These were concocted by John Cole of Balloon Juice (via Andrew Sullivan):

1.) “Would you have sex with a man to stop a terrorist attack?”

2.) “If lowering taxes results in increased revenues then would lowering taxes to zero result in infinite revenues?”

3.) “If you had a time machine, would you travel back in time and abort Bin Laden?”

4.) “Would you torture and kill Jesus to ensure mankind’s salvation? And how does that work?”

Republican apologists for George Bush have been trying to justify his enormous disaster in Iraq by pointing out that no major terrorist attacks have occurred in the U.S. since 9/11. They assert, without proof, that Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq (including his policies of rendition, torture, warrantless wiretaps, suspension of habeus corpus, etc.) have helped to prevent another terrorist event. They claim this demonstrates that America is “winning the war on terror.” Several Republican presidential candidates, and quite a few congressional ones, have been making such arguments to bolster their campaigns for the 2008 election. Their reasoning contains two glaring errors. One is that correlation does not prove causation. There is simply no evidence of any causal relationship between Bush’s invasion of Iraq and the absence of major terrorist attacks in America. Stationing U.S. troops in Baghdad might offer Mid-East terrorists easier American targets, thus reducing their desire to come to America, but it does not prevent them from doing so.  Indeed, the available evidence indicates that terrorist recruiting has dramatically increased in the Mid-East over the past few years, suggesting that Bush’s invasion has increased the long-term terrorist threat and greatly reduced America’s long-term security.

A second, and more disturbing, flaw in Republican reasoning is their erroneous assumption that suicide bombing is the only way to attack a nation. There is also, for example, economic terrorism. Indeed, America itself has often used economic terrorism — e.g., trade sanctions, predatory lending, etc. — to bully and coerce other nations. We should not assume America cannot also be a target of such attacks, though of a different type than America uses.

In this latter regard, George Bush might be al Qaida’s best friend. Not only has Bush’s occupation of Iraq been a political failure, it has also been a financial disaster. For the relatively insignificant cost of box-cutters, suicide vests, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), etc., al Qaida and other Muslim extremist groups have inflicted gigantic losses against the U.S. treasury — to the tune of half a trillion dollars and rising. Indeed, the entire terrorist budget spent against America is probably less than the $25 billion that America has lost in Iraq to fraud and corruption alone. Were you in Osama bin Laden’s shoes right now, you would no doubt be delighted with Bush’s so-called “war on terrorism,” especially his invasion of Iraq. Bush has destroyed America’s moral standing across the globe; enraged the Muslim world against the west; given Muslim extremists easy American targets to kill in Iraq; ignited huge al Qaida recruiting efforts all over the Middle East; and, to top it all off, driven America deeply into debt to pay for it. For every dollar al Qaida has spent against America, Bush has spent ten thousand to respond. Sure, al Qaida has not blown up any more American real estate, but what more could they wish to achieve? George Bush has done more to weaken America and strengthen al Qaida in the past six years than Osama bin Laden himself has done. Perhaps it is no surprise that al Qaida has not blown up more buildings in America: why should they? Bush is already doing more to ruin America than they could possibly hope to achieve through the bombing of a few buildings. In the “war on terror,” Bush has been al Qaida’s best ally. He is, unwittingly, their best friend.

I hope you will consider these issues when you hear Republican political candidates praising Bush’s policies in the so-called “war on terror.” When they point to the absence of a major terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11, do not assume this demonstrates that Bush’s policies are succeeding. In fact, the opposite is true, because American losses have come in other forms — forms that are not measured in collapsed buildings, but in spiraling debt, a falling value of the U.S. dollar, and widespread disgust with American policies.

I bristled yesterday as I read yet another faux-controversy concocting article in my misguided home town paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  You see, Body Worlds is coming to my town and the morality “experts” are getting restless.  The “concern” is that maybe we shouldn’t be staring at dead bodies.  The morality experts quoted by the article are suggesting that the Body Worlds exhibit, sponsored by the St. Louis Science Center, “exploits the dead for entertainment and commerce.”

