Dalai Lama: I Am a Marxist

The Dalai Lama is a Marxist, the power that comes with being tall, and the continuing discrimination against the transgendered people in the U.S. military. These discoveries and more after the jump.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

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I am a Marxist, says Dalai Lama Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has said that he is a Marxist, yet credits capitalism for bringing new freedoms to the communist country that exiled him — China.

How You Can Become More Powerful by Literally Standing Tall As it turns out, there is a simple method to both transform people psychologically and signal power to others: altering your body posture. Across species, body posture is often the primary representation of power. From fish to reptiles to lower mammals to human’s closest evolutionary cousins, non-human primates, power is expressed and inferred through expansive postures, large body size, or even the mere perception of large body size through expansive postures.

McDonald’s defends gay filters on Wi-Fi McDonald’s has been labelled homophobic, for blocking gay websites from its new free Wi-Fi service. Members of GayNZ.com noticed they were being denied access to the gay news site a few days ago, and have since found others — like Family Planning — are also being filtered out.

Gay Marriage: It’s Evolution, Not Revolution Marriage has already been radically transformed — in a way that makes gay marriage not only inevitable, as Vice President Biden described it in an interview late last year, but also quite logical.

Transgender vets want military access for own … As the Pentagon prepares to welcome openly gay, lesbian and bisexual service members for the first time, [Autumn] Sandeen is not alone in hoping the United States will one day join the seven other nations … that allow transgender troops.

One Constant: American Gun Industry Thrives Trace the long history of guns in American life and one truism remains constant: The firearms industry always manages to sell large volumes of product.

The Revenge of Comic Sans New research suggests that less-legible, less-elegant fonts might actually promote better recall of information. Dave Munger examines the evidence.

Death of the history of economics? Is the history of economic thought dead? Yes, in the sense that all the mainstream doctoral programs in economics in the United States long ago eliminated courses … in the history of economic thought.

Good Grief! Marketing the American Way of Death and Bereavement A merciless look at the “five stages’’ of grief — denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance — and their scientific basis, which, according to research, are basically nonexistent.