Study finds that Trump voters were not driven by economic concerns but rather concerns that their dominance as white Christians was being threatened.

Courtesy of the New York Times:  

Ever since Donald J. Trump began his improbable political rise, many pundits have credited his appeal among white, Christian and male voters to “economic anxiety.” Hobbled by unemployment and locked out of the recovery, those voters turned out in force to send Mr. Trump, and a message, to Washington. 

Or so that narrative goes. 

A study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences questions that explanation, the latest to suggest that Trump voters weren’t driven by anger over the past, but rather fear of what may come. White, Christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk. 

“It’s much more of a symbolic threat that people feel,’’ said Diana C. Mutz, the author of the study and a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics. “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”

There have been other studies that have proven this point as well, and of course  even our own powers of observation should lead us to a similar conclusion.

Trump recognized this ethnic anxiety among white Christians during his time publicly calling for President Obama to reveal his birth certificate.

And that made him a hero to these self entitled white racists.

Then all he had to do was drag Sarah Palin back onto the national stage to give him her seal of approval, and the basket of white supremacist deplorables were all set to do their thing. 

Racism, and fear of "the other," has been a theme uniting these Trump supporters since the very beginning, and it is only a uniting of the more enlightened among us that will defeat them in the upcoming elections.

20% of gun owners in America admit to taking illicit drugs or have issues with mental health.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

More than 20 percent of gun owners in the U.S. admit to using drugs while also suffering from a mental health disorder, according to a study. 

According to a survey of 1,098 gun owners by rehab center The Florida House Experience, one in three people self-identify as having a mental health disorder, with anxiety, mood disorders and post-traumatic stress among some of the most common conditions. 

Elsewhere, 33.7 percent of those taking part in the survey admit to being drug users, with nearly 17 percent of these gun owners saying they take drugs every day. According to the survey—Don’t Shoot the Messenger: A Look at Gun Ownership, Drug Use, and Mental Health in America— cocaine, marijuana and Xanax, a prescription medication used to treat anxiety that is becoming increasingly popular among young people recreationally, are the three most used drugs by gun owners.

In total, one in five gun owners self-identify as having a mental health condition—not necessarily diagnosed with one—as well as taking drugs illicitly.

I of course am not at all surprised by this since I already think the idea of buying dozens of firearms is by itself an indication of a mental health problem.

I am not however necessarily down with the idea of Marijuana use being a problem for gun owners.

But definitely mark me down as being worried about opioid and cocaine use among Ammosexuals.

I have an uncle who went through a rather prolonged period of cocaine abuse and he jumped out of bed one night and shot his whole bedroom up absolutely convinced that he somebody was climbing through the window to murder him.

He most CERTAINLY should not have had access to a gun.

P.S. Here is the study.

During Trump rallies there was an increase in violence. I know, color me surprised.

Courtesy of the New York Times:  

A study published on Friday appears to confirm what news reports suggested long ago: President Trump’s campaign rallies were associated with a rise in violence when they came to town. 

A city that hosted a Trump rally saw an average of 2.3 more assaults reported on the day of the event than on a typical day, according to the study, led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and published in the journal Epidemiology. The authors found no corresponding link between assaults and rallies for Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. 

“It appeared to be a phenomenon that’s unique to Donald Trump’s rally,” said Christopher Morrison, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the study. 

It may come as little surprise that the rallies were associated with increased violence, as the often volcanic clashes between Mr. Trump’s supporters and opponents were widely covered at the time.

Yeah I think we all knew this even without a study.

And most of that violence probably happened right there at the rally.

So now that Trump is elected it appears that uptick in violence is now spreading across the country.

New MIT study suggests that people simply prefer fake news to real news.

Courtesy of The Atlantic:  

The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories. 

“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”

.........

Though Vosoughi and his colleagues only focus on Twitter—the study was conducted using exclusive data that the company made available to MIT—their work has implications for Facebook, YouTube, and every major social network. Any platform that regularly amplifies engaging or provocative content runs the risk of amplifying fake news along with it. 

Though the study is written in the clinical language of statistics, it offers a methodical indictment of the accuracy of information that spreads on these platforms. A false story is much more likely to go viral than a real story, the authors find. A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does. And while false stories outperform the truth on every subject—including business, terrorism and war, science and technology, and entertainment—fake news about politics regularly does best. 

Twitter users seem almost to prefer sharing falsehoods. Even when the researchers controlled for every difference between the accounts originating rumors—like whether that person had more followers or was verified—falsehoods were still 70 percent more likely to get retweeted than accurate news. 

