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Next
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Friday, September 26, 2008, 07:00 PM: Truthiness and Agnotology
Does the massive increase in communications, brought about by cable and satellite television, and, especially, the internet, help us find truth?
Or does it help spread doubt, confusion, lies, mythology, crackpot conspiracy theories, and the like? As internet bandwidth continues its upward spiral into the future, what should we expect in the future?
More...
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Politics
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Banks are failing to provide consumers with information about fees on savings and checking accounts even though federal rules require such disclosures.
Some of the invisible fees have climbed substantially in recent years. The average overdraft fee, for instance, increased 11 percent from 2000 to 2007.
Staff made undercover visits to 185 branches of 154 depository institutions throughout the country and were unable to get comprehensive lists of checking and savings account fees at more than a one-fifth of the locations. The information was not available on the Web sites of half of the institutions.
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America has been failed by its government, and the nation now faces economic and security catastrophes unless its leaders change their ways, Wharton management professor Lawrence G. Hrebiniak concludes in his new book, The Mismanagement of America, Inc. He directs his severest criticism at the government's supervision of the Social Security Trust Fund and an intelligence infrastructure in which various agencies are no better at communicating with each other than they were before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Video, 27:34
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Americans are increasingly choosing to live among like-minded neighbours. This makes the culture war more bitter and politics harder.
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For a majority of likely voters, meaningless bullshit will be the most important factor in deciding who they will vote for in 2008.
Video, 2:20
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Calling its claims “overly speculative and not credible,” and saying that it is too late anyway, lawyers for the federal government argued this week that a so-called “doomsday suit” intended to prevent the startup of a the world’s most powerful particle accelerator should be thrown out of court.
When it begins operations, the collider will smash together subatomic particles at a rate just short of the speed of light in search of new forms of matter and new laws of physics.
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America's elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.
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The RIAA Radar is a tool that music consumers can use to easily and instantly distinguish whether an album was released by a member of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Just as people can currently find out where some products come from and who made them (Is this banana organic? Does this milk contain growth hormones? Were these clothes made in a sweatshop?), it is important to have that knowledge for as many consumer goods as possible. Knowledge is power, and knowing where the product came from can (and should) influence what you buy.
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 The Great Global Warming Swindle is a controversial documentary film by British television producer Martin Durkin, which argues against the ... all » scientific opinion that human activity is the main cause of global warming. The film showcases scientists, economists, politicians, writers, and others who are sceptical of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Publicity for the programme states that global warming is "a lie" and "the biggest scam of modern times."
The programme's accuracy has been disputed on multiple points and several commentators have criticised it for being one-sided, noting that the mainstream position on global warming is supported by the scientific academies of the major industrialized nations and other scientific organizations. The film disputes the positions of these scientific organizations by interviewing scientists and others, including Richard Lindzen and other contributors to reports by the IPCC, who disagree with explanations that attribute global warming to human activities.
Channel 4, which screened the documentary on March 8, 2007, described the film as "a polemic that drew together the well-documented views of a number of respected scientists to reach the same conclusions. This is a controversial film but we feel that it is important that all sides of the debate are aired."
Video, 1 hr 13 min
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Scientist by day, lobbyist by night—how one trailblazing researcher in embryonic stem cells meets conservative objections with scientific fact.
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On Sept 11, nearly 3000 Americans were killed. Since then, about 10 million Americans have died of other causes.
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If you put a pot, even a big one, under a glacier and built a fire to melt the glacier — what happens? The pot gets crushed. It may take time, but a couple thousand feet of ice crushes any pot. Puts out any flame. Destroys anything in its path and carve out a new place. The illegal alien invasion of the United States is so huge it's like a glacier to our idea of a melting pot. This glacier will demolish our melting pot and snuff our flame of liberty and opportunity.
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A top-ranking US judge has stunned a conference of Australian judges and barristers in Chicago by advocating secret trials for terrorists, more surveillance of Muslim populations across North America and an end to counter-terrorism efforts being "hog-tied" by the US constitution.
Judge Richard Posner, a supposedly liberal-leaning jurist regarded by many as a future US Supreme Court candidate, said traditional concepts of criminal justice were inadequate to deal with the terrorist threat and the US had "over-invested" in them.
"We have to fight terrorism with our strengths, and our strengths evolve around technology, including the technology of surveillance."
