)

*Physician Use of Big Data - "More  than 80% of physicians in the U.S. now have some form of electronic medical records." "Now, when you've got millions to tens of millions of data points in these databases, we can start to learn more and learn faster." The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, signed by President Bush in 2008, makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of an existing or genetic condition. Since healthier employees cost less, we are likely to start seeing a new role in corporate America: the chief medical officer. (Source: "Can Big Data Save Lives?" Fortune, January 1, 2016.)