Author: nick

An ad from a super PAC supporting Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley features a heart-wrenching testimonial from the father of a woman who was murdered in 2025. The ad falsely implies the accused murderer was one of the prisoners released during the COVID-19 pandemic when Whatley’s Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, was governor of North Carolina. The problem: Cooper had nothing to do with the accused murderer’s release. The suspect was released from a prison in South Carolina, not North Carolina. Here’s how the ad from the Senate Leadership Fund, or SLF PAC, tiptoes the line, implying, but not directly stating,…

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Our natural aptitudes enabled humans to thrive for ages, even in harsh environments. People observed regularities in their world (e.g., Inuit understood when ice was safe to travel) and manipulated nature to serve human ends (e.g., breeding corn in Mesoamerica). Several centuries ago, these natural ways of thinking evolved, and scientific methods emerged from diverse cultural foundations to build on traditional knowledge, separate fact from myth, reveal a deeper understanding of underlying mechanisms (e.g., DNA), and generate advanced technologies previously unthinkable (e.g., satellite imagery). A scientific way of thinking about the world and its successes thrived despite repeated challenges from…

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Lawrence Davidson on the problems with the Texas Board of Education’s effort to institutionalize a fundamentalist form of Christianity through public schools. Flag of Texas over Corpus Christi. (Quintin Soloviev /Wikimedia Commons/CC0) By Lawrence Davidson TothePointAnalysis.com I have been thinking about folks who are into one or another messianic worldviews. This can be a secular or religious search for what is really a false sense of certainty. Either way that need for certainty requires one to think that history is foreordained and a belief in holding the secret to correctly predicting mankind’s future. The United States has several versions of this obsession,…

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