A judicious writer avoids adjectives like "mind-blowing," especially when covering political or economic issues. But no other word seems to describe the stunning reality of corporate taxation in modern America, which cries out for the italics-heavy, exclamation-point-driven format made famous by "Ripley's Believe It or Not."

Stylistic overkill? Read these 13 facts and you may change your mind.

1. We're told we can't "afford" full Social Security benefits, even though closing corporate tax-haven loopholes would pay for Obama's "chained CPI" benefit cut more than 10 times over!

Abusive offshore tax havens cost the U.S. $150 billion in lost tax revenue every year (via FACT Coalition). That's $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

The "chained CPI" cut, proposed by President Obama and supported by Republicans, is projected to "save" a total of $122 billion to $130 billion over the same time period by denying benefits to seniors and disabled people.

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Earlier this year, New York looked poised to become the 19th state to legalize medical marijuana. The state Assembly passed a bill by a 99-41 margin June 3. A Quinnipiac poll taken that week indicated that 70 percent of New Yorkers supported the idea. And in the state Senate, the Republicans who had blocked medical-marijuana measures the three times they’d passed the Assembly now retained power only by allying with five renegade Democrats—one of whom, Diane Savino of Staten Island, was the bill’s sponsor. Savino repeatedly said she believed she had enough votes to pass the bill, and would bring it to the floor when the right time came.

That time didn’t come. When the state Senate adjourned early in the morning of June 22, the bill had never reached the floor, despite the renegade Democrat faction’s leader, Jeffrey Klein, cosponsoring a more restrictive revised version. Another measure, to reduce the penalty for marijuana possession “in public view” from a misdemeanor to a $100 fine, also died without a vote in the Senate.

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Oops. The World Food Prize committee’s got a bit of egg on its face—genetically engineered egg. They just awarded the World Food Prize to three scientists, including one from Syngenta and one from Monsanto, who invented genetic engineering because, they say, the technology increases crop yields and decreases pesticide use. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Monsanto and Syngenta are major sponsors of the World Food Prize, along with a third biotech giant, Dupont Pioneer.)

Monsanto makes the same case on its website, saying, “Since the advent of biotechnology, there have been a number of claims from anti-biotechnology activists that genetically modified (GM) crops don’t increase yields. Some have claimed that GM crops actually have lower yields than non-GM crops… GM crops generally have higher yields due to both breeding and biotechnology.”

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"But people need religion for community! For social support! People get so much from religion—counseling, emotional help during hard times, financial help during hard times, rituals and rites of passage, day care, even job networking. Why do atheists want to take that away?"

There are a lot of arguments people make for religion. But this one gets atheists' attention. Not because it's a good argument for religion—it's not. People don't need religion to help each other out, or even to form organized groups to help each other out. We form communities and support networks around all sorts of ideas and identities: philosophies, political views, sexual orientations, gender identities or lack thereof, hobbies, geographical accidents, food preferences, and much, much more. And the communities people build around religion are hardly evidence that God exists... any more than Dickens re-creation societies are evidence that Oliver Twist exists.

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Multivitamins are the most popular dietary supplement on Earth. But here’s the sobering reality: They may be simply useless—or worse.

For the last several years, a Mount Fuji of evidence has piled up to show that multivitamins don’t do much of anything for the health of the average person. Though less conclusive, a growing body of evidence suggests that they may even shorten your life. Unless you are taking vitamins to address a specific deficiency, malnutrition or illness, gulping down a multivitamin in hopes of preventing disease or cheating the Grim Reaper may be one of the most prevalent medical myths of our time.

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During and immediately after the election many employers in the low-income service sector warned about dire effects the Affordable Care Act would have on employment and prices. The jerry-rigged, patchwork healthcare reform Obamacare tries to mend America’s long-standing coverage gaps with a variety of tools, including expanding Medicaid, establishing state-based exchanges supported by public assistance, and granting small businesses (25 or fewer employees) subsidies to provide insurance for their employees. But larger businesses (50 employees or more) are incentivized to provide coverage with a stick: Pay a $2,000 fine per employee who works more than 30 hours and lacks insurance.

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Bigger isn’t always better. From the Tower of Babel to Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting, that principle’s been enshrined in law and legend since the dawn of history. Have we forgotten the lesson?

Corporations, databases, storehouses of personal and institutional wealth all are expanding at ever-increasing speed, threatening to engulf our economy and our lives as they do. That’s the problem with Big Things: Once they reached a certain size, they keep on getting bigger.

