Causes and Consequences of Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine

A video of a talk by Michael McFaul

11 a.m., February 5, 2023

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At this Sunday’s Humanist Forum, we will watch and discuss a video of a talk given at Stanford last October by Michael McFaul, in which he discusses Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He cites Putin’s changing attitude toward NATO, and events in both Russia and the international scene that preceded the invasion.
Michael McFaul is an American academic and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. McFaul is currently the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor in International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, where he is the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also a Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, and a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. Prior to his nomination to the ambassadorial position, McFaul worked for the U.S National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and as senior director of Russian and Eurasian affairs. In that capacity, he was the architect of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Russian reset policy.
You can watch this 42-minute video at Explaining the Causes and Consequences of Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine | Michael McFaul.

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If you attend in person, COVID protocols will be followed. Vaccinations and masks will be required. If you have symptoms that may be COVID, kindly attend on Zoom (see below).

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From Junkie to Judge: Recovery without God

Retired judge Mary Beth O’Connor

11 a.m., January 29, 2023

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This Sunday we welcome retired judge Mary Beth O’Connor as she joins us in the Mountain View Community Center.

Mary Beth will describe her long history of injecting methamphetamine. She will describe how she responded when her rehab ordered her to comply with the God-based approach of Alcoholics Anonymous and how she built a secular recovery program. Mary Beth then will provide an overview of substance use disorder and treatment options. This will include six peer support groups and a study comparing the efficacy of several of them. She will explain the benefits of building a personalized recovery program and the obstacles to doing so. Mary Beth will provide recovery resources and take questions.

Bio: In her memoir, From Junkie to Judge: One Woman’s Triumph Over Trauma and Addiction, Mary Beth shares her three-phase journey. The abuse and trauma that drove her to shoot methamphetamine at 17, the chaos from her addiction, and how she developed a personalized recovery plan, without a higher power, that led to twenty-nine years of sobriety thus far.

Mary Beth is a Board Member for She Recovers Foundation and a Director for LifeRing Secular Recovery. She regularly speaks on behalf of these organizations and about multiple and secular paths to recovery. She had an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “I Beat Addiction without God,” and one in Recovery Today, “How I Attained 28 Years Sobriety by Rejecting my Rehab’s Submit to AA Order.”

Professionally, 6 years into recovery, Mary Beth attended Berkeley Law. She worked at a large firm, then litigated class actions for the federal government. In 2014 she was appointed a federal Administrative Law Judge from which position she retired in 2020.

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230129 Mary Beth O’Connor from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

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McWhorter video on Anti-racism, Victimhood, Testing, and Woke Language

A video of an interview of John McWhorter

11 a.m., January 22, 2023

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This Sunday we will watch John Stossel interview Professor John McWhorter, author of “Woke Racism.”
Professor John McWhorter argues that condescending leftist ideology hurts black people. He argues that “Woke Racism” hurts black people in many ways: from treating them as incapable of logic, to calling for abolition of tests, to insisting that violent kids stay in schools. He says that all these ideas are propped by a religion-like ideology that “requires that you sequester your brain for illogical thinking.” They are also driven by a desire to claim victimization status, and to somehow cast oneself as continuing the civil rights struggles of the past. McWhorter compares Black culture of today with that of the 1950s. Even though racism was far worse then, he claims, Black people were pragmatic in their willingness to make the best our of a terrible situation, instead of wallowing in victimhood. The disparity of performance on testing, for example, was not as gaping as it is today.
John Stossel is a libertarian television presenter, author, consumer journalist, and pundit. He has been a host a host on ABC News, Fox Business Network.
John McWhorter is a famous American linguist with a specialty in creole languages and Black English. He is currently associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He has also authored books on race relations and African-American culture. McWhorter characterizes himself as “a cranky liberal Democrat.”

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A video of Michael Shellenberger: “Why I Changed My Mind about Nuclear Power”

A video of a talk by Michael Shellenberger

11 a.m., January 15, 2023

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This week, we will discuss a follow-on to last week’s presentation with the video, “Why I Changed My Mind about Nuclear Power” by Michael Shellenberger. This week we will have lots of time for Q&A to discuss among ourselves our thoughts about nuclear Power’s Pros and Cons.
You can view this video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak.

Michael Shellenberger is co-founder and Senior Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, where he was president from 2003 to 2015, and a co-author of the Ecomodernist Manifesto. Over the last decade, Michael and his colleagues have constructed a new paradigm that views prosperity, cheap energy and nuclear power as the keys to environmental progress. A book he co-wrote (with Ted Nordhaus) in 2007, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, was called by Wired magazine “the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,” while Time Magazine called him a “hero of the environment.” In the 1990s, he helped protect the last significant groves of old-growth redwoods still in private hands, and bring about labor improvements to Nike factories in Asia. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

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