Chyden Finance: profit from hypocrisy

Asia Times Online reports, “Life-saving medicines could become too costly for the world’s poor after a new trade agreement between the European Union and India comes into effect.”
According to the US Constitution, the purpose of patents is to promote innovation, however they more commonly are used to secure monopoly profits.
In general, two kinds of monopoly [...]

The Meme of the Week seems to be ’spread the wealth’.
Let’s look at that one.
One of the frequently cited ‘facts’ is the string of Clinton Surpluses.
However, if one pulls data from the US Treasury website on the level of the US federal government debt and graphs it, one can see the slightest of wiggles and [...]

As the rest of the world has become more economically and socially developed, emigration has become less expensive, in the sense that a US resident has to give up less than was the case in the past, when going abroad permanently.
When I was a kid, we were told to eat all of our [...]

Most maddening of all in this debate over health-care reform in the USA is the tendency of the mainstream media to divide issues into two falsely dichotomous sound-bite extremes. We end up with a debate that is framed on a foundation of fallacies.
With regard to health insurance, we are told that ‘the’ choice is [...]

Ayn Rand championed cigarettes. The Ludwig von Mises Institute champions alcohol. And, of course, there’s the Second Amendment crowd out there championing guns.
I get the whole right-to-choose thing, and I recognize that if there is no victim, then there is no crime. Similarly, I am all for self-defense. I am a Floridian, after all!
But still… [...]

The rhetoric in this round of the healthcare nationalization debate in the USA is as idiotic as it has been in its previous incarnations. On the one hand socialists, statists, and other busybodies call it a moral imperative and libertarians and conservatives treat it like the second coming of Bolshevism.
It is neither.
If we strip [...]

HDL is ‘good’ cholesterol. LDL is ‘bad’ cholesterol.
At least… that’s what we’ve been told lo these decades.
Men’s Health reports “It’s time to rethink the halo-and-pitchfork view of our blood fat levels.”
“For decades, a tidy narrative about the relationship between LDL cholesterol and heart disease has affected everything from the food we eat to the [...]

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s news that vegetarianism is bad for the environment, we have news from Time magazine that a healthy diet is bad for you.
Granted, the article stresses that ‘orthorexia’ is health consciousness taken to an unhealthy extreme, but the subtle undertone is clear: conventional foods are superior to extremist diets like [...]