This summer, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a group of protesters remained outside Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) office for 31 days, demanding that he call a special session to repeal the Stand Your Ground law. Scott said he wouldn’t call lawmakers back to the capitol, but House Speaker Will Weatherford agreed to hold a hearing on a repeal bill in the fall.

On Thursday, after five hours of emotional testimony, the House’s Criminal Justice Subcommittee wholly rejected the repeal bill by a vote of 11-2, and voted in favor of a bill to expand Stand Your Ground-like immunity to those who fire or brandish a gun.

Among the speakers was Lucia McBath, the mother of 17-year-old Jordan Davis, shot dead in purported self-defense after a disagreement at a Jacksonville gas station. ‘My grief is unbearable at times,

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Would you give up a year of your life to advance your political views? Two years? Three? Five? This sounds like the very definition of hypothetical. But what if it were not? What if you really were faced with that choice? What would you choose? What if I told you, you may have already chosen.

In 60s and 70s, it used to be said that the United States was just becoming one homogeneous mass. Super highways, big-box stores, chain restaurants, and strip malls were everywhere. One state was much like another, it was said. Academics studied the idea. Pundits discussed it, but history now shows us that it was true in only superficial ways.

In the second decade of the 21st century, we are in fact more fragmented than we were 40 years ago, riven into competing camps in a split so intense, it evokes comparison with America just prior to the Civil War. This is an ancient split deep in the fabric of our country. Partly race based, partly economic and cultural it goes all the way back to the Constitutional Convention. It is a point of view, not just a region. As I write this Counties in Virginia, Colorado and […]

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Australia’s national health service, Medicare, treats health care as a human right for all, including illegal immigrants – and it costs less and delivers better outcomes than US health care, according to McLaren.

Article 25 (1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN in 1948, states: ‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including . . . medical care . . . and the right to security in the event of . . . sickness, disability . . . ‘

These days, most people would say that an adequate standard of living includes readily available health care of a proper standard, that ‘health care delayed is health care denied.’ Most people would also expect that citizens of a wealthy country should be able to expect better health care than the benighted citizenry of a poor country. So it comes as something of a shock to learn that the United States, which spends almost 50 percent of the world’s total health expenditure, ranks way down on most health statistics. Let’s start with the World Bank Health Indicators, which show that, in 2009 (latest available figures), […]

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I felt there was no separation between anything. I felt as if I were united with everything, and it was wonderful!’ This recent report from a reader is a universal experience of people who are concerned with psychological and spiritual growth. This sense of connectedness is not fantasy, but is being affirmed by recent advances in consciousness research.

But where our mind is concerned, we’ve been more concerned with disunity than unity. During the 20th century we took the mind apart — the conscious, the unconscious, the pre- and sub-conscious, the collective unconscious, the superego, ego, id, and so on. When we look through the other end of the telescope, however, we can see a different pattern. We can make out what I call the One Mind — not a subdivision of consciousness, but the overarching, inclusive dimension to which all the mental components of all individual minds, past, present, and future belong. I capitalize the One Mind to distinguish it from the single, one mind that each individual appears to possess.

This is not a philosophical gambit, but is based on human experience and actual scientific experiments. Consider studies in which human neurons are separated into two batches and sealed in […]

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Raymond Bohlin holds a doctorate in molecular biology. He received his master’s degree in population genetics, the study of how adaptation and speciation is expressed by DNA. In other words, he possesses more than a passing knowledge about the theory of evolution. At the University of North Texas, he participated in research revealing that colonies of pocket gophers in Oklahoma and Texas, once indistinguishable, had diverged somewhere along the way into two identifiably distinct species.

In a way, so had Bohlin. He never accepted the hypothesis central to his discipline, hardened in the crucible of 150 years of experimentation, validated by the advent of modern genetics. He could not believe that evolutionary mechanisms could account for the dizzying complexity he saw in the living world. It was easier for him to detect the work of some unseen force - a designer’s hand guiding a spontaneous appearance of species - behind the rise of complex life. It’s the sort of completely untestable idea that doesn’t gain much traction among the editors and reviewers of scholarly journals.

And so, according to his own list of published work, Bohlin’s name was never attached to another peer-reviewed scientific study after his paper on gophers in 1982. […]

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