A Charisma Model of Telepathic Communication

This paper opened by making some general criticisms of the state of parapsychological research: that it suffered from a lack of external validity and from uncritical acceptance of a flawed paradigm. The charisma model was offered as an attempt to rectify these problems. It allows for laboratory experiments to be designed which closely approximate genuine human interactions by shifting the paradigm for telepathy from that of energy transfers to one of communication events

Civilian Immunity and the Rebuttable Presumption of Innocence

Terrorist is a word that at once vilifies and justifies, serving the same function in today\u27s politics and popular imagination as was served by the term Nazi a half century ago, or communist thereafter, or witch in our colonial days, in that it is always, or even necessarily, wrong. Few appellations today are as effective to ostracize a person, movement, or organization from civilized company, and an astonishing array of actions and reactions can be fully warranted when having as their intent a response to the mere threat -- much less an actual act -- of terrorism. This Essay does not defend terrorism, or argue, as others have done, that in specific circumstances terrorism can be morally justified. It argues instead that many criminally violent acts are mistakenly labeled terrorism because the innocent victims, the sine qua non to find prototypical terrorism, were not innocent in a required sense. From this analysis the article seeks to distinguish the term\u27s use as a tool of political propaganda from its utility as a category of moral and social philosophy. The analysis begins with a description of the phenomenological impact upon the American psyche from terrorist acts. I use that foundation to identify the elements that render an act identifiable as terrorism, particularly the presumed innocence of the targeted victims. Having isolated the elements of terrorist acts that underlie their psychological impacts, I will be in a better position to critically reexamine the events of 9/11, and to suggest what duties this understanding places upon citizens of a participatory democracy, in which each person accrues collective responsibility for acts of its representative government

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Leave the Books on the Shelves: Library Space as Intrinsic Facilitator of the Reading Experience

Library literature frequently reports projects to remove print collections and replace them with other amenities for patrons. This project challenges the untested assumption that the physical library itself serves no useful function to users unless they are actively consulting books from the shelves. The alternative hypothesis is that readers benefit from the mere act of studying while in a book-rich environment.To test this possibility, ten subjects completed SAT-style reading comprehension tests in both a traditional library environment, and a renovated chapel that strongly resembles library space except for lacking books. Results provide a reasonable basis to support an expectation that readers perform better on reading comprehension tasks performed in book-rich environments

DOMA: An Unconstitutional Establishment of Fundamentalist Christianity

According to the text of the Act, DOMA\u27s purposes are to define and protect the institution of marriage, where marriage is defined to exclude same-sex partners. To be constitutionally valid under the Establishment Clause, this notion that heterosexual marriages require protection from gay and lesbian persons must spring from a secular and not religious source. This Article posits that DOMA has crossed this forbidden line between the secular and the religious. DOMA, motivated and supported by fundamentalist Christian ideology, and lacking any genuine secular goals or justifications, betrays the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution

Half-Baked: The Demand by For-Profit Businesses for Religious Exemptions from Selling to Same-Sex Couples

Should bakers be required to make cakes for same-sex weddings? This Article unravels the eclectic arguments that are offered in support of a religious exemption from serving gay customers in the wake of Obergefell. Preliminary issues first consider invocations of a libertarian right to exclude. Rather than being part of our concept of liberty, this right to exclude from commercial premises is a new rule devised to prevent African Americans from participating in free society. Instead of expanding this racist rule to likewise bar gays from the marketplace, it should be reset to the antebellum standard of free access to all public places of commerce. A second background strategy defends discrimination for conduct (like marriage) rather than status such as sexual orientation. This approach has found no positive reception in the courts because of the close relationship between same-sex marriage and the status of being homosexual. The principle legal arguments consider first the free speech claim that cakes send unwilling messages of support for homosexuality. Although courts have rejected these defenses, the possibility of a coerced speech defense contextualized to the receiving audience and read against background social norms should be recognized. The marquee free exercise claim presents an even less likely chance of success, especially in states without a RFRA law. In jurisdictions that do have such a law, it is unclear how judges will assess the government’s compelling interest to prevent sexual orientation discrimination. That analysis will involve a description of the harms threatening both sides of the conflict. While the injuries arising from the violation of sincerely held religious beliefs are to be assumed, the dignitary harms to the same-sex couple should not be mischaracterized and trivialized as a “minor inconvenience.

Baby Steps or One Fell Swoop?: The Incremental Extension of Rights is Not a Defensible Strategy

The problem of incrementalism emerges from the common practice of limiting certain rights only to groups on certified lists. Section I reviews this problem of the list, and how the failure of lists to include gay men and lesbians profoundly impacts their daily lives. Possible strategic responses to this problem (such as doing nothing, interpreting the current list to include us, eliminating the list altogether, or expanding the list to include us explicitly) are considered in Section II, concluding by focusing on a special kind of gradualism, list incrementalism. List incrementalism occurs when a right is extended to new groups by merely adding them to the relevant list. Presumably, the longer and more detailed the list, fewer groups would be experiencing systematic discrimination on that particular issue. The addition of a new group is often justified in terms of taking a step toward realizing the ultimate goal of protections for all, thereby raising the issue of human rights. Subsequent sections scrutinize list incrementalism from three different perspectives: the formal, the practical, and the philosophical. The formal analysis (Section III) considers whether, given the inherent imprecision of language, the quest for legal exactitude may not make matters worse. I contend that the addition of details by creating new lists and expanding existing lists, although done with the intent to clarify the law, instead introduces uncertainty. The practical analysis in Section IV balances the actual costs of implementing an incrementalist strategy against the benefits the strategy is expected to yield. In contexts where incrementalism seems most reasonable, the costs are demonstrably very high and the benefits few, so that society is worse off in the long run. Section IV discusses the prototypical example of the list of inclusion: the list of groups against whom employment discrimination should be expressly prohibited. The two analyses address the first question regarding the prima facie validity or desirability of the incrementalist strategy. As usually presented, the choice between incrementalism and radical wholesale strategies can be influenced by many factors -- political, economic, even psychological -- but the options do not differ on their underlying concept of human rights, the purported end goal. This assumption is probably wrong. The philosophical analysis in Section V critiques the assumption that incrementalist and wholesale strategies are merely different paths directed toward the same objective of universal human rights. These three analyses illustrate that the assumption that rights incrementalism is intellectually unproblematic and a reasonable alternative strategy is false. All things considered, incrementalism is extraordinarily difficult to justify as a deliberate strategy to effect rights reform. Perhaps it should not be justified at all. Section VI parries the objection that the rejection of incrementalism as a credible strategy will lead to destructive dogmatism in the political arena