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Iraq’s oil reserves — thought to be the second largest in the world — have always been high on the corporate wish list. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then chief executive of Chevron, told a San Francisco audience, “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas — reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.”
A new oil law set to go before the Iraqi Parliament this month would, if passed, go a long way toward helping the oil companies achieve their goal. The Iraq hydrocarbon law would take the majority of Iraq’s oil out of the exclusive hands of the Iraqi government and open it to international oil companies for a generation or more.
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 OK, what’s this book about? It’s about what’s happened to the American government lately. It’s about the disastrous decisions that government has made. It’s about the corruption that rotted the Congress. It’s about how traditional conservatism has nearly been destroyed by authoritarianism. It’s about how the “Religious Right” teamed up with amoral authoritarian leaders to push its un-democratic agenda onto the country. It’s about the United States standing at the crossroads as the next federal election approaches.
“Well,” you might be thinking, “I don’t believe any of this is true.” Or maybe you’re thinking, “What else is new? I’ve believed this for years.” Why should a conservative, moderate, or liberal bother with this book? Why should any Republican, Independent, or Democrat click the “Introduction” link on this page?
Because if you do, you’ll begin an easy-ride journey through some relevant scientific studies I have done on authoritarian personalities--one that will take you a heck of a lot less time than the decades it took me. Those studies have a direct bearing on all the topics mentioned above. So if you think the first paragraph is a lot of hokum, or full of half-truths, I invite you to look at the research.
PDF, 261 pages
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If the Bush administration succeeds in its latest request for funding for the war in Iraq, the total cost would rise to $611.5 billion, according to the National Priorities Project, a nonprofit research group.
The amount got us wondering: What would $611 billion buy?
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It was Rocio Palacios who first noticed the woman who appeared to need help.
It was 8 a.m. when she and her husband, Erasmo, dropped their 6-year-old daughter off at school and had picked up their 22-year-old daughter to go out for breakfast when they saw the woman waving her arms at 53rd Street and Kedzie Avenue last November.
The Palacioses, of Chicago, claim the woman approached their car, parked outside Manolo's restaurant, leaned in to the passenger side where Rocio was sitting and asked Erasmo if he wanted oral sex for $20 or sex for $25.
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NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE/NSPD 51.
HOMELAND SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE/HSPD-20.
Subject: National Continuity Policy.
Purpose:
(1) This directive establishes a comprehensive national policy on the continuity of Federal Government structures and operations and a single National Continuity Coordinator responsible for coordinating the development and implementation of Federal continuity policies. This policy establishes "National Essential Functions," prescribes continuity requirements for all executive departments and agencies, and provides guidance for State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector organizations in order to ensure a comprehensive and integrated national continuity program that will enhance the credibility of our national security posture and enable a more rapid and effective response to and recovery from a national emergency.
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In an astounding development that has completely failed to register any attention amongst mainstream U.S. media, China promised to escalate preparations for war in advance of a potential conflict, after President Bush shook hands with a Taiwanese government official yesterday.
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Manchester, NH - Freelance reporter Matt Lepacek, reporting for Infowars.com, was arrested for asking a question to one of Giuliani's staff members in a press conference. The press secretary identified the New York based reporter as having previously asked Giuliani about his prior knowledge of WTC building collapses and ordered New Hampshire state police to arrest him.
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A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.
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Manzanares committed suicide Friday amid charges he had stolen a court laptop. Anger and sadness settled Saturday on those who remembered Larry Manzanares for his lifelong service to the community and blamed his suicide on excessive publicity surrounding the scandal that toppled his career.
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By Kejda Gjermani. Do you like having other people telling you what to do, how to live your life? The crucial counter consideration to this argument is that while most people don't like to be told what to do, they would nevertheless love to dictate others what to do. Accordingly, most of us are not closet libertarians but rather closet authoritarians.
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The "virtual fence" is a real boondoggle.
The sophisticated mix of radar, satellites, sensors and computers is supposed to help the U.S. Border Patrol nab illegal immigrants and smugglers. But it's way over budget, way behind schedule - and doesn't work.
