dreday

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Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:49:53 -0500

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via BLAAAHG

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:04:24 -0500

via BLAAAHG

MRI Pornography

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:01:02 -0500

MRI Pornography

“If there’s anything worse than a secret Federal Reserve, it’s Congress...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:11:47 -0500

“If there’s anything worse than a secret Federal Reserve, it’s Congress...

Martian Landscape pictures via The Big...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:33:20 -0500

Martian Landscape pictures via The Big Picture

“Intersecting swirling trails left by the earlier passage of dust devils across sand dunes, as they lifted lighter reddish-pink dust and exposed the darker material below. Also visible are darker slope streaks along dune edges, formed by a process which is still under investigation.”

So wild…

War vs. Criminal Justice

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:15:50 -0500

The ambiguity began shortly after 9/11, when then-U.S. President George W. Bush defined two...

DidGlennBeckRapeAndMurderAYoungGirlIn1990.com legal battle...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:50:36 -0500

DidGlennBeckRapeAndMurderAYoungGirlIn1990.com legal battle over.

Beck Lost.

There is a hilarious irony here in this story in that Glenn Beck, in his attempted challenge to the satirical website, used the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO - a specialized United Nations agency) rather than bring it up in American courts. A major theme of Beck’s show, after all, is railing against a “one-world government” conspiracy among international organizations to undermine the U.S. Constitution. His legal team advised him that he would surely lose if he based his challenge on U.S. legal precedence.

Another deliciously ironic aspect of this whole story is that the website was employing a manipulation technique that Glenn Beck has himself mastered and employed on his own guests. When Beck interviewed Congressman Keith Ellison, a Muslim, he famously said

“No offense and I know Muslims, I like Muslims, I’ve been to mosques, I really don’t think Islam is a religion of evil. I think it’s being hijacked, quite frankly. With that being said, you are a Democrat. You are saying let’s cut and run. And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview because what I feel like saying is, sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies. And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy. But that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.”

Now, this whole rhetorical trick is simple. Beck attacks Ellison by asking him to prove that he is not “working with our enemies” thus putting the burden on Ellison to “prove” that the accusation is untrue. It’s a cheap imitation of a humor technique Gilbert Gottfried used to make fun of Bob Saget, in which Gottfried brought up a rumor that Bob Saget had raped and killed a girl in 1990, and then admonished the audience to stop spreading this untrue rumor (that hadn’t existed before Gottfried brought it up) - thus starting the rumor and subsequently questioning why Bob Saget hadn’t denied it. The basic equation is: (outrageous accusation) + (celebrity) + (question of why the celebrity does not deny the accusation) = (confirmation of the falsity of the accusation + laughter).

Beck tried to do the same thing, without the humor, to Keith Ellison. And the website did the same thing to Beck, except with the humor. And Beck lost. And the website won.

Obama hates women?

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:36:00 -0500

In light of all the controversy around the health care bill passed in the House late Saturday night...

the most adorable dead fly i’ve ever seen plenty more,...

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:50:01 -0400

the most adorable dead fly i’ve ever seen

plenty more, including a dead fly gang-bang, where that came from here

Q: Is that an Arlington bum with a laptop? A: Yes it is. Q: What...

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:13:58 -0400

Q: Is that an Arlington bum with a laptop?

A: Yes it is.

Q: What does that say about the economy/capitalism-in-general?

A: I have no idea, but I love it.

Hookworm for my sniffles Apparently letting a few hookworms (10...

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:25:55 -0400

Hookworm for my sniffles

Apparently letting a few hookworms (10 seems to work) into your digestive tract can “turn down” your immune system enough to get rid of your allergies. Thinking about going to Cameroon and walking around in some piles of shit so I can finally get that pet kitty I’ve always wanted.

Thanks Radio Lab

“More than half of babies born in rich nations today will...

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:05:27 -0400

“More than half of babies born in rich nations today will live to 100…”

via reuters

The Nuclear Sword of Damocles “The great question which...

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:40:18 -0400

The Nuclear Sword of Damocles

“The great question which confronted this body in 1945 is still before us: whether man’s cherished hopes for progress and peace are to be destroyed by terror and disruption. … Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. … Men no longer maintain that disarmament must await the settlement of all disputes—for disarmament must be part of any permanent settlement. … The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race. … Ladies and gentlemen of this Assembly, the decision is ours. Never have the nations of the world had so much to lose or so much to gain. Together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames.”

-JFK

Healthy Living in Hard Times

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:18:36 -0400

Yet another interesting study I’ve been forced to digest. It shows that during temporary...

The Cost Conundrum Check out the article Obama required his...

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:12:00 -0400

The Cost Conundrum

Check out the article Obama required his staff to read. It explores the idea of the patient as a “profit-center,” and compares different health care systems by outcomes and cost. My favorite paragraph that kind of sums up the whole argument:

“Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.

As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.”

A(H1N1): Just Another Flu

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:28:45 -0400

Within the United States, the data STRATFOR finds most complete comes from New York City, one of the...

RIP Norman Bourlag The greatest humanitarian in the world just...

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:13:00 -0400

RIP Norman Bourlag

The greatest humanitarian in the world just died.

To every organic pushing eco-hippy out there protesting the use of selective genetic breeding and modification, take a brief moment to ponder the work of Norman Bourlag, a man who has probably saved more human lives than anyone else in history. He died at age 95 this past Saturday, Sept. 12th, 2009.

He is widely credited as being the father of the Green Revolution, a title he modestly denounced as “a miserable term.” While most academics in the 1960’s were predicting inevitable mass famine due to untamed population growth, Bourlag brushed aside the ridiculous notion that we could somehow control this growth and instead worked tirelessly on a real solution. His genetically modified dwarf wheat resisted a wide range of plant pests and diseases, and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties. Bourlag and his colleagues began a massive campaign to ship this wheat to Pakistan and India, and to teach local farmers how to cultivate it.

It worked. In five years wheat yields nearly doubled in both India and Pakistan. Researchers in the Philippines expanded on his methods to produce similarly high yield dwarf varieties of rice. Consequently, instead of massive famines, the past four decades have seen amazing progress in agricultural that has handily outmatched any population explosion. His worked has literally saved hundreds of millions of lives.

Bourlag acknowledged the detrimental impact that modern agriculture can have on the environment. But he also recognized that high yield agricultural takes far less land to make the same amount of food as traditional farming does. “Had crop yields been frozen at 1961 levels, growing as much food produced today would require more than a doubling cropland, from 3.7 to 8 billion acres. This is an area nearly equal to the size of South America. In other words, the entire Amazon rain forest would now be gone.”

He also knew how life was for the poor living in developing countries, and properly put his elitist “green” critics in their place. “They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger,” he told the Atlantic Monthly in 1997. “They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

Dr. Bourlag is a beast. And the world is a better place because of him.

Allostatic Load

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:33:53 -0400

According to one study, there are health disparities between Blacks and Whites evident at all...

So you know how certain lizards can voluntarily shed their own...

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:51:28 -0400

So you know how certain lizards can voluntarily shed their own tails when attacked? Well apparently a gecko’s severed tail can respond to environmental cues, flipping and wiggling around in a deft attempt to both buy the gecko some time (by distracting the predator) as well as to perhaps save itself. This way the gecko can return after the predator is gone, eat it’s own severed tail and restore all the fat and resources that are contained within. I’m impressed.

Photo

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:40:08 -0400