Immigrants boost pay, not prison populations

Immigrants are less likely to go to prison than U.S.-born residents of the same ethnic group and they boost pay for natives, research says.

Two new studies by California researchers counter negative perceptions that immigrants increase crime and job competition, showing that they are incarcerated at far lower rates than native-born citizens and actually help boost their wages.

A study released Tuesday by the Public Policy Institute of California found that immigrants who arrived in the state between 1990 and 2004 increased wages for native workers by an average 4%.

UC Davis economist Giovanni Peri, who conducted the study, said the benefits were shared by all native-born workers, from high school dropouts to college graduates, because immigrants generally perform complementary rather than competitive work.

As immigrants filled lower-skilled jobs, they pushed natives up the economic ladder into employment that required more English or know-how of the U.S. system, he said.

"The big message is that there is no big loss from immigration," Peri said. "There are gains, and these are enjoyed by a much bigger share of the population than is commonly believed."

Another study released Monday by the Washington-based Immigration Policy Center showed that immigrant men ages 18 to 39 had an incarceration rate five times lower than native-born citizens in every ethnic group examined. Among men of Mexican descent, for instance, 0.7% of those foreign-born were incarcerated compared to 5.9% of native-born, according to the study, co-written by UC Irvine sociologist Ruben G. Rumbaut.

Both studies are based on U.S. census data, which includes both legal and illegal immigrants. They were released just days before the U.S. Congress is to restart debate on major immigration reform legislation and as numerous states, including Texas, consider harsh measures against illegal migrants.

The authors say their work shows that immigrants clearly benefit U.S. residents and are being unfairly scapegoated for problems they do not cause.

Extreme terrorism

Radical Islamic Extremists Snowboard Into U.S. Embassy

American security is not certain how Al-J'Aqasse was allowed to build their custom snowpipe-ramp setup across the street from the embassy, but banners and promotional materials scattered across the blast zone point to the involvement of radical, extreme-sports-beverage bottler Sunni Delight.

a bad idea

Mercenaries to fill Iraq troop gap

Bushwacked

U.S. economy leaving record numbers in severe poverty

WASHINGTON - The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation's "haves" and "have-nots" continues to widen.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 - half the federal poverty line - was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy's review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties, and similar increases in 28 states. The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor residents isn't confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.

These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation's 37 million poor people into deep poverty - the highest rate since at least 1975.

The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson

Part I



Part II



Good for him.

Zotero

The Next-Generation Research Tool

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.

Italy's premier quits over war vote

Stung by a bruising foreign policy defeat Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi stepped down Wednesday, his center-left government collapsing after just nine months in power.

Prodi failed to win parliamentary endorsement of his decision to maintain Italian troops in Afghanistan, a loss attributed in part to desertions by members of his coalition who oppose continued cooperation with the U.S. military in Italy and abroad.

Chants of 'Quit! Quit!' filled the Italian Senate as opposition politicians realized Prodi had lost the vote. A few hours later, he tendered his resignation to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.

On the neurobiology of emails and social inhibitions

The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.

This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.

Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses; like small children, they commit mortifying social gaffes like kissing a complete stranger, blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward.

Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information — a change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say.

The right response

Habeas Corpse

American Liberty at the Precipice

In another low moment for American justice, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that detainees held at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, do not have the right to be heard in court. The ruling relied on a shameful law that President Bush stampeded through Congress last fall that gives dangerously short shrift to the Constitution.

The right of prisoners to challenge their confinement — habeas corpus — is enshrined in the Constitution and is central to American liberty. Congress and the Supreme Court should act quickly and forcefully to undo the grievous damage that last fall’s law — and this week’s ruling — have done to this basic freedom.

An overture?

Iranian official offers glimpse from within: A desire for U.S. ally

It does make more sense for Iran to go through CNN than back channels.

Step It Up 2007

Communities uniting for climate action now

I no longer need to blog to express myself

Flippin' Libby?

Is Fitz going to go after Cheney?

On the morality of liars

Almost Everyone Lies, Often Seeing It as a Kindness

Experiments have found that ordinary people tell about two lies every 10 minutes, with some people getting in as many as a dozen falsehoods in that period. More interestingly -- and Libby might see this as the silver lining if he is found guilty -- Feldman also found that liars tend to be more popular than honest people.

"It is not that lying makes you popular, but knowing when to say something and not be completely blunt is in fact a social skill," Feldman said. "We don't want to hear hurtful things, so a person who is totally honest may not be as popular as someone who lies. This is not to say lying is a good thing, but it is the way the social world operates."
...
But before you get all high and mighty about how your lies never got anyone killed, consider this. A lot of research shows that serious lies are almost always told with the best of intentions. Think of it this way: Everyone would agree that telling a Nazi knocking at your door that you are not harboring Jews is a lie worth telling -- a heroic, necessary lie. What is harder to understand is that many people who lie for what we feel are contemptible reasons see themselves in the same heroic light.
...
DePaulo once conducted a study in which she asked people to recall the worst lie they had ever told and the worst lie ever told to them. In a reflection of how much our perceptions of lying depend on our particular points of view, the psychologist found that many young people reported that the worst lie ever told to them was by a parent who concealed news that someone they loved was sick or dying. By contrast, DePaulo found, parents never thought of such deceptions as particularly serious ethical breaches -- in fact, they saw them as acts of love.

Never to late to prepare

For 01.20.09, Bush's Last Day

Top Gear

What will we tell the children?

