Women can no longer be charged more than a man for the same insurance.
here’s hunger games
The Independent:
Speculation by large investment banks is driving up food prices for the world’s poorest people, tipping millions into hunger and poverty. Investment in food commodities by banks and hedge funds has risen from $65bn to $126bn in the past five years, helping to push prices to 30-year highs and causing sharp price fluctuations that have little to do with the actual supply of food…
monopolize our spectrum
via Wired’s Idea Lab
You’d think that Congress would want to have an empowered regulator able to do something to protect the country from the rational, profit-seeking depredations of our new generation of monopolists.
Instead, the House Republicans are going in exactly the opposite direction.
excuse me not at all
reign of corruption
Thomas Frank:
But the problem goes far beyond politics.
We have become a society that can’t self-correct, that can’t address its obvious problems, that can’t pull out of its nosedive.
…we have entered an age of folly that—for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati—we can’t wake up from.
bravely click these pictures
choose your elephant
1) is our government broke?
2) http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/03/military-spending-2011-chart
3) are wingnuts popular?
vast new bubbles
these 2 links
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/16mar_theedge
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/new-structure.html
sometimes I wonder if our senses are helping us
genetics of altruism
David Sloan Wilson:
1) Selfishness beats altruism within groups.
2) Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.
3) Everything else is commentary.
Wilson’s larger point is that, to the extent that altruism exists, it isn’t an illusion.
Instead, goodness might actually be an adaptive trait, allowing more cooperative groups to outcompete their conniving cousins.
In a field defined by the cruel logic of natural selection, group selection appears to be the rare hint of virtue, the one biological force pushing back against the obvious advantages of greed and deceit.
“I see human nature as hung in the balance between these two extremes.
“If our behavior was driven entirely by group selection, then we’d be robotic cooperators, like ants. But, if individual-level selection was the only thing that mattered, then we’d be entirely selfish.
“What makes us human is that our history has been shaped by both forces. We’re stuck in between.”
finding quality content
Do you choose programming?
I sense by advertising if networks are true. I know by noise.
And fraud.
walkable living
The symbol of American success often involves having the biggest house possible, but our outsized fantasies seem to be shifting. It turns out most of us value nearby stores and parks rather than McMansions.
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” —Jane Jacobs
flares and bones
♫
ain’t got nuthin’ but walkin’ the road
ain’t got nuthin’ but carryin’ the load
paranoia is the morality party
@mims
People who have had premarital sex or watch porn are ineligible for GOP.
Yes. You’re reading that right.
If You’ve Had Pre-Marital Sex, You Can’t Be A Republican.
background on bananaland
Religious freedom is as American as apple pie, isn’t it?
How could anyone oppose it?
To recover America’s biblical foundation, Christians had to “do battle on the entire front:” not just in church, but in the courts, classrooms, outside abortion clinics and everywhere else….
The emerging Christian right asserted that this was the true meaning of “religious freedom” in America: freedom to institutionalize Christian dogma in American society and law.
Freedom of religion — a phrase that sounds at first blush like a bipartisan nod to our common political heritage — is a weapon of culture war.
our rights are equal, period
that weapon is your brain
dumb opinions are raising gas prices
by Jocelyn Fong
This tolerance for unsubstantiated claims about gas prices is part of a larger pattern among many news outlets: In an effort to capture the political argument of the day, journalists often miss the larger, more interesting, and more important story.
What is the origin and the nature of our problem with gas prices?
What can we do about it?
Who supports and opposes those solutions?
Who benefits from the status quo?
If reporters aren’t framing their gas price coverage around these questions, they’re serving someone — but it’s not the public.