Like so many other complex issues, Americans don’t seem to understand global warming. In a Gallup poll conducted in March, respondents ranked their level of concern regarding several environmental issues. When asked to rank their level of concern over global warming, 36% of Americans claimed that it worried them “a…
My government’s violent occupation of Iraq has not flustered me nearly as much as the nonchalance of half of America. Why are so many Americans utterly complacent about the wretched and rampant killing going on in our names? Is it possible that we have become confused and seduced by the magnitude of the killings and by the music? Allow me to explain.
First, the magnitude. Stalin’s well-cited quote comes to mind: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Perhaps the immoral nature of Bush’s aggression would be clearer had Bush caused the death of only one man. Imagine this hypothetical:
…President Bush looks out the window of the oval office and sees a man wearing a backpack walking down the sidewalk. In a dry-drunkish paranoid moment, Bush tells his security officers that the man walking down the sidewalk has nuclear weapons grade aluminum tubes in his backpack and orders his guards to capture “that terrorist.” While capturing the man with the backpack (it turns out to be empty), a U.S soldier is accidentally shot by friendly fire of a fellow soldier.
It is later disclosed that, one minute before giving his order to capture the man, a former ambassador had advised Bush the man wearing the backpack had just been searched and that he was not carrying anything dangerous. Then it came out that Bush and his highest advisers had intentionally blown the cover of a CIA agent to discredit the former
According to the Associated press, Tobacco alone is predicted to kill a billion people this century, 10 times the toll it took in the 20th century, if current trends hold. This humongous number begs for a morbid illustration. If you lined up the dead bodies of one billion dead smokers end to…
Earlier, I wrote about the tendency of suburbanites to feel they have limited options, and how such a life can seem unfulfilling or failed. At the time, I inspected the personal shortcomings that have a hand in this, as well as the human predisposition to discontentment. But it appears that yet another factor contributes to the often portrayed suburban dread: the structure of the suburbs themselves.
Prior to the Second World War, most suburbs had what architects and city planners call a “traditional” or “mixed-use” structure. Towns of this type have closely arranged, small city blocks intermittent with other amenities such as shops, restaurants, churches, and public buildings such as schools and post offices. To get a better idea of a town of this type, picture the typical conception of a small New England village or city. This traditional structure made pedestrian activity both easy and inviting, claims Andres Duany, one of the authors of Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.
In the 1950’s and beyond, building codes began to prevent such a seamless blend of commerce, public activity, and personal residence from organizing. Most American towns now have much more rigid building codes the divide all the realms of society into isolated sections: a housing district, a shopping center-like area, and government buildings shoved somewhere else. Duany describes the trend this way:
…“It’s an architectural version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Our neighborhoods are being replaced by soulless
In 2004, the same geneticist who had earlier discovered a gene linked to male homosexuality found a gene associated with religious belief. The geneticist, Dr. Dean Hammer of the National Cancer Institute, used a 226-question survey to determine a person’s feelings of spirituality, or willingness to believe in supernatural phenomena. He found that those with an inclination for religiosity tended to share a gene called VMAT2. Nicknamed the “god gene”, it purportedly dictates the flow of mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and determines one’s level of belief in religious experiences.
I first accepted this research with a sense of mild dread. I assumed, forgetting that the devoutly religious tend to eschew all scientific or logical prospects, that the religious would respond to this discovery as a palpable sign that God exists. It seemed like a perfect opportunity for classic religious circular logic, the same used to “prove” the significance of the Bible: We know God exists because we believe in him, and we believe in him because he wants us to.
Even Dr. Hammer used this train of thought. In an interview shortly after his discovery became public, he said, “Religious believers can point to the existence of god genes as one more sign of the creator’s ingenuity – a clever way to help humans acknowledge and embrace a divine presence.”
However, the religious community did not embrace Hammer’s findings. Christian reviewers of Hammer’s book on the subject labeled it as bad science, and claimed that he didn’t define …