This is why it’s so difficult to get good people to run for political office

Help Wanted:

Now Hiring U.S. Senators and Representatives

We are in desperate need for honest and intelligent citizens of the United States to apply for the jobs of Senators and Representatives as specified in Article I of the United States Constitution. Job Duty: To do anything necessary to keep getting re-elected. Job Requirements: - You must be willing to raise $1,000,000 every two years ($10,000/week for a Representative) or $6,000,000 every six years (about $20,000/week for Senator). To raise one million dollars, you can either convince 10,000 citizens to give you $100 each or you can make secret promises to a few hundred large corporations. It’s your choice. - You must be willing to vote to pass 2,000-page hyper-technical and incoherent bills that were drafted by corporate lobbyists. - You must spend most of your time on the job secretly promising favors to large companies and asking them for money, while simultaneously denying to your constituents that you’ve made secret promises. - You must be willing to expose yourself, your family and your friends to the constant risk of being shot by incoherent disgruntled people. - You must be willing to find a way to avoid spending time with lower-class and middle-class Americans. - You must be willing to expose yourself to constant ridicule and false charges trumped up by the media to sell advertisements. Everything embarrassing you’ve ever done will appear in national publications, especially if it is irrelevant to the issues facing this country. - Once you start campaigning for the very first time, you must agree to stop talking candidly about anything. - You must support America’s war-machine or else you will be called a traitor and run out of office. - You must be willing to expose your family and your closest friends to massive invasions of their privacy. - You must pretend to explain and solve complex social issues using only 8-second sound bites. - You must be willing to expose yourself to scandalous and false Swift-Boating attacks. - Your door must always be open to lobbyists for banks, insurance companies and telecoms. - To win re-election, you must get down in the dirt and personally hurl false charges against your opponent, because the ends will justify the means. - You must constantly speak of our duty to our children while simultaneously crushing the next generation with federal debt, and providing the nation's children with terrible educations.

Continue ReadingThis is why it’s so difficult to get good people to run for political office

Blindsight demonstrated

I spotted this article about blindsightedness at Seed:

TN’s rare condition is known as blindsight. Because his stroke damaged only his visual cortex, his eyes remain functional and as a result can still gather information from his environment. He simply lacks the visual cortex to process and interpret it. Sight has changed for TN from a conscious to a largely subconscious experience. He no longer has a definitive picture of his surroundings, but he has retained an innate awareness of his position in the world. He is, to some degree, able to see without being aware that he is seeing.

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Brain wiring

Meet the new effort to map the wiring of the human brain. The brain connectome "offers a unique opportunity to understand the complete details of neural connectivity. The Human Connectome Project (HCP) is a project to construct a map of the complete structural and functional neural connections in vivo within and across individuals." Do check out the images at the link location.

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More thoughts about Wikileaks and the First Amendment

Glenn Greenwald is one of my most trusted self-critical sources of information. He writes for Salon.com. Check out this post (and explore his other recent writings) and consider viewing the short video interview at CNN, and you’ll see why I’m so cynical about the mainstream media, including host Jessica Yellin of CNN (BTW, the ex-Bush adviser on this clip is really a piece of work). And then check out this post and the following comments, where Yellin tries to redeem herself: The following comment to the video sums up Yellin’s alleged even-handedness nicely:

Jesse Frederik December 28th, 2010 7:33 pm ET Compare the questioning of Fran Townsend: "[After showing a video of Joe Biden calling Assange a high-tech terrorist] Is it fair to call him a terrorist?" "Is there anything good that can come from what Assange is doing?" To the questioning of Glenn Greenwald: "Shouldn't he go to jail in defense of his beliefs?" "Any qualms about that he is essentially profiting of classified information?" [Bob Woodward anyone?] And do you see any irony in the fact that he's making money of a corporate publisher?' "What is his ultimate goal, beyond embarrassing and disrupting the US government? What good do his supporters hope will really come from everything he's doing?" "Do you think [the rape charges] are part of a smear campaign? And beyond that do you think it hurts his credibility?" Is the difference in the questioning not obvious?
My feelings about Wikileaks and the person(s) that leaked the most recent cables are inextricably woven with the many disturbing revelations disclosed by Wikileaks. This is not the sterilized slow drip of information that you get from the mainstream media, such that we only really learn what was going on 30 years after we could have done something about it. Wikileaks has enabled a torrent of important and often disturbing information and it is causing massive embarrassment to the elites that run this country, and they run it far too often in secret. Yes, I live in the U.S., but it is no longer my country. The leaders of the U.S. rarely speak for me anymore because they don’t treasure the First Amendment, they are crushing our children with debt and they are xenophobic and unapologetic warmongers and torturers. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingMore thoughts about Wikileaks and the First Amendment