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“I didn’t want my friends to know that my mom’s a naked jungle woman eating tarantulas,” he says today. David’s mother, Yarima, is a member of the Yanomami tribe of Venezuela. In 1978, he (David's Father) was offered Yarima, who was then about 9 to 12. Good was 36. He saw no real problem. After David was born, Kenneth attempted to settle Yarima into modern American domesticity. In 1991, The whole family would return to the Amazon for a documentary. While there, Yarima told Kenneth she would not be going back to America.

Throughout history, religion has sanctioned and fueled the persecution of homosexuality. That dynamic may be drawing to an end. Polls, clerics, and denominations are shifting. Theology is adapting. Resistance to same-sex marriage is dwindling, and there’s no end in sight. For 15 years, the Ethics and Public Policy Center has hosted the Faith Angle Forum, a regular conference on religion and public life. Several weeks ago, the group met again to discuss current issues. Transcripts of the conference have just been posted on EPPC’s website. They underscore the extent of the anti-gay collapse. The first session, led by papal biographer...

Does IQ correlate with power? How many powerful people in the U.S. are actually geniuses, and how much does intelligence really affect success? In one of my research papers published last year, Investigating America's Elite, I set out to address these questions. I collected data on some key groups that greatly influence society: Fortune 500 CEOs, billionaires, federal judges, Senators, and House members. Individuals were deemed to be in the top 1% of ability if they attended an undergraduate or graduate school that had extremely high average standardized test scores that put the typical person well within the top 1%....

"If all you have is a hammer," the old saying goes, "everything looks like a nail." Left unsaid is the fact that the real problem isn't the possession of a hammer, but the certitude that all you need is the hammer. In other words, it's a failure of the imagination -- which is a kind of arrogance -- that's really to blame. "I've got my hammer, and that's all I need. Besides, have you ever seen a problem that didn't look like a nail?" This is a version of what academics call "confirmation bias" -- the tendency to accept only...

CNN’s Don Lemon has been entertaining all sorts of theories about the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, including the chance something “supernatural” happened, but on Wednesday night, he actually asked panelists about the possibility a black hole was involved.

Ted Cruz seems to be becoming something of a Republican bogeyman. One can imagine Republican lawmakers trudging home and telling their recalcitrant kids that if they don’t brush their teeth and go to bed, Ted Cruz is going to bring a mob of torch-bearing tea partiers over to take them away. But they should remember that Ted Cruz is a particularly irritating symptom, not the problem. [snip] But make no mistake: He’s riding a wave of sentiment, not causing it. If there was no Ted Cruz someone else would fill that role; it might be someone in the Congress, like...

David Remnick of The New Yorker showed up on PBS’s Charlie Rose Monday night to discuss his long, mostly sympathetic profile of Barack Obama from the January 27 issue of the magazine. Near the end of the interview, Rose focused in on the president’s reported desire to be “big.” The host wondered, “[W]hat's his definition of 'big,' and does he believe in his deep recesses of his own mind that the chance of that has slipped away?” Remnick replied that no, Obama does not think his chance of being “big” has slipped away. The editor then rattled off a laundry...

Trayvon Martin continues to be a subject of intense interest for the academic elite. The Princeton University Orchestra and the University Concert Jazz Ensemble is set to debut “The Ballad for Trayvon Martin” today, NJ.com reports. The goal of the music, according to its composer, noted jazz artist Anthony D.J. Branker, is to pay homage to victims of racial violence.

(CNSNews.com) - On the first day of the “shutdown” of the federal government, when members of the U.S. Senate were going to the well of their house to point out that the shutdown would prevent the National Institutes of Health from starting clinical trials for cancer patients and others facing possibly terminal illnesses, the administration was giving $445,000,000 to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, according to the Daily Treasury Statement. That means PBS NewsHour, National Public Radio and Sesame Street got a taxpayer subsidy during the shutdown, but not would-be cancer patients at the NIH. The $445 million the Treasury...

The Reuters news agency is cutting some five percent of its editorial staff, a source close to the company said Wednesday, the latest layoffs in the troubled media industry. Parent company Thomson Reuters announced in a statement it would be making reductions, but offered no figures. -snip- A source familiar with the matter said the cuts would affect some five percent of the global staff of some 2,800.

