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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blamed “MAGA influence” on Friday for falling support for aid to Ukraine among Canadian conservatives. “The real story is the rise of a right-wing, American MAGA-influenced thinking that has made Canadian Conservatives — who used to be among the strongest defenders of Ukraine, I’ll admit it — turn their backs on something Ukraine needs in its hour of need,” Trudeau said Friday, according to the CBC.

The 2020–2022 pandemic split parties and ideologues, separated friend from friend and family members from family members. Neighbors were dangerous, and strangers even more so: the invisible enemy stalking our lands overturned every other concern in life: The conflicts it spurred replaced bonds of affection with fear and hatred. More than ever, we need calm and level-headed thinkers, honest and willing to admit past errors, with eyes wide open for the corruption of industry or government itself. In other words, we need as little politics as humanly possible. As I wrote in a previous piece: we need “people without a...

The economist Thomas Sowell distinguished himself in the early 1970s as a critic of the traditional civil rights leadership, but in earlier decades he had been optimistic about the direction of the civil rights movement. Sowell was born into an extremely poor family in rural Gastonia, North Carolina, during the Great Depression and raised in a New York City ghetto in the 1940s. Like many other blacks of that time and in those places, his family was uneducated. The men mostly worked as laborers or in the service sector, and the women typically were domestics. Racist laws had reduced opportunities...

Watch out. Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley have locked their sights on the next targets of a frightening free speech-squelching purge: independent citizens who dare to raise questions online about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. I'm vaccinated. My children are up to date. There's no dispute that vaccines have saved untold lives. But over the years, I've voiced my concerns about vaccine claims and government coercion in my newspaper columns and blog posts. These concerns include my objections to Gardasil mandates for schoolchildren in Texas and California; schools' threatening parents with jail time for refusing chickenpox shots for their...

 I'm skeptical today, though...And...    and  and  and, Skeptical Kangaroo Is still skeptical   but... Is just dramatic   Because...we still have this guy....    But hey, at least today is Make Your Dream Come True Day  Still skeptical?  I'm still with this guy...

When a handful of liberal advocacy organizations convened a series of focus groups with young black voters last month, the assessments of Donald J. Trump were predictably unsparing. But when the participants were asked about Hillary Clinton, their appraisals were just as blunt and nearly as biting. “What am I supposed to do if I don’t like him and I don’t trust her?” a millennial black woman in Ohio asked. “Choose between being stabbed and being shot? No way!” “She was part of the whole problem that started sending blacks to jail,” a young black man, also from Ohio, observed...

From MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY: Climate-change foes winning public opinion war EAST LANSING, Mich. — As world leaders meet this week and next at a historic climate change summit in Paris, a new study by Michigan State University environmental scientists suggests opponents of climate change appear to be winning the war of words. "It's extremely difficult to change people's minds on climate change, in part because they are entrenched in their views," says Aaron M. McCright, a Michigan State University environmental scientist. “It’s extremely difficult to change people’s minds on climate change, in part because they are entrenched in their views,”...

Ya don’t say. He's retiring, so it's safe to speak ill of the Media Messiah. CBS’ Bob Schieffer says that perhaps reporters in the media “were not skeptical enough” of President Barack Obama as a presidential candidate in 2008, telling Fox News’ Howard Kurtz that the whole political world was struck by the sudden rise of the senator from Illinois. This isn’t some revelation that Schieffer just had. It’s certainly been kicking around in the heads of veteran media types since early ’09 when it became rather apparent that Barack Obama was more of a bumbler than the suave,...

MOSCOW, October 16. /TASS/. Russian physicists dismissed as a promotional action on Thursday the statement by the US company Lockheed Martin about its technological breakthrough in the thermonuclear fusion field. Skunk Works (a subsidiary of the Lockheed Martinweapons producer) on Wednesday reported a breakthrough in the field of practical use of controlled thermonuclear fusion. The company claims that in the next decade it would present a commercial sample of a compact thermonuclear reactor. President of the National Research Center Kurchatov Institute, Academician Yevgeny Velikhov told TASS in an interview that first it was necessary to develop such a project and...

Italian researchers have resurrected the idea that the Shroud of Turin's mysterious image of a Christlike figure could only have been created by a powerful flash of light — but skeptics still aren't buying it.

