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Sky Palma is the founder of DeadState, and a senior editor at Raw Story.

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If I was to ask you what was the most dangerous animal in the world, and you were to think tigers, bears or sharks, you’d be wildly wrong, particularly with sharks. Despite Shark Week, despite Jaws, sharks are not statistically dangerous to humans – quite the reverse, humans kill millions, many, many millions of times more sharks that sharks kill humans.

I’m sure some smartass out there will be thinking that the most dangerous animal is man, but I’m thinking of other animals that kill humans.

And by a mile, the winner is the mosquito. To put it in context, sharks typically kill five or six humans per year, worldwide. Depending on your sources, mosquitoes kill somewhere between 700,000 and 2.7m people per year. Get that, mosquitoes kill at the very least 100,000 times more people than sharks. They are estimated to be responsible for about 17 per cent of all the disease on the planet. I can’t wait for Mosquito Week on the Discovery Channel.

Continue reading “CO122 Sky Palma on Opinion News”

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Jared Moffat is campaign coordinator for the Marijuana Policy Project.

I mentioned that Ferguson, Missouri gains an extrordinary amount of its revenue from motoring fines.

Black people make up 27 percent of the population, but represent 71 percent of drivers pulled over by police officers. Last year, the town issued 29,072 traffic citations, according to statistics from the Missouri attorney general’s office.

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A couple of weeks back an international group of scientists announced that they had detected a black hole swallowing a neutron star.

I say a couple of weeks back, but the detection made last month was actually of something that happened 900 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs walked the earth. It was detected last month because that’s how long it took the gravitational waves to arrive at earth from where this event happened, 900 million light years away.

Continue reading “CO121 Jared Moffat on the Legacy of Prohibition”

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Reese Erlich has won numerous journalism awards including a Peabody award. He’s also a freelance journalist who writes for CBS Radio, Australian Broadcasting Corp., NPR and VICE News, and his Foreign Correspondent column distributed nationally in the US.

Last year he published his latest book with the title The Iran Agenda Today: The Real Story Inside Iran and What’s Wrong with U.S. Policy.

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I mentioned the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong a few weeks back, particularly the fact that a huge proportion of the city’s population was taking part in them. Since I talked about them, the protests have been covered widely in the western media, and they haven’t dissipated, they are continuing every weekend.

Continue reading “CO120 Reese Erlich on Tensions with Iran”

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Gautam Tejas Ganeshan is a musician and a writer and blogger, and we talked about a piece that he wrote titled ‘Is there an intelligible “anti-vaxx” position?‘

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Andrew Branca is a lifelong NRA member, a lawyer who consults on self-defence law and the author of The Law of Self Defense: The Indispensable Guide to the Armed Citizen.

During our discussion, I metioned the Dickey Amendment, which forbids the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from advocating or promoting gun control, but has widely been interpreted as preventing the CDC from studying the health effects of gun ownership.

Continue reading “CO118 Andrew Branca on Gun Law”

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Will Wilkinson is the vice president for research at the Niskanen Center.

He’s also and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He was previously, a correspondent for The Economist and a research fellow at the Cato Institute.

Continue reading “CO117 Will Wilkinson on Community and Ideology”

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Raymond Ibrahim is the author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West.

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Let’s do a bit of science.

Maybe, like me, you have had various social media invaded by people making all sorts of complaints about something called 5G. That’s the newest mobile data standard. Unless you are really special, that doesn’t work on your phone yet, but the networks are being installed, and newer handsets using them will be available soon, probably starting at the top end of the price range.

Continue reading “CO116 Raymond Ibrahim on Islam and the West”

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John Hawkins is a writer for Bizpaq review, Brass Pills and is the editor Right Wing News. He’s also the author of 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know.

We talked about John’s article The Best Stats & Quotes From ‘Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse’, John’s take on the findings of that book. I mentioned the fact that the number of hours needed to work at minimum age to pay college tuition has increased about tenfold in the last 40 years, and the book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.

Continue reading “CO115 John Hawkins on Politicized Data”

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Greg Shupak has a PhD in Literary Studies and teaches Media Studies at the University of Guelph in Toronto. He regularly writes analysis of politics and media for outlets including Electronic Intifada, In These Times, Jacobin, and the website Fairness and accuracy in reporting.

Continue reading “CO114 Greg Shupak on Reporting the Conflict”

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Mark Vernon is a psychotherapist and writer, with a degree in physics, before two degrees in theology, and a PhD in philosophy. He’s written books covering subjects from friendship and belief, to wellbeing and love.

