In a private speech in 2024, only released publicly for the first time in January, China’s President Xi Jinping announced his plans for the Renmibi to be the world’s global reserve currency. China’s leadership has moved its currency strategy from implication to articulation, according to Financial Times writers Cheng Leng and Joe Leahy. This marks…

On this date in 1940, Walt Disney released his second feature-length movie, Pinocchio, in New York City. But the idea that your nose would grow if you tell a lie originated much earlier, from the character Pinocchio in the 1883 children’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. As you know, the wooden puppet’s…

Prediabetes is an insidious and sneaky condition, and a relatively new word to describe a condition where a person’s blood sugar levels are higher than normal but not high enough to be classified as Type 2 diabetes. The Centers for Disease Control say 15-30 percent of people with prediabetes will worsen into Type 2 diabetes…

Since the price of beef has shot back up to covid-era levels, you might be going with a bit less meat lately. That’s a shame, and unhealthy, as Dr. Jens Moller, M.D. (1904-1989), medical researcher and practitioner viewed protein as the substance on which all the biochemical and physiological activity of life is based. If you…

Cities are running dry, and people are scrambling to get by however they can. And while the government’s talking about emergency water transfers and rationing, and literally praying for rain, none of it is really fixing the deeper problems. The folks who live there are getting used to empty taps, dried-up wells, and the sound…

Most folks learn to just “live with it,” thinking it’s a natural part of the aging process, and adjust their lifestyles accordingly. They accept that they will have their sleep patterns forever interrupted by nighttime trips to the bathroom and that they’ll never be able to sit all the way through a movie again. Or,…

We run a losing race with the money cre­ators if we don’t own gold and silver. Prices are going up in terms of paper money and prices are going down in terms of gold. And, since politicians destroy capital and savings as fast as they can, which means that they are inadvertently big promoters of…

In one of his legendary lectures on science, Richard Feynman said that the layman has “as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments — but be patient and listen to all the evidence — to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.” He added: “The experts who are leading you…

The government shutdown and the arguments over just how much to grow government spending seem to prove the Shirky Principle. Have you heard of it? In 2010, Clay Shirky was giving a speech and, while talking about his book Cognitive Surplus, said, “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”…

When Louis XIV’s ego demanded fountains for Versailles that sprayed a “god-like mist,” his engineers had to come up with these super-tiny valves and a new kind of compression system. Long after, those same innovations would find their way into early versions of the carburetor, where they were used to turn gasoline into a fine,…