And blame for this problem cannot be laid with our robotic brethren. From 2006 to 2016, Twitter bots amplified true stories as much as they amplified false ones, the study found. Fake news prospers, the authors write, “because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.”

Well, that's disheartening. 

How do we actually reach and educate people who are conditioned to only respond to explosive headlines and hyperbolic content?

No seriously, I'm asking.

Massive study by the Rand Corporation finds that NRA backed gun policies actually increase the number of gun homicides and violent crime. Quick, put on your surprised face.

Courtesy of WaPo:

The best available evidence suggests two major National Rifle Association gun policy prescriptions — what are known as “stand your ground” self-defense laws and permissive concealed carry laws — increase homicides and violent crime. 

That is according to a massive new study by the RAND Corporation, an independent think tank. The group's experts scoured thousands of academic papers on gun violence in an effort to make definitive statements about how gun policies affect crime and safety. They winnowed that list down to only the highest-quality studies — just 62 in total — containing evidence capable of establishing a causal link between a gun policy change and a specific outcome. 

Because the RAND researchers' criteria for including studies in their final analysis were rigorous, for the majority of policies and outcomes, there was not enough good research to make any definitive statements — a clear indication of how little we know about how to prevent gun violence. But there were notable exceptions.

There is moderate evidence, for instance, that “stand your ground” laws, which remove the requirement for gun owners to attempt to retreat from a situation before using lethal force, increase total rates of homicide. A 2013 study, for instance, found that states passing such laws saw 6 percent to 11 percent increases in their total homicide rate. Another study found that Florida experienced a significant 24 percent increase in total homicides and 32 percent increase in firearm homicides following enactment of the stand-your-ground law in 2005.

Gee, how completely unsurprising.

Now if you are relatively new to the whole gun debate question, you may be asking yourself why is there is so little research into the impact that guns have on our society, the answer to that is both simple and infuriating.

Courtesy of Vox:  

For decades, the federal government, with the support of the National Rifle Association, has made it very difficult to answer a question at the heart of American public health and safety: Does gun control work? 

The answer is hugely important given that guns killed nearly 39,000 Americans in 2016 alone. But after research on gun violence in the 1990s found that firearms do not — contrary to NRA talking points — make people safer, the group backed a federal funding freeze on gun policy research.

That's right ladies and gentlemen, the reason that the government does not have reams of well researched data to back up their policy decisions, is because the NRA recognized decades ago that having access to that data would undermine their mythology about more guns leading to less gun fatalities.

Guns kill. Period.

And more guns, kill more people. Period.

And the NRA actually know this, which is why they have spent millions to obstruct research. Once again, period.

I think one of the first things that the blue wave of Democrats coming into Congress and the Senate in 2018 need to do is to is thaw out that gun research freeze from the 90's, and start accumulating some real data to use in order to move forward with comprehensive new gun control legislation.

Majority of Americans blame the problems with Obamacare on Donald Trump, not Barack Obama.

Courtesy of The Independent:  

A majority of Americans blame Donald Trump’s administration for any future problems with Obamacare, a new poll has found. 

Carried out by the Kaiser Family Foundation, it found 61 per cent of respondents believe the US President and his Republican Party are responsible for any issues with the Affordable Care Act (ACA). 

Only 37 per cent said Barack Obama's administration - who introduced it in 2010 - would be at fault for fewer enrollments.

......

Although Republican efforts to repeal and replace the ACA have failed, the party’s actions have been blamed for forcing prices for Obamacare plans up in 2018. 

The Trump administration slashed the Obamacare budget for advertising by 90 per cent and significantly reduced spending on groups that help customers find the appropriate insurance plan.

The 2018 open enrolment period for the health insurance exchange is also only running for six weeks, which is half as long as last year. 

Analysts say these measures increase the likelihood of less people signing up to the ACA.

Good, I am glad that most Americans are seeing through the Republican's bullshit. 

And it is important to remind people that EVERY SINGLE problem that happens with health care in this country moving forward is directly the fault of this administration.

You can bet your ass that if Hillary Clinton had been elected that she would have been working to make Obamacare function better, not trying to destroy it from within.

Study shows that exposure to religion renders children unable to differentiate between fact and fiction.

Courtesy of Waking Times: 

A study conducted by researchers led by Kathleen H. Corriveau of Boston University examined how religious exposure affects a child’s ability to distinguish between fact and fiction. They found that religious exposure at an early age has a surprising effect: it makes children less able to differentiate between reality and fantasy. 

