Articles Posted in the Opinion Category

  • Dragon Tattoo Girl Still Going Strong

    In addition to the three Trilogy books, I also enjoyed the movie versions of each of these mysteries. The Swedish versions starred Michael Nyqvist as Mikael Blomkvist and Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander. The American version of The Dragon Tattoo starred Daniel Craig as Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as Salander. For this role, Rooney Mara received an Oscar nomination for best actress. Sony plans movie versions of the other two books with the Played With Fire due for release late next year. Both the Swedish versions of the three books and the American version of The Dragon Tattoo are excellent. Although, Noomi Rapace more closely captured my imagined Lisbeth Salander. This is not to slight Mara’s excellent portrayal.

  • I Hate it When I’m Right

    I Hate it When I’m Right

    There are times you just hope you are wrong. Several years ago, I warned about parents needing to get more involved in their children’s lives, but it was not heard by enough people, whose voices just might have been able to prevent the recent murders of students at a school in Ohio.

  • SWIFT Pressured to Ban Iran Over Nuclear Ambitions

    SWIFT is the financial equivalent of the United Nations. It facilitates the bulk of the world’s cross-border payments. The member-owned cooperative has been described as the ‘glue’ of the global banking system with the value of daily payments using SWIFT estimated at more than $6 trillion. SWIFT is vital to international money flows, exchanging an average 18 million payment messages per day between banks and other financial institutions in 210 countries.

  • Time to Protect Kid’s Privacy Online

    COPPA, effective April 21, 2000, was passed before browser cookies and other tracking technologies were being used, and doesn’t cover teens, who frequently use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. COPPA applies to the online collection of personal information from children under 13. COPPA spells out what a website operator must include in a privacy policy, when and how to seek verifiable consent from a parent, and what responsibilities an operator has to protect children’s privacy and safety online. COPPA is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC has promulgated regulations to enforce COPPA. (For more information on COPPA, see the FTC’s Frequently Asked Questions about the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule).

  • Smallpox – Still a National Safety Issue?

    The Obama administration recently awarded a $433 million no-bid contract to Siga Technologies, the maker of ST-246, an experimental smallpox antiviral drug. This staggering amount would have us believe we were dealing with a multi-trillion dollar surplus instead of the mega-deficit of monumental proportions in which we are currently mired.

  • Jim Crow Never Left

    Jim Crow was not the name of an actual person. Rather, it was a stereotype; the name of a rigid racial caste system. But it was more than a series of rigid anti-Black laws enacted from 1876 to 1965. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens and and Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-Black racism.

  • The Federal Reserve: An Insight into the Most Powerful US Economic Body

    Initially the Congress had established three major objectives for monetary policy: maximum employment; stability of prices and interest rates in the long term being moderate. Most often the first two objectives are referred to as the dual mandate of the Federal Reserve.