New Zealand Are addictive medicines cures or problems? “Legalising cannabis for medicinal purposes would be the thin end of the wedge towards increasing drug use in New Zealand, according to a former detective who now manages a drug education company.” APN News and Media also reports: “Dale Kirk, managing director of MethCon, said taking a softer line on drug offenders would do more harm than good.” “I think we'd see people suddenly developing medical problems to source the drug,” asserts Kirk. The former detective is also concerned about impressionable children and vulnerable teenagers, but especially the many ways in which...

Osama bin Laden is shown pointing in this video frame grab released by the U.S. Pentagon May 7, 2011. REUTERS/Pentagon/Handout Reuters © Enlarge photo CHAK SHAH MOHAMMAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani security officials reacted with scepticism on Sunday to a U.S. assertion that Osama bin Laden was actively engaged in directing his far-flung network from his compound in Abbottabad where he was killed on May 2. Washington said on Saturday that, based on a trove of documents and computer equipment seized in the raid, bin Laden's hideout north of Islamabad was an "active command and control centre" for al Qaeda...

You undoubtedly know that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a progressive Christian and champion of civil rights and the social gospel. You may also know that he spoke out against the Vietnam War, harshly criticized U.S. foreign policy, and questioned the capitalist system that produced poverty. But do you know his theology? Right up until Dr. King's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had traveled to support striking sanitation workers, the civil rights leader worked—not as a secular activist but as a Baptist minister—to awaken the conscience of the nation. What was the meaning of Jesus for Dr. King?...

More Americans say global warming exaggerated: poll Richard Cowan WASHINGTON Thu Mar 11, 2010 5:08pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A growing number of Americans, nearly half the country, think global warming worries are exaggerated and more people doubt that scientific warnings of severe environmental fallout will ever occur, according to a new Gallup poll. The new doubts come as President Barack Obama pressures Congress to produce legislation significantly cutting smokestack emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for climate change problems. Gallup's survey was released on the same day that the Obama administration unveiled in Texas a public-private...

About half of the public believe there is no proof that global warming is caused by humans, according to a new poll. The ICM survey for The Sunday Telegraph revealed that 46% of those quizzed did not believe mankind was largely responsible for the global temperature rise. The opinions of this relatively large group are wildly at odds with the main conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Some 39% of those questioned for the poll said climate change was not proven to be man made. And about 7% of pollsters believed that climate change was not taking...

The day after the most important speech of his presidency , Barack Obama had the satisfaction of a poll showing that one in seven Americans who watched it had changed their minds to back his health reforms. But there was little sign of a shift among the small group of senators who may decide the fate of his proposals. While Democrats and a majority of voters welcomed a speech that demanded universal, affordable health insurance as a “moral” choice, congressional Republicans remained united in their scepticism about how Mr Obama would pay for it. There was one possible exception —...

Even in a city of cynics, the Inauguration of a new president — and the infusion of new ideas, new personalities and new energy that comes with it — summons feelings of reverence. Barack Obama, especially, is the object of inaugural good feelings. He has assembled an impressive White House and Cabinet team. The country is clearly in his corner. With the economy gasping, and two wars dragging on sullenly, even many Republicans who ordinarily might enjoy seeing Obama fail now root for him to succeed. The stakes are simply too great. Amid all these high hopes, it may seem...

The majority of Britons do not believe the Biblical story of the birth of Jesus, a survey has suggested. Of 1,000 people questioned, 70% doubted the account, according to the British Market Research Bureau. Almost a quarter of people who described themselves as Christians shared their scepticism.

ABSTRACT:We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when, how, why and under what conditions citizens are prone to be biased political information processors. We report the results of two experimental studies that explore how citizens evaluate arguments about two political issues – affirmative action and gun control – to test hypotheses predicting motivated reasoning. As predicted, in situations where participants (Ps) are presented with a balanced set of pro and con arguments, we find strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading the pro...

This is the first of what I hope will be an ongoing series of exchanges with notable friends of the Ablution. Our first respondent is one of the most popular novelists of our time. According to his official biography, he: Graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, received his MD from Harvard Medical School, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, researching public policy with Jacob Bronowski. He has taught courses in anthropology at Cambridge University and writing at MIT. He’s “a writer and filmmaker, best known as the author of Jurassic Park and the...