The researchers presented three different types of stories – religious, fantastical and realistic – to a group of 5 and 6-year olds. Religious children were divided into three groups: children exposed to the Christian religion either as churchgoers who attended public school, non-churchgoers who attended parochial school, or churchgoers who attended parochial school. The fourth group of children included non-churchgoing children who attended public school and had no exposure to religion in either church or school. The goal of the research was to find out if religious exposure would affect the child’s ability to identify if the lead character in each of the stories was real or make-believe. 

The study found that children who attended church services and/or were enrolled in a parochial school had a much harder time differentiating between fact and fiction when compared to children of non-religious background. The study, published in the journal Cognitive Science, states: 

“The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children’s differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories.”

I am still often puzzled that there are people who do not simply recognize this by casual observation.

There is a reason why scam artists often target deeply religious people, they are the most gullible.

And that is the same reason that politicians invoke god, religion, and the Bible in their speeches.

They know that religious people are predisposed to accept things without the benefit of evidence.

Let's face it, without religious indoctrination there would be NO president Trump.

It requires the dulling of critical thinking skills to convince people to vote for idiots, assholes, and criminals.

And religion serves that purpose quite nicely.

So I stand by my contention that introducing religion to children is in fact a form of child abuse. But will add that in the long run it is also an abuse of our basic human right to use our intellects to protect ourselves as adults.

The AP and USA Today combine forces to study just how any children are dying from gun violence in this country every year.

Here is what the study found as reported by the New York Daily News:  

The findings: During the first six months of this year, minors died from accidental shootings — at their own hands, or at the hands of other children or adults — at a pace of one every other day, far more than limited federal statistics indicate.

Using information collected by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonpartisan research group, news reports and public sources, the media outlets spent six months analyzing the circumstances of every death and injury from accidental shootings involving children ages 17 and younger from Jan. 1, 2014, to June 30 of this year — more than 1,000 incidents in all. Among the findings: 

— Deaths and injuries spike for children under 5, with 3-year-olds the most common shooters and victims among young children. Nearly 90 3-year-olds were killed or injured in the shootings, the vast majority of which were self-inflicted. 

— Accidental shootings spike again for ages 15-17, when victims are most often fatally shot by other children but typically survive self-inflicted gunshots. 

— They most often happen at the children's homes, with handguns legally owned by adults for self-protection. They are more likely to occur on weekends or around holidays such as Christmas. 

— States in the South, including Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia, are among those with the highest per capita rates of accidental shootings involving minors. 

In all, more than 320 minors age 17 and under and more than 30 adults were killed in accidental shootings involving minors. Nearly 700 other children and 78 adults were injured. 

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 74 minors died from accidental discharges of firearms in 2014, the latest year for which comparable data are available. The AP and USA TODAY analysis counted 113 for that year, suggesting the federal government missed a third of the cases.

Great, so now we know that the information that we had which horrified us concerning the number of children dying due to gun violence, is actually watered down and the REAL numbers are even more horrific.

And all it does is to reinforce the knowledge that the guns people buy to protect their families actually put their families at greater risk.

Just try to imagine how many more children would be alive today without the 2nd Amendment to protect us in this country.

Once again California leads the way. This time on researching gun violence.

Courtesy of The Week:

Despite the fact that the United States has a very, very high rate of gun deaths compared to other developed countries, we actually know very little about the public-health threat posed by firearms. That's because Congress, working closely with the NRA, passed legislation in the 1990s barring the Centers for Disease control from spending money on any research that could be seen as pro-gun-control, and the CDC has interpreted this ban in a broad manner — the NRA's maneuvering has effectively choked off decades of would-be new research on an area of huge public importance. 

This has been a very big deal: There is a ton of stuff we don't know about the public-health impact of guns that we would know were it not for Congress and the NRA. But now, there's some welcome news out of California that will chip away at this knowledge deficit: The University of California, Davis, is launching the first-ever state-funded center on the study of gun violence. 

The center, notes a UC Davis press release, "will build on unique resources already in place at UC Davis for conducting transformative violence-prevention research and draw on the power of other UC campuses and beyond to provide the scientific evidence that informs the development of effective prevention policies and programs." It will be run by Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency physician and gun-violence expert who has spent $1 million of his own money on this sort of research, and who heads UC Davis' Violence Prevention and Research Program, or VPRP. California will be footing the bill — it has set aside $5 million to launch the center.

As with so many things, LGBT rights, moving towards renewable resources, innovative technologies, a lot of progressive policies and products seem to spring from California.

And here they are again starting a research project that will do what the government really should have been doing all along, and that is studying gun violence and its impact on the country and its citizens.

