Category: interesting

Lawyer Orly Taitz fined $20,000 for legal misconduct in her claims that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and so should be removed as president.

U.S. District Court Judge Clay D. Land wrote that one recent Taitz response to the court “is breathtaking in its arrogance and borders on delusional. She expresses no contrition or regret regarding her misconduct. To the contrary, she continues her baseless attacks on the Court….”

Her “misconduct was not an isolated event; it was part of a pattern that advanced frivolous arguments and disrespectful personal attacks on the parties and the Court.

“In all of counsel’s frivolous filings, she hurled personal insults at the parties and the Court. Rather than assert legitimate legal arguments, counsel chose to accuse the Court of treason and of being controlled by the ‘Obama machine.’ She had no facts to support her claims – but her diatribe would play well to her choir.”

Religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate statements of fact.

Our study compares religious thinking with ordinary cognition and, as such, constitutes a step toward developing a neuropsychology of religion.

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure signal changes in the brains of thirty subjects—fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers—as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions.

For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, belief (judgments of “true” vs judgments of “false”) was associated with greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for self-representation [3], [4], [5], [6], emotional associations [7], reward [8], [9], [10], and goal-driven behavior [11]. This region showed greater signal whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc. or statements about ordinary facts.

A comparison of both stimulus categories suggests that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks.

Of these two, both neutral expressions, which is likely aggressive?

Most of us correctly analyze in under half a second.

Do banks contribute to our society?

“Successful societies maximize the creative and minimize the distributive. Societies where everyone can only achieve gains at the expense of others are by definition impoverished.”

Are these people, as they like to say, the wealth creators?

“This completely misses the point….the question is, what has the process that generated this money contributed to the common weal?”

Metafilter digs in. A thread discussing boys and men harassing girls and women. What they’re put through is rude and horrible.

This understanding is new to me as a guy but I think I’m coming around. When my fiancee and I started dating she would tell me she couldn’t stay out after dark without someone else accompanying her for protection. I thought she was overreacting and needed to be more assertive, like me. It’s only 8:00pm! Ha Ha.

The more I learn about the dangers real women face in places that are comfortable to me, in daylight or in the middle of the night, the more I realize how wrong I’ve been.

Bush and Cheney ignored the EPA proposal to declare greenhouse gases a danger. The report, known as an endangerment finding, was kept secret from the public — until now. The 2007 draft [pdf] just released by the EPA begins:

The Administrator proposes to find that the air pollution of elevated levels of greenhouse gas concentrations may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public welfare.

more at SolveClimate blog
story at LATimes

My Mark Twain Rain Story:
While walking my good spaniel Lucky Lord Barkeley along our flooding street this afternoon, he was bitten on the nose by a crayfish!

True.

Bruce Bartlett, the man who wrote many Reagan economic policies, says about George Bush:

During the George W. Bush years, however, I think Supply Side Economics became distorted into something that is, frankly, nuts–the ideas that there is no economic problem that cannot be cured with more and bigger tax cuts, that all tax cuts are equally beneficial, and that all tax cuts raise revenue.

These incorrect ideas led to the enactment of many tax cuts that had no meaningful effect on economic performance.

Many were just give-aways to favored Republican constituencies, little different, substantively, from government spending.

What, after all, is the difference between a direct spending program and a refundable tax credit? Nothing, really, except that Republicans oppose the first because it represents Big Government while they support the latter because it is a ‘tax cut’.

These are the top ten states that get back more federal money than every dollar of federal taxes they pay in:

1. New Mexico, $2.03
2. Mississippi, $2.02
3. Alaska, $1.84
4. Louisiana, $1.78
5. West Virginia, $1.76
6. North Dakota, $1.68
7. Alabama, $1.66
8. South Dakota, $1.53
9. Kentucky, $1.51
10. Virginia, $1.51.

These are all Republican states.

Have you ever bothered to look at the safety, security and economic stability of red states compared to blue states?

Well have you?

Republicans Should Sit Down and Shut Up!

War on this:

1. The earth is a divine creation.
2. The earth is an organism.
3. The earth is machinery.

“Flagrant evils cure themselves by being flagrant….” – John Henry Newman

Imagine a metronome in the brain that ticks quickly throughout the day, then slows its pace at night. The rest of the body hears the ticking and adjusts its daily rhythms, also known as circadian rhythms.

Turns out that’s wrong.

Phil Gyford:

It’s odd to feel excited and inspired by something we can barely imagine. It’s humbling. It’s a reminder that, while it sometimes feels like we’re living in the future, this is someone’s distant past. Yes, the Internet, or your phone, or whatever newer technologies appear over the next few years are pretty impressive. But one day people will think back from whatever planet they’re living on, to people on Earth at the turn of this millennium and see us as primitive and laughable. We’re just a tiny step, part-way along an impossibly long timeline.

Which could be depressing. But it’s a reminder that we’re never at the end. Even our inter-planetary descendants will one day, in turn, be viewed by their descendants as backward and simplistic. We’re permanently on a journey with no certain destination. We should, I guess, simply be trying to make the journeys of those ahead of us as extraordinary and as just as possible.

Cargo shipping pumps out more carbon dioxide annually than the United Kingdom.

The shipping industry is an invisible and nearly unregulated environmental disaster, and if you haven’t heard much about its poor record, you’re not alone.

Most commercial ships are powered by a thick brew of sulfur and sludge called bunker fuel with a deserved reputation as one of the dirtiest energy sources on earth.

“Drinking on a full stomach massively extends the stomach delay, thereby making it much harder to manage one’s blood alcohol level.”

