In a seminar room on an Ivy League campus, I sat across from earnest, and anxious college seniors. In a few months, they would leave the classic tree-lined campus, the football games, and the overflowing cafeterias where food magically appears three times a day. I had arranged the meeting to find out what these “emerging adults” desperately wanted to learn …
Andy Tix – The New Psychology of Atheism
“Do I believe in God?” This is a question many people will ask themselves this week – even if only to themselves – as they go to church to commemorate Easter. Religious beliefs and behaviors are changing. According to the most recent Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study(link is external), the number of Americans who aren’t affiliated with any religion has grown substantially …
Sonali Kolhatkar – The U.S. Is Becoming a Terrifying Nation for Women
Much is at stake in a Supreme Court case over a Texas abortion law. The nation’s highest court heard oral arguments last week in Whole Woman’s Health v. John Hellerstedt. The case challenges restrictions placed on Texas abortion clinics under a law known as HB2. That law uses medical arguments to restrict women’s access to abortion in a state that …
Your brain might be hard-wired for altruism
PRINT E-MAIL It’s an age-old quandary: Are we born “noble savages” whose best intentions are corrupted by civilization, as the 18th century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau contended? Or are we fundamentally selfish brutes who need civilization to rein in our base impulses, as the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued? After exploring the areas of the brain that fuel our …
Marc Bekoff – 85% of Americans Support Animal Protection: A Positive Shift
The is so much literature out there about animal protection that a report about rising support for animal protection in the United States escaped my attention. The brief summary published in 2014 called “New Poll Shows Support for Animal Protection Rising in the U.S.(link is external)” begins, “Animal protection has the support of 85 percent of Americans, according to a …
Your brain might be hard-wired for altruism
It’s an age-old quandary: Are we born “noble savages” whose best intentions are corrupted by civilization, as the 18th century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau contended? Or are we fundamentally selfish brutes who need civilization to rein in our base impulses, as the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued? After exploring the areas of the brain that fuel our empathetic …
Eric Zuesse – U.S. Government Blames 9/11 On Iran, Fines Iran $10.5B; Iran Refuses To Pay
On March 14th, Iran announced that it will never pay the $10.5B that a U.S. court demanded it pay for the 9/11 attacks. The same Bill-Clinton-appointed judge who had ruled, on 29 September 2015, that Saudi Arabia has sovereign immunity for 9/11 and so can’t be sued for it, ruled recently, on March 9th that Iran doesn’t have sovereign immunity and fined Iran $10.5 billion …
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR – ALEXANDER COCKBURN – Clintons, Contras and Cocaine
The political rise of the Clintons has been monetarily fueled by a man linked to one of the biggest banking scandals in the nation’s history. Arkansas financier and political king-maker Jackson Stephens, with his son Warren, helped raise more than $100,000 for Clinton. More important, Stephens’ Worthen National Bank extended Bill Clinton a $2 million line of credit in January 1992, …
Michael Specter – Hillary Clinton, Nancy Reagan, and AIDS
It will take somebody with more psychiatric sophistication than me to figure out how Hillary Clinton could have come to praise Ronald and Nancy Reagan, as she initially did earlier today, for having started the American conversation about AIDS “when, before, nobody talked about it.” President Reagan’s first speech on the subject wasn’t until May 31, 1987. By then, more than twenty-five …
JOSEPH A. P. WILSON – DECODING SCALIA’S SECRET HUNTING SOCIETY, FROM JÄGERMEISTER TO MEDIEVAL HERESY TO BUDDHIST LEGEND
The media is abuzz this week with the revelation that Justice Antonin Scalia died while on a hunting expedition with several prominent members of a 300-year-old Bohemian secret society, the Order of St. Hubertus. The owner of the hunting lodge where he passed away is a prominent member of this order, as was Scalia’s traveling companion. The order’s motto “Deum Diligite …