You would think that this would be the kind of research that the NRA and 2nd Amendment folks would rally around in order to get access to the best information available.

However I think we all know that will not happen because they already know that the findings will not support their bullshit about the importance of having more guns in the hands of more Americans.

It is appears that there is little to no chance that the Bernie Sanders backed candidate will defeat Debbie Wasserman Schultz in Florida. And that's not all. Update!

Courtesy of the Washington Post:  

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz — the former head of the Democratic Party — appears to be leading by about 10 points in her primary against progressive challenger Tim Canova. 

Canova was backed by Bernie Sanders in a Miami area district that overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary. Some progressives say the fact that the race is even that close is a win of sorts for their movement. (Thought not, as of now, an actual win, in the sense of receiving more votes.)

Oddly enough while Schultz has had both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden out campaigning with her, Sanders has not bothered to show up to support Canova.

And though former aides to Bernie Sanders did work on the campaign for a short time, they all left abruptly with no reason given as to why.

As I have said in the past I am not exactly a huge fan of Wasserman Schultz, but neither am I terribly critical of her time as head of the DNC.

Ultimately I think it is good for the Democrats that Schultz wins this race and that it sends the kind of message which I am sure the Republican party would have liked to have sent to the Tea Party back in 2010.

The last thing the Democratic party needs right now is their own version of a grass roots revolution challenging their every decision and playing the obstructionist when the party needs to negotiate of compromise with the Republicans in order to move forward.

In other news it appears that Sanders has no intention of giving up his mailing list, even though it could greatly benefit the party which graciously allowed him to run in their primary.

Courtesy of Roll Call: 

Despite his plan to help the Senate Democrats win a majority, Sanders still intends to draw the line on support somewhere: He will not turn his donor list over to the DSCC. 

Instead, according to a source, he will send his own fundraising pitches on behalf of candidates.

So clearly Sanders wants to "help," but only so much, and only those candidates who pass his litmus test.

He clearly has no intention of giving away his bargaining power.

Another recent event in the world of Bernie Sanders was the release of a study which claims to show that he would have won the primary by a landslide if not for Targeted voter suppression, Registration tampering, Illegal voter purges, voting machine tampering, and unsecured voting machines.

Now if your bullshit meter started pinging, good for you, because as the folks at Daily Kos and Reddit quickly pointed out the poll was conducted by unqualified individuals, with no experience, and with a very obvious agenda.

From one Daily Kos visitor put it:  

Wow, I just did some searching on Election Justice USA (which appears to have been established in April 2016), and found it’s staff had some VERY impressive credentials. One of the main authors of the report is Lulu Fries’dat, who’s claims she is an “Investigative Journalist”, but who’s IMDB page lists her as an editor, who’s many contributions to investigative journalism include: 

“In 2004, she developed, directed and edited a series of voter registration public service announcements for VH1 featuring Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. “ 

Seems legit! 

I love the smell of bullshit propaganda in the morning... 

Do you think 3 months is enough time to do an analysis of primary elections in all 50 states for a new unknown organization? Hmm…. I doubt it.

The problem with this, besides the sloppy methodology, is that it perpetuates the same myth which the Republicans are pushing, and that is that the Democratic party is corrupt and Hillary Clinton cheated to win the nomination, and will cheat again to win the general.

While in fact we are seeing in real time the Russian government attempting to cheat on Trump's behalf, and the Republicans resorting to every dirty trick in the book.

So these never say die Bernie supporters, whether they know it or not, are essentially working in tandem with the Republican party and the Russian government to undermine American democracy.

If we really want to keep this country moving towards progressive goals we need to work together to fight against foreign hackers and GOP merry tricksters to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.

If there are liberals who do not yet understand that cold hard fact, they might want to go up to the nearest mirror and ask themselves who they really are, and what they really believe.

Update: Schultz has won her primary.

So apparently nobody is feeling the Bern in Florida.

New study by nonpartisan group finds that Bernie Sanders' economic plan would double the national debt, increase federal spending by 33 trillion dollars in 10 years.

Courtesy of the AP:

Sen. Bernie Sanders' tax and spending proposals would provide new levels of health and education benefits for American families, but they'd also blow an $18-trillion hole in federal deficits, piling on so much debt they would damage the economy. 

That sobering assessment comes from a joint analysis released Monday by the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and the Urban Institute Health Policy Center, well-known Washington think tanks. 

Democratic presidential candidate Sanders would raise taxes by more than $15 trillion over 10 years, with most of that paid by upper-income earners. 

