Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
“Oh but wait”, you say, “we have lots happening, lots of meetings to agree targets, electric cars, we all re-cycle”. All true, but sadly it is simply not enough, the latest evidence I bring to the table is a leaked report that …. well here it is, read it for yourselves :
The manner in which the Catholic church handles the topic of AIDS is quite frankly bizarre, and illustrates the degree of their utter moral bankruptcy. It is highly ironic, not only because they claim to hold the high moral ground, but also because they claim to have an exclusive direct line to God. This of course is a complete delusion, but I need not ponder on that, it is blindly obvious to any critical thinker.
The latest news is that a Vatican cardinal, Cardinal Tarcisio Berton, opened an international conference on AIDS with a speech that strongly defended the church’s two-pronged strategy against the disease – education of consciences and mobilization of Catholic health resources for patients.
There is an interesting study that went up on PubMed a few days ago. the abstract reads …
Objective: Conscientious individuals tend to experience a number of health benefits, not the least of which being greater longevity. However, it remains an open question as to why this link with longevity occurs. The current study tested two possible mediators (physical health and cognitive functioning) of the link between conscientiousness and longevity.
Method: We tested these mediators using a 10-year longitudinal sample (N = 512), a subset of the long-running Health and Retirement Study of aging adults. Measures included an adjective-rating measure of conscientiousness, self-reported health conditions, and three measures of cognitive functioning (word recall, delayed recall, and vocabulary) included in the 1996 wave of the HRS study.
Results: Our results found that conscientiousness significantly predicted greater longevity, even in a model including the two proposed mediator variables, gender, age, and years of education. Moreover, cognitive functioning appears to partially mediate this relationship.
Conclusions: This study replicates previous research showing that conscientious individuals tend to lead longer lives, and provides further insight into why this effect occurs. In addition, it underscores the importance of measurement considerations.
Sometimes it is simply appropriate to, coffee shop style, slap an article down and announce, “You must read this”. Well, this is one of those occasions, because Johann Hari says it far better than I ever could …
Sometimes, there are hinge-points in human history -moments when we have to choose between an exuberant descent into lunacy, and a still, sober voice offering us a sane way out. Usually, we can only see them when we look back from a distance. In 1793, the great democrat Thomas Paine said the French Revolution shouldn’t betray its principles by killing the King, because it would trigger an orgy of blood-letting that would eventually drown them all. They threw him in jail. In 1919, the great economist John Maynard Keynes said the European powers shouldn’t humiliate Germany, because it would catalyze extreme nationalism and produce another world war. They ignored him. In 1953, a handful of US President Dwight Eisenhower’s advisors urged him not to destroy Iranian democracy and kidnap its Prime Minister, because it would have a reactionary ripple-effect that lasted decades. They refused to listen.
I’m off on a slightly different tack today, and am asking you, the reader, a question.
In essence … if you are a blogger, then what should the policy be regarding comments?
It should of course be very obvious, if something is not offensive, abusive, illegal, or spam then it should stay, so perhaps the real challenge is to come to terms with how you define those. Lets take a quick look at some:
Nick Cohen sums it all up very nicely when he writes in Sunday’s Guardian … When censors try to restrict debate, democratic peoples must learn to reply with two words: that’s tough. “You want to use violence to stop criticism of religions that claim supernatural dominion over men’s minds and women’s bodies – that’s tough. … Read more