The odds are good you won’t read this entire post. The reason? It has to do with confirmation bias. If you think what I am going to say conflicts with your belief system – whether you are a scientist or a Christian – you won’t finish it to avoid cognitive dissonance even though you aren’t…
The single most important line in the President’s State of the Union speech to Congress last night hasn’t gotten a lot of attention. Here it is: Over the next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school degree. And yet, as many as a quarter of…
As the American Civil War dawned, William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who was to be called the “first modern general”, remarked to a Southern friend: You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly,…
I really enjoy paradox, especially in areas of science, religion and philosophy. There are all kinds of paradoxes in life – some are paradoxes of logic, some of self-reference, some of mathematics, some of statistics, some of probability, some of decision theory, some of physics. The world is full of paradoxes. [mainbodyad] What do I…
According to a new story out by the Associated Press and posted on Yahoo, “Blacks struggle with a 72 percent unwed mothers rate”, the out-of-wedlock pregnancy crisis in the United States has become unfathomable with single mother pregnancies accounting for between 17% of pregnancies in Asians to 72% of pregnancies in African Americans. Why should…
Much of a person’s economic worldview can be understood by answering a simple question: “Do you believe that all men, regardless of actions, behavior or character, are entitled to housing, three meals a day, health care, and retirement security?”.
I happened to start reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand today, inspired in part by Joe Woodhull’s recent undertaking of it. [mainbodyad]Back in 2004, I picked up a copy in Rehoboth Beach when Aaron, Jocelyn and I went to visit a mutual acquaintance of ours and hang around Washington, D.C., the Chesapeake Bay, etc. It was a…
When I was 16 years old, I was sitting in the hallways of the local high school, waiting for class to begin, discussing the state of the world with Molly. She stopped me and asked a simple, direct question: “Do you believe that the life of an American is more valuable than the life of…
On April 11th, 1823, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to John Adams. In the private correspondence, the man generally regarded to be one of the three most brilliant founding fathers confided to his fellow founder and former President, “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter”.
Countless Americans mistakenly believe that the constitution says we are a nation, “of the people, by the people, and for the people”. Though it’s a nice sentiment, many don’t realize that the line came halfway through the nation’s history in the Gettysburg Address by President Lincoln and isn’t part of our constitutional framework at all.