But that wouldn't be enough to cover the cost of his proposed government-run health care system, along with free undergraduate college, enhanced Social Security, family and medical leave, among other new programs. The cost of the health care plan alone is more than $30 trillion, according to the study. 

The bottom line: Sanders would add $18 trillion to federal debt over a decade. That's about double the current total government debt of $19 trillion.

Other news agencies have reported on the study as well.

Courtesy of Politico: 

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed a whopping $33 trillion federal spending increase over 10 years, according to a new report likely to fuel complaints his campaign promises are unrealistic. 

His proposed tax increases would not come anywhere close to covering those costs, the centrist Tax Policy Center said Monday, and his plan would drive federal debt to “unprecedented” levels. 

Courtesy of the Washington Post: 

The studies, published jointly by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and the Urban Institute in Washington, concludes that Sanders's plans are short a total of more than $18 trillion over a decade. His programs would cost the federal government about $33 trillion over that period, almost all of which would go toward Sanders's proposed system of national health insurance. Yet the Democratic presidential candidate has put forward just $15 trillion in new taxes, the authors concluded. 

In principle, national health insurance could make many families better off overall, without imposing unsustainable burdens on the federal budget. For the system to work in terms of dollars and cents, though, the benefits would have to be less generous than they are in the system Sanders has proposed, or the taxes would have to be more onerous for the middle class, as they are in many European countries.

And the Chicago Tribune simply accuses Sanders of selling a "fantasy agenda."

This is certainly not the first report we have seen that Sanders' plans are simply not workable, but it seems to be the most comprehensive.

Of course ultimately it really doesn't matter what the cost might be because even IF Sanders was to win the nomination, and then the general election, there is absolutely no way any of this would ever make it past Congress.

And in fact it would be this very move towards a more socialist system that would help Republicans hold onto power and most likely increase their hold over the House and the Senate.

New study reveals that spanking increases childhood defiance and mental health issues.

Courtesy of Red Orbit: 

If you think that the answer to an unruly child is a good spanking, think again, say researchers from the Universities of Texas and Michigan, who after extensive analysis found that this form of punishment only makes youngsters more likely to be defiant and aggressive. 

Their study, which was published in the April edition of the Journal of Family Psychology, was based on five decades worth of research involving more than 160,000 children. They are calling it the most extensive scientific investigations into the spanking issue, and one of the few to look specifically at spanking rather than grouping it with other forms of physical discipline. 

“Our analysis focuses on what most Americans would recognize as spanking and not on potentially abusive behaviors,” lead author Elizabeth Gershoff, an associate professor of human development and family sciences at the University of Texas, said in a statement Monday. “We found that spanking was associated with unintended detrimental outcomes and was not associated with more immediate or long-term compliance, which are parents' intended outcomes when they discipline their children.” 

In fact, Gershoff and co-author Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, found that the more frequently that children are spanked, the higher the risk that those kids will start to defy their parents, become aggressive, experience mental health issues, exhibit anti-social behaviors, and/or develop cognitive difficulties. 

In the mental health field this is really old news, but you would be surprised at the number of people who still feel that all any unruly or disruptive child needs is more discipline. And of course their idea of discipline always involves corporeal punishment.

Let me confess that when I was a young father I did swat my daughter on the butt one or two times at least.

My only excuse is that I was not well educated enough to know the harm I was doing and I now regret every swat I ever administered to my child.

And trust me she remembers every one of them as well, and will bring it up to remind me that I was not always the cool headed professional that people think I am today.

The problem of course is that positive behavior modification techniques are still not widely known, and even when known take time to change disruptive behaviors, while for many parents the spanking creates immediate gratification both by temporarily altering the child's behavior and also feeding into the parent's sense of power and need for control.

However if parents choose the slower path of positive behavior modification they will end up with happier children and ultimately more successful adults.

Largest study ever finds that gun control laws do indeed reduce the number of gun related fatalities. Gee, really?

Courtesy of Science Alert:

 As the US continues to stall on gun control talks, the largest study ever conducted on the topic has found a clear link between firearm regulation and fewer gun-related deaths around the world. 

Until now, studies on gun laws have been limited to just one city or country, and have failed to reach consistent conclusions. But the new research took a broader view - the team reviewed 130 high-quality studies conducted in 10 countries over the past 60 years. And while they stopped short of saying they've conclusively proved that gun restrictions equal fewer deaths, the research provides pretty powerful evidence to suggest that it's the case. 

"Across countries, instead of seeing an increase in the homicide rate, we saw a reduction," lead researcher Julian Santaella-Tenorio from Columbia University told Zack Beauchamp over at Vox. 