What is Body Worlds?  Check out the short video at the bottom of this page.  Here’s a written description from the official Body Worlds site:

The BODY WORLDS exhibitions are first-of-their-kind exhibitions through which visitors learn about anatomy, physiology, and health by viewing real human bodies, using an extraordinary process called Plastination a groundbreaking method for specimen preservation invented by Dr. von Hagens in 1977. Each exhibition features more than 200 real human specimens, including whole-body plastinates, individual organs, organ configurations and transparent body slices. The specimens on display stem from the body donation program that Gunther von Hagens established in 1983. The exhibitions also allow visitors to see and better understand the long-term impact of diseases, the effects of tobacco consumption and the mechanics of artificial supports such as knees and hips. To date, nearly 25 million people around the world have viewed the BODY WORLDS exhibits.

I visited the Body Worlds exhibit twice while it was in Chicago two years ago.  The exhibition was breath-taking and educational.  I plan to see Body Worlds III while it is in St. Louis.  I plan to bring my kids (aged 7 and 9), because this is a terrific chance to learn about one of the most incredible phenomena on Earth—the human body.  Viewing the body from the numerous perspectives offered by the exibitors, the question is not why it sometimes breaks down or dies.  The real question is how it ever actually works, given its surreal complexity.  There is no reason that human specimens should be viewable by anatomy students, but off-limits to the rest of us.  Why has the viewing of dead humans become off-limits to most of us?  There is probably no single reason, but it’s not because we aren’t interested in viewing dead bodies.  I’ve long suspected that it’s due to a widespread reluctance to consider the undeniable fact that humans are animals. See here and here and here and here and here and here.

While at Body Worlds, I plan to be inspired (as I was in Chicago) by Gunther von Hagens’ professionalism and creativity.  He puts boundless time and energy into preparing his specimens. Perhaps the problem for some people is that von Hagens has a little fun with his specimens.  Instead laying the bodies out on slabs, he arranges them in real-world postures.  They “do” things like play chess and ride bicycles.  Oh, but how dare they arrange dead human bodies so that they are doing the same things that living humans do! Such disrespect!

Yes, there are now accusations that Body Worlds is “exploiting the dead for entertainment and commerce,” as though the dead can be exploited.  And as though dead bodies aren’t exploited whenever they are dressed up for wakes, to allow us to pretend that those dead people are merely sleeping.

Consider yet another way of displaying images of dead human bodies:  Two days ago, my family attended a St. Louis animal preserve run by Anheuser-Busch.  This beautiful facility is called “Grant’s Farm” because part of the land was once owned by Ulysses S. Grant.  Given that Halloween is coming up, the grounds were decorated with ghoulish specimens that undoubtedly exploit the dead for entertainment and commerce.  Check out these photos, then nod your head in agreement that we have a stark double-standard at play:

                      (more…)

The Onion News Network always gives us top notch humor.  Often, though, ONN uses its wit to effectively make a serious point.

I understand that we are all a bit nervous now that a persona named “Mark Tiedemann” has seemingly come out of nowhere to take over Jason Rayl’s body. I’m hoping that Jason didn’t go down without a fight because I did enjoy many of Jason’s posts.

Actually, I’ve known Mark Tiedemann for 20 years.  I’ve known him as a precise yet eloquent writer, as a thinker, as a musician and as a friend.  It’s good to have him here using his actual name, though I fully understood why Mark began his early blogging career under an assumed name– he discusses those reasons here.

I know that Mark has been considering the use of his actual name for several months.  I chuckle at his recent surprise when I advised Mark that one of his posts, “Reading in America,”  had become quite popular, with more than 20,000 people reading it over the past week.  I suspect that the difficulty of taking some personal credit for this solid piece of writing made anonymity a bit too cumbersome for him. Or perhaps he made the move in a moment of jealousy, because that guy named “Jason” was outshining him. The endpoint is the same, no matter the ultimate reason: Welcome to this blog, Mark Tiedemann! 

I suspect that Dangerous Intersection is unusual in that most of our authors post using their actual names.  It’s surprising that so many of us are doing this, given the numerous controversial issues raised by this blog– consider also that we often don’t take the most popular positions on these issues.

