Archive for October, 2010
Are Parents Less Loving Towards Fat Children?
In a nation suffering from a childhood obesity epidemic, this is bad news for the youth of the future: whether or not they intend to be, parents are meaner to their overweight children. TIME writes:
It’s no secret that overweight kids are typically not the most popular kids on the block. Nor is it news that kids can be mean, forming groups of “haves” and “have-nots,” gossiping, ostracizing their chunky classmates.
You’d think that home would be a safe haven for them, but a new study in the journal Obesity reveals that even parents can come down hard on their heftier offspring.
Researchers at the University of North Texas in Denton have found that parents may be less likely to chip in and help their overweight kid buy a car. “No one is going to be surprised that society discriminates against the overweight, but I think it is surprising that it can come from your…
Trade Unionists Speak Out Against FBI Attacks on Civil Liberties
Joe Burns writing in Working In These Times:
Important labor groups are speaking out against the recent spate of federal attacks on the civil liberties of U.S. peace and labor activists. On October 1, 2010, the convention of AFSCME Council 5, representing 46,000 public employees in Minnesota, passed a resolution objecting to recent FBI raids of prominent peace and labor rights activists in Minneapolis and Chicago. Likewise, the San Francisco Central Labor Council delegates meeting voted on September 27 to denounce the raids and “participate in the ongoing movement to defend our civil rights and civil liberties from FBI infringement.”
On September 24, the FBI raided the homes of seven activists, seizing computers, cell phones and documents. The FBI also raided the offices of the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee, seizing their computer containing a database of supporters. The peace movement nationally has roundly condemned the FBI for attempting to silence dissent. In the weeks…
Obama on ‘Mythbusters’ TV Show – What’s Up With That?
Peter Grier wonders why Obama feels the need to follow Sarah Palin onto a Discovery TV show, in the Christian Science Monitor:
President Obama is scheduled to appear on the December 8 episode of “MythBusters,” a Discovery Channel reality show. What’s up with that? Is Mr. Obama just trying to match Sarah Palin, who is getting her own show on Discovery-affiliated TLC?
Well, maybe. But the stated point of Obama’s star turn with Jamie Hyneman, Adam Savage, and the rest of the “MythBuster” gang is to promote science and math education. Monday is science fair day at the White House – besides officially announcing his television appearance, Obama will play host to the winners of a range of science and math competitions, from the Intel Science and Engineering Fair to the Team America Rocketry Challenge…
Obama is going to appear in an episode titled “Archimedes Solar Ray.” He’ll challenge Jamie and Adam to…
It’s Dark As A Dungeon Deep Down In The Mine
Report from the Epicenter of Fraudclosures: Can There be A Rescue of US Workers Facing Foreclosure & Unemployment?
WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA: In all of the economic issues we are dealing with, there is always a “back story, a deeper context” that is usually missing, “disappeared” like those Allende supporters in Chile in the 1970s who wanted to empower workers, not just rescue them when they get buried in a deep hole.
Most deeper issues go uncovered. Luis Campos, Director of the School of Anthropology at Chile’s Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, points out, “more buried than the miners themselves, the demands and the rights of the indigenous population continue to be flouted and unrecognized in our country.”
Many unsafe mines worldwide are still at risk from China to Zambia.
Who woulda thunk—certainly not the 1300 “journalists” on the scene–that this mine disaster had its origins in the era when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger…
Belgian Archbishop Calls AIDS ‘Inherent Justice’
What is it with Catholic clergy? These guys just don’t know when to zip it! From Reuters:
Belgium’s Roman Catholic Church, already reeling from allegations of sexual abuse, faced a new scandal Friday after its primate wrote that AIDS was “a sort of inherent justice.”
Many lawmakers condemned Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, the head of the Belgian church, for the remarks in a new book and Belgium’s center for equal opportunities received a series of complaints, including one by a lawyer who said his comments were incitement to hatred.
The Church is struggling to recover from the resignation of the Bishop of Bruges in April after he admitted sexually abusing a nephew.
In his book “Monseigneur Leonard – Conversations,” the archbishop referred to a remark by the late Pope John Paul II who said, when asked whether AIDS was a punishment from God, that it was difficult to judge God’s will.
“I would not at all…
Osama bin Laden Living Comfortably in Pakistan
It’s no great surprise to learn that bin Laden isn’t hiding in a mountain cave, considering that he’s probably been receiving kidney dialysis and other medical treatment for years. Barbara Starr reports for CNN:
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) — Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are believed to be hiding close to each other in houses in northwest Pakistan, but are not together, a senior NATO official said. “Nobody in al Qaeda is living in a cave,” said the official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the intelligence matters involved.
Rather, al Qaeda’s top leadership is believed to be living in relative comfort, protected by locals and some members of the Pakistani intelligence services, the official said…
Massive Facebook Privacy Breach
Journalists Emily Steel and Geoffrey A. Fowler engage in the lost art of investigating malfeasance by large corporations, for the Wall Street Journal:
Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.
