Browsing PBH By Articles

Choose Another Charity Part 2: MADD

Every holiday season, people open their hearts and wallets for family, friends, and charities alike. Unfortunately, some large organizations who regularly solicit for money are often using funds for political motives or ‘overhead’ costs. In a series of posts, we’ll be investigating three popular charities that don’t deserve your charity.

It seems almost blasphemous to say there’s anything wrong with Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Drunk driving is totally irresponsible and has caused many deaths and disfiguring injuries. At the same time, it’s hard to think of MADD and not imagine your own mother telling you to find a designated driver or take a taxi if you get too sauced. How could anyone fault MADD if its objectives are situated within a universal motherly concern?
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Is Solitary Confinement A Form Of Torture?

The Article: Hellhole: The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture? by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker.

The Text: Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys.

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It’s that time of the year again, where you mask your truly feelings for family and friends by dutifully wasting money on things they will most likely throw away. But while you’re at it, help PBH and do your shopping at Amazon. Otherwise, like PBH on Facebook and subscribe to the RSS feed!

How Barack Obama Lost America

1) 11:54 AM, September 20

“I’m exhausted of defending you,” the woman told President Barack Obama. And with that Obama lost America. Not on the House floor. Or in a prime-time Oval Office address to the nation. But at a town-hall meeting in a dingy Washington D.C. auditorium.

Obama laughed at first at the gall of the statement. He bought some time with his trademark “Well…” opener. He hemmed and hawed before rattling off his litany of presidential achievements: student loans, health insurance companies can’t drop you, and on and on.

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The Injustice Of The Death Penalty In America

John Edward Green Jr. is on trial in Houston, charged with fatally shooting a woman in a 2008 robbery. Harris County Judge Kevin Fine, a Democratic judge in Republican Texas, has stated his decision whether to allow prosecutors to request the death penalty will “boil down to whether or not an innocent person has actually been executed” in Texas. Texas has a treasure trove of innocent people who’ve found themselves on death row. The problem isn’t those who’ve been exonerated, it’s those who haven’t.

Cameron Todd Willingham and Claude Jones are names that supporters of the death penalty don’t want to hear. Both were executed in Texas after trials left more questions than answers with evidence uncovered after both executions showing that both were likely innocent.
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