If consciousness is just the workings of neurons and synapses, how do we explain the phenomenon of the near-death experience? By some accounts, about 3% of the U.S. population has had one: an out-of-body experience often characterized by remarkable visions and feelings of peace and joy, all while the physical body is close to death. To skeptics, there are more plausible, natural explanations, like oxygen deprivation. Is the prospect of an existence after death "real" and provable by science, or a construct of wishful thinking about our own mortality?

The Washington Post (8/10/16) published what has to be one of the most naked examples of projection ever displayed by a major American paper. The Post’s editorial board, in anothereffort to bashRussia, lumped its President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s increasingly autocratic ruler President Recep Tayyip Erdogan into a generic “strongman” category, and warned of their paranoia:

Independent Voter Project attorney Chad Peace went on RT America Friday to discuss what independent and independent-minded voters can do to make their voices heard in the current two-party system. Peace most recently authored an amicus curiae brief in the lawsuit filed by Level the Playing Field and Peter Ackerman against the FEC, challenging current presidential debate entry rules established by the Commission on Presidential Debates that the lawsuit argues intentionally serve the private interests of the Republican and Democratic parties.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter James Grimaldi of The Wall Street Journal, who has covered the Clinton Foundation for years, looks at the relationship between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department during Hillary