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The USA is starting to find itself in a similar position to the ailing Roman Empire of ancient times. I will mention a number of factors that coincide: slow decline of the American economy as the primal economy (increased economic multi-polarity), high and increasing debt per capita, currency devaluation, addiction to foreign resources and consumer goods. There are also many political similarities: poor leadership on key issues, an over stretched military, new types of enemies, migrant problems, internal political division and polarized religious factions vying for power. In fact, both Rome and the United States attempted to "liberate" Mesopotamia and secure it from Iranian (then Parthian) influence: it was short lived and costly.
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For the first time in 70 years, the US Supreme Court may decide next week whether to examine the question of the right to bear arms, something which is fiercely upheld by millions of Americans.
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 The Bush administration is expected to announce a massive series of arms deals in the Middle East tomorrow that are being seen as part of a diplomatic offensive against the growing influence of Iran in the volatile region.
The centrepiece of the deals is an agreement between the US and a group of Persian Gulf nations, including Saudi Arabia, that could eventually be worth at least $20bn, according to news reports. At the same time, 10-year military aid packages will be renewed with Israel and Egypt.
The main thrust of the deal is the supply of advanced American weapons to long-term Arab allies in the Gulf. They include Saudi and five other Gulf states: the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman. All those countries have been jittery over the growing power of Iran and the possibility that Tehran is seeking to build a nuclear bomb. The supply of American arms to the countries not only gives them greater military power to counter Iran's but also cements them further as American allies.
In fact, so great is the White House's fear over Iran's intentions that the deal appears to ride roughshod over other American strategic concerns - such as Israeli fears over arming Arab countries and concern that Saudi Arabia has been supporting Sunni militants in Iraq.
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So you think you know how you are going to vote on Tuesday? Chances are both the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) know which way you’re leaning as well…
This just in: politicians, and the marketing strategists running their campaigns are finally getting it—niche marketing is available now and it's not just for B2B companies anymore.
The Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2006, in a page one article titled "Democrats Playing Catch-Up, Tap Database Marketing to Woo Potential Voters", highlights that Democrats are now realizing what Republicans have known for at least two years, that micro-targeting (also known as niche marketing) really works.
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Iran says it has successfully tested a new model of its home-made fighter jet. Officials say the Defense Ministry and the Air Force carried out the research, design and production of the "Saegheh" warplane.
The model is said to be similar to the US F-18 fighter plane -- and Iranian experts say it is more powerful.
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With the revived comprehensive immigration reform bill expected to come up before the Senate this week, several high-tech companies like Microsoft have mounted a campaign to get more foreign skilled workers into the United States.
Bill Gates and Steven A. Ballmer of Microsoft have led a parade of high-tech executives to Capitol Hill, urging lawmakers to provide more visas for temporary foreign workers and permanent immigrants who can fill critical jobs. Google has reminded senators that one of its founders, Sergey Brin, came from the Soviet Union as a young boy.
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Dear Annie: I am the head of what I thought was a pretty strong, cohesive team. But I just heard from one of the people who reports to me that another subordinate went to my boss and said she could do my job better than I can. I'm not sure if there's some kind of ax to grind between these two subordinates, but this troubles me, since the person who allegedly badmouthed me is my top performer. (I jumped through flaming hoops to get her an extra 2% bonus last year.)
Now I don't know what to do. Ignore it? Feel out my boss to see if he's taking the criticism seriously? Confront the employee who is supposed to have stabbed me in the back? Your advice, please.
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From Mother Jones, a left-wing biased website.
How did the Fox host end up with a high-school student on his show quoting his own advice on "healthy sex?" The strange and convoluted tale of the Boulder High teen panel.
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A brief guide to software development in the real world. Aimed mainly at new developers: experienced programmers already know most of this. This guide is for hands-on programmers, not managers.
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[Opinion] Moscow's rapprochement with its regional ally are inevitable as instability widens.
The Persian state is bordered effectively by four war zones. The first is Turkey whereby Ankara appears in have been drawn this December into a "mini guerrilla war "with the Kurds on its southeastern border. Furthermore, the other three: Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan are all in a big-bloody mess to say the least. Iraq has begun to decompose and is headed for a de facto partition along sectarian-religious lines. Afghanistan risks "rollback" in the form of a Taliban revival and return to power of the Mullahs and Imams.
Moreover, nuke equipped and civil- war prone Pakistan is on the verge of an Islamist takeover which would make the 1979" Iranian revolution" look like a kindergarten- tea party by comparison.
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A new documentary will focus on U.S. prisoners wrongly convicted of capital crimes.