I thought about blogging anonymously when I was first setting up this blog.  I was concerned about using my full actual name because it was possible that someone with whom I dealt in my career as an attorney (potentially a judge or a juror) might take offense at a position I took.  On the other hand, I thought that it would give the blog more credibility if at least some of the authors posted in their actual names.  This latter approach won out in my head (I don’t have a persona named “Jason Rayl” in my head, but I do have “discussions” up there). 

Actually, this reminds me of a related topic.  We do write frankly on controversial issues at the site.  When beginning this blog, I was somewhat concerned that this would cause some people to get very angry.  If that has happened much, I am not aware of it. Perhaps, when people get pissed off with something we write, they tend to just leave the site rather than to make a scene through comments. What we have tried to do (though obviously we are not always successful at this) is to speak directly yet respectfully.  I am convinced that there is always a way to discuss controversial issues in ways that don’t unnecessarily antagonize people with opposing points of view.  When we take care to do our writing with that in mind (and Jason — er — Mark excels at this), we make our blog more personal and much less prone to cause such flareups.

I’m glad that I chose to blog using my real name and I’m relieved that so many of the co-authors followed suit (even though I invited each of them to blog using a pseudonym if they preferred that). Again, I am amazed that so many of the authors agreed to blog in their actual names, given the potential risks for doing so. I enjoy having a blog where many of us are plainly who we are.  It is in that context that I again welcome “Mark Tiedemann” to Dangerous Intersection.

Here are the numbers.   Obama is running his campaign without taking money from PACS or lobbyists. 

Senator Bernie Sanders writes that the American Middle Class is being decimated.  He cites some interesting numbers.  Here’s a couple shockers:

Robert Frank, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has detailed the lives of the rich and famous in the book Richistan. He writes that households with a net worth of between $100 million and $1 billion last year spent an average of $182,000 on watches. Meanwhile, in the real world, 400,000 qualified students were unable to go to college because they lacked the funds.

Frank also details how during this one-year period the economically elite households spent $311,000 on cars, $397,000 on jewelry and $169,000 on spa services. At the same time, President Bush presented a budget in which he proposed cuts that would deny child care to 300,000 families and food stamps for 280,000 families.

Glenn Greenwald points out that an inordinate number of neocons didn’t earn their warmongering positions of power.  Rather, they were put their by their parents: 

It really is endlessly striking — and revealing — just how nepotistic the neoconservative tough-guy faction is…

[O]ur neoconservative tough guys [are] the very opposite of those virtues they claim to embody. Their whole movement is based on endless sermons about warrior virtues, self-reliance, toughness, courage and the like — and yet a huge bulk of them, and virtually all of the most influential ones, never leave the safe and protective sides of their moms and dads.

They faithfully follow in their footprints without wavering — not only having their careers built for them by their parents and their parents’ friends but also never deviating even slightly from the extremist political views that their parents raised them to spout. They are coddled, protected, sheltered recipients of endless nepotistic, parental largesse who never tire of sermonizing to the world about the necessities of self-sufficiency and meritocracies and whose entire world-view is driven by the insatiable quest to send other people off to one war after the next — all while they insist to the world how their war advocacy shows how tough, resolute, and willful they are, self-glorifying announcements they make from positions arranged for them by their moms and dads.

Via Emerging Pensees

But what’s puzzlin’ you is the nature of my game…

That’s about the only song I can stand to listen to the Rolling Stones do.  Musically, thematically, it all comes together for them.  It’s perfect.  Beyond that, while I certaiinly like a lot of their songs, I cannot abide listening to the Stones.  Particularly, I can’t tolerate Mick Jagger’s sorry excuse for a singing voice.  Call me old fashioned, but a hoarse tenor croak is not pleasant to listen to.

(To be fair, I can’t stand Tony Bennet, AC/DC, Rod Stewart. Or Bruce Springsteen, largely for the same reasons.)

I start this piece with that bit of personal revelation for a reason.  Voice, to me, is very important.  Getting it right, using it properly, saying something meaningful…they all work together.  One may argue over style vs. substance—and there is validity to the argument, for certainly some people have nothing but style (Celine Dion comes to mind) and it would be nice if they had something to say—but ultimately, to get across what you mean, the two must work hand-in-glove.