Here are seven ways the runaway power of Bigger in finance and in data is threatening to overwhelm us all.

1. Bigger Corporations

Americans have known about the danger of overly large corporations since the founding of the Republic. “I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations,” said Thomas Jefferson, “which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

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Is the religious right, which has been the electoral backbone of the Republican Party since the creation of the Moral Majority in the '70s and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, in trouble? The strongly right-wing Washington Times reports rather dimly on the conference for the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a group founded by religious right luminary Ralph Reed, because it couldn’t even gather 400 audience members, despite having a deep bench of fundamentalist-beloved politicians and celebrities like Pat Robertson, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry and Scott Walker. The Times contrasted the small conference with its '80s and '90s counterpart, the Christian Coalition’s Road to the White House conventions, which drew thousands of participants every year.

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It was Texas Representative Michael Burgess’ turn on the GOP’s Bullhorn of Crazy this week. “You watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” Burgess said during a congressional debate on the House Republican’s absolutely pointless bill outlawing abortions past 20 weeks. “They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. I mean, they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to think that they could feel pain?”

Burgess’ prenatal masturbation musing is only the tip of the melting iceberg of Republican science denial. Here are seven battier things they believe, from trees causing global warming to fetuses in your Pepsi.

1. Abortion Leads To Cancer, Birth Defects, And Everything Else

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It is going on five years since the financial crash and three years since President Obama signed the meager Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and the big banks are still scamming and conning and ripping off their customers. What a huge surprise.

After the financial crash, we heard about a laundry list of abuses and frauds that ranged from small things, like hidden fees, to pushing minorities into subprime loans and then switching them into more expensive mortgages at signing time, to huge things like selling trillions of dollars in complicated CDO schemes and making bets on derivatives of derivatives without having the reserves to pay off what they owed when the bets went bad.

Of course, no one at the top was prosecuted and the banks were allowed to settle a host of charges (which meant that their shareholders, not the executives who made the decisions, paid the fines). The bad behavior gave these giants a competitive advantage, driving out what good companies there were. So the costly and destructive bad behavior, schemes, cons and scams continue.

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If you thought that Americans who kept their jobs during the Great Recession were glad to be working, you would be dead wrong. According to a Gallup.com report, 70 percent of American workers are “emotionally disconnected” at work, with nearly one in five employees “actively disengaged.”

It's zombieland out there for the American workforce.

Gallup’s ongoing “State of the American Workforce” survey reveals that America is largely a nation of working automatons, with most people not feeling emotional ties to what they do and sizeable numbers actively seeking to sabotage their colleagues and managers.

“These latest findings indicate that 70 percent of American workers are ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ and are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and less likely to be productive,” the pollers said. “Currently, 52 percent of workers are not engaged, and worse, another 18 percent are actively disengaged in their work.”

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America is the richest country on Earth. We have the most millionaires, the most billionaires and our wealthiest citizens have garnered more of the planet's riches than any other group in the world. We even have hedge fund managers who make in one hour as much as the average family makes in 21 years!

This opulence is supposed to trickle down to the rest of us, improving the lives of everyday Americans. At least that's what free-market cheerleaders repeatedly promise us.

Unfortunately, it's a lie, one of the biggest ever perpetrated on the American people.

Our middle class is falling further and further behind in comparison to the rest of the world. We keep hearing that America is number one. Well, when it comes to middle-class wealth, we're number 27.

The most telling comparative measurement is median wealth (per adult). It describes the amount of wealth accumulated by the person precisely in the middle of the wealth distribution—50 percent of the adult population has more wealth, while 50 percent has less. You can't get more middle than that.

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It’s not really news that America’s economics departments, particularly at elite institutions, are stuffed with people whose careers are founded on protecting monied interests. But it’s pretty rare when someone just comes straight out and announces the fact.

Meet Greg Mankiw, chairman and professor of economics at Harvard, one of the most influential economists in the country. As chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, he guided the economic blundering of George W. Bush. Then in 2006, he became an adviser to Mitt Romney and steered Romney's economic positions in 2012, which included some of the most shocking expressions of classism yet heard from a presidential candidate.

Mankiw's name might not be a household word, but the tentacles of his power and influence extend into Washington, the blogosphere and the classroom, where he molds young minds through his ubiquitous textbooks and lectures (that is, when students are not walking out to protest his conservative bias and harmful agenda).

