The Fifth Column

The Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus estimated that technology producers capture only a small share of the social value they c...

Contraception is akin to pica - eating things which are not nutritive (e.g., sand, rocks, wood chips). Pica is an eating disorder most commo...

Catholics who pay attention to the history of canon law have it easy. For the entire history of Western civilization, the legal age of marri...

“Privately, once the Anthropic delegation arrived at the Vatican, Mr. Olah and his team lobbied the Pope’s advisers to take the prospect of ...

Bacteria aren't as smart as people, but bacteria both help and kill billions of people each year. Bacteria in our guts keep us alive , b...

 Can AI ever be conscious? That's a theological question. If consciousness is purely a product of natural physical laws (chemistry, elec...

Christianity cannot survive contact with modernity. Islam survives contact with modernity primarily by rejecting everything associated with ...

People keep calling AI generated output "slop" Dudes and dudettes, listen closely: AI essays are the average output of all human b...

Why did Bibi pay Hamas over $1.8 billion using Qatari money? Why did the payments continue even though Israel clearly knew  the money was ...

Mathematics originally started as a religion. Pythagoras founded the Pythagorean Brotherhood , a secretive, cult-like society where mathemat...

Literacy is magic - a series of arcane rituals used as necromancy that allows you to listen to dead people. Literacy is a psychedelic drug -...

Christianity, along with all the other ancient religions, see the world as a zero-sum game because none of them understand economics. Thus, ...

One of the classic Catholic justifications for the death penalty is the state's duty to protect its own citizens from harm ( CCC 2265 , ...

The problem with vegetarians: they have no freaking idea how biology works. For instance, to take but one of innumerable examples, iron abso...

Education is NOT about teaching. Most colleges employ most professors as adjuncts (i.e., part-time). Up to 40% of profs are adjunct, part-t...

A lot of people are upset about Flock cameras. I must confess, I don't like them, but I can't see any way to stop them from what the...

Amnesty International is now up in arms over the Taliban's recent passage of a law allowing child marriage . I have pointed out in previ...

All colleges teach the same facts. Course content is the same. There's only so many ways to teach someone how to calculate the area of a...

Everyone says say teen years are hard. That's bullshit. Homeschool and all these problems go away. I never had a dime's worth of tro...

How common was lynching? In a country of 76 million people in 1900, there were about 4800 lynchings, total, for the whole of US history, and...