Take the Money, Donald Trump! Do It for the Children!

Apparently Donald Trump wants to help charities, but he won't donate the money without extorting President Obama to release documents that, let's face it, will not satisfy the birthers and their conspiracy theories.

Fortunately, Stephen Colbert has an offer of his own for Donald Trump :)

The Colbert Report
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And of course, once it's all over, those will be the smartest things ever to come out of Trump's mouth...

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Richard Dawkins - Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life (1)

Dostoevsky's dictum "without God, anything is permitted" is often used by religious believers to make the point that, quite aside from the issue of its truth, religion plays an important role, perhaps even a necessary one, in fomenting moral behavior and virtue. Without God, where would morality come from? If we were simply left to our own devices, what would be there to prevent absolute chaos, violence, crime and wanton lasciviousness?

Well, whatever you may think about the moral foundation of morality, as an empirical claim, it simply isn't true that without God or religion we would turn into savages. How do we know? For one, because non-human animals, presumably not being religious believers, do have all sorts of customs and rules by which they abide without having to descend into anarchy. And second, because when you look at the behavior or religious and non-religious people, you find that there is almost no difference there.

What religious people do have, though, is a lot of shame and guilt for things that should not be quite as big a deal as they think. So it seems as though religion is a self-perpetuating industry of devotion based on making its followers feel bad about themselves and then making them turn to religion for "salvation." Not much different from drug pushers, huh?

And it's getting to the point that religious people will go to all kinds of extremes to reconcile the inevitable cognitive dissonance they experience from the conjunction of their religious beliefs and their biological nature. Richard Dawkins explores these and other related issues

What exactly is the fascination with virgins? I never understood that one...

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Obama and Romney Laugh It Up

With the upcoming elections, things have been heated up for the past few months. And though not to the same level, both major contenders, as well as the PACS and Super PACS that support them, have resorted to some cheap shots, ad hominem attacks and tactics that are unbecoming of our best ideals of civility and leadership.

So I was really glad to see Obama and Romney take a break this past week to lighten things up and engage in some humor at their own expense and that of each other.

Here's Romney, who actually did a lot better than I would have expected:

And here's Obama, more experienced in this kind of thing, and therefore doing a better job:

That joke about having been rested for the second campaign from the nap he took during the first one was priceless :)

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Obama on Romnesia: Don't worry. Obamacare Covers Pre-Existing Conditions :)

Romnesia is a serious and highly contagious medical condition, usually related to Paulzheimers. As its name suggests, it's most obviously related to Mitt Romney's almost daily political flip-flopping depending on what particular constituency's votes he's trying to secure. If he's in Massachusetts, for instance, he will advocate for various liberal platforms and women's issues. When he's in the Bible Belt, he is all about religion and the need to go back to that time when people did whatever they thought their invisible friend up in the sky wanted them to (including, but not limited to, restricting the rights of women, minorities, immigrants, gays, etc.). When he's in a secret meeting with corporate moguls, he'll make fun of and dismiss 47% of the American public as moochers and irresponsible leeches, and when that tape becomes public, he's suddenly all about 100% of Americans. Poor guy...

This is a very serious affliction, but President Obama has some great news :)

That made my day...

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Adora Svitak - What Adults Can Learn from Kids

Have you ever wondered what could happen if you respected the intelligence and potential of your children, and read to them a little Aristotle, some history and science instead of just simple bedtime stories?

Well, wonder no more. Here's a great example of the positive influence of intellectual stimulating your children's brains.

Now, pick up that dusty philosophy book that's been sitting in your book shelf for years and put it to good use :)

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Jumping from Space

What did you do this weekend? Oh, no reason... It's just that while you were doing whatever you were doing, stuntman Felix Baumgartner ended up becoming the first human to break the sound barrier without actually being on any kind of supersonic aircraft... he just jumped to a free fall from something like 24 miles above the Earth!

Me? I was riding a segway :)

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Children's Television Chop Shop - This Week With George Snuffleupagus

Romney wants to fire Big Bird, and conservatives seem to agree that we spend way too much money on things like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR. And while reigning in excessive spending is generally a good idea, do programs that educate the public count as a waste of money? No, it's actually an investment; one that will pay off in great dividends!

So how about we cut other forms of outrageous spending? Like, I don't know, the stupid wars we're always waging all over the world? Or maybe the gigantic tax cuts given to the rich, and the enormous subsidies given to corporations? Oh, but conservatives wouldn't like that, so in order to distract the nation from the real forms of outrageous and frivolous spending that go to benefit Wall Street, they'll just exaggerate how much tax-payer money goes to Sesame Street...

