Politics

Livingstone, the Mayor of London, has been suspended on full pay for 4 weeks for calling a reporter a 'concentration camp guard'. Given the recent discussions we have had on inciting racial/religious hatred, what do people think of this. Ken made an interesting comment himself I thought: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4746016.stm Hmm... I wonder if I could get suspended on full pay for 4 weeks if I make an offensive comment....

George Deutsch was a junior staffer in NASA's public affairs office. He resigned in the midst of an uproar kicked off by a memo he wrote dictating content for a PA website. So one of the larger issues in play pertains to the appropriate role of public affairs in Big Science--the community of institutions, researchers, policymakers and implementers associated with large government and corporate scientific enterprises. Keep in mind that the stakes here often involve public or private investment beyond anything reseachers over a century ago might've considered attainable. And given the broad scope of the aims and resources attached, Big Science may attract greater non…

Though I act as though im exposing a big secret. From what i gather in the academic community, this fairly simple concept doesnt seem to be very well understood. Forewarning, I don’t believe any of this to be provable truth it is simply a novice’s speculation from a bit of personal research. After the Great Depression FDR took the financial security of Americans into his hands and took America off the gold standard. Previously, each dollar was backed up by a specific amount of gold to be held in Fort Knox. It was a portion of his New Deal to remove this stipulation and create the Federal Reserve Board whose sole concerns were to monitor interest rates and the am…

I do not believe a thread has been posted for this topic. I heard on a radio show that the U.S governement is selling six of their ports to the United Arab Emirates. From what Ive heard the UAE is or was associated with the Taliban. That sounds absolutely outrageous and very dumb. Here<s an article on the topic: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=022206D and Bush responding to America: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,185799,00.html I live in canada so this is not a big issue, in fact nobody has heard of this. I was wondering if it is having a big impact over in the US.

the folks I mean are friends and relations, people we think are generally nice, or resemble us in most ways. when one of them gets war fever and starts calling for war against Islam, and gives reasons-----like the way the Taliban treated women in Afghanistan or some other moral absolute-----like that suicide bombers kill noncombatants (many of them women and children like those the Dresden fire consumed, like those consumed in Hiroshima)----when the tone of voice starts to get really punitive, self-righteous, and vindictive, what can we learn? I think by listening carefully we can probably learn something about ourselves. and maybe there is something to learn…

I've linked below a fascinating op/ed piece by a Washington lobbyist that I think everyone should read. Of course you want to read this with a grain of salt -- his position is self-serving, no doubt about it. But he is producing an alternate opinion that you will read in very few other places. What you're mostly hearing these days is that the problem with lobbyists is the practice of "earmarking". But, and I've heard this in a couple of places recently, there is a murmuring undercurrent that says that the real problem is not earmarking, but rather the fact that it's the lobbyists that, increasingly, are what get congresscritters re-elected. The fundraisers they h…

I am not a great watcher of current events and don't know the details about this, of if it has already been discussed here. But maybe it is interesting. Severian called my attention to a Wikipedia article about a proposed law in the UK to make it criminal to INCITE RELIGIOUS HATRED http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incitement_to_religious_hatred Since I don't know the legal definitions as stated in the proposed law, I have only a superficial reaction. perhaps someone can correct any misapprehensions. This seems like a strange law to me. I do not approve of religious hatred but don't people have a RIGHT to it? Like suppose I have this deepseated loathing…

http://www.aip.org/pnu/2005/split/757-1.html the American Institute of Physics online "Physics News Update" publishes an annual list of top physics stories, with links. quite a few these links have further links to graphics/animations like if you check out the "molecules that walk" story http://www.aip.org/pnu/2005/split/751-2.html it gives a movie link at the bottom http://www.chem.ucr.edu/groups/bartels/ this year PNU has about 20 top stories.

Any thoughts on appropriate responses to an 'asymmetric warfare' situation? aguy2

I have a good idea about how to get New Orleans back on the road to recovery. If I was in charge, I would get the national guard in there for logistics, i.e., food, shelter, equipment, and then allow the residents of the broken down homes to build bonfires. Maybe each neighborhood could get a bonfire going to burn up the past so to speak, to get closure and be able to shift through their rubble. This will also reduce the debris by a large proportion. It would make excellent TV, mobilize the former residences, and get country mobilized.

Is Google being hypocritical? This question is being asked in a number of venues these days, due to the ironic confluence of Google's China situation (which involves Google's compliance with China's censorship of the Internet) and Google's legal trouble with the US Justice Department (in which the government has requested usage data from Google). The basic case for "it's hypocrisy" is framed fairly well in this editorial by New Orleans Times Picayune reporter and columnist Stephen Sabludowsky on his Bayou Buzz web site: His full column can be found here: http://www.bayoubuzz.com/articles.aspx?aid=6301 Here's another interesting quote in which he …

I'm not sure I understand these "cover-up" allegations. Cheney's staff notified the local sherrif's department within just a few minutes of the incident, and everyone was interviewed by deputies. Local reporters immediately picked up on the story and reported it on a local newspaper's web site within 18 hours of the incident. Where exactly is the cover-up here?