LONDON — It has been five years since Shirwa Ahmed, a 26-year-old from Minneapolis, blew himself up in northern Somalia, and sent shivers up American spines about young immigrants from war-torn Muslim countries who were turning into terrorists. Unconfirmed reports that American Muslims might have been among the gunmen who stormed Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall over the weekend will no doubt revive fears of the “enemy within.” [...] I remain, however, unafraid of Somalis, least of all of Americanized ones. I spent time in Minnesota in 2011 — the Twin Cities is home to the greatest concentration in the United...

At last night's 2013 Emmy Awards, actor Don Cheadle offered a rambling salute to the power of TV. Starting with Walter Cronkite's emotional reporting of Pres. Kennedy's assignation and moving on to other touchstones of leftist history, Cheadle argued that TV is the binding force of modern society. TV tells society what to feel, how to think, and what is OK to express openly. TV is the vanguard and constitution of all that is worthwhile. Cheadle's eyes tracked the teleprompter as if in disbelief of the propaganda he was required to spew. Far from an assertion of dominance, Cheadle's speech...

A media shield law approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee defines a “real reporter” deserving of extra protection. Bloggers, "citizen journalists," and others cry "foul!"[snip]The first version of a media shield law that handily made it through the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday defined for the first time what constitutes a “real reporter” deserving of extra protection versus what Sen. Dianne Feinstein called a “17-year-old blogger” who doesn’t deserve a legal shield.[snip] That Congress is attempting to define “journalist” at all in order to expand protections after a number of high-profile leak cases and ensuing Justice Department prosecutions caused blog...

Time managing editor Rick Stengel's decision to join the Obama administration is just the latest example of a new trend among mainstream media journalists who are making it official by officially joining the Obama administration. Stengel, who is joining the State Department, is just one of 15 (or 19) who have given up a career in journalism to join Obama's crusade to fundamentally transform America:

Killology.com KILLING FOR THEIR COUNTRY: A NEW LOOK AT “KILLOLOGY” by Robert Engen For more information on accessing this file, please visit our help page. “Patriots always talk of dying for their country, but never of killing for their country.” – Bertrand Russell Introduction Over a decade ago, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a former US Army Ranger and military psychologist, published a book entitled On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. This work, along with its recent sequel, On Combat, have established Grossman’s reputation in military law enforcement circles in North America as an expert on the...

Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington and a group of other CEOs and former world leaders have formed a group whose goal is to end capitalism as we know it. The nonprofit, known as “The B Team,” was created to help promote a “better version of capitalism, one that prioritizes people and planet over profit.” This ignores the fact that capitalism is, by definition, motivated by profit. The team, led by Branson and German businessman Jochen Zeitz, calls for drastic changes in how the economy works. These include “new rules and models for the future of business – not incremental ‘change as...

For centuries, Christians thought culture would change if we just had a majority of Christians in the culture. That has proven to be a false assumption. Culture is defined by a relatively small number of change agents who operate at the top of cultural spheres or societal mountains. It takes less than 3-5 percent of those operating at the top of a cultural mountain to actually shift the values represented on that mountain.For example, this is exactly what advocates in the gay rights movement has done through the "mountains" of media and arts and entertainment. They have strategically used these...

At least a half-dozen professors who gave political donations to President Obama have been quoted in news articles opining about his administration and the 2012 race for the White House. ... The Hill cross-checked academics who have been quoted in news articles with Obama’s donor list and eliminated those who worked in prior Democratic administrations. The half-dozen professors detailed in this article do not mention their political affiliations in their bios online. A similar search for Romney donors did not yield any results. The scholars say they didn’t tell reporters that they had donated to Obama, but would have had...

My friends the world abounds with liars in all classes of politics and life in general but particularly here in America for the last six years (2006 elections) the Progressive Democratic Left has faithfully lied about everything under the sun to promote, preserve and protect their lawless Marxist agenda and their chosen chief chosen one. From Health Care to Medicare, from Republicans to the Tea Party, from the economy to tax increases, from the Fast and the Furious to the Stimulus, from the war on terror to Guantanamo, from drilling to green energy, from Limbaugh to Bush to Palin, from...

For the past three months, Jonah Lehrer, science journalist, author of three books, and (former) New Yorker staff writer has been under siege. In mid-June, he was accused of recycling his old work and publishing it as new. Since then, a number of accounts assert that Lehrer committed the two mortal sins of journalism: fabrication and plagiarism. Before Lehrer joined The New Yorker, he was one of the premier bloggers at Wired.com; the site still boasts several hundred blog posts he wrote for his Frontal Cortex blog. Quite naturally, when the Lehrer scandal first broke, the editors at Wired.com worried...