Continue reading “CO113 Mark Vernon on the Secret History of Christianity”

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Justin Strekal political director at Norml.

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I mentioned last week that I would talk about the earthquake – earthquakes really – in UK politics. In particular that Nigel Farage’s new party, the Brexit Party won the European Parliament elections in the UK by a mile last month.

Continue reading “CO112 Justin Strekal on Legalizing Marijuana”

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Bruce Schneier is a public-interest technologist. He’s been writing about security issues for more than 20 years, and he’s a Special Advisor to IBM Security, a fellow and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and a board member of Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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A couple of quite similar stories caught my eye in the past while.

The first was about a German MP called Markus Frohnmaier. He was elected to the Bundestag, the German parliament for the far-right AfD party in 2017.

Continue reading “CO111 Bruce Schneier on Cybersecurity”

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Grayson Quay is a freelance writer. His work has been published in The Washington Times, Reason.com, National Interest, Townhall and others. He is also MA candidate at Georgetown University Master’s Degree candidate.

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Aaron Naparstek is a cohost of the War on Cars podcast, and also the founder of Streetsblog.org.

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There have been a couple of stories about facial recognition. This audio is from a BBC report where the police set up a van with cameras filming passersby and searching for records on them based on facial recognition. One man decided that he didn’t like that, and pulled his sweater up over his mouth and nose to frustrate the camera system; the police stopped him, forced him to be photographed, and fined him £90, about $115 for what they called disorderly conduct.

Continue reading “CO109 Aaron Naparstek on the War on Cars”

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Rob Bluey is vice president for communications at The Heritage Foundation and Founding Editor of Daily Signal. I mentioned in the interview an article that Rob wrote during the Obama administration criticizing the removal of a website about earmark reform, and contrasted it to the Trump cull of the EPA’s website.

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Last month, a mob of more than 70 men, armed with baseball bats, knives, and rocks launched a series of vigilante attacks around the towns of  Clichy-sous-Bois and Bobigny, about an hour east of Paris. French police arrested at least 20 of them.

Continue reading “CO108 Rob Bluey on Standards and Consistency”

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David Dayen is a contributing writer The Intercept and a weekly columnist for the New Republic. He is the author of the book Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud., and he’s shortly to become the executive editor of the American Prospect.

We talked about his article How Vaping Giant Juul Explains Everything that’s Wrong with our World.

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There’s a story in the last couple of weeks that, if you’re in Australia, you’ve almost certainly heard, if you’re not in Australia, you’ve almost certainly not heard.

Continue reading “CO107 David Dayen on the Economics of Vaping”

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Mitchell Robinson is a writer for Eclectablog and associate professor and chair of music education at Michigan State University, as well as being a former high-school teacher. His research is focused on music education and education policy.

Continue reading “CO106 Mitchell Robinson on Education Reform and Charter Schools”

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Cathy Reisenwitz is a writer whose work has appeared in The Week, Forbes, the Daily Beast, VICE Motherboard, Reason magazine, Talking Points Memo and others, and she’s appeared as a commentator on Fox News and Al Jazeera, which an interesting combination to say the least.

Continue reading “CO105 Cathy Reisenwitz on Cars and Freedom”

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Christian Toto is the editor of Hollywood in Toto, and a regular commentator on both politics and the entertainment industry.

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Clement Atlee, the British World War II Labour Party leader, and minister was once quoted by Margaret Thatcher, the conservative party leader of the 1970s and 1980s. They both agreed that referendums are ‘a device of dictators and demagogues’.

Continue reading “CO104 Christian Toto on the Politics of Hollywood”

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Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, with an emphasis on poverty and social welfare policy, health care, and Social Security and entitlement reform.

His most recent book, The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America’s Poor, looks at the ways government contributes to poverty in the United States and suggests reforms that will enable the poor to more fully participate in a growing economy. 

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I saw a couple of things recently related to podcasts, or at least that might resonate with podcast listeners. One was a YouTube video that compared the market valuation of WeWork, the company that offers hotdesking to remote workers, to Regus, a similar but much more established company, now owned by the IWG group. WeWork has a valuation of $47 billion. WeWork have been advertising heavily on some podcasts. Hell, if they have that much money, I should be tapping them for ads on Challenging Opinions. Regus has a valuation of $4 billion and, get this, Regus is does almost ten times the business. Almost ten times bigger, but less than one tenth of the valuation.

Continue reading “CO103 Michael Tanner on Helping the Poor”