MOUNT VERNON, Ohio - Most people in this quiet all-American town describe themselves as devoutly Christian, but even here they are deeply divided over what should happen to John Freshwater. Mr. Freshwater, an eighth-grade public school science teacher, is accused of burning a cross onto the arms of at least two students and teaching creationism, charges he says have been fabricated because he refused an order by his principal to remove a Bible from his desk. After an investigation, school officials notified Mr. Freshwater in June 2008 of their intent to fire him, but he asked for a pre-termination hearing, which has lasted more than a year and cost the school board more than a half-million dollars. The hearing is finally scheduled to end Friday, and a verdict on Mr. Freshwater’s fate is expected some months later. But the town - home to about 15,000 people, more than 30 churches and an evangelical university - remains split. To some, Mr. Freshwater is a hero unfairly punished for standing up for his Christian beliefs. To others, he is a zealot who pushed those beliefs onto students. ‘Freshwater’s supporters want to make this into a new and […]
What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany’s best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer ‘moral clarity’-a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world. Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives […]
Research by UK and American scientists has struck another blow to the theory that Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) became extinct because they were less intelligent than our ancestors (Homo sapiens). The research team has shown that early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals. Published today (26 August) in the Journal of Human Evolution, their discovery debunks a textbook belief held by archaeologists for more than 60 years. The team from the University of Exeter, Southern Methodist University, Texas State University, and the Think Computer Corporation, spent three years flintknapping (producing stone tools). They recreated stone tools known as ‘flakes,’ which were wider tools originally used by both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and ‘blades,’ a narrower stone tool later adopted by Homo sapiens. Archaeologists often use the development of stone blades and their assumed efficiency as proof of Homo sapiens’ superior intellect. To test this, the team analysed the data to compare the number of tools produced, how much cutting-edge was created, the efficiency in consuming raw material and how long tools lasted. Blades were first produced by Homo sapiens during their colonization of Europe from Africa approximately […]
A gay soldier says he disclosed his sexuality to his superiors, even offering graphic proof, and was neither discharged nor reprimanded, despite the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy on homosexuality. Army Sgt. Darren Manzella appears in a Lesley Stahl report on gays in the wartime U.S. military to be broadcast on 60 Minutes this Sunday, Dec. 16, at 7 p.m. ET/PT. Manzella, a medic who served in Iraq for a year, currently serves as medical liaison for the 1st Cavalry Division stationed in Kuwait, where he says he is ‘out’ to his entire chain of command, including a three-star general. After leaving Iraq, he started receiving anonymous emails warning him about his openness that suggested he was being watched, so he went to his commander to head off an investigation he felt was coming. ‘I didn’t know how else to do it,’ he tells Stahl, acknowledging that he initiated an investigation of himself by violating the policy. ‘I felt more comfortable being the one to say, ‘This is what is real,” Manzella says. He then says his commander reported him, as he was obliged to do, and then ‘I had to go see my battalion commander, […]
Donald Richie has been living in Japan for half a century. The American writer, translator and film scholar has spent most of that time explaining Japan to the English-speaking world. But lately he’s found himself, somewhat disconcertingly, in an entirely new roleas an interpreter of Japan to the Japanese. The Tokyo university students who attend his lectures on the great postwar filmmaker Yasujiro Ozuno longer understand the world portrayed in the 1953 classic “Tokyo Story.” They don’t know anything about the family system because the family system doesn’t exist anymore,” says Richie. “So I have to reconstruct it for them.” They can still understand the traditional, intricately polite version of Japanese used in the movies, but that language sounds alien, as if it comes from a “vanished” world, he says. Vanished. That word crops up often in Japan these days. Before my family and I arrived here in September 2004, we weren’t really sure what to expect. My head was filled with lingering images from the Japan-bashing 1980s, and Japan was still widely cast in the West as unique and alien. I wondered whether we could expect a land clinging to its differences: its lifetime employment, its company […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
