- May 17, 2016
David Burress
This, from the Lancet, is probably the best international study yet showing that contraceptives drastically reduce abortion and criminalization doesn’t. Unfortunately, the criminalization variable was handled in a far more primitive statistical fashion than the contraception proxies.
Nonetheless, these data support the idea that the Catholic Church and other antisex religions, by inhibiting access to contraceptives ...
- May 17, 2016
David Burress
Health Insurance reform is still on the table. Not so much because the Republicans want to abolish The Affordable Care Act (ACA) –referred to now both affectionately as well as pejoratively as “Obamacare”– but because it didn’t go far enough. At the time I feared Obamacare meant that needed further reforms would be off the ...
- May 16, 2016
David Burress
Annie Dillard’s wonderful meditation “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” contains the memorable line “Evolution loves death more than you or me.” It is a mistake to think that what is natural is always your friend.
Evolution also loves competition more than happiness. Consider envy.
We are biologically primed to envy those who have what we would like to ...
- May 13, 2016
David Burress
I can think of several historic ways to evaluate the state of American freedom. The most immediate criterion is: what actually happens to dissenters, minorities, and oddballs. The results are mixed.
As to political activists, on the one hand we have no Palmer raids. Nonviolent law-abiding opponents of the War on Terror or the National Security ...