To figure this out, Santaella-Tenorio and his team systematically analysed 130 studies that had been conducted across 10 different countries, including the US, Australia, Brazil, South Africa, and Austria. 

Each of the studies looked at some kind of specific gun legislation change, and its impact on gun-related homicides, suicides, and/or unintentional injuries or deaths, and was carefully selected for the quality of its research.

You know the only reason that this has to be proven by a study is due to the effectiveness of the  NRA's misinformation campaign.

In my opinion every gun death that happens in this country can be laid at the feet of the NRA and the politicians who they bullied into compliance.

We are dying by the thousands, and if this were simply a disease we would be holding telethons three times a year to raise money to fight it.

Overwhelming majority of women getting abortions are Christians. Let's file this under "Things we kinda already knew."

Courtesy of Reverb Press:  

When it comes to anti-choice activists interfering with women’s reproductive rights, there’s no denying that it’s mostly Christian groups trying to get Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers shut down. From the Pro-Life Action League to the National Pro-Life Religious Council, there’s an undeniable link between Christianity and anti-choice activism. That’s what makes a recent survey, sponsored by a self-proclaimed pro-life group, so ironic. 

The newly released research, conducted by Christian research group LifeWay at the behest of pro-life group Care Net, paints a very different picture of those seeking abortions than you might imagine. The study interviewed 1,038 women who had received an abortion. Surprisingly, a full 70 percent of these women were Christian.

The study’s results were broken down by religious beliefs, and Christianity was further divided into four distinct categories — Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and non-denominational. The two groups with the highest reported abortion rates were Protestants (26 percent of respondents) and Catholic (27 percent of respondents).

I have two favorite parts of this report.

First that Atheists only account for 4% of abortions which should be shoved in the face of every one of those smug fundamentalist who call us sinners and accuse us of lacking morality.

Second that this study was paid for by a pro-life group who certainly expected a different result to emerge.

The study goes on to point out that 43% of those Christians who had an abortion go to church at least once a month, and 20% go weekly. So these are not just women who picked the label Christianity out of a hat, they are died in the wool church going believers.

Which leads to only one conclusion. When it comes to baby murdering none of us can hold a candle to Christians.

Now whose turn is it to be smug?

Now I know why I am not dating. Not pathological enough.

Source.

Courtesy of Scientific America:  

In the study researchers focused on nearly 1,000 heterosexual men and women with a variety of pathological personality traits whose disorders ranged in severity from none to diagnosable. Participants were referred to the study by general practitioners or other medical professionals, says Fernando Gutiérrez at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, who led the research. Gutiérrez and his team inquired about participants’ lifetime numbers of mates and children, along with job level, income and other sociodemographic factors using a combination of self-reporting surveys and interviews. 

Their results show that people with some pathological personality types, such as those considered neurotic and impulsive, had more mates and even more children than average, suggesting that such traits are not being weeded out by natural selection and actually may confer an evolutionary advantage. 

The study results show both males and females who were pathologically reckless and impetuous attracted more short-term partners than participants with average personalities. And obsessive-compulsive males—but not females—were successful at securing long-lasting mates, an outcome strongly associated with this group’s high income (obsessive-compulsives made nearly twice as much as the less obsessive study participants), Gutiérrez says.

(So sane people make less money? Well that explains two things.) 

It should be noted that the findings of this study are considered speculative since certain personality types tend to be less trustworthy.

But putting that aside for now, there IS a grain of truth here.

There IS something to be said for the fact that pathological personalities sometimes have over inflated egos, and lack the kinds of self doubt that trouble those who are more introspective or self aware.

And perhaps there is something to be said for the fact that it requires a certain level of self delusion or fear of being alone which helps a marriage last for decades. I am of course not saying it is true of all marriages, but the possibility certainly makes me feel better about my past relationships.

For instance I do not usually have trouble attracting female attention, but cannot make relationships last for the long haul. And I ALWAYS think after a few years into the relationship that my partner has gone a little crazy.

In fact an actual Thanksgiving conversation with my family centered around whether I only attract crazy women, or whether living with me DRIVES them crazy.

I for one chose the former. Sadly that was not the consensus.

So apparently I am crazy enough to attract a woman, but not crazy enough to keep a woman. Not sure how to feel about that.

I guess my only option is to sit here ensconced in my sanity and feel smugly superior.

Yeah, THAT should keep me warm at night.

New study finds that not only are the non-religious numbers growing, but they are becoming even MORE secular over time.