The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure.
The problem has ties to the growing field of companies that build detailed databases on people in order to track them online—a practice the Journal has been examining in its What They Know series. It’s unclear how long the breach was in place.…
Bad News for Super-Villains: Blotting Out The Sun May Soon Be Banned
Mr. Burns: Smithers, have The Rolling Stones killed.
Smithers: But sir, the UN is responsible…
Burns: Do as I say!
Bad news for super-villains everywhere. Tim Wall writes in Discovery News:
Blotting out the sun has been the dream of many arch-villains, including The Simpson’s Mr. Burns. Their schemes may soon be foiled by the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity.
Super villains aren’t the only ones who want to shade the Earth from the sun. Blocking some of the sun’s rays could slow climate change by reducing the amount of sunlight warming the Earth, say some researchers, such as Roger Angel of the University of Arizona.
The Convention may consider banning or limiting research into space sunshades. Some question their wisdom. A space sunshade would have a rapid effect on global warming and provide time to develop more permanent measures, they say. The technique has already received serious attention from NASA and other organizations.
But others, such as the…
Peter Berkowitz: Why Liberals Don’t Get the Tea Party Movement
Another take on this disinfo.com post. Peter Berkowitz writes in the Wall Street Journal:
Highly educated people say the darndest things, these days particularly about the tea party movement. Vast numbers of other highly educated people read and hear these dubious pronouncements, smile knowingly, and nod their heads in agreement. University educations and advanced degrees notwithstanding, they lack a basic understanding of the contours of American constitutional government.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman got the ball rolling in April 2009, just ahead of the first major tea party rallies on April 15, by falsely asserting that “the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass-roots) events.”
Having learned next to nothing in the intervening 16 months about one of the most spectacular grass-roots political movements in American history, fellow Times columnist Frank Rich denied in August of this year that the tea party movement is “spontaneous and leaderless,”…
Portable Solar Powered Desalination System A Reality
I’ve been clamoring for this kind of tech to break out of development status and into marketability for most of the last decade, and it’s just great to see it finally manifest in a way that allows for ease of transport and comparatively simple maintenance. In a world top-heavy with serious issues, this is a breath of fresh air … or more to the point, a drink of fresh water. Stephen C. Webster writes on RAW Story:
About one in eight humans do not have access to clean drinking water, according to the World Health Organization. That’s approximately 884 million people.
The repercussion of this reality are a daily reality in developing nations: an estimated 1.4 million children perish each year due to diarrhea brought on by waterborne bacteria. In spite of breathtaking advances in human technology, over 97 percent of the world’s water is still undrinkable.
And while salty or impure water…
Obama Derangement Syndrome: Yes It’s Racist
Here’s a sort of follow up to two earlier posts about subconscious racism and Obama Derangement Syndrome. Ira Rosofsky writes in Psychology Today:
Pollster Stanley Greenberg and political operative James Carville, last year, reported on a series of focus groups with older, white Republicans in Georgia. They were on a quest to understand the hardcore opposition to Obama. Is it racist?
They concluded no. They admonished us to “Get over it.” The animus to Obama, they claimed, is “based in the same unwavering, bedrock conservative principles that have always led them to oppose liberal policies. Some of their subjects even claim to be post racial-”proud” there is an African-American president.
I have my own informal focus group, and I’m not buying it.
I work as a psychologist in nursing homes, and I talk daily to the older salt of the earth. The other day I assessed the cognitive status of an 87-year-old male member of…
Revolutionary Musings
How do we kick this mother off? … the Fight, I mean.
Although we at Metabolic Chambers maintain this movement is about waking people up to the interconnectedness of all things, there is also a political element that must be addressed. The construct we refer to as “the government” is a twofold problem & solution: 1. The politicians who dictate policy. 2. The public who puts politicians in positions of power and authority. The government itself is merely a tool and is only as benevolent or malevolent as the people who wield its power. The Democratic and Republican parties are broken, obsolete relics of by-gone age. The evidence of that statement is the deterioration of the United States of America. The antidote is a new political party with a new vision for the future. The American Party.
It’s party time!
• The ECONOMY. The labor-based economy is dying in America due to outsourcing and…
U.S. Electrical Grid Too Crappy to Be Vulnerable to Terrorist Attack, Say Physicists
Interesting article from Annalee Newitz on io9.com:
The US government worries that terrorists could take down the country’s electrical grid just by hitting a small node in the system. But a new study reveals the grid is too unreliable for that kind of attack.
Last year, network theorists published some papers suggesting that terrorists could take down the entire US electrical grid by attacking a small, remote power station.
But new research shows that network theory models, which great for analyzing many complex systems, don’t work for patchwork systems like the US electrical grid. Basically, the grid was set up so haphazardly that you’d have to take out a major node before you’d affect the entire thing.
