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For more than a millennium, scholars have noticed a curious correlation: Atheists tend to be more intelligent than religious people.

It’s unclear why this trend persists, but researchers of a new study have an idea: Religion is an instinct, they say, and people who can rise above instincts are more intelligent than those who rely on them. (emphasis added)

“Intelligence — in rationally solving problems — can be understood as involving overcoming instinct and being intellectually curious and thus open to non-instinctive possibilities,” study lead author Edward Dutton, a research fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. [Saint or Spiritual Slacker? Test Your Religious Knowledge]

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In classical Greece and Rome, it was widely remarked that “fools” tended to be religious, while the “wise” were often skeptics, Dutton and his co-author, Dimitri Van der Linden, an assistant professor of psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, wrote in the study.

The ancients weren’t the only ones to notice this association. Scientists ran a meta-analysis of […]

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Charles and David Koch – The Koch Brothers Charles de Ganahl Koch and David Hamilton Koch are the notorious Koch Bothers. The brothers own Koch Industries and are major benefactors for organizations and candidates involved in pushing radical Republican policies. The Koch Brothers use their immense wealth to cast a shadow on American government at all levels and form it to their own design. Your vote has value to the Koch Brothers Would billionaires spend millions to influence your vote if it had no value? The U.S. Map is adapted from a Creative Commons licensed image available via Wikimedia. The caricatures of Charles and David Koch are an original paintings in Photoshop.
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The 22 Republican senators who recently sent a letter to President Donald Trump urging the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement received more than $10 million dollars in campaign funds from fossil fuel interests.

The two-page letter was signed by a number of Republican heavyweights from coal/gas/oil-rich states, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Jim Inhofe of […]

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Jaiden Emmons, Elizabeth Baker and Suzan Emmons stand in their kitchen in Iola, a small town in southeastern Kansas. 
CREDIT:Ana Swanson/The Washington Post

IOLA, KANSAS — Suzan Emmons has done the most she can for the girls. Her small green house has bunnies in the back yard, class pictures proudly displayed on the living room wall, food in the refrigerator. She has scrimped from her annual salary of $14,000 to pay for one dance class each: tap for Elizabeth, jazz for Jaiden.

But far-off political decisions have made the haven that Emmons built for them more precarious.

Five years ago, she rescued Jaiden, her granddaughter, and Elizabeth, her granddaughter’s half sister, from a dangerous home. Today, she doesn’t make enough money to qualify for health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. She would qualify for Medicaid under Obamacare’s proposed expansion of the program, but because the Kansas governor turned down federal funds for that expansion, she doesn’t qualify there either, leaving her unable to afford insurance coverage.

Meanwhile, dramatic funding cuts at the state levels […]

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