When Erich invited me to contribute to Dangerous Intersection, I agreed under the proviso that I use a pseudonym.  My reasons were many, but mainly I wasn’t sure how good I’d be at it, and I wanted to practice.  But practicing in public can be…dicey.  So while I learned better how to do this, I elected to do it behind the cloak of an alter ego.

Jason Rayl is my creation.  In many ways, he is me.  He is a character in an unpublished novel I wrote in my late teens and early twenties, the first novel I ever completed.  It’s a big sucker and may never see the light of day, but the main character is very much me.  Or, at least, a very idealized version of who I thought I was and who I thought I’d like to be.  I grew out of him, but from time to time he’s been useful.

My name is Mark W. Tiedemann and I write science fiction.  You can find my books on Amazon.  I’ve posted a link to my own website, which I’ve just finished revamping.  It’s not all done yet, but done enough.  There, you’ll find a page called The Distal Muse, which is where I post news and assorted ramblings, and may now be posting much of what I’ve been posting here.  If Erich permits, I may cross post.

It’s not so much that I think I’ve mastered this form of writing—I wonder how many ever master their words—but I think the experiment has paid off and frankly I’m not in the least ashamed of anything I’ve put on Dangerous Intersection.  I would not be ashamed of the content in any event, but the voice….ah, the voice.  From time to time in my life I’ve committed actual songwriting.  Whatever other merits my attempts may possess, I do not sing them myself.  I don’t have the voice.

When Stephen King did away with Richard Bachman, he declared that Bachman had died “from cancer of the pseudonym.”  In Jason’s case, it was bad cold.

I said I write science fiction.  I’ve published ten novels, fifty plus short stories.  Writing fiction of any kind forces one to grow perspective.  Writing science fiction requires an appreciation if not a full understanding of how systems work and why things come together the way they do.  Historical writing shares this.  What it has done for—or to—me is cause me to see as many sides of an issue as I can grasp.  Consequently, I cannot abide doctrinaire positions, ideologues, Us Or Them thinking.  This has also caused many friends to view me with frustration and consternation, because they can’t pin my sympathies down.  Am I a liberal?  A conservative?  Reactionary, radical, libertarian?  Relativist?

See all of the above.  More often than not I take a “curse on both your houses” approach, because more often than not the primary issues are overlooked, run down, trampled, or twisted in the name of political expediency.
This has caused me to draw back from posting on some topic on which I have strong feelings, but can’t quite find the center of, and don’t wish to shortchange the complexities of what may really be going on in the interest of presenting a solid front for one position or another.

For instance, this whole mad, trendy, fashionable rush for bio-fuels.  I have friends who two years ago would never have admitted to any sympathy with Green anything and are now on the bandwagon for ethanol.  Why?  “We need to become independent of foreign oil.”  And when I say, “oh, so we should become dependent then on foreign sugar?”  they look at me as if I’d just farted at the birthday party.  See, they now support this for political reasons, not environmental reasons, and I find that just as objectionable as unthinking support for Big Oil.  It will solve nothing, just shift the focus of the problem.  The issues are far more complex than party politics allow.  Even though the bedrock issue is as simple as first-year algebra, and no one really wants to talk meaningfully about it.

Which means I stand outside both groups and lob stink bombs.  Not a comfortable place to be.

But it’s where I am and where I live.

So I thought it would be a good time to introduce myself.  So now you know who and what I am and can accept or reject what I say with full knowledge that you’ve been addressed by a Science Fiction writer.

Excuse me?  The bedrock problem?  Oh, sorry.  Population.  Very simply, there are just too damn many people on the planet, with no obvious possibility of curtailing the growth rate.  People don’t want to talk about that.  In order to live, to survive, to be what we may potentially be, we have to burn energy.  We have to burn something.  What that something is, frankly, is less important in the long run than the fact that we have to burn it.  Solar is passive, sure, but make solar panels we have to use petroleum, heat, the kind of high tech that has emerged as a legacy of a burning economy.  Hydropower is also pasisve, but building dams has other environmental drawbacks and is not transportable everywhere.  Geothermal?  Well, sure, but we may be releasing heat.

