News story pet peeve

Here's an example of a type of news story that really bugs me, and it happens every so often. Someone gets fired for saying something, and the entire story revolves around the thing that was said. Should the guy who said it resign? Should he be suspended? Did he have a right to say it? Intense story, right? But wait a minute! What, exactly did the guy say? In stories like this, you never learn what he said. Nope, viewers are little babies and the news media must protect our ears from such potentially vile/rude/inappropriate language. Or should they? It all depends on what he said, and we'll never know. But it was rude and he deserved what he got, or maybe not.

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More of my favorite quotes

I collect lots of quotes. Lots of bang for the buck. There's a novel in every good quote. Here's my most recent batch of favorites: "Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms." Alan Corenk "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." Plato "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Aristotle "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." Michael Jordan "Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital." Aaron Levenstein (Professor of Management at Baruch College, City University of New York) "I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom." Noam Chomsky "Some people are called to build the piano, some to carry the piano, and some are called to play the piano" Darrin Patrick "One of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will." Pema Chodron, Start Where You Are “None of us are as smart as all of us” Japanese proverb "The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe" H.L. Mencken Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose Bill Gates Atheism is a religion like off is a TV channel. The Godless Blogger "There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it." William Jennings Bryan at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1896. "[T]he life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Thomas Hobbes "Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels." Bob Thaves, "Frank and Ernest", 1982 "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." Thomas Jefferson

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The ugliness and the hope

Jeremy Rifkin has a few things to say at Huffpo. First, the problem:

In a nation that has come to think of human nature as competitive, even predatory, self serving, acquisitive and utilitarian, is it any wonder that those very values have led to a "winner take all" syndrome in the marketplace in which the rich get richer while everyone else becomes marginalized, and the well-being of the larger community, including the biosphere, becomes eroded?
And then the hope:
If we listen very closely, we can hear the whisper of a new dream in the making, one based on what youth around the world are beginning to call "quality of life". In this new world, the American Dream seems almost provincial, even quaint, and entirely unsuited for a generation that is beginning to extend its empathic sensibility beyond national identities, to include the whole of humanity and the entirety of the planet as their extended community. If the American Dream served as the gold standard for the era of national markets and nation-state governments, the dream of "quality of life" becomes the standard for the emerging biosphere era. . . The empathic civilization looms on the horizon.

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“The greatest preventable holocaust in the history of planet Earth”

"The greatest preventable holocaust in the history of planet Earth" That's the judgment on what awaits us from Michael Ruppert, in a new documentary entitled "Collapse". The age of fossil fuels has been a blip in the scale of human history. We've only been using them a few centuries, and yet we are unable to remember a time when fossil fuels were not abundant and cheap. That age is now over. Recent experience has taught us that the end of this age was heralded by massive price spikes and has already caused the greatest economic dislocation since the Great Depression, or possibly even including it. Given that the growth of human population has so neatly coincided with the growth in the production of fossil fuels, human population now faces a analogous decline on the far side of the bell curve.

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Take a nap to get smarter

This is a post to complement Huffington's "sleep challenge." U.C. Berkeley reports this good news for afternoon nappers:

In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap. At noon, all the participants were subjected to a rigorous learning task intended to tax the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels.

At 2 p.m., the nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later that day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In contrast, those who napped did markedly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn. Matthew Walker, assistant psychology professor, has found that a nap clears the brain to absorb new information.

These findings reinforce the researchers' hypothesis that sleep is needed to clear the brain’s short-term memory storage and make room for new information . . .

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