Sofian will blend live action and experimental animation in Truth Has Fallen, which examines the views of James McCloskey, a minister who heads the nonprofit organization Centurion Ministries.
The documentary also will feature input from famed Charles Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and O.J. Simpson defense attorney Barry Scheck.
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Since the discovery of human embryonic stem cells in 1998, stem-cell science has been subjected to trial in the court of public opinion. In that court scientists have been called upon as expert witnesses.
Over the past 12 months, Australia rumbled through its second-round debate on embryonic stem cells and therapeutic cloning. Scientists in the public spotlight walk a difficult tightrope. It seems to me that all scientists should adhere to some basic tenets when they address the public. P
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China's military is harvesting organs from unwilling live prison inmates, mostly Falungong practitioners, for transplants on a large scale - including to foreign recipients- according to a study.
The report's authors - Canada's former secretary of state for the Asia Pacific region David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas - implicated dozens of hospitals and jails throughout China in July, after a two-month investigation.
Chinese officials denied those allegations.
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The top editors of the China Youth Daily were meeting in a conference room last August when their cell phones started buzzing quietly with text messages. One after another, they discreetly read the notes. Then they traded nervous glances.
The episode illustrated the profound impact of the Internet on political discourse in China, and the challenge that the Web poses to the Communist Party's ability to control news and shape public opinion, key elements to its hold on power.
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The more I travel, study history and read the papers, the more convinced I become of the superiority of rationalism. With that attitude, I should spend all my time traveling to northern Europe and Japan. However, fate has also seen fit to send me to many places where people think with their viscera and gonads instead of their brains. The more I see it in action, the more convinced I become that societies that place personal "honor" before everything else are truly cursed. This value system has ramifications that pervade the societies infested with it. It is, in my view, the most toxic value system on the planet. The term toxic is carefully chosen and meant to be taken with the utmost literalness because societies pervaded by this value system are deeply poisoned spiritually.
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Sarah Hamm-Alvarez, the Gavin S. Herbert Professor in Pharmaceutical Sciences, has been appointed chair of the National Institutes of Health Gene and Drug Delivery Systems Study Section of the Center for Scientific Review. Her two-year term begins on July 1.
The Gene and Drug Delivery Systems Study Section considers grant applications to the NIH that focus on the development and delivery of drugs, genes and gene products to living organisms. According to the study section’s description on the NIH Web site, "research grant applications driven by bioengineering principle, design or validation, but not necessarily driven by hypothesis, are expected."
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A Missouri House of Representatives committee was urged Tuesday to let voters have another say about what forms of stem cell research to allow in Missouri.
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The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast holding of US treasuries if Washington imposes trade sanctions to force a yuan revaluation.
Two officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent days warning - for the first time - that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion (£658bn) of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter pressure from the US Congress. Shifts in Chinese policy are often announced through key think tanks and academies.
Described as China's "nuclear option" in the state media, such action could trigger a dollar crash at a time when the US currency is already breaking down through historic support levels.
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A bloody conflict between Hispanic and black gangs is spreading across Los Angeles. Hundreds are dying as whole districts face the threat of ethnic cleansing. Paul Harris reports from the epicentre of America's new urban warfare.
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Thousands of people who may have been exposed to chemical or biological agents during military tests remain unaccounted for, and the Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs have given up on tracking them down, according to a new report.
Some of the tests were conducted as part of a weapons testing program known as "Project 112." In others, individuals were intentionally exposed to hazardous substances such as blister, nerve, and biological agents as well as LSD and PCP.
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New Hampshire could surprise a lot of people.
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Thousands of polls, top-notch analysis, and up-to-date candidate information.
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A hysteria of sorts has been generated by reports that some of China's products lack quality control. Some cat food has been tainted. A few cell phone batteries have blown up. Cough syrup contained stuff that makes you sick. And so on. In response, the Chinese government actually executed its regulatory head of food and product safety, Zheng Xiaoyu.
How very strange this last point is! In the West, we long ago gave up the idea that these people are actually supposed to carry out their jobs and should be personally responsible for their failure to do so.
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How to Decode the Psychology of the
Morning Meeting. After watching the woman interact with colleagues, executive consultant Constance Dierickx offered several suggestions. One of the most important: "I told her to stop sitting against the wall and sit around the table instead." Within six months, co-workers were commenting that she had more "executive presence and spoke with greater conviction," says Dierickx.