No simple answer.  The one factor, which if addressed could begin to solve some of these problems is population, but people insist, in aggregate, that they are separate from “nature” in this instance.  We take for ourselves the unhampered right to reproduce at will, without restraint, and that means that all the solutions we come up with for this overcharged fossil fuel existence are band-aids.  What could be sustainable and manageable at a billion people is a horrific problem at seven billion.  The planet isn’t getting any bigger.

There have been science fiction writers talking about this for decades.

Anyway, if you’ve a mind, come over to my website occasionally.  Or, if the whole pseudonym thing has put you off, stop reading me altogether.  I’m done with the experiment and feel that I have gotten from it what I needed.  So from now on, it’s me you’ll be dealing with.  Not Jason.  Oh, he’s not gone.  He always was part of me and always will be.  But he’s on my advisory board now.  Retired from public life for the time being.

Pleased to meet you…hope you get my name.

Steven Pinker on consciousness (from an interview in Slate.com):

It might not be the actual stuff of the brain that makes us conscious so much as it is the information processing. I don’t think Chalmers’ view [that the physical laws of science will never explain consciousness] would give much support to a traditional religious view about the existence of a soul. He says that consciousness resides in information. So a computer could be conscious and a thermostat could have a teensy bit of consciousness as well. Still, the information content requires some kind of physical medium to support the distinctions that make up the information. And the Cartesian idea that there are two kinds of stuff in the universe — mind and matter — doesn’t find a comfortable home in current views of consciousness . . .

[T]he reason I’m not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization. For the same reason that a movie critic doesn’t focus a magnifying glass on the little microscopic pits in a DVD, even though a movie is nothing but a pattern of pits in a DVD. I think there’s a lot of insight that you’ll gain about the human mind by looking at the whole human behaving, thinking and reporting on his own consciousness. And that might be true of creativity as well. It may be that the historian, the cognitive psychologist and the biographer working together will give us more insight than someone looking at neurons and brain chemistry.

Well, not exactly, but the big picture is a disturbing one from the perspective of the millions of people criminally prosecuted every year for seeking to self-medicate using street drugs .  If all of those mind altering street drugs are really “bad,” then they should stay illegal. But maybe it’s not so bad to feel good as long as you’ve got enough money to buy Congress:

[O]ver the last two decades, the pharmaceutical industry has developed a full set of substitutes for just about every illegal narcotic we have. Avoiding the highly charged politics of “illegal” drugs, the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, and citizens have thus quietly created the means for Americans to get at substitutes for almost all the drugs banned in the 20th century. Through the magic of tolerated use, it’s actually the other drug legalization movement, and it has been much more successful than the one you read about in the papers.

That’s why drug legalization is happening in a wholly different way. Over the last two decades, the FDA has become increasingly open to drugs designed for the treatment of depression, pain, and anxiety—drugs that are, by their nature, likely to mimic the banned Schedule I narcotics. Part of this is the product of a well-documented relaxation of FDA practice that began under Clinton and has increased under Bush. But another part is the widespread public acceptance of the idea that the effects drug users have always been seeking in their illicit drugs—calmness, lack of pain, and bliss—are now “treatments” as opposed to recreation. We have reached a point at which it’s commonly understood that when people snort cocaine because they’re depressed or want to function better at work, that’s drug trafficking; but taking antidepressants for similar purposes is practicing medicine.

This other drug legalization movement is an example of what theorists call legal avoision. As described by theorist Leon Katz, the idea is to reach “a forbidden outcome … as a by-product of a permitted act.”

For Tim Wu’s full article at Slate.com, see (”American Lawbreaking“). 

Download a frame by frame deconstruction of the twirling dancer optical illusion. Make your own mini flipbook animation!

. . . and says the obvious, I should add.  Last week, it was retired General Sanchez, who blasted the Bush Administration, calling it “incompetent” in the way it has run the Iraq occupation.

This week, it’s Retired General John Abizaid, former CENTCOM Commander, who spoke about Iraq:

During a round table discussion on “the Fight for Oil, Water and a Healthy Planet” at Stanford University on Saturday, Gen. John Abizaid (Ret.), the former CENTCOM Commander, said that “of course” the Iraq war is “about oil“: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that,” Abizaid said of the Iraq campaign early on in the talk.