That’s news for too many that drink to get drunk.

While traveling and stumping, Sarah Palin finished her book in four months. LOL

Nigel Horne writing in the UK:

But that isn’t the reason Palin’s book is the talk of New York publishing circles: what’s getting tongues wagging is the ghostwriter, a San Diego-based journalist called Lynn Vincent.

Lynn Vincent is a creationist, strongly anti-abortion, and seeking to criminalize gay relations. It’s pointed out that Sarah Palin’s ghostwriter is a white supremacist.

Michael Wesch:

I often like to think of the quote from Kevin Kelly, who says: “Nobody is as smart as everybody.“

That hangs in my head every time I go into a classroom. I look at the classroom. I look at the students. I start to think about who they are. Throughout the semester, I learn more and more about who they are, and it becomes increasingly evident to me that with all the intelligence and life experiences that they have, they are collectively much smarter than I am alone. Then the goal becomes trying to somehow harness all of that.

And I think I’ve finally found the “secret sauce.” It basically comes down to approaching the students as collaborators, co producers, co researchers, or whatever you want to call them — but not as students. So you take away that hierarchy.

I still maintain that I’m the most experienced in the bunch — the expert learner, the expert researcher. But the students also have skills to bring to the table, and it’s important to recognize those. Doing so facilitates a feeling of empowerment among them. I try to harness that from the very beginning, pointing out to them that whatever we do is going to contribute to the real world.

We’re not just going to be hiding behind the classroom walls and doing our own thing.

We start to brainstorm together: “What does the world need from us? What can we do?”

How we know global warming is still happening:

So the point to remember when considering short term cooling trends in surface temperature records is that the atmosphere is only one small part of a planet which is in energy imbalance. Empirical measurements show the planet continues to accumulate heat. More energy is coming in than is radiating back out to space.

Far from expertly manipulating their firms’ books, many could not understand them.

The Economist:

Perhaps the clearest lesson is that big banks are as close as businesses can get to being unmanageable.

Bank of America’s assets are now ten times those of Exxon Mobil, America’s most valuable firm. A balance-sheet of $2.3 trillion is beyond the ken of mere mortals.

We know nothing about the rich and nothing of their skills.

What we do that wrecks our earth:

Use

• Sahel Syndrome – overcultivation of marginal land.
• Overexploitation Syndrome – overexploitation of natural ecosystems.
• Rural Exodus Syndrome – environmental degradation due to abandonment of traditional agricultural practices.
• Dust Bowl Syndrome – non-sustainable agro-industrial use of soils and water.
• Katanga Syndrome – environmental degradation due to depletion of non-renewable resources.
• Mass Tourism Syndrome – development and destruction of nature for recreational ends.
• Scorched Earth Syndrome – environmental destruction due to war and military action.

Develop

• Aral Sea Syndrome – environmental damage to natural landscapes as a result of large-scale projects.
• Green Revolution Syndrome – environmental degradation due to un-adapted farming methods.
• Asian Tiger Syndrome – disregard for environmental standards in the context of rapid economic growth.
• Favela Syndrome – environmental degradation due to uncontrolled urban growth.
• Urban Sprawl Syndrome – destruction of landscapes due to planned expansion of urban infrastructure.
• Disaster Syndrome – singular anthropogenic environmental disasters with long-term impact.

Sink

• High Stack Syndrome – environmental degradation as a result of large-scale dispersion of emissions.
• Waste Dumping Syndrome – environmental degradation due to controlled and uncontrolled waste disposal.
• Contaminated Land Syndrome – local contamination of the environment at industrial locations.

architect cities around it:

It is by now clear that over the last decade a great number of people on Earth, in the developed and the developing world both – certainly the overwhelming majority of those reading these words – have embraced the digital mediation of everyday life, to such a ferocious extent that it can already be difficult to remember how we ever got through our days without the networked things around us.

I saw that time is love, and time requires
  of everything its full expenditure
  that love might be conserved; and the I saw
  that love is not what we mean by the word.

  For some idea of it, choose a point
  in the middle of a waterfall, and stare
  for as long as you can stand. Now look around
  see how every rock and tree flows upwards?

  So the whole world blooms continually
  within its true and hidden element,
  a sea, a beautiful and lucid sea
  through which it pilots, rising without end.

Bathysphere by Don Paterson
link to Barely Imagined Beings

The Secret Sentry by Matthew M. Aid

New York Review of Books: Who’s in Big Brother’s Database?

On a remote edge of Utah’s dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America’s equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” a place where the information is both infinite and monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood.

At a million square feet [22 acres], the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

It’s being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for “signals intelligence,” the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital “pocket litter.”

Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite “libraries,” the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA’s world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

U.S. banks are reducing their lending at the fastest rate on record, tightening the credit squeeze and threatening to leave many otherwise viable businesses unable to borrow money to expand their businesses, meet their payroll or refinance their maturing debts.

According to weekly figures provided by the Federal Reserve, total loans at commercial banks have fallen at a 19% annual rate over the past three months, while loans to businesses have dropped at a 28% annualized pace.

Republicans see the award as so outrageous that they’re using it to raise campaign money.

Mark Morford:

Republicans scoff at Obama’s Nobel win, say Sarah Palin should’ve won for her work locating Russia on a map.

“Republicans cheered when America failed to land the Olympics and now they are criticizing the president of the United States for receiving the Nobel Peace prize — an award he did not seek but that is nonetheless an honor in which every American can take great pride — unless of course you are the Republican Party.”

“Rush Limbaugh argued that it was an attempt by elites in the world to encourage Obama “to emasculate the United States.””