Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is enjoying increasing popularity all over the world - to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars each year, making it Big Business.

Yet there are concerns. Two molecular genetics studies show that the treatments can be harmful, as well, because not all of their ingredients are listed, or even legal, some can cause cancer and proponents often simply do not know what they are doing when making combinations. 

The Utopian vision society has always dreamed about was a world where people could eat so much for so little money, that it wasn't just rich people who could afford to be fat; anyone could.

Well, we have that. America is more self-loathing about its obesity issues than most countries but Italian kids are fat, everyone in Britain is fat, and even the French are closing in on a weight crisis.

A few days away from a Supreme Court ruling on the the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act(Obamacare to detractors) comes some sobering claims from Britain, which already has nationalized health care.

Professor Patrick Pullicino, a consulting neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Kent, says National Health Service (NHS) doctors in the UK are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds.

Joan Gonzalvo of the Ionian Dolphin Project, who studies dolphins off western Greece for the Tethys Research Institute, captured an incredible sequence of images showing a leaping bottlenose dolphin with a large octopus clinging to its belly.

Well, more specifically the dolphin's genital slit. Yikes.

It's a nightmare for Whole Foods shoppers; what if genetically modified crops produced by evil scientists who only care about profits for their employers (i.e., the same as every employee of Whole Foods and its organic Mega-Farm suppliers) are actually good for the ecosystem?

We already know that genetically modified foods are as good for people as organic foods - or better if you'd prefer not to get E. coli from your food. We also know that, despite the silly claims, organic food is incapable of feeding poor people while genetically modified foods have brought prosperity and nutrition to a billion people worldwide in the last decade, and they have done it without using more land and with less harmful pesticides.

Bank of America was recently so crushed by its risky derivatives investments it needed $45 billion in bailout money from taxpayers - and then proceeded to engage in questionable practices to cover its losses, much like it engaged in questionable practices to acquire the losses.  

Things are so much better now they can afford to fix global warming and are devoting $50 billion to the cause. 

If we want to start cutting budgets, Republicans are not wrong for noting that the Education Department and the Department of Energy could disappear without any consequence at all to America beyond the government union employees working there.

But one darling of the right, the military, could do some cutting as well.  America has 16 different intelligence agencies and one of them you likely never heard of, the National Reconnaissance Office, has donated not one but two Hubble-sized military telescopes to NASA because, darn it, they just don't need them after all.

Count on economics, the dismal science, to claim that the one economy not crippled in 2012, is in peril.

Change it must, argues political scientist Victor Shih of Northwestern University in Financial Times, because its net exports to GDP is falling rapidly. Since its trade surplus, the cheap engine of its financial machine, has shrunk, they must consider

Conservatives and more taxes are kind of an oxymoron in the same sentence but pretend for a minute that more taxes are going to happen.   Because they are.  Do you want a bad one or a really terrible one?

America has been trying to get a really terrible one but even President Obama couldn't pull that one off - he gave us terrible health care law instead.  But he had limits even on what he could do with a bulletproof majority.  When it came to higher taxes in the form of cap and trade for emissions, his own party's Senators were airing commercials shooting the bill with an assault rifle.