The Higher The Body Count, The More Popular The President
Noticed via OrgTheory:
The finding is simple. War casualties, as a fraction of the population, positively correlate with how historians rate presidents. More death = better presidents. The regression model includes some controls, like economic growth. This is consistent with sociological research on state building, which has traditionally linked wars, bureaucratic growth, and tax collection.
Young Mitt Romney Makes A Lot of Sense Talking About Politics and Partisanship (Video)
Mitt Romney’s parents were two moderate politicians who bucked the Republican establishment of the time, an idea that has been unthinkable to Mitt in his two presidential campaigns. Maybe it’s time to have a talk with your younger self, Mitt. Great find from Andrew Kaczynski on Buzzfeed:
Mitt Romney’s roots in politics run in his family. His father George served as the Governor of Michigan from 1963–1969 and later as HUD Secretary in the Nixon Administration. George Romney was a natural and charismatic politician, but the younger Romney perhaps better takes after his mother Lenore, who lacked her husband’s natural political gifts. Lenore Romney ran for Senate in 1970, and 23-year-old Mitt Romney campaigned during his summer vacation for his mom. Romney appeared in a video made for her campaign.
The History Of Neoliberalism — And How To Undo It
Via New Left Project, London School of Economics professor Jason Hickel on the 1980s rise of neoliberalism — the belief system that defines our reality:
I often find that my students take today’s dominant economic ideology – namely, neoliberalism – for granted as natural and inevitable. This is not entirely surprising given that most of them were born in the early 1990s, for neoliberalism is all that they have known. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had to convince people that there was “no alternative” to neoliberalism. Today, this assumption comes ready-made; it’s in the water, part of the common-sense furniture of everyday life.
If an economist living in the 1950s had seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in today’s standard neoliberal toolkit, they would have been laughed right off the stage. As Susan George has put it, “That the market should be allowed to make major social and political decisions;…
How The CIA Doped San Franciscans With LSD
Did the CIA accidentally turn San Francisco into America’s grooviest city? SF Weekly on newly uncovered details on Operation Midnight Climax, one of the absolute strangest slices of U.S. history:
Wayne Ritchie may be among the last of the living victims of MK-ULTRA, a Central Intelligence Agency operation that covertly tested LSD on unwitting Americans in San Francisco and New York City from 1953 to 1964.
There were at least three CIA safe houses in the Bay Area where experiments went on. Chief among them was 225 Chestnut on Telegraph Hill, which operated from 1955 to 1965. Inside, prostitutes paid by the government to lure clients to the apartment served up acid-laced cocktails to unsuspecting johns, while martini-swilling secret agents observed their every move from behind a two-way mirror. Recording devices were installed, some disguised as electrical outlets.
To get the guys in the mood, the walls were adorned with photographs of tortured women…
Scholar: Resurrection Of Christ Was An Optical Illusion
Basically, the claim is that Jesus’s rising from the dead circa 2,000 years ago happened much in the same way as his being spotted in potato chips today. The Daily Mail writes:
A sensational new theory about the Turin Shroud claims to destroy the core belief of Christianity – that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
Art historian Thomas de Wesselow is convinced the Shroud is real and did touch Christ’s body. But the Cambridge academic insists that the image on the cloth fooled the Apostles into believing Christ had come back to life, and the Resurrection was in fact an optical illusion.
His theory is that in the mind of a person 2,000 years ago, the image on the Shroud would have been astonishing – far beyond their normal experiences and truly unsettling. ‘They saw the image on the cloth as the living double of Jesus,’ he said. ‘Back then images had a…
Why Some Civil War Soldiers Glowed in the Dark
Matt Soniak writes on Mental Floss:
By the spring of 1862, a year into the American Civil War, Major General Ulysses S. Grant had pushed deep into Confederate territory along the Tennessee River. In early April, he was camped at Pittsburg Landing, near Shiloh, Tennessee, waiting for Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s army to meet up with him.
