You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to surmise that war has a perverse appeal for the human race, nor is the attraction limited to religious fanatics committing mass murder and suicide for the greater glory of God.
There are things about our world that almost by their nature defy our ability to comprehend them. Some people use a religious register to deal with that - they call it God and that's a way of domesticating it.
I know not what you believe of God, but I believe He gave yearnings and longings to be filled, and that He did not mean all our time should be devoted to feeding and clothing the body.
And as far as doing God's work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.
I've lost count of the number of times that I've been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile.
The $52.6 billion U.S. intelligence arsenal is aimed mainly at unambiguous adversaries, including al-Qaida, North Korea and Iran. But top-secret budget documents reveal an equally intense focus on one purported ally: Pakistan.
As a beat reporter covering the CIA and intelligence world after the terrorist attacks of 2001, I could sense that many things I couldn't see or understand were changing, expanding, getting so big they were difficult to manage.
I am a full-time Research Fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a small 501(c)(3) public charity supported primarily by individual donations.
I keep trying to explain to people that the archetype of intelligence is not Dustin Hoffman in 'The Rain Man;' it is a human being, period. It is squishy things that explode in a vacuum, leaving footprints on their moon.
When you think of intelligence, don't think of a college professor; think of human beings as opposed to chimpanzees. If you don't have human intelligence, you're not even in the game.
According to Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, Bush was so obsessed with Iraq that he failed to take action against Osama Bin Laden despite repeated warnings from his intelligence experts.
We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior.
In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance. You have the National Security Agency building the world's giantest spy center.
Wormholes don't exist because the only way they would exist is if they were seeded with exotic material created by an intelligence far beyond our own. Something would have to make one.
George W. Bush attended the intelligence briefing every day. Obama has not even attended half of them. He sends surrogates. That to me is significant.
For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a ze...
We learn much during our sleep, and the knowledge thus gained slowly filters into the physical brain, and is occasionally impressed upon it as a vivid and illuminative dream.
Wild Bill was anything but a quarrelsome man yet I have personal knowledge of at least half a dozen men whom he had at various times killed.
Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
The intellectual takes as a starting point his self and relates the world to his own sensibilities; the scientist accepts an existing field of knowledge and seeks to map out the unexplored terrain.
Common Core, the initiative that claims to more accurately measure K-12 student knowledge in English and math, also encourages children to step up their 'critical thinking.'
