For one, balance of party identification in this sample is very similar to what Gallup found: 58 percent of this sample identified as or lean Republican.  In several other ways, however, the political behavior of the top 1 percent diverges more strongly from the 99 percent than Gallup’s analysis suggests.

The 1 percent cares more about deficits than the economy.

The 1 percent wants private-sector solutions, not government solutions

science is one of humanity’s most noble and successful endeavours, and our best way to learn how the world works.

Today science faces a crisis of legitimacy which is entirely centred on rampant public distrust and disavowal.

Many scientific findings run counter to common sense and challenge our deepest assumptions about reality

In a newly published paper, two MIT professors assert that by re-examining contemporary human language, we can see indications of how human communication could have evolved from the systems underlying the older communication modes of birds and other primates.

From birds, the researchers say, we derived the melodic part of our language, and from other primates, the pragmatic, content-carrying parts of speech. Sometime within the last 100,000 years, those capacities fused into roughly the form of human language that we know today.

human language consists of two distinct layers: the expressive layer, which relates to the mutable structure of sentences, and the lexical layer, where the core content of a sentence resides.

Hello to the real world of human perception, the product of a system of physical and psychological processes which blend facts and feelings, intellect and instinct, and, when the two conflict, a system which gives the upper hand not to conscious evidence-based reason but to instinctive and subconscious gut reaction.

Just like balance, our risk perception system employs several distinct components; one is purposeful conscious reasoning about the facts (think of that as the vision of visitors to Demon Hill), and one is a set of psychological processes and instincts and emotions that help us make quick subconscious judgments about how those facts feel

Just as visual and vestibular information conflicts in visitors to Demon Hill, in risk perception, when reason and evidence clashes with emotion and instinct, no matter how clear and compelling the evidence, we are ‘cognitively impenetrable’ to just the facts, and our brain literally denies that evidence if it conflicts with how our instincts – the subconscious part of the risk perception system that is beyond our control - make that evidence feel

Validating emotions isn’t a glorified psychological process. It’s about being a real, authentic human being who empathizes with another’s emotional state. And, guess what, that’s damn hard.

Some of the most delicate emotional responses we run into surface when people experience identity issues

The good news is we can boost worth with seemingly simple things like listening and letting people be themselves.

Recent debates about the economy have rediscovered the question, “is that right?”, where “right” means more than just profits or efficiency.

Some argue that because free markets allow for personal choice, they are already ethical. Others have accepted the ethical critique and embraced corporate social responsibility.

Most radical of all are the ethical systems that reject the market completely. Marxists, some feminists and a few Buddhist approaches to economics take this line: their ethics dispute the starting points of classical market economics—ideas like individual consumer sovereignty, private property and the attractiveness of material wealth. They conclude that to be ethical, an individual should withdraw from the market entirely, or even actively disrupt it.

This leads to the salient question of whether being a neurosurgeon is in any way a relevant qualification to seek the highest elected office in the nation.

Dr. Carson the scientist would laugh someone off the stage at a conference if they presented such sloppy thinking for review.

specifically for the purposes of harvesting that tissue