Whenever I think of the archetype of patchouli wearing, pot smoking, Capitalism-hating, anarchosyndicalist liberal hippies, George Will is definitely the first person that comes to mind. Oh yeah: George Will in his anal retentive conservative douche disguise. Ingenious! It fooled me! So it was no surprise to see a column where he was ranting against the Bush Administration's attempt at a power grab and the marginization of checks and balances: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/15/AR2006021502003_pf.html

Commercial model top speed 290 kph goes on sale this April in the US market http://www.theage.com.au/news/World/Lithiumpowered-super-cars-April-launch/2006/02/16/1140052209543.html April is when Hybrid Technologies says they will start taking orders---at the Car Show in NY. I don't think it is an April Fools: here is a link about Hybrid Technologies http://www.hybridtechnologies.com/company.php This blogger in Japan http://rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/2006/02/electric-super-cars-290kph-370kph.html says that they have a non-commercial demo electric that does 370 kph. But the Japanese concept sounds weird, not the sort of thing you could market for peo…

What is it with religious fundamentalists that they feel the need to force their personal religious views onto everyone. If necessary, at the expense of the greater good. From GWB's State of the Union address ... "I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research - human cloning in all its forms: creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator - and that gift should never be discarded, devalued, or put up for sale. " http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4668320.stm What's wrong with cloning? What's…

http://www.imdb.com/news/sb/2006-02-14/tv/2 Really Bryant? Wanna tell that to 2005 speed skating world champion Shani Davis? Or perhaps he can explain to Sweden's Lina Andersson's gold medal is meaningless because she only had to sprint 1.5 kilometers on nordic skis to win it. What a moron.

Well, a new report explains what you should do: http://pewresearch.org/social/pack.php?PackID=1 From the Boingboing coverage: "Would you like to be happier? Become a rich, married, religious, Republican, white person from the Sunbelt, says this Pew research report." This is why I'm glad to say that pursuing my own personal happiness is not my most important life goal (although I suppose it can be argued that my pursuits are vicariously for my own happiness) Ultimately, underpinning all of my beautiful, teleological, goal-directed pattern seeking nature is atheistic existentialism. From this the core of my belief can be summed up as: I'm a random f…

Eric Burns, the moderator of FNC's media-watch show "Fox News Watch" raised an interesting question on this past weekend's show, and I thought I'd pass it along here just to see what people think. Is it hypocritical for a media web site to refuse to run pictures for ethical reasons, and yet include a link to a place where the reader can find those pictures? I think it's an interesting question to ponder given the explosion of popularity and importance of web news outlets.

Looks like Bush planted a flunkie in NASA and changed their policies about talking about global warming and making it clear that the Big Bang is "just a theory". This whole nightmare ended when Texas A&M called NASA and told them they've never heard of the guy, so he resigned. The story here:

hello any thought that we maybe seeing less of osama in the near future. thinking, he's not that dumb, he saw what happened in the palestine occupied territories. why not cut back his attack against the u.s. for now. allow them to leave and simply have the iraq people vote his followers into goverment. all very democratically. at some point reappear as a new political leader who has given up on terrorism, well at lease quite as visible, then allow himself to be elected into power. odd how he was mentioning about a truce before that palestine election. perhaps he already knew what the results would be. why not appear a man of peace and simply have the rule o…

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060203/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/rumsfeld_chavez Hmm, pot calling the kettle black? He was elected legally. Therefore, he is Hitler. Q.E.D.

Still in uproar http://news.inq7.net/nation/index.php?index=1&story_id=65780

I've just read a thread where someone labelled a country as uncivilized and I replied by bringing up the topic of methodological individualism. I thought that I might start a thread about the topic. Below is an example of how group thinking leads to fallacious thinking and how reasoning from the micro foundations helps explains contradictions that arise from looking at the world with eyes that see only grand entities (e.g. countries, nations, religions) rather than more fundamental entities (e.g. individuals, atoms, energy): From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Methological Individualism: “Methodological individualism became important, not as a wa…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4679220.stm clouds of dark matter which are not massive enough (less than 30 million solar mass) or which are too small----less than 1000 lightyear diameter----apparently disperse by random motion of the particles, because astronomers do not find them below that size. the assumption is smaller less massive clouds don't have enough gravity to hold themselves together given the random motion characteristics of DM. this allows one to infer the AVERAGE SPEED of dark matter particles, or to put it another way their TEMPERATURE so the estimate is that DM particles are moving on average at a speed of 9 kilometers per second

This is turning out to be a very revealing incident and I think the lessons learned are going to take a while to digest. My initial reaction is that in any free country people have the right to protest and to boycott any paper which offends. If someone dips a crucifix in urine, that is intended to provoke a reaction, and the artist cannot complain if Christians react lawfully. What I'm trying to guage is how widespread are the threats of violence. I can't help but hope that this religion does not flourish. One billion seems quite enough. They seriously need to unclench.