Thursday, October 30, 2008
The "socialist" Economist endorses Obama
It's time
Oct 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition
America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world
Oct 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition
America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Socialism? I don't smoke.. unless I drink.
Bob the Banker speaks out in an exclusive interview, Joe the Plumber's big brother reveals why Obama's plan to "spread the wealth" will turn America into a socialist hell.
ALSO - "Make no mistake," Republican activist John Hancock told a John McCain rally in this St. Louis suburb, "this campaign is a referendum on socialism."
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Nader on the bailout.
You know he's right.... it's just too bad he's a lousy politician. I suppose that's a good thing for his soul.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
"Stayin' Alive" could save your life
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. doctors have found the Bee Gees 1977 disco anthem "Stayin' Alive" provides an ideal beat to follow while performing chest compressions as part of CPR on a heart attack victim.
The American Heart Association calls for chest compressions to be given at a rate of 100 per minute in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). "Stayin' Alive" almost perfectly matches that, with 103 beats per minute.
CPR is a lifesaving technique involving chest compressions alone or with mouth-to-mouth rescue breathing. It is used in emergencies such as cardiac arrest in which a person's breathing or heartbeat has stopped.
CPR can triple survival rates, but some people are reluctant to do it in part because they are unsure about the proper rhythm for chest compressions. But research has shown many people do chest compressions too slowly during CPR.
In a small study headed by Dr. David Matlock of the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria, listening to "Stayin' Alive" helped 15 doctors and medical students to perform chest compressions on dummies at the proper speed.
Five weeks after practicing with the music playing, they were asked to perform CPR again on dummies by keeping the song in their minds, and again they kept up a good pace.
"The theme 'Stayin' Alive' is very appropriate for the situation," Matlock said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "Everybody's heard it at some point in their life. People know the song and can keep it in their head."
The findings will be presented this month at a meeting of the American College of Emergency Physicians in Chicago.
(Writing by Will Dunham; Editing by David Storey)
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
This American Life: 232: The Real Story
Audio. I suggest opening the audio in a new tab in Firefox.
It's been said that truth is the first casualty of war. In this week's show, we try to get the real stories from three very different wars.
Prologue.
Host Ira Glass talks with a Lance Corporal from the Marines' Eighth Communication Battalion at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, about what his superiors told him about Iraq at his pre-deployment briefing to go overseas. (7 minutes)
Act One. Jarhead.
Anthony Swofford reads an excerpt from his memoir, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, about his experience fighting in the first Gulf War in 1991, as a Marine sniper. (20 minutes)
Act Two. What's the Truth Good For, Anyway?
For many years, Israeli citizens learned a sanitized version of what happened during their War of Independence in 1948. They learned that 700,000 Arabs fled the country on their own accord. But in the late 1980s, a group of Israeli historians gained access to most of the government documents from the war and started writing a truer, less flattering version of the story: that in some cases, the Palestinians were forced out, or scared away, and then not allowed to return. Ira discusses the real history and its impact on the Israeli public with some of the men who uncovered it: Benny Morris, author of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947 -1949, and Tom Segev, who wrote 1949, The First Israelis. He also talks to BZ Goldberg, one of the filmmakers behind the Emmy-winning documentary about Israeli and Palestinian kids, called Promises. (20 minutes)
Song: " In the Real World," Roy Orbison
Act Three. Jar Jar Head.
John Hodgman tries to tell the real version of a war movie that's already been written, filmed and released on DVD — Star Wars. Aside from contributing regularly to This American Life, John Hodgman hosts a monthly performance series in New York City called The Little Gray Book Lecture Series. (10 minutes)
Song: " What Did I Do Last Night," Dave Edmunds
It's been said that truth is the first casualty of war. In this week's show, we try to get the real stories from three very different wars.
Prologue.
Host Ira Glass talks with a Lance Corporal from the Marines' Eighth Communication Battalion at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, about what his superiors told him about Iraq at his pre-deployment briefing to go overseas. (7 minutes)
Act One. Jarhead.
Anthony Swofford reads an excerpt from his memoir, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, about his experience fighting in the first Gulf War in 1991, as a Marine sniper. (20 minutes)
Act Two. What's the Truth Good For, Anyway?
