Opinion

The latest abysmally low birth rates from North America, Europe and Asia continue to alarm business leaders and policy-makers, as well they should.

The NBA Summer League recently concluded, and the Oklahoma City Thunder’s rebuild was front-and-center with a plethora of young talent on the roster.

This talent has many pundits praising the direction of the team and how the Thunder rebuild has been handled.

It also provides our state’s political leaders with an example they could follow.

The surge of inflation under President Joe Biden has given many people flashbacks to the 1970s. Sadly, the latest data released by the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) evokes a similar sense of déjà vu.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) administered the NAEP long-term trend reading and math assessments to 13-year-old students from October to December of the 2022–23 school year.

The results provide much reason for alarm.

Everyone in Oklahoma is keenly aware that food security is national security. A nation that cannot feed itself cannot hope to defend itself. 

Because of this, it is essential we protect our farmland, especially from foreign adversaries. For far too long we’ve seen entities - Chinese in particular - coming over and buying our agricultural land. That’s why I’ve led on several fronts to address this troubling issue. 

Undoubtedly you heard that several days in early July were the “hottest days ever” for good old Planet Earth. The source of that story was an entity called Climate Reanalyzer, affiliated with the University of Maine.

It is worth noting that even the federal government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which usually supports the global warming narrative, hastened to point out that the figures cited by Climate Reanalyzer were unofficial and based on computer climate programs, not actual measurements. Hmmm…

To the Editor:

The term “mental health” is a subject that is not talked about enough in our tribal communities. In my family, I remember the men and boys were always told to be strong and not to cry. This is a mindset I learned to live with until I couldn’t any longer.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve endured traumatic events and grief that I needed to process, but I didn’t know how. When I lost my mother in January 2022, I was lost and broken. I didn’t know how to pick up the pieces of the life I knew until I was told, “It’s OK to ask for help, Zach.”

Oklahoma needs to move quickly if it wants to reap the benefits of being an early mover on tax reform

Oklahoma has long been a relatively low-tax state, but the recent reluctance to continue the reduction in the state’s income tax may result in other states passing us by.

The case, many say, is long closed.

It’s been 70 years since the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of spying for the Soviet Union. It’s been 28 years since the public release of decrypted Soviet cables revealing that Julius Rosenberg was indeed guilty, and at least strongly implying that Ethel Rosenberg knowingly participated in his espionage work -- not just typing documents to hand over to his handlers, but even actively recruiting her own brother into the operation.

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has declared war on a “loneliness epidemic.” Murthy noted “about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic cut off so many of us from friends, loved ones and support systems.”

According to the CDC, 25.5 percent of adults ages 18-24 reported having seriously considered suicide in the past month.

“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences,” reads the opening lines of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski’s notorious manifesto, “have been a disaster for the human race.”

Kaczynski, who recently died in prison, blamed that period of history not just for “severe damage to the natural world,” but for destabilizing society, making life unfulfilling and inflicting indignity and psychological suffering on humankind. Perhaps not entirely in fairness, I fancy I detect a similar tone in Peter Bach’s recent “Letter from London” in CounterPunch.