But Americans are also braced for a major energy crisis and a warming planet, according to the survey. More than half, or 58 per cent, fear another world war in the next 40 years and 53 per cent expect a terrorist attack against the United States using a nuclear weapon.

The poll also shows a sharp dip in overall optimism from 1999, when 81 per cent said they were optimistic about life for themselves and their families. The current poll found just 64 per cent were.

Sixty-one percent said they were optimistic about the future of the United States, compared to 70 percent in 1999. And 56 percent predicted the US economy would be stronger in 40 years, compared to 64 percent of those polled in 1999.

The results were compiled from telephone and online interviews with 1,546 adults in April. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points, according to Pew.

Here are some other findings of the poll:

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IN 1953 the leaders of America’s big tobacco companies met John Hill, founder of a public-relations company, Hill and Knowlton, to talk about worrying new scientific research linking their products to cancer: worrying, that is, in that it might hurt sales. Hill stressed that a key part of their response had to be making sure that the public was informed of scientific doubts about the validity of the research. The tobacco industry took his advice to heart, even when its own in-house scientists were confirming what the public-health researchers had found out.

In this powerful book, Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, two historians of science, show how big tobacco’s disreputable and self-serving tactics were adapted for later use in a number of debates about the environment. Their story takes in nuclear winter, missile defence, acid rain and the ozone layer. In all these debates a relatively small cadre of right-wing scientists, some of them eminent, worked through organisations sometimes created specially for the purpose to take on a scientific establishment that they perceived to be dangerously unsympathetic to the interests of capital and national security.

By the time the makers of cigarettes were fighting against legislation on secondary smoking and the makers […]

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Anyone whose mobile phone has ever run out of juice-which means, these days, more than half the world’s population-will like the idea of getting electrical power out of the air. The notion is far from new. A little over a century ago, the inventor Nikola Tesla drew up ambitious plans to transmit electrical power without wires. He carried out a series of experiments in which electric lights were illuminated via electrostatic induction, by connecting them to metal sheets suspended in a strong electric field produced by a distant transmitter. In 1898 he proposed a ‘world system

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In our culture right now we have several ‘denier’ movements actively engaged in trying to impede the free development of science: the creationists, the climate change deniers, and the consciousness deniers-those who cannot, or will not, consider consciousness as anything other than materialist processes. For all their lack of substance, these movements are powerful forces in the culture, with substantial detrimental effects.

Creationism, on its face, seems medieval and absurd, but The Pew Research organization, which has tracked the creationist question for many years, reports that 55% of Americans believe the world was created within the last 10,000 years, with all the species pretty much as they are today.1 As appalling as that is, I want to point out, in the context of this essay, that it is getting worse. Creationists are winning the hearts and minds of the American public. Consider the 2005 poll by the Harris organization, shown in Table 1.2
Table 1.

Do You Believe Apes and Man Have a Common Ancestry or Not?

[…]

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Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project may have broken new First Amendment ground by upholding a restriction on speech even after applying ‘strict scrutiny’ – the highest level of judicial review – to the law at issue.

Strict scrutiny is usually fatal to government regulation of speech, but it wasn’t this time, as the Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, upheld a federal law that criminalizes ‘material support’ – including training and ‘expert advice’ – to groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations. Human rights groups had claimed the law’s vague language would chill and punish benign education projects and speech aimed at defusing the conflicts that lead to terrorism.

‘This is the first time that the Supreme Court has applied strict scrutiny and found a statute to satisfy that strict standard,’ lamented Georgetown University Law Center professor David Cole, who argued against the law before the high court. ‘The Court came to this conclusion without the kind of demanding scrutiny the doctrine requires.’

First Amendment law expert and Volokh Conspiracy blogger Eugene Volokh at first appeared to agree with that analysis yesterday afternoon. But by last night, Volokh had returned to his blog to revise his […]

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