On the morning of April 6, Confederate troops based out of nearby Corinth, Mississippi, launched a surprise offensive against Grant’s troops, hoping to defeat them before the second army arrived. Grant’s men, augmented by the first arrivals from the Ohio, managed to hold some ground, though, and establish a battle line anchored with artillery. Fighting continued until after dark, and by the next morning, the full force of the Ohio had arrived and the Union outnumbered the Confederates by more than 10,000.
The Union troops began forcing the Confederates back, and while a counterattack stopped…
Could Humankind Ever Transcend War?
On the Last Word On Nothing, a debate on whether or not war is an innate part of the human makeup. Scientist John Horgan says no:
There is no evidence of hominid or human group violence (as opposed to isolated acts of violence) dating back millions or even tens of thousands of years. The oldest evidence of deadly group violence by humans — a mass grave in the Nile Valley — is about 13,000 years old, and the vast bulk of evidence dates from 10,000 years ago or less, leading scholars such as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Doug Fry, and Erik Trinhaus to conclude that war is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon, associated often with agriculture and permanent settlements.
In response, some skeptics say, Well, we don’t have good evidence of any human behaviors more than 10,000 years ago. Actually, we have evidence of many complex cultural behaviors — tool-making, hunting, cooking, art,…
Iraq War’s Curveball Confesses All
Remember how the Bush era had pivotal, history-altering characters with names like “Brownie” and “Curveball”? The latter comes clean and has no regrets, via the Independent:
A man who helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow. “Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up.
When it is put to him, “We went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi simply replies: “Yes.”
His lies were presented as “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” by Colin Powell when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003, after US officials “sexed up” Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs, admits General Powell’s former chief of staff.
Mr. Janabi tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq.”
Exploding H-Bombs In Space: Operation Starfish Prime
It was hypothesized at the time, the radiation might provide a defensive shield above the U.S. against Soviet nukes, but aside from the light show, it ended up frying many of our satellites. The radiation took 10 years to dissipate, which made study of our natural radiation belts, the Van Allen belts, problematic during that period.
Wikipedia has a good article explaining the test and NPR has a good article and video about it from a few years ago:
Back in the summer of 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in outer space, some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. It was a weapons test, but one that created a man-made light show that has never been equaled — and hopefully never will:
40 Years Ago, A Congressional Commission Told The Truth About Marijuana
So you think the government has been lying to you about the effects of cannabis (marijuana)?
Well, are you aware that the United States Congress concluded with the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, a.k.a., the Shafer Commission:
“…that the] possession of marijuana for personal use no longer be an offense, [and that the] casual distribution of small amounts of marihuana for no remuneration, or insignificant remuneration, no longer be an offense.”
Paul Armentano writes a brief synopsis on NORML’s blog on how the U.S. federal government has ignored its own fact-finding in favor of doing the opposite and counter-intuitive for the past forty years.
Also, for those of you that would like to read the Shafer Commission report, “Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding,” you can check it out here at the Shafer Library of Drug Policy.
Why Is Nearly Every President Left Handed?
Did you know that being left-handed is basically a requirement to hold the U.S. presidency? Lefties comprise just 10 percent of the population, yet the only right-handed president over the past three decades was George Dubya Bush. What does it mean? Are the left-dominant a superior race? Is the “evil” hand some sort of Illuminati-approved symbol? Via Wikipedia:
As of 2012, four (five if Reagan is counted) out of the last seven presidents have been left-handed. In the 1992 election, all three major candidates – George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot – were left-handed. The 1996 election also involved three left-handed candidates: Clinton, Perot, and Bob Dole, who learned to use his left hand after his right hand was paralyzed by a World War II injury. Additionally, both major-party candidates in the 2008 presidential election – Barack Obama and John McCain – were left-handed.
According to Daniel Geschwind, a…
The United States Under Permanent State Of Emergency
Did you know that we in the U.S. are living under the gravest of danger, like, always? Via Parapolitical:
Due to a variety of crises, the United States has been in an almost continuous State of Emergency since 1941.
