Under President George W. Bush, the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning, driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even to married women.

Bush's mammoth global anti-AIDS initiative, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, poured billions of dollars into Africa but prohibited groups from spending any of it on family planning services or counseling programs, whose budgets flat-lined.

Over the past decade, oil giant Exxon Mobil has paid millions to organizations and "think tanks" in an attempt to deceive the public about the science behind global climate change.

Rogue Wave:

03-01 Boston, MA - Paradise Rock Club
03-02 Brooklyn, NY - Music Hall of Williamsburg
03-03 New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom
03-04 Philadelphia, PA - First Unitarian Church Sanctuary
03-05 Washington, DC - 9:30 Club
03-06 Carrboro, NC - Cat's Cradle
03-08 Atlanta, GA - The Loft
03-09 Nashville, TN - Mercy Lounge
03-10 Birmingham, AL - Bottletree
03-13 Orlando, FL - The Social
03-15 New Orleans, LA - One Eyed Jacks
03-16 Houston, TX - Warehouse Live
03-17 Dallas, TX - The Loft
04-07 Santa Cruz, CA - Rio Theatre
04-09 Portland, OR - Wonder Ballroom
04-10 Seattle, WA - Neumos
04-13 Boulder, CO - Fox Theatre
04-14 Lawrence, KS - The Bottleneck
04-15 Minneapolis, MN - Fine Line Café
04-16 Madison, WI - High Noon Saloon
04-17 Chicago, IL - Lincoln Hall
04-20 Columbia, MO - Mojo's
04-21 Tulsa, OK - Bob's at Cain's
04-23 Albuquerque, NM - Launchpad
04-24 Tucson, AZ - Club Congress
04-27 Solana Beach, CA - Belly Up
04-29 Los Angeles, CA - El Rey Theatre
04-30 San Francisco, CA - Fillmore

Quick quiz: according to the chart, are global temperatures rising, or falling? If you are the average 9th grader, you'd say they're rising. But not if you're George Will. In his column in this week's Newsweek, Mr Will says temperatures are falling,...

One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.....Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates "evidence." The difference between this "evidence" and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.... - Richard Hofstadter

via Boing-Boing.

America will someday come to recognize the broad social and economic benefits of a not-for-profit, single-payer health care system, which is good for the American people and good for America’s businesses...

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Great is the power of steady misrepresentation... - Charles Darwin.

"How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic," a series by Coby Beck

I love him and hope he's wrong about us.

Thanks Pete.

He also found that the 20th century had the largest rate of warming of any century...

image originally found here.

...the cosmos of chords consists of weird, multidimensional spaces, known as orbifolds, that turn back on themselves with a twist, like the Möbius strips math teachers love to trot out to prove to students that a two-dimensional figure can have only one side.

People, in other words, need people: We are the glue holding ourselves together.

"In California, we have divided our systems along funding lines. It should be about their health and well-being, not their incomes."

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Nonetheless, it seems clear that the majority of U.S. physicians support using both public and private insurance options to expand coverage. A majority of physicians also support the expansion of Medicare. Support for the public option is consistent across physician specialties, practice settings, and regions of the country, and therefore should be carefully considered by lawmakers as they finalize legislation to reform health care and provide coverage for 47 million uninsured Americans.

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In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.

thanks prospiracy

Montipora (long version) from Delrious on Vimeo.

"We spend billions of dollars trying to understand the origins of the universe," Helbing says, "while we still don't understand the conditions for a stable society, a functioning economy, or peace."

"music" happened.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

"Ultimately the Objectivist movement failed for the same reason that communism failed: it tried to make its people live by the dictates of a totalizing ideology that failed to honor the realities of human existence."

For those who don’t speak crazy, let me translate: ...you establish that conclusion and proceed backwards to any evidence that supports it.

Thanks BoingBoing.

read the comments to...

Briefly, the expectations on the modern president are far greater than the powers of the office. There is an “Expectations Gap” wherein the public expects President Obama to fix a lot of things he lacks the power to fix. The president’s control over the economy is indirect at best and his role in the legislative process is extremely limited. When Candidate Obama promises health care reform, what he does is paint himself into a corner from which he must find some way to get Congress to provide reform. He can’t just do it himself.

“I’ve met a lot of other people in creative fields, and it is interesting to see how the same things drive them: The sense that there’s something missing, that there’s more to be done, that there’s more to be known.”