“We’ve treated the Arab world as a collection of big gas stations,” the retired general said. “Our message to them is: Guys, keep your pumps open, prices low, be nice to the Israelis and you can do whatever you want out back. Osama and 9/11 is the distilled essence that represents everything going on out back.”

In his new book, The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman cites some statling numbers regarding American attitudes toward miscegenation.  The good news is that we are changing for the better, at least viewed in the long term:

Beyond the blunt, crude fact that America is getting less white, there’s a more uplifting reason to believe that the political exploitation of race may be losing its force: As a nation we’ve become much less racist. The most dramatic evidence of diminishing racism is the way people respond to questions about a subject that once struck terror into white hearts: miscegenation. In 1978, as the ascent of movement conservatism to power was just beginning, only 36 percent of Americans polled by Gallup approved of marriages between whites and blacks, while 54 percent disapproved. As late as 1991 only a plurality of 48 percent approved. By 2002, however, 65 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriages; by June 2007, that was up to 77 percent.

I recently met a person who just can’t shut up.  She chatters endlessly, which wears me out.  I have discussed her tendency to dominate conversations with other people; they have noted the same way about her.   She rarely allows other people a chance to take a turn speaking during conversations.

All of us dread this woman’s invitations to spend time with us.  Perhaps she suspects that we don’t like something about her personality, which is not true: she is truly an intelligent and kind-hearted person.  The problem is only the manner in which she presents herself through conversation.   She has issues related to a sub-field of speech therapy called “pragmatics.”   

Pragmatics refers to both non-verbal and verbal aspects of communication - volume, turn taking, eye contact, attention, asking and answering questions and understanding social boundaries during conversation.

I can’t imagine anyone else spending much time with this person.  Perhaps, someday, she might (if she hasn’t already) seek out a therapist as a result of her social isolation.   It also occurs to me, however, that she might benefit much more from seeing a speech therapist than a psychologist.  I wonder whether psychologists are even trained to identify this serious problem in the artificial confines of a therapist’s office.  It’s out in the real world where this woman seems to express every thought occurs to her, driving others away in the process. 

While she is unintentionally driving others away with her chatter, this woman seems to put her energy into ever higher gears, trying even more desperately to spread her “charm.”   It’s all very sad.  I haven’t known this person long—I don’t feel that I know her well enough to speak to her on this issue.  

Turn-taking seems like such a basic strategy for allocating limited resources (in my example, a chance to talk).  Most of us use this turn-taking strategy all the time, including in conversations.  Who would have thought that a person’s deep need be heard could override this fundamental allocation method?  How could it be that an otherwise kind-hearted person would ignore this basic rule in a conversation.  Perhaps she doesn’t appreciate that talk-time is a limited resource.  Maybe it’s thoughtlessness–she just hasn’t thought about it.  Or maybe talking to others is a “high” that overrides all other concerns, making her a talk-addict.  Perhaps she doesn’t appreciate the long-term consequences of violating the turn-taking rule.  Innocuous-seeming early moves (here, the willingness to occupy most of the conversation with one’s own voice) can have serious long-term effects.  In this way, the failure to share the conversation is like overeating:  Perhaps chatterboxes don’t see that they are assuring their own loneliness much like people who eat too much every day have a difficult time connecting that behavior the extra 80 pounds they carry around.

This woman is not the first person I’ve met who seems almost desperately lonely in ways that could best be addressed by a speech therapist.  I meet such people from time to time.  They constitute a small minority of the people I meet, less than 1%.   Here’s what’s especially frustrating, though.  Such people are usually so lonely that their desperation to connect causes them to drive away all new acquaintances.   Their problem is self-perpetuating.

Very few people would ever spend time getting to know this woman because of the high investment required to include her in one’s circle of friends.  Even if you had the patience to tolerate her conversation wrecking, your other friends and acquaintances might not.  Therefore, it might be social suicide to help out—inviting a chatterbox to your social gatherings might cost you your other friends and acquaintances.