Courtesy Pew Research Center:  

Religious “nones” are not only growing as a share of the U.S. population, but they are becoming more secular over time by a variety of measures, a fact that also is helping to make the U.S. public overall somewhat less religious, according to surveys done as part of our Religious Landscape Study.

The “nones,” a category that includes people who self-identify as atheists or agnostics, as well as those who say their religion is “nothing in particular,” now make up 23% of U.S. adults, up from 16% in 2007. But there is more to the story. To begin with, this group is not uniformly nonreligious. Most of them say they believe in God, and about a third say religion is at least somewhat important in their lives. 

At the same time, between the Pew Research Center’s two Religious Landscape Studies – conducted in 2007 and 2014 – we also see consistent evidence that the “nones” are becoming less religious. For example, the share of religious “nones” who say they believe in God, while still a majority, has fallen from 70% to 61% over that seven-year period. Only 27% of “nones” are absolutely certain about God’s existence, down from 36% in 2007. And fully a third of religiously unaffiliated Americans (33%) now say they do not believe in God, up 11 percentage points over that time.

To all my religious friends questioning their faith out there let me just say, "Come join us, we open and eager to welcome you to the family."

Life without religion is a wondrous and exhilarating existence.

It's like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute but still knowing that the trip to the end will be worth the moments of uncertainty and possibly terror.

More bad news for Fox News as increasing number of middle aged white folks just start dying off.

Courtesy of HuffPo: 

Middle-aged white Americans are dying at increasing rates and half a million people are dead who should not be, according to a new report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The study, co-authored by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, analyzed death rates for men and women aged 45 to 54 in the United States, a range often categorized as "middle-age." The duo, both economics professors at Princeton, then compared the data to those death rates found within other domestic racial categories and those seen in similarly wealthy nations. 

Black, Hispanic and older Americans (65 and up) have continued to see longer lives, as have those in Sweden, Australia, Germany and other rich nations, but middle-aged white Americans have not. The results represented a "marked increase" in mortality between 1999 and 2013, and the trends seem to "reverse decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States."

Well isn't that inter......hey wait a minute I'M a middle aged white American!

So what the hell are they dying from?

The study links the increase in mortality to a slew of problematic issues seen throughout American society, including an increase in drug and alcohol abuse and an increase in suicide rates. White men had the highest suicide rate of any demographic in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The authors also draw a stark link between a rise in opioid availability, including the growing problem of cheap heroin. They theorize that an uptick in "the epidemic of pain, suicide and drug overdoses" may be tied to 2008's financial crisis, and say many baby-boomers are among the first to live a harsher life than their parents.

Phew! Okay well I should be fine more or less, because I am not much of a drinker, and I am much too poor to support a heroin addiction. 

Besides right before typing this I finished the second of the three workouts I have planned for today and am currently sucking down a blueberry and coconut milk protein shake.  So I am doing what I can to keep the grim reaper at bay.

As for suicide, yeah that's not my thing.

I have always considered my life to be a gift, and I have no plans on shuffling off this moral coil until they drag me kicking and screaming into the void.

On the bright side, and yes I know there is not much of a bright side, this is doing nothing to help the GOP demographic. 

Group releases study which finds that often online education is like not receiving an education at all.

Courtesy of The Washington Post:  

The study was done by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, and located at Stanford University, in collaboration with the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington and Mathematica Policy Research. CREDO’s founding director, Margaret Raymond, served as project director. CREDO receives funding from the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation, which provided support for the new research. 

In its newest report, released this week, CREDO evaluated online K-12 charter schools. There are 17 states with online charter students: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia. 

The study sought to answer this question: “How did enrollment in an online charter school affect the academic growth of students?” Academic growth, as mentioned before, is measured by standardized test scores for the purpose of this study, which evaluated scores from online charter students between 2008 and 2013 and compared them to students in traditional public schools (not brick-and-mortar charters). Here are some of the findings: 

Students in online charters lost an average of about 72 days of learning in reading. 
Students in online charters lost 180 days of learning in math during the course of a 180-day school year. Yes, you read that right. As my colleague Lyndsey Layton wrote in this story about the study, it’s as if the students did not attend school at all when it comes to math. 
The average student in an online charter had lower reading scores than students in traditional schools everywhere except Wisconsin and Georgia, and had lower math scores everywhere except in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. 

Layton quoted Raymond as saying, “There’s still some possibility that there’s positive learning, but it’s so statistically significantly different from the average, it is literally as if the kid did not go to school for an entire year.”

I actually have some experience with online education as well, for the continuing education that I have to do for my job, and I can concur that what I "learn" online is often harder for me to retain than the classes that I attend in person. 