For many years, Israeli citizens learned a sanitized version of what happened during their War of Independence in 1948. They learned that 700,000 Arabs fled the country on their own accord. But in the late 1980s, a group of Israeli historians gained access to most of the government documents from the war and started writing a truer, less flattering version of the story: that in some cases, the Palestinians were forced out, or scared away, and then not allowed to return. Ira discusses the real history and its impact on the Israeli public with some of the men who uncovered it: Benny Morris, author of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947 -1949, and Tom Segev, who wrote 1949, The First Israelis. He also talks to BZ Goldberg, one of the filmmakers behind the Emmy-winning documentary about Israeli and Palestinian kids, called Promises. (20 minutes)
Song: " In the Real World," Roy Orbison
Act Three. Jar Jar Head.
John Hodgman tries to tell the real version of a war movie that's already been written, filmed and released on DVD — Star Wars. Aside from contributing regularly to This American Life, John Hodgman hosts a monthly performance series in New York City called The Little Gray Book Lecture Series. (10 minutes)
Song: " What Did I Do Last Night," Dave Edmunds
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Friday, October 3, 2008
Thursday, October 2, 2008
9/11 really was an outside job.
Newsweek: Feeling Powerless? Do I Have a Conspiracy Theory for You
Sharon Begley
Control freaks have a bad name, but they shouldn’t. When you feel you have some control over your work, you feel less stress even when the actual task is identical to when someone is standing over you ordering you to finish; when you can control, or even when you just believe (incorrectly) that you can control the duration of painful shocks, they don’t hurt as much. Even when control is out of the question, just knowing what’s in store can be beneficial: when you learn details about colonoscopy, your anxiety drops and you will likely recover more quickly, as a 1999 study in The Lancet showed.
And when you feel that things are beyond your control? Then, according to a study being published today in Science, you fall prey to what the scientists call “illusory pattern perception”: you see “a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli.” Less politely, we might call it seeing things that aren’t there, falling victim to conspiracy theories and developing superstitions.
The reason, suggest Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas, Austin, and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University, is that pattern perception compensates for feeling out of control in a sea of forces you do not comprehend. It balances the sense that life is random and restores the sense that you do understand what’s going on and might even be able to affect them. It can be more comforting to believe that a vast conspiracy explains, say, the stock market crash than to acknowledge that the financial system is beyond your comprehension, let alone control: conspiracy beliefs, write the scientists, give “causes and motives to events that are more rationally seen as accidents ... [in order to] bring the disturbing vagaries of reality under ... control.”
The scientists ran six mini-experiments to assess the effect of feeling out of control. They induced a feeling of powerlessness in the participants by having them recall a situation in which they felt out of control, or having them answer questions and telling them that many of their answers were wrong—but with feedback so random, participants felt befuddled, unable to figure out which answer would be scored correct. Having made the participants feel that events were random and beyond their control, the scientists then showed them “snowy” pictures. Half were grainy patterns of dots, while the others contained images of a chair, a boat or Saturn faintly visible against the grainy background. When the images really existed, 95 percent of people identified them. When there was no image, people who had been made to feel as if they had no control over the situation saw images in 43 percent of the pictures. They saw something that wasn't there.
The participants also read scenarios that tapped into superstitious beliefs, such as a story in which someone knocked on wood before or wore lucky socks to an important meeting and then got his proposal approved. The participants were asked whether they thought the superstition had anything to do with that approval. Again, participants manipulated into feeling powerless, feeling that life is random and beyond their control, perceived a stronger connection than those who did not feel so at sea in a storm of random events. “Mere recollection of an experience involving a lack of control increases superstitious perceptions,” conclude the scientists. Similarly, when they read an account of a worker passed over for promotion, participants made to feel powerless tended to blame private conversations between the boss and the unfortunate worker’s competitors for the promotion. Conspiracies everywhere they looked.
As always, you have to be careful about extrapolating from the artificial confines of a lab to the real world, but the findings do agree with earlier work about how feeling powerless affects people. If perceiving patterns, even illusory ones, soothes the helpless feeling of not being in control of a situation, then it’s no wonder people trick themselves into seeing and believing connections that aren’t there. “The less control people have over their lives, the more likely they are to try and regain control through mental gymnastics,” said Galinsky. “Feelings of control are so important to people that a lack of control is inherently threatening.”
