How could people do something like this?

Today comes yet another story of the incredible cruelty that the US government is willing to inflict on totally innocent people, sacrificing them to its militaristic goals. NPR had a shocking story about how the US Army tested chemical weapons on 60,000 of its own soldiers during World War II. They picked out black, Puerto Rican, and Japanese-Americans to test out a theory that their skin might have greater resistance to chemical weapons.
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Humanism at Work conference

The second annual one-day conference on Humanism at Work sponsored by the Foundation Beyond Belief will held on July 25, 2015 in Boston, MA. The program is designed to help identify more and better ways for humanists to put their nontheistic compassionate beliefs to work for the betterment on the world. You can get more details here.

Online harassment of women

On his show Last Week Tonight John Oliver points out that the internet provides a medium for some of the worst elements of society to mercilessly attack women via revenge porn and other means just for the ‘crime’ of being a woman online or expressing an opinion publicly. There is something very, very disturbing about this phenomenon because it reveals a really ugly side of humanity and the fact that there seems to be little recourse for the targeted women makes it even worse.
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The ‘lone wolf’ theory implicates us all

The murder of the nine people in a church in Charleston, SC has of course prompted discussions of why anyone would commit such a terrible act. If the killer had been a Muslim, there would be no debate. He would have been immediately branded a terrorist and his motive would have assumed to be that it was driven by his religious beliefs and was part of the war waged by Muslims against the US and civilization in general and Christians in particular.
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Why the Snowden revelations enraged the US government

Computer security expert Bruce Schneier says that the allegations that the Russians and Chinese have access to the documents that are in the trove that Snowden took may well be true but that is not because they got them from Snowden, as was the charge made by the smear article in the Sunday Times. Instead it is likely because the US, Russian, and Chinese governments have each penetrated each other’s networks because “while cryptography is strong, computer security is weak”.
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The clown car overflows

Donald Trump’s grandiose announcement that he is entering the presidential race created some consternation within the Republican party and their supporters in the media, with concerns expressed that his buffoonish style will make the Republican primary race even more of a clown show than it already is. His announcement was typical, all spectacle and stream of consciousness nonsense.
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Taking aim at those who stoke the fires of racism

Jeb Lund catalogues in great detail all the people who have contributed to the racist paranoia in the country that poison the minds of people like the murderer in Charleston, and have constantly emitted “the long low dog whistle that entered the mainstream of American conservatism with Nixon and the Southern Strategy in 1968 — a toxic mixture of anti-government resentment, absolute refusal to recognize the left as legitimate, and racial loathing.”
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The pope’s encyclical on climate change and inequality

I have not read pope Francis’s 40,000 word encyclical Laudato Si’ dealing with climate change and its relationship with inequality. But Joshua J. McElwee, the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, has read it and summarizes some of the key points. There is no doubt that this document is going to infuriate conservatives in the US even though the basic message would be considered uncontroversial in most parts of the world.
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