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What many Americans, including many scientists, think they know about drugs is turning out to be totally wrong. For decades, drug war propaganda has brainwashed Americans into blaming drugs for problems ranging from crime to economic deprivation. In his new book High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society, Carl Hart blows apart the most common myths about drugs and their impact on society, drawing in part on his personal experience growing up in an impoverished Miami neighborhood. Hart has used marijuana and cocaine, carried guns, sold drugs, and participated in other petty crime, like shoplifting. A combination of what he calls choice and chance brought him to the AIr Force and college, and finally made him the first black, tenured professor of sciences at Columbia University.

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In her 2011 book Disconnect, National Book Award finalist, former senior White House health advisor and internationally regarded epidemiologist Devra Davis revealed that the cellphone industry is knowingly exposing us to dangerous levels of electromagnetic radiation. No small problem when you consider that of the roughly 7 billion people on this planet, about 6 billion of us now use mobile phones.

In a recent analysis for the Huffington Post, Davis examined the cellphone industry's long-term strategy, devised in the early '90s, to deal with studies showing cellphone radiation damages DNA: "war-game the science." Noted in a 1994 Motorola memo, this strategy, wrote Davis, "remains alive and well" today, the latest example occurring just last month. When the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) published newly detailed documentation for its yearlong 2011 expert review—which declared cellphone radiation a "possible human carcinogen" (same as lead and DDT)—the multi-trillion-dollar cellular industry responded by citing a new dubious report out of Taiwan.

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NSA leaker Edward Snowden may be a rebel-heartthrob to the EFF crowd, but his whistleblowing is grating the ears of the politicians and pundits who built the intelligence-gathering apparatus Snowden unveiled. These folks haven’t spent the past dozen years expanding the parameters of government surveillance just to have some ingrate let us all in on it, and their responses have ranged from calling Snowden a dimwit to calling for his head. From Fox News to the Wall Street Journal, here are the most cringe-inducing reactions.

1. Jeffrey Toobin

Jeffrey Toobin’s quick and vicious takedown in the New Yorker set the tone for attacking Snowden as a naïve nincompoop. “Any marginally attentive citizen, much less N.S.A. employee or contractor, knows that the entire mission of the agency is to intercept electronic communications,” Toobin wrote. Never mind that even many legislators were in the dark as to the size and scope of the NSA’s operations—Snowden was one warrant short of a wiretap for believing we hadn’t just assumed the highly classified intrusion into our lives.

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The bottom line, which resonates most strongly among civil liberties advocates on the left and conservative libertarians on the right, is not just the loss of privacy but also the growing power of the state to target and oppress people who it judges to be critics and enemies. That list doesn’t just include foreign terrorists of the al-Qaeda mold, or even the Chinese government that has stolen the most advanced U.S. weapon plans; it also includes domestic whistleblowers, protesters and journalists—all of whom have been targeted by the Obama administration Justice Department.

Let’s go through 10 points about these latest revelations of domestic spying to better understand what Americans have underestimated and overlooked about electronic eavesdropping.

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You know things are bad in the pork industry when the whistleblowers aren't animal rights activists, but the government itself. In May, the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Office of the Inspector General exposed extreme sanitation and humane violations in 30 US swine slaughterhouses it visited and in records of 600 other US plants slaughtering pigs.

"During FYs 2008 to 2011, FSIS [Food Safety and Inspection Service, the regulatory agency within USDA] issued 44,128 noncompliance records (NRs) to 616 plants; only 28 plants were suspended, even though some plants repeated violations as egregious as fecal matter on previously cleaned carcasses," says the Office of the Inspector General report. "In one plant, flies hovered over an area where blood was being collected to be sold for human consumption" (for products like blood sausage and blood soup). Twenty-two of the 28 plants that were actually suspended were allow to "continue to operate within a short period--some as little as one day after suspension," says the report. There's a deterrent for you.

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It’s that time of year. The sun is shining, the flowers are in bloom and all across America, graduating students are forced to endure that dreaded rite of passage, the commencement speech. Often boring, typically clichéd and frequently self-aggrandizing, commencement speeches form their own subgenre of fatuous prose.

Get out the barf bag! Here are a few choice orations from some of America’s most illustrious jerks.

1. Ivan Boesky at Berkeley, 1986

Ivan Boesky was a big-time stock trader who hustled his way to riches betting on corporate takeovers. On May 18, 1986 at the University of California, Berkeley, he shared these lustrous pearls of wisdom with business school students:

“Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”

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