A key principal in sportsmanship is that you shouldn’t run up the score on your opponent. The reasoning is simple: as long as you win, the score doesn’t matter. Part of winning graciously, therefore, is to reserve some dignity for your opponent. And there is very little dignity in getting slaughtered. [...]

It’s shockingly easy to motivate racial hatred. Remind people what their problems are: unemployment, taxes, wars, crime, drugs, etc. Tell them that those problems result from a competition for scarce resources. Whatever your problems are, they result from a lack of enough money, jobs, women, etc. to go around. Tell people [...]

One of my professors in graduate school once said that the only thing that changes with partition is to make civil wars into interstate wars.  I’ve been reminded of that comment lately as an increasingly large number of “experts” have come out favoring some form of partition in Iraq to “avoid a civil war” there.  [...]

The last few days I’ve been reading Come On People, by Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint.  The book, and the extensive book tour that they’ve been doing to support it over the last week, is a call to action for black community leaders, teachers, and parents, among others.  I’m only about half-way through it, [...]

That Foreign Affairs special series on candidate viewpoints has released their next two articles, by Clinton and McCain respectively.  I haven’t had a chance to check them out thoroughly yet, but I will probably post on one or both of them next week.  Consider yourselves warned!

Watson, a nobel Prize winner who in conjunction with Crick first understood the nature of DNA, recently incited a storm of controversy by insinuating that different racial groups had different levels of intelligence. To start, I don’t agree with his statements. I’ve read into the genetics of race, and teach classes on intelligence [...]

So far as I can tell, there is absolutely no evidence that vaccines have any link to autism in children. The CDC has issued a report reviewing the evidence and has found no connection between MMR vaccines and autism. A similar report was issued by the Institute of Medicine, rejecting any [...]

“This government does not torture people.”
Or so repeated President Bush a mere twelve days ago, after the New York Times reported that on CIA interrogation methods that sound an awful lot like torture.
And so, in today’s press conference, President Bush was asked how he defined torture. The Commander in Chief made a bold statement [...]

Fox News has hit a new low.
It might be gone from their front page by the time you read this post, but as of this moment the headline on their website is “Which State Will Be The First To Legalize… Sex with a Robot?” (Bold in original.) The article is about David Levy, [...]

Ok, here’s something I don’t understand that perhaps the more economics minded folks on leftfielder can explain to me.  I keep hearing politicians talking about tax cuts to boost the economy.  The idea being that if taxes are lower, people will have more disposable income, and will thus spend more.  The additional spending then boosts [...]