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Hello, Tom? Mammon here. Talk To Action continues its run of stunning investigative reports, reminding us of a hellhole parcel of U.S. territory on the Marianas Islands in the Pacific where where “thousands of garment workers–most of them young Chinese women–labor in indentured servitude, live in labor camps run by members of the Chinese Communist Party, and submit to forced abortions if they become pregnant. Human rights worker Eric Gregoire told ABC News, ‘With 11,000 Chinese workers here, I have never seen a Chinese garment factory worker have a baby.’”
Making America safe for stupidity. Americans are the second most ignorant country on the subject of evolution, narrowly edging out Turkey. That’s the news from political scientist Jon D. Miller–formerly of the Chicago Academy of Sciences and Northwestern University, now at Michigan State–in a paper published in the August 11 issue of Science. The original is behind a pay wall, but reasonable summaries are here and here (more spice). Oh, here’s the one-sentence abstract:
The percentage of Americans who disbelieve or doubt one of the best-established scientific frameworks for understanding our world has actually risen–from 55 to 60 percent in the last 20 years.