I have no training in speech therapy.  Nor do I know whether any adult with severe problems in pragmatics can be helped.  It might be that such people would resent any changes to their way of communicating.  They might see their way of conversing as an integral and immutable part of who they are.

If only there were simple ways for us non-speech therapists to broach this topic with the people who need to hear straight talking.  It seems simple enough from the outside.  For instance, people need to take turns when they’re involved in a conversation.   After speaking for awhile, competent conversationalists pause so that others can feel part of the conversation too.  It all seems so obvious, but many people don’t get it.  It might be that they don’t know how to read the non-verbal cues that others constantly broadcast.   These cues include lack of eye-contact, fidgeting and (eventually) the making of excuses and physical leaving.  For most of us, these cues mean that we need to share the floor.  For those with severe pragmatics issues, these cues don’t take root. (more…)

“Show me a man wearing an American flag pin in his lapel, and I’ll show you an asshole,” said Bill Maher during a recent “New Rules” segment.

What does it show that one puts a little flag on one’s lapel or that one sanctimoniously goes around saying “God bless America?”   Nothing.  These are cheap substitutes for being a well-informed, good-hearted and active citizen.  In my expereience, not all flag wearers are fake patriots, but many are.  I wouldn’t therefore go as far as Maher, though his conclusion is substantiated all too often. 

To be reliable, a signal needs to be expensive. This is true of all animals and it was was well established by Amotz Zahave, author of The Handicap Principle.  And humans, of course, are animals.

Which way is the dancer above spinning, clockwise or counter-clockwise? Or does she sometimes change direction? This optical illusion is getting a lot of hits over the past few days; I first encountered it on 3quarksdaily.com

My family spent several minutes staring at her last night, each of calling out at irregular intervals comments like “She just flipped!” of “I just saw her flip!” or “I made her flip!” according to our various perspectives.

So is the dancer just an optical illusion, or is she a test of whether you are “left-brained” or “right-brained”, as the link above presents it? Or is it a test of something else, perhaps of how long people will stare at her to try to to make her spin the other way if they don’t like the results of the  test?  Or perhaps, as one commenter on 3quarks suggested, it is a predictor of the viewer’s support for Hillary Clinton. If you can watch her change direction from left to right repeatedly without getting nauseated, you are more likely to support Clinton.

I don’t have Photoshop on this computer, so I will have to wait til tomorrow to waste valuable work time dissecting the animated gif.

Rick Kaempfer, a Chicago media critic, a 20-year radio veteran, “thanks” the FCC and media conglomerates for their roles in promoting media consolidation (a development that cost Rick his job).

What’s the problem with a few huge corporations owning and operating most of our media outlets? Consider this information from stopbigmedia.com:

Big Media companies get a sweet deal from the government. They get to use the public airwaves – for free – to make billions in profits. In exchange for this government handout, broadcasters are supposed to serve the public by offering quality programs that meet the needs of local communities. Instead, Big Media companies gut local newsrooms and ignore local issues.

Consider, also, a visit to Free Press for more information.

There’s really little more that I can add to this clip, other than refer you to this post. 

Here’s the video.

Here’s what precipitated Maher’s rant:

Four years ago Tucker Carlson asked Britney Spears on CNN, “A lot of entertainers have come out against the war in Iraq. Have you?” And Britney, who was chewing gum throughout the entire interview, answered, “Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens.”

Project Censored has just released its list of top censored stories for 2008.  Civil rights violations of U.S. citizens and economic abuses invited by the U.S. government are prominent thoughout this list.   Sobering and depressing.

This video features bonobo expert Sue Savage-Rumbaugh discussing the bipedal physiology and impressive intellectual capacities of bonobos.   Lots of footage of bonobo behavior in captivity. 

Savage-Rumbaugh mentions that it’s a rare zoo that houses bonobos.  Why?  Because they are sexually active in ways that very much resemble humans.  For most zoos, this is just too much.

Here’s another of those memorable videos making the rounds on Stumbleupon.com.  It’s well worth a viewing or three or five. 

This video is making the rounds on Stumbleupon.com. If you’re into wacky and clever gadgetry, this will be heavenly for you.