christianty's branding problem

24 - 05/23 /12:54

According to Jessica Grose, NY Times opinion writer, Christianity’s got a branding problem. Christianity is seen as the religion of conservative Republican politics. She claims people are out there, even in New York City, who are open to Christianity. But they don’t want to be associated with that.

There’s a body of research indicating that the right-wing politics that attracted many Christians during the 1980s—90s simultaneously pushed other people away from Christianity. Read More…

in defense of merit in science

10 - 05/23 /11:18

In the 1930s the USSR enforced the untenable theories of Trofim Lysenko, a charlatan Russian agronomist who rejected the existence of genetic inheritance. Scientists who disagreed with Lysenko’s claims were fired, some sent to the gulag.

Implementation of Lysenko’s theories in Soviet and Chinese agriculture led to famines and the starvation of millions. Russian biology still hasn’t recovered.

~~ Adapted from an article by Jerry Coyne and Anna Krylov ~~

A wholesale and unhealthy incursion of ideology into science is occurring today in the West. We see it in progressives’ claim that scientific truths are malleable and subjective, similar to Lysenko’s insistence that genetics had no place in progressive Soviet agriculture. Read More…

we work in our graves

01 - 05/23 /16:24

Lucien—tall and lean with piercing eyes and shattered legs—was in a constant state of agitation while Siddrarth Kara interviewed him.

At age 15 Lucien began work as an artisanal miner in an cobalt mine near Kasulo in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Fifty men and teenage boys worked the site. 200 feet beneath the surface, the steep mine shaft opened into a large chamber from which three tunnels branched off, each following veins of cobalt rich heterogenite. Read More…