Last May, CNN's Jessica Yellin said that when she was at MSNBC, "the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this [the Iraq War] was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation"; "the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives ... to put on positive stories about the president"; and "they would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive." Katie Couric said that when she was at NBC, "there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or other considerations" not to be too critical of the Bush administration. MSNBC's rising star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then fired after she criticized news media organizations generally, and Fox News specifically, for distorting their war coverage to appear more pro-government. And, of course, when MSNBC canceled Phil Donahue's show in the run-up to the Iraq war despite its being that network's highest-rated program, a corporate memo surfaced indicating that the company had fears of being associated with an anti-war and anti-government message.

thanks M-A

Barton plays dumb.

"That is the cold reality of big-money politics," he said.

To convert some of the remaining wild areas into state and national parks, however, is only part of the answer. Even public parks are not what nature created over the eons of time, working with wind and wave and sand. Somewhere we should know what was nature’s way; we should know that the Earth would have been had not man interfered. And so, besides public parks for recreation, we should set aside some wilderness area of seashore where the relations of sea and wind and shore—of living things and their physical world—remain as they have been over the long vistas of time in which man did not exist. For there remains, in this space-age universe, the possibility that man’s way is not always best.”

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The French mathematician Henri Poincaré once wrote about how he struggled for two weeks with a difficult mathematical proof. He set it aside to take a bus to a geology conference, and the moment he stepped on the bus, the solution came to him.

"By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed."

Above is Matt Tiabbi's latest research on the financial crisis. Unfortunately, his fairly well researched article (it could have used more links to resources) is slightly undermined by his overly populist writing style clearly geared for the average Rolling Stone reader. However, if you can put up with that, you might find it interesting.

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Mike Kim
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then...

I wish there would have been more on the physiological underpinnings... but provoking nonetheless.

can't wait for the Nova special.

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Oliver Sacks
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Thanks again Pete

maybe "Michael" is the next....


Richard Feynman

The title of this video is "energy secretary puzzled by simple question". The real title is "Energy secretary asked a highly complicated scientific question by a senator whose career is owed to energy companies knowing the secretary only had 6 seconds to respond in order to discredit him". Anyway, I actually thought he gave a cogent answer despite being blind-sided.



For more on willfully ignorant assholes like Joe Barton...

A combination of corporate money and an unregulated corporate media keeps America in the dark ages. This bill is the best we're going to get for now because the corruption of public life in the United States has not been addressed. Whether he is seeking environmental reforms, health reforms or any other improvement in the life of the American people, this is Obama's real challenge.

We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

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Dick (Uncut)
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more here

you're up Hannity.

more perspective here.

The Obama strategy can thus be seen as an attempt to make the core Bush approach to terrorism politically and legally more palatable, and thus sustainable.

Onward Christian Soldiers! (GQ article)

they were inhibiting their inhibitions...

There is no great genius without a tincture of madness.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.”

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Get on the D Tour

Become an organ donor.

“When you look at pro-social behaviors,” says David Sloan Wilson, “behaviors that are for the good of the group, they’re not locally advantageous. If you’re an altruist, and you’re doing what’s good for the group, that fundamentally requires time and energy and risk on your part. If your neighbor isn’t doing that, then these behaviors are locally disadvantageous. We have a problem here. How do these traits evolve when they are less fit than the traits that we associate with selfishness and free riding? That’s the dilemma.”

Puzzled?

It feels good to...

I Guess Ill Have To Cry, Cry, Cry - James Brown

Put Bush/Cheney/Rummy/Condi in jail.

I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist."

Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred."

it kinda made me feel better to...

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Elizabeth Warren Pt. 2
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"I'm going to make this point later as I wrap up about the importance of books. But the things books do -- I would argue books are more important in the age of blog sites and tweaks and whatever else they call it -- I read a bunch of them -- because there's more information than ever before, but you can have all the facts in the world in your head. If you don't know how to organize and evaluate, construct an argument, get from A to Z, what you know in your head doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

We need perspective and linear argument. That's why I think books are important…

...The point I'm making is, you wouldn't even think about that if you never read a book; if you had no sense of history; if you were under the illusion that because you were on the Internet everything about you was new and everything was special and all that mattered was what you blurted out in the moment that was on your mind…" - Bill Clinton

dont take away my laser plane...