The moral of the story: Where you sit influences where you stand. If you take away their Brooks Brothers suits, Manolo Blahnik shoes, and BlackBerrys, managers are little more than naked apes -- social mammals with primal methods of expressing group power hierarchies.
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 "In 2000 as a result of the collapse of communism, India’s turn from autarky, China's shift to market capitalism, the global economy encompassed six billion people. Had China, India and the former Soviet empire stayed outside, the global economy would have had 3.3 billion people." As Smith adds: "The 'before' and 'after' picture was of a worldwide workforce of 1.46 billion in 2000, swollen to 2.93 billion as a result of China (760 million), India (440 million) and the ex-Soviet states (260 million)."
China’s growth was proclaimed as 'unique'. Moreover, they projected an ascending line – a linear growth – of Chinese economic expansion into the future. Within an expansion averaging between 8% and 9%, stretching over 23 years, China has undoubtedly had a major effect in prolonging the present upward cycle of world capitalism.
But this growth is not at all 'unique'. In fundamentals it is little different to the experience of the Asian 'Tigers' more than 20 years ago. Stimulated by land reform – removing the residual elements of feudalism – under US occupation and with favourable treatment, Japan averaged a growth rate of 8% between 1950 and 1980, sometimes reaching an annual rate of 13%. The economy doubled in size every six years and something similar occurred in Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.
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Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.
The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.
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The US government had implemented sophisticated surveillance and apprehension technology to stem the influx of immigrants. The number of Border Patrol agents tripled from 1993 to 2006, and spending on border enforcement grew six-fold during this period.
These activities have managed only to affect the strategies used by illegal entrants to cross the border – such as changing their border-crossing points– but did not deter them from attempting clandestine entry.
The results of this study imply that the current US immigration control policy is unlikely to have its desired effect unless underlying drivers of migration—the employer demand for unauthorized immigrant labor and the U.S.-Mexico wage gap—are addressed.
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It’s very curious that the stock market has plunged on either the day of, or the day after, the four or five recent primary election contests. While there may be no direct causality, one can’t help but wonder whether the investor class hasn’t been disappointed with the shape of this election battle.
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by Zhu Jing - East African Standard (Nairobi). China practises a unique democratic experience, which
is beneficial, reasonable and fruitful because it
suits the country and has stood the test of time.
The political party system that China adopts is
consultative under the leadership of the Communist
Party of China (CPC), which is different from the
Western two-party or multi-party and the one-party
system practised in some countries.
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The difference between Kennedy and Johnson--I hated Johnson, such a sleaze, but he was a suburb inside operator. He was able to get Kennedy's programs though congress. All that fal da rah about Kennedy's mystique and charisma is more than half nostalgia. I mean, he barely beat Nixon!
I say this because of the comparisons being tossed around: Obama to Kennedy.
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A western intelligence official said the Chinese security services saw the Olympics as "a goldmine for intelligence gathering, blackmail and commercial secrets". A main fear now is that business visitors to China will be permanently subject to "a cold war level" of industrial espionage from systems put in place for the games.
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by a certain neocon definition, Iraq is a success.
What if the war in Iraq did go on for 100 years, as McCain suggested it might? What are we looking at? An entire century of ever-increasing military spending.
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A lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii in an attempt to hold up the start of operations by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom-smasher on the French-Swiss border.
A colourful American botanist, teacher, former biologist and sometime physicist says (in outline) that the LHC may rip a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum and so destroy the Earth. He wants the US government to act now and delay the LHC's startup while a new safety review is carried out.
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Before the Army builds any system, it rigorously defines requirements to ensure stuff fielded to the troops works well and only essential items are included. One reason is to save grunts from having to tote extraneous gear on their already overloaded backs.
Defining requirements for the Army's troubled Future Combat Systems -- which has an estimated final price tagof $230 billion, which tops the annual gross domestic product of Norway ($216 billion) -- took a real skid when it came to a requirement for a robot that a soldier would carry on his or her back, called a man-packed robot. Officials with iRobot told GAO that the Army has imposed a requirement that the 30-pound robot come equipped with a fire extinguisher.
Even small fire extinguishers -- such as the one in my house -- weigh more than 4 pounds.
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