A declaration of emergency allows the President to exercise any of approximately 500 powers contingently delegated to him by Congress, from the dramatic – such as the seizure of ships in port (50 USC § 191) – to the mundane – such as the waiver of vehicle weight limits on a section of I-95 in Maine (23 USC § 127).
The Pyramid Of Capitalism, 1911
Some perspective displayed in a poster created approximately a century ago by The Industrial Worker. The tiered wedding cake of society, if you will. Via Retronaut:
A Tree Falls In The Forest …
Sabu Masked
To paraphrase the old Buddhist koan, “When Sabu shoots himself in the head, alone in the desert, will anyone care?” What, for that matter, about the copper who turned him?
By now every one’s read at an account of how an influential member of the hacktivest collective Lulzsec was co-opted by American “law enforcement” to incite his fellow members into incriminating behavior for which they may now spend the rest of their natural lives behind bars.
Some of these stories have focused on local interest of individual participants in the drama. Others have investigated the nature of hacker culture. Still others on the legal problems presented by the apparently classic “entrapment” strategy used by the FBI. But to date I have yet to see one discuss at any length the operation here of the deeper psycho/social dynamic that underlies the the self-concept of both Lulzsec and police forces.
This seems very odd to…
The Declining Influence of the U.S. Constitution
Joel S. Hirschhorn writes at Common Dreams:
Among Americans there remains strong pride about the US Constitution, even though there is widespread support for creating reform amendments to it. Globally, however, what should surprise Americans is a significant loss of respect for it. Other nations, especially those creating new democracies, see better constitutions elsewhere. This is not opinion. It is fact. And it is important to understand this historic shift.
A new university study sends a disturbing message to all Americans that want to hang on to the fiction that the US constitution is not only the world’s best one, but does not need to be improved. Do not mentally block this finding: “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to the study by David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia.
What exists today is far different than what was…
Home Movies From The Manhattan Project
Newly unveiled — a beautiful, haunting glimpse at life inside the carefree, secret 1940s desert summer camp that birthed the atom bomb:
In 1943, the top scientists from the United States and other nations gathered in Los Alamos, NM for the Manhattan Project. Among them was physicist Hugh Bradner. With informal permission from the U.S. Army, he shot a collection of home movies of life in a place that officially didn’t exist, and of people working on a project that ultimately changed history. His footage represents the only look at life in the Los Alamos area during that time.
Varney the Vampire’s Feast of Blood
The fictional vampire may have made his debut at the Algonquin Round Table, but he flourished alongside the cave-dwelling cannibals and homicidal maniacs who introduced the British working class to the magic of reading. The 1845-1847 penny dreadful Varney the Vampire was penned by none other than James Malcolm Rymer, who created the character Sweeney Todd. Victorian Gothic writes:
James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire has been described as the worst book of the 19th century. Introduced in 1845, the completed serial consists of over 600,000 words of tedious dialog, aimlessly meandering storylines, maddening repetition, and enough kernels of genius to consistently inspire horror fiction into the present day. Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Russell T. Davies and Freidrich Wilhelm Murnau are just some of the writers and filmmakers who have been indebted to concepts originated in the pages of Varney, making it easily the most influential vampire story that nobody reads.
The first full-length work of vampire fiction, Varney appeared in the…
After the First Sleep: The Myth of 8 Hours a Night
Stephanie Hegarty reports in BBC News:
We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.
Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists …
Trafalgar Square Riot Of 1913
What did civil disobedience look like a century ago? Considerably calmer and more formally dressed. Riots broke out after busloads of suffragettes poured into central London, resulting in the police arresting women for their own safety. From the British Film Institute:
A suffragette procession in Trafalgar Square led by Sylvia Pankhurst results in a riot in Whitehall. Policemen are seen escorting Miss Pankhurst away.