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Full Metal Budget
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Pattern Transformation

A-Pod is an ant inspired hexapod robot with a 2 DOF abdomen (tail), a 3 DOF head with large mandibles. 6 legs with 3 DOF each. Total 25 servos. This video demonstrates body movement and mandible control. I still have to do some mechanical improvements to the legs (therefore little walking). The robot are remotely controlled with a custom 2,4 GHz RC transmitter.

Some of our biggest financial firms got away from their original purpose — to fund innovation and to finance the process of “creative destruction,” whereby new technologies that improve people’s lives replace old ones, said the Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, in an interview in The American Interest. Instead, he added, too many banks got involved in exotic and incomprehensible financial innovations — to simply make money out of money — which ended up as “destructive creation.”

From the heart of all matter
Comes the anguished cry
Wake, wake, great Siva,
Our body grows weary
Of its law-fixed path,
Give us new form
Sing our destruction,
That we gain new life…

– Rabindranath Tagore

watch this...



then watch this...



You tell me.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

I could fall asleep to these...

The White Rabbit

Colleen Champ, Alice's Adventures in a Microscopic Wonderland.

With roughly 84% of the human population classifiying themselves as "religious", is religion therefore an evolutionary stable strategy?



Image taken from this other interesting article

When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago.

I post a lot of Daily Show clips (especially lately). If you have been under a rock and haven't been following the Daily Show vs. CNBC thing, you should watch these as well as previous posts. I have been a fan of John Stewart since he started the show and I can honestly say, he has been in top form lately. I don't think it's overstating it to say his show is an American treasure. (Colbert to)

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Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

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Jim Cramer

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Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 2

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Jim Cramer

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Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

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Jim Cramer

"Asked to compare her work to physics, one quant, who requested anonymity because her company had not given her permission to talk to reporters, termed the market “a wild beast” that cannot be controlled, and then added: “It’s not like building a bridge. If you’re right more than half the time you’re winning the game.” There are a thousand physicists on Wall Street, she estimated, and many, she said, talk nostalgically about science. “They sold their souls to the devil,” she said, adding, “I haven’t met many quants who said they were in finance because they were in love with finance.”

dislocate yourself...

here

"You have a deliberately nonbiological system, but it's behaving a bit like a biological system," says Iain Couzin, who heads Princeton's Collective Animal Behaviour Laboratory. "I just like the way that it spans across biology and physics in quite a beautiful way."

F@#% You

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CNBC Gives Financial Advice

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Another John Stewart comedy masterstroke.

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Optimist Prime

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Bobby Jindal's Republican Response

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Perhaps it's time, evolutionary economists argue, to focus less on finding the best way to foresee the economic future and more on explaining how the economy works. That discovery may lie in modeling the economy as a complex system based upon the three core concepts of Darwinism: variation, selection, and inheritance. "We're not saying it's identical. We're not saying the mechanisms are the same," Hodgson says. "The key issue is whether there is an ontological similarity in terms of the structure of reality that crosses the two domains, that's similar in biology and similar in the economic sphere."

Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented several detainees, describes the government's position on Bagram and Guantánamo as a distinction without a difference, and worries that by maintaining Bagram as a legal black hole for detainees, the Obama administration will continue to hold terror suspects indefinitely without trial, even if Gitmo is closed. "The fact is that since this first Supreme Court ruling upholding Gitmo detainee's access to habeas corpus," Hafetz explains, "the administration stopped bringing people to Guantánamo and started bringing them to Bagram. The population skyrocketed."

The above article (written by Adam Serwer for "The American Prospect") gives the impression that Obama will review all the Bush terror/torture policies and eventually reverse the many particularly egregious ones. The article also comes to the general conclusion that this will take time. Fair enough. But the Bush policies were so ghastly, I am going to continue to follow Obama's tract fairly closely in addition to his Green agenda (see the below post on his public support of "clean coal"). I generally support Obama and agree with the overall direction he is taking the country in his albeit short tenure, but I dislike the tendency I see in some of his supporters to not think critically of his policies.

If you don't understand why these issues are imperative for the future of this country and want to know more about the Bush admin. torture history... watch these movies. I've posted about them before. They are both awesome in a horrible way... or horrible in an awesome way.. yea.. the second one.

"And Maybe Unicorns Will Save Us"

Clean coal is very much like a unicorn: it doesn't exist.