On an average day, a person is subjected to more than 5,000 advertisements and exposures to brands. Out of that number about 362 are “ads only.” That means that during your waking hours you are exposed to an average of 23 ads per hour, or about one advertisement every two and a half minutes. A lot of people along the advertising chain—from creation to display of ads—are getting paid. If everyone else is getting paid to distribute the ads, why...

Bill McKibben The minute it was announced – months in advance of its official release –Laudato Si was instantly “highly anticipated” by nearly every opinion and news source. Finally a Christian document the masses could support because … why, exactly? Oh, yeah, global warming and a call for global government control of energy and, therefore, the world’s economies. So, es as no surprise climate-change activist would weigh-in on Laudato Si, a document released in mid-June and one he identifies, naturally,...

Over the past couple of years the Obama administration has made it clear that when religious freedom conflicts with their political agenda, religious believers are the ones that will have to set aside their conscientious objections. And to be honest, I suspected that would be what happened more often than not. Sure, you’d have some brave holdouts, like the owners of Hobby Lobby and the dedicated nuns of the Little Sisters of the Poor. But for the most part, I...

With persecution of Christians there at an all time high, many have chosen to leave the Middle East. Christianity Today, reporting on the latest Pew Research report, says the number of Christians in the Middle East has dropped from 14 percent of the population to just 4 percent. That translates to less than half a million people in the Middle East who identify as Christians. The problem turned from bad to worse with the rise of the Islamic State as...

Since 2001, the U.S. Department of State has released a Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report. This report examines trafficking country-by-country, ranks each country and gives suggestions to each country’s government to improve the fight against modern slavery. The 2015 report begins with, among others items, a list of all situations that are now considered forms of human trafficking. Sex traffickingChild sex traffickingForced laborBonded labor or debt bondageDomestic servitudeForced child laborUnlawful recruitment and use of child soldiers Part of this report...

No one can call Camille Paglia an easy person to pidgeon-hole. She’s a feminist, but refers to herself as a dissident one. She’s a professor, an author, a critic. In the late 1990s, she began writing a regular column for Salon (she continues to contribute, but not regularly.) She once said she would not be unhappy if her entire career were to be judged by this sentence she wrote: “God is man’s greatest idea.” Suffice it to say that she...

In 2002, fewer than one in four Americans were dissatisfied with the nation’s system of government and how well it works. Since then that level of discontent has been steadily increasing. Last year the number who said they were somewhat or very dissatisfied reached 65 percent. The primary reason for our disgruntlement is the government’s record of failure. As Peter Schuck explained in his recent book Why Government Fails So Often, ‘government failure’ is neither a political creed nor a...

Your writer has taken quite a bit of heat from some readers of a local newspaper column he writes for not “getting in-line” with the Pope on his identification of imminent climate catastrophe wrought by human activity. Even so, I cling to my Rosary on all matters actually Catholic. Aside from the brilliant minds at Acton and its scholars and prised of highly educated, amazingly spiritual individuals, I was beginning to feel as if I was an orphan in a...

If you’re on welfare in New Hampshire you might want to rush out and get that new tattoo and tongue piercing, and load up on cigars and weed. In 60 days you’ll no longer be able to use your welfare payment cards on marijuana, cigars, piercings, or tattoos: Gov. Maggie Hassan signed a law that bans welfare “electronic benefit transfer” cards from being used on marijuana, among other vices. More than 12,000 New Hampshire households receive benefits on EBT cards...

What’s the purpose of lighting in a large city? That may seem like the a fine example of a stupid question, but it’s not. While we could answer that question with suggestions like safety, allowing for mercial hours and ease of travel, lighting may now be used as a way to collect data on private citizens. Using bination of LEDs and big data technology, public lighting is the potential backbone of a system that could use billions of fixtures to...