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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But this is really hilarious part

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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How awesome was that? :)

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Rumble 2012 - Bill O'Reilly vs Jon Stewart

The recent presidential debate between Romney and Obama turned out to be a disaster. Romney came loaded with a semi-automatic shotgun full of soundbites and lies, he threatened to fire Big Bird, and once again flipped flopped on his position (I've never known a prostitute who can assume so many positions, but I guess if you're a corporate whore, you gotta be extra flexible). Obama, on the other hand, just let Romney get away with all these bs claims, and acted as though he hadn't slept in a few days. Maybe Clint Eastwood was right all along when he talked to that empty chair at the Republican National Convention...

So if that debate left you unsatisfied, worry not, my friends because Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly had a little debate of their own this weekend, which turned out to be more substantial and more entertaining. President Obama, take some notes from Jon Stewart on how to call a spade a spade, and how to have substantial and nuanced points to make while not being a total bore...

Check out more debates in our debate tag.

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Hexaflexagons to Blow Your Mind

Whether you are particularly fond of it or not, you have to admit that when math gets involved in origami, amazing things start to happen (as we've seen in this previous TEDTalk presentation).

So imagine what would happen when origami and math meet Vi Hart's quirky style to make mathematical concepts accessible and interesting: pure awesomeness. Thanks to the following lesson on the hexaflexagon, you'll never think of hexagons the same way again...

And as if that weren't awesome enough, here's a second part:

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Samuel Jackson, Wake the F**k Up! - A Rebuttal

You may remember from a few days ago that video reminiscent of the children's story Go the F**k to Sleep, in which Samuel Jackson highlighted the importance of civil and political involvement, and complained about voter apathy by inciting voters to Wake the F**k Up! Of course, of the two main candidates running, Obama is clearly the better choice over Mitt Romney, but the least of two evils is still not the best state of affairs.

So, the folk over at Reason.com decided to play Jackson's game... and sort of kick his ass :)

Ouch!

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A Christian Nation?

A great number of Americans believe that the U.S. is a Christian nation. Can this claim be justified?

Well, if what one means by that claim is that the majority of Americans are Christians, that's most likely an empirical fact: most Americans really are Christian. However, it doesn't follow that because the majority of citizens are Christian, the nation itself is Christian. Why not?

This would be an instance of the logical fallacy of composition: assuming that what's true of the parts is necessarily true of the whole, as in, most Americans are women, therefore America itself is a female nation; or most Americans are white, therefore America itself is a white nation (I hope only racists and white supremacists would be convinced by such a blatantly obviously bad argument); or most Americans are old (hello Baby Boomers!), therefore the U.S. is an old nation! The problem, in other words, is that you can't automatically transfer the properties of the parts to the whole made up of those parts.

What else could the claim that America is a Christian nation mean? Maybe that our Constitution and guiding principles are based on Judeo-Christian tenets? Well, if you compare the First Commandment and the First Amendment to the Constitution, we can put that claim to rest: while Yahweh prohibits you from worshiping any other gods (how insecure), the Bill of Rights guarantees you the right to worship any goddamn thing you please, or not to worship anything at all. You could not find two more mutually exclusive claims if you tried.

What about the Founding Fathers? Weren't they Christian? Well, I think you're starting to get the point... none of these claims is really going to hold up to a bit of rational and historical scrutiny:

God bless America? Thanks, but no need: our success is a result of our drive, our ingenuity, our ambition, our geographical luck, our historical vicissitudes, and most importantly our secular values. We are great despite being Christian...

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Ben Goldacre - What Doctors Don't Know About the Drugs They Prescribe

Richard Feynman once defined science as that which we do to avoid fooling ourselves. We humans are universally prone to the cognitive bias known as selection (or confirmation) bias: instead of looking at the big picture, hits and misses alike, we have a natural tendency to look for evidence that confirms the things we already believe, and we tend to ignore and/or forget evidence that would contradict our view of the world.

This is why if you're a liberal, you watch MSNBC, and if you're a conservative, why you watch Faux News. In both cases, you're not really looking for information: you're looking for confirmation. You're listening to people who are going to tell you that the way you see the world is exactly how you think it is. Yes, it's extremely self-congratulatory. This is why you might believe in homeopathic remedies or alternative medicine: you count every time they "worked," and are completely unaware of the much greater amount of times when they don't, and so you think they count as real medicine.

And science, and scientific thinking in general, are supposed to be an antidote against confirmation bias, but as Ben Goldacre explains in the following chilling TEDTalk, there is a major problem with selection bias in the reporting and publishing of scientific studies regarding the health effects of various drugs: the studies that tend to get published are those that find a positive effect, while studies that find no effect, or even an adverse effect, tend not to see the light of day. And if your doctor is prescribing some medication based on this incomplete amount of information (through no fault of his own), it's your health that is ultimately at risk...

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