Speaking at the PA Atheist conference

I have been invited to be one of the speakers at the Pennsylvania state Atheist/Humanist Conference to be held in Pittsburgh from Friday, August 29 to Sunday, August 31 which also happens to be the Labor Day weekend with Monday as a holiday. It looks like it will be a good meeting and I hope that readers of this blog will try to attend and if they do, please introduce yourself to me.
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‘A Room For Death’ Card trick

I love seeing card tricks. As someone whose small motor skills are pretty poor, it delights me to see the dexterity with which these magicians handle cards, making them move around in complex ways using just one hand. The catch with watching videos of card tricks is that you can never be sure that you are not seeing editing tricks instead of actual card tricks. But assuming that there is no such funny business going on here, this is a pretty good one.
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The mind of a mass murderer

In the wake of the recent killings in California that have grabbed the public’s attention, there has been an odd trend in the debate over the motives of the killer. Was it misogyny? Or was it some other cause such a mental illness or video games or films or even homosexuality? For some reason, there has been a reluctance in some circles (especially Fox News) to blame the killer’s actions on his attitudes towards women and shift the focus to these other factors.
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A compromise on guns

Apart from any constitutional questions involved, I think reasonable people can and do disagree on whether it is acceptable for private individuals to own guns. I myself over time have shifted my view away from totally opposing private gun ownership except under exceptional circumstances to thinking that people do have a right to own guns. But given that it is a lethal weapon, they have to earn the right to do so by showing that they understand the responsibility of it. This would require training in its use and certification of competence.
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Death row secrecy

The recent botched attempts at executing prisoners on death row has resulted in some confusion as to what to do next. The problem stems from the fact that the cocktail of drugs that had traditionally been used are no longer freely available, partly because the countries where they are produced have refused to allow them to be shipped to the US for use in executing people and partly because the drug companies that produce them are fearful of the bad publicity that would result if the public discovered that they are being used not to treat people but to kill them.
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The importance of not ignoring agency

I was involved recently in organizing a program at our university to highlight the problem of human trafficking. That label immediately conjures up the notion of women and children being forced into the sex trade and this is undoubtedly a major problem. But there is also human trafficking of people and children for labor, who end up working in appalling conditions in foreign countries and cannot escape.
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Another reason to hate the Spelling Bee

I have written before that I am not a fan of the national Spelling Bee contest. One reason is that the format is inherently unfair and needlessly nerve-wracking to the children taking part. The second is that it results in students pending enormous amounts of time memorizing the spelling of esoteric words that they are unlikely to ever even encounter again, let alone use them.
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