My daughter has also studied online courses, and though she always passes them with ease, her retention is not that great either. 

There is something to be said for being part of a class listening to a teacher as being superior to reading materials online or watching instructional videos.

Just another reminder that public education is USUALLY far superior to its various alternatives.

Study essentially destroys the conservative myth that shootings are the result of mental illness.

Image courtesy of Salon.

I happened to stumble across this study, released in February of this year, on Reddit and thought I would share a few of its findings:

The focus on mental illness in the wake of recent mass shootings reflects a decades-long history of more general debates in psychiatry and law about guns, gun violence, and “mental competence.” Psychiatric articles in the 1960s deliberated ways to assess whether mental patients were “of sound mind enough” to possess firearms. Following the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School, Breggin decried the toxic combination of mental illness, guns, and psychotropic medications that contributed to the actions of shooter Eric Harris. After the 2012 shooting at Newtown, Torrey amplified his earlier warnings about dangerous “subgroups” of persons with mental illness who, he contended, were perpetrators of gun crimes. Speaking to a national television audience, Torrey, a psychiatrist, claimed that “about half of . . . mass killings are being done by people with severe mental illness, mostly schizophrenia, and if they were being treated they would have been preventable.” Similar themes appear in legal dialogues as well. Even the US Supreme Court, which in 2008 strongly affirmed a broad right to bear arms, endorsed prohibitions on gun ownership “by felons and the mentally ill” because of their special potential for violence. 

Yet surprisingly little population-level evidence supports the notion that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes. According to Appelbaum,25 less than 3% to 5% of US crimes involve people with mental illness, and the percentages of crimes that involve guns are lower than the national average for persons not diagnosed with mental illness. Databases that track gun homicides, such as the National Center for Health Statistics, similarly show that fewer than 5% of the 120 000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness.

This of course is almost exactly what I have been saying for months now, but it it always nice to have research to back it up.

Here's more:  

Media reports often assume a binary distinction between mild and severe mental illness, and connect the latter form to unpredictability and lack of self-control. However, this distinction, too, is called into question by mental health research. To be sure, a number of the most common psychiatric diagnoses, including depressive, anxiety, and attention-deficit disorders, have no correlation with violence whatsoever. Community studies find that serious mental illness without substance abuse is also “statistically unrelated” to community violence. At the aggregate level, the vast majority of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts—only about 4% of violence in the United States can be attributed to people diagnosed with mental illness.

The study also says that of course people who demonstrate hostility, or aggressive behaviors should have their access to guns restricted, but that there are many with a mental health diagnosis who are just as safe, or safer, than those who have never even seen a psychiatrist.

I would like to expand on that further by saying that everyday you are surrounded by people with mental health issues that fall within the diagnostic classifications found within the DSM IV.

In fact some of these people may even benefit from such disorders as Aspergers, paranoia, compulsive disorders, and even body dysmorphia (As related to success as a body builder or model.)

Some classifications are subtle and not easily detected, or temporary, and though inconvenient (Such as depression) not disruptive enough to warrant a psychiatric evaluation.

Simply put if you yourself do not suffer from one ore more classifications for mental illness, you are almost certainly surrounded by several people who do.

And trust me that if we were to get really serious about expanding psychiatric screenings, and then taking the guns away from anybody who received a negative diagnoses (Which by the way sounds like a great idea to me.), the NRA would stop talking about mental illness overnight and start blaming all the shootings on video games, violent movies, or rap music.

Study finds that belief is easier on the brain, and therefore favored by many in the population, than disbelief which requires the brain to work harder.

Courtesy of The Daily Beast:

While in an fMRI scanner, participants were asked whether or not they believed in a number of statements. Sentences ranged from the very simple and fact-based (California is larger than Rhode Island), to the abstract and highly subjective (God probably does not exist). The data revealed activation of distinct but sometimes overlapping brain areas during belief versus disbelief conditions. 

Additionally, the scans clearly showed something that was more straightforward. Brain activation, overall, was much greater and persisted longer during states of disbelief. This is important because neuroscience has long shown that greater brain activity requires more mental resources, of which there is a limited supply. A cognitive process that demands little mental resources, such as believing, is less work for the brain and therefore favored. This concept was summed up nicely in a 2015 NewScientist cover story on the science of beliefs, which stated, “Harris’ results were widely interpreted as further confirmation that the default state of the human brain is to accept. Belief comes easily; doubt takes effort.”

Well that makes sense.

I favor cognitive thinking and skepticism because I have an active intellect, while those who simply accept things on faith are intellectually lazy.

Makes pretty good sense actually.