James Kenneth Rogers

Film producer Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual assault and sexual harassment shouldn’t come as a shock. Everyone’s known that this sort of thing has been going on Hollywood since the 1930s. Corey Feldman and Elijah Wood have each talked about how Hollywood does far worse: pedophilia and sexual exploitation of children. The question is, why do we tolerate it? Hollywood makes its money because its films get copyright protection. But the U.S. Constitution says that the sole purpose of…

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Some people are dumber than others, yet everyone’s vote counts the same. Surveys since the 1950s have consistently shown that most Anericans are poorly informed about basic, important civic facts about our country, government, and political situation. An academic overview of research since the 1950s about voters’  knowledge found that a majority of Americans didn’t know the answers to questions about: definitions of key terms such as liberal, conservative, primary elections, or the bill of rights; knowledge of many individual…

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I’ve said it before: religion is an innate part of human nature. Someone can give up on organized religion, but he can’t give up on being human, so religiosity will still be a part of his character. Those who give up on church just transfer their religiosity to other things. Unfortunately,  most of those other things are poor replacements. And the worst replacement is the most common: the Church of Social Justice. To show what I mean, let’s look at…

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Another interesting passage from Starship Troopers: That old saw about “To understand all is to forgive all” is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them.

Google apparently dropped all the accounts of a statistics professor, with no warning. His activities and his blog were apolitical, but that didn’t seem to matter to Google. He lost his blog archives, his email address, and years of archived emails. Google tried something similar with psychology professor Jordan Peterson until public outcry forced Google to back down. Google has taken too much power over modern life, to the point where it has near-absolute power over many people’s digital lives….

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I’ve been reading Robert Heinein’s 1959 military science fiction masterpiece,  Starship Troopers. I found interesting this discussion about value (during a flashback to a high school): ​“‘Value’has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—‘market value’ is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different…

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I got an top grade in Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. It was an intensive yearlong class taught by Charles Fried, a distinguished constitutional law expert and former Solicitor General of the United States. So, I speak with a fair degree of confidence when I say that poems inscribed on statues have no legal or precedential value in the American legal system. That one side in a major national debate continually runs to a poetry quotation as one of…

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In my first post on this blog I said that Religion is an inescapable part of human nature—it has been a part of all human cultures everywhere and at all times. Religion serves important functions by providing, among other things: 1) a way to make parts of our lives sacred and allow us to commune with God (or some higher power); 2) moral guidelines and answers to deep life questions; 3) ceremonies and rites marking major life events; 4) a…

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The authors of a recent article in The Lancet found nine “potentially modifiable” risk factors that appear to account for 35% of dementia: Our results suggest that around 35% of dementia is attributable to a combination of the following nine risk factors: education to a maximum of age 11–12 years, midlife hypertension, midlife obesity, hearing loss, late-life depression, diabetes, physical inactivity, smoking, and social isolation. I suspect that genetic factors may affect these risk factors as well, so making behavior…

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“We are a nation of pioneers….We have but little room for the timid, the irresolute, and the idle.” -Theodore Roosevelt America used to see itself as a nation of pioneers. We need to start seeing ourselves that way again.