The human mind prefers to believe that mysterious, invisible forces are secretly at work rather than that the world is random. Whitson put it this way: “People see false patterns in all types of data, imagining trends in stock markets, seeing faces in static and detecting conspiracies between acquaintances. This suggests that lacking control leads to a visceral need for order, even imaginary order.” Feel free to apply this to current events, starting with the conspiracy that people imagine in the proposed financial bailout.
Sharon Begley
Control freaks have a bad name, but they shouldn’t. When you feel you have some control over your work, you feel less stress even when the actual task is identical to when someone is standing over you ordering you to finish; when you can control, or even when you just believe (incorrectly) that you can control the duration of painful shocks, they don’t hurt as much. Even when control is out of the question, just knowing what’s in store can be beneficial: when you learn details about colonoscopy, your anxiety drops and you will likely recover more quickly, as a 1999 study in The Lancet showed.
And when you feel that things are beyond your control? Then, according to a study being published today in Science, you fall prey to what the scientists call “illusory pattern perception”: you see “a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli.” Less politely, we might call it seeing things that aren’t there, falling victim to conspiracy theories and developing superstitions.
The reason, suggest Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas, Austin, and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University, is that pattern perception compensates for feeling out of control in a sea of forces you do not comprehend. It balances the sense that life is random and restores the sense that you do understand what’s going on and might even be able to affect them. It can be more comforting to believe that a vast conspiracy explains, say, the stock market crash than to acknowledge that the financial system is beyond your comprehension, let alone control: conspiracy beliefs, write the scientists, give “causes and motives to events that are more rationally seen as accidents ... [in order to] bring the disturbing vagaries of reality under ... control.”
The scientists ran six mini-experiments to assess the effect of feeling out of control. They induced a feeling of powerlessness in the participants by having them recall a situation in which they felt out of control, or having them answer questions and telling them that many of their answers were wrong—but with feedback so random, participants felt befuddled, unable to figure out which answer would be scored correct. Having made the participants feel that events were random and beyond their control, the scientists then showed them “snowy” pictures. Half were grainy patterns of dots, while the others contained images of a chair, a boat or Saturn faintly visible against the grainy background. When the images really existed, 95 percent of people identified them. When there was no image, people who had been made to feel as if they had no control over the situation saw images in 43 percent of the pictures. They saw something that wasn't there.
The participants also read scenarios that tapped into superstitious beliefs, such as a story in which someone knocked on wood before or wore lucky socks to an important meeting and then got his proposal approved. The participants were asked whether they thought the superstition had anything to do with that approval. Again, participants manipulated into feeling powerless, feeling that life is random and beyond their control, perceived a stronger connection than those who did not feel so at sea in a storm of random events. “Mere recollection of an experience involving a lack of control increases superstitious perceptions,” conclude the scientists. Similarly, when they read an account of a worker passed over for promotion, participants made to feel powerless tended to blame private conversations between the boss and the unfortunate worker’s competitors for the promotion. Conspiracies everywhere they looked.
As always, you have to be careful about extrapolating from the artificial confines of a lab to the real world, but the findings do agree with earlier work about how feeling powerless affects people. If perceiving patterns, even illusory ones, soothes the helpless feeling of not being in control of a situation, then it’s no wonder people trick themselves into seeing and believing connections that aren’t there. “The less control people have over their lives, the more likely they are to try and regain control through mental gymnastics,” said Galinsky. “Feelings of control are so important to people that a lack of control is inherently threatening.”
The human mind prefers to believe that mysterious, invisible forces are secretly at work rather than that the world is random. Whitson put it this way: “People see false patterns in all types of data, imagining trends in stock markets, seeing faces in static and detecting conspiracies between acquaintances. This suggests that lacking control leads to a visceral need for order, even imaginary order.” Feel free to apply this to current events, starting with the conspiracy that people imagine in the proposed financial bailout.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Mexico's War on Drugs
Essayist Richard Rodriguez reflects on the toll that is taken by Mexico's increasingly violent war on drugs.
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