Science Daily sums up: [The] electric grid is probably more secure that many people realize — because it is so unpredictable. This, of course, makes it hard to improve its reliability (in another line of research, [study co-author Paul] Hines…
Tea Party Candidate: Abolish All Public Schools
Thought Americans were dumb enough as is? Apparently you’re just not ambitious enough; this from David Knowles at AOL’s Newsdesk:
School’s out … forever?
Tea Party candidate David Harmer, who is running as a Republican for the U.S. House of Representatives in California’s 11th District, thinks the nation’s public education system should more closely resemble the way it looked in 1825. In other words, Harmer would abolish public schools altogether.
In an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000, Harmer wrote the following:
To attain quantum leaps in educational quality and opportunity, however, we need to separate school and state entirely. Government should exit the business of running and funding schools.
This is no utopian ideal; it’s the way things worked through the first century of American nationhood, when literacy levels among all classes, at least outside the South, matched or exceeded those prevailing now, and when public discourse and even tabloid content was pitched…
The Statue of Liberty Hit By Lightning
Via Metro (UK):
This is the moment the Statue of Liberty was hit by lightning — and caught on camera by a photographer who waited two hours in a storm-hit New York City.
New Yorker Jay Fine apparently waited more than 40 years for the shot before braving the storm last month in Manhattan’s Battery Park City.
The 58-year-old photographer caught the incredible snap — but it was a rather arduous process capturing the perfect picture.
He said: ‘I had been watching weather reports so I knew a storm was coming and it just seemed like a great opportunity.
‘I was ready and waiting and took 81 shots before finally getting this one.
‘I was shocked when I realised what had happened.
‘It was pure luck really, a once in a lifetime opportunity. It’s the first photograph of its kind I have ever seen.’
Before “The Secretary,” Hannah Cullwick was “The Maid”
Cullwick claimed to be able to tell where her husband had been by the taste of his boots. Kathryn Hughes reviews Love and Dirt in the Guardian:
The secret marriage between minor man of letters Arthur Munby and his servant Hannah Cullwick has become one of the great set pieces of 19th-century social history. Whenever a case study is needed to show the sheer weirdness of Victorian men in the bedroom, the story of how the gentlemanly Munby stalked, caught and loved the huge, dirty Cullwick over a period of 40 years is pressed into play … At Munby’s direction, Cullwick produced thousands of pages of letters and memoir which told the strange story of how she came to spend 40 years in a sado-masochistic relationship where her greatest treat was to be allowed to lick her husband’s dirty boots (horse shit was her favourite relish).
Cullwick’s private name for Munby was “massa”,…
Man Sees Dalek In Tree Trunk, Mistakes It For Jesus
Hell of a mistake, friend. Instead of “Love thy neighbor as thyself” you might be facing: “Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!” Rich Johnston writes on Bleeding Cool:
From the Winston-Salem Journal comes this charming story about an elderly fellow, Bill Johnson, who has discovered the image of Jesus in a tree limb that fell in his front yard. He believes it to be a “robed image of Jesus with an outstretched hand. The head is near the center of the limb where the rings of the tree are lighter, giving an almost halo appearance.”
And he’s milked this observation in newspapers and TV … but seriously. Halo, or no halo, that’s not Jesus.
That’s a Dalek.
The two differ in a number of ways. One is the saviour of the world, the Son of God, who died and is risen and will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
And the other is a mutated…
Democrats Actually SHRANK Spending & the Deficit
Despite a lot of intentional misinformation put out by the GOP and their propaganda ministry at Fox or partisan radio shows like Rush Limbaugh, it seems the actual numbers say something completely different about the nature of the economy. On the subject of both the deficit and government spending, they are similarly incorrect/deluded in part because they listen to a relentless droning of rightwing media nearly exclusively.
The actual RAW DATA from the non-partisan OMB communicates something completely different however.
Per AFP via Raw Story:
- The U.S. deficit actually SHRANK 9% in the last fiscal year, down 122 billion dollars over the previous year.
- Democrats also brought down the cost of the financial “rescue” of the banks by $240 billion.
- 2010 marked the largest DECLINE in government spending since 1984.
- And thanks to cutting corporate loopholes, revenue increased by 3%.
Of interest in the article as well, is this statement by Republican Judd Gregg, who said, “Just…
Two Out of Three ‘Fox & Friends’ Think ‘All Terrorists are Muslim’
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
No one should believe that Fox & Friends is a bastion of journalistic integrity or even slightly interested in fact checking. However, the morning show took the cake in redefining those two terms this week when co-host Brian Kilmeade, declared “Not all Muslims are terrorists, all terrorists are Muslim.”
So, I suppose this would mean that the following terrorist organizations are somehow secret Muslims:
- Provisional Irish Republican Army (Catholic)
- Ulster Defense Association (Protestant)
- Real IRA (Catholic)
- Sons of Freedom (Christian)
- National Liberation Front of Tripura (Christian)
- Babbar Khalsa (Sikh)
The list could go on. If you spend more than ten seconds even on Wikipedia, you might learn that there are even Hindu terrorists targeting Muslims…
