Anti-vaxxers take aim at Mississippi

Mississippi is a poor state combined with a strong religious tradition and is usually at the bottom of the list when it comes to most measures of social well-being. But there is one area where it excels and that is in the vaccination rate where the rates are the highest in the nation. 99.7% of its kindergartners are fully vaccinated, compared with 94.5% nationwide. I discussed the reasons for this anomaly in a post last year. They achieved it by limiting exemptions from vaccination only under very strict conditions, unlike the much looser exemptions in other states.
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Ego depletion theory in trouble?

The field of psychology has been reeling because of problems with replicability, in that studies that claim to see certain effects have later had doubts cast upon them when efforts to replicate them failed to do so. Part of the problem is of course dealing with human subjects. But one of the theories that seemed to be pretty robust was based on a study by Roy Baumenister and Dianne Tice that suggested that people have a finite reservoir of will power and that when that is depleted by using it on some tasks, then we have reduced ability to overcome new challenges until that reservoir is replenished.
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Important contraception case hearing today

The US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on a very important case involving Obamacare, religion, and contraception. This case does not challenge the constitutionality of Obamacare itself, although the religious groups bringing the suit and its conservative backers had hoped it would. After the Supreme Court twice ruled earlier upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare, it turned down efforts to turn this into a third attempt.
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When a militant atheist confronts religious conservatives…

David Silverman is the president of American Atheists and is a person who was born to wear the label of ‘militant atheist’. CPAC is the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of some of the most extreme conservatives in the country, many of whom are extremely religious. Samantha Bee sent one of her producers to see what happened when Silverman attended CPAC three weeks ago.
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The “Rule of Three”

In watching Michael Moore’s film Where to Invade Next that I reviewed here, I was struck by a segment that he had on the role of women in Iceland. In 1980, that became the first country to democratically elect a woman as president of a republic (though not the first country to elect a woman as an executive head of state which happened in Sri Lanka when it elected a female prime minister twenty years earlier) and she went on to serve four consecutive terms. Every major political party in Iceland now requires a minimum of 40% of women members.
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Reactions to the Supreme Court nominee

President Obama has nominated Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, to replace Antonin Scalia on the US Supreme Court. Garland seems to be a well-respected jurist, by all accounts not particularly ideological in any clearly identifiable way but instead someone who will bring a proper degree of thoughtfulness to the weighty matters the court deals with.
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Candidate favorability by gender

Jon Schwarz discusses the differences between how men and women view the remaining candidates. Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz all have net unfavorability ratings among both men and women. There seems to be no gender difference with Cruz in that men and women dislike him equally but women dislike Trump a lot more than men do, while men dislike Clinton a lot more than women do.
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