"Speaking of George Bush, with whom Sharon developed a very close relationship, Uri Dan recalls that Sharon's delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: 'I will screw him in the ass!'"

Invest in dyke construction companies

Climate change: scientists warn it may be too late to save the ice caps

Red meat

McCain: Roe V. Wade Should Be Overturned

Mystery of the Himalayas solved

The world's highest mountains shot up by 2km when a massive slab of rock anchoring them fell away

Technologies of urban survival

Iraqis use internet to survive war

Google is playing an unlikely role in the Iraq war. Its online satellite map of the world, Google Earth, is being used to help people survive sectarian violence in Baghdad.

Libby Trial Recap

Looks like ol G.W. might have known.

With both sides resting, jury instructions and deliberations ahead, David Shuster gives a recap to date of the testimony and how not only do all arrows point to the office of the Vice President but to the President himself. Remember when George said that anyone found leaking classified information would be dealt with?

The Gavel

Speaker of the House starts a blog

The year of Iran

Here we go

In April, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that U.S. troops were already on the ground in Iran, negotiating alliances with the Azerbaijanis in the North, the Kurds in the Northeast, and the Baluchis in the Southeast. In September, Time reported that a U.S. campaign to wipe out Iran's nuclear program could entail bombing up to 1,500 targets. More recently, Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan, asserted in the Baltimore Chronicle that Bush "will attack Iran with tactical nuclear weapons, because it is the only way the neocons believe they can rescue their goal of U.S. (and Israeli) hegemony in the Middle East." Adds former C.I.A. officer Philip Giraldi, "I've heard from sources at the Pentagon that their impression is that the White House has made a decision that war is going to happen."
...
Whatever the administration's master plan may be, parts of it are already under way. In mid-January, the U.S. sent a second aircraft-carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf. According to Gardiner, by the end of February the United States will have enough forces in place to mount an assault on Iran. That, in the words of former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, would be "an act of political folly" so severe that "the era of American preponderance could come to a premature end."

Think it won't happen? Cheney's aide calls it the year of Iran and says an attack is a real possibility

The administration is trying to make the arguments - recently there was a media briefing by anonymous sources highlighting its new causus beli.

Already the media is playing its role as stenographer: just. shoot. me.

This might be our only hope.

Instead of a nap

Do a 10 minute meditation

Some other meditations here.

Ayn Rand

Just one comment - it has been shown that happiness comes from altruism and. She would have to incorporate that into her philosophy if it truly is objectivist (i.e. based on reality) as she says.

7 steps to Happiness

1. Invest yourself in closeness: Of all the circumstances happy people share, loving relationships seem the most characteristic and most important. So when you're setting your priorities, time for your loved ones should be No. 1.
2. Work hard at what you like: If love is most important to happiness, keeping busy at work you like may be second in importance. If your job doesn't fit that description now (or look like it will in the near future), search hard for ways to find work that satisfies your very real need to do something that is meaningful to you.
3. Be helpful: Altruism builds happiness in at least two ways. Doing good makes you feel good about yourself. In psychological terms, it enhances self-esteem. And there's evidence that altruism relieves both physical and mental stress--thus protecting the good health so important to most people's happiness. (See "Beyond Selfishness" and "Helper's High," October 1988 PT, for more on this.)
4. Make the pursuit of happiness a priority: All things may indeed come to he (or she) who waits, but why wait to feel good? Discover what makes you happy and make time to do it.
5. Energize yourself: Run, play a sport, dance--the choice is yours, as long as you keep aerobically fit. Whether the feeling of well-being produced by exercise is due to the release of endorphins--the brain's natural painkillers--or something else, researchers agree that fitness is one reliable road to happiness.
6. Organize, but stay loose: It's good to know where you're going and to make plans for fun along the way. But since novelty makes us happy, be ready to seize an unexpected opportunity to try something different.
7. Steady as she goes: We all have our highs and lows, but strive for a sense of perspective. Emotional intensity can be costly. Those who hit the highest highs tend to reach the lowest lows as well.

Tomar la siesta

On-The-Job Naps Might Help Heart

Office nappers now have the perfect excuse: New research shows that a little midday snooze seems to reduce the risk of fatal heart problems, especially among men.

In the largest study to date on the health effects of napping, researchers tracked 23,681 healthy Greek adults for an average of about six years. Those who napped for about half an hour at least three times weekly had a 37 percent lower risk of dying from heart attacks or other heart problems than those who did not nap.

...

Still, it's possible that study participants who napped "are just people who take better care of themselves," which could also benefit the heart, said Dr. Marvin Wooten, a sleep specialist at Columbia St. Mary's Hospital in Milwaukee.

"The guy ... who doesn't take time out for a siesta in their culture is probably the guy who is extremely driven and under a lot of pressure," which could increase heart risks, he said.

One small step in the right direction

Dem Sens To Back Bill Restoring Habeas Corpus

Word comes down that tomorrow Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) are going to introduce a bill to radically reform the constitutionally-challenged system of terrorism detainee prosecutions. Known as the Effective Terrorists Prosecution Act, the bill, according to Dodd, would reintroduce habeas corpus protections to Guantanamo Bay detainees; create an independent court review to military commission rulings; and bar information obtained through 'coercion' (read: torture); among other provisions.

Cheney expected to make 'historic appearance'

on witness stand at CIA leak trial

For some insight on how Cheney will respond to questioning:

MoveOn.org Civic Action

Save NPR and PBS once and for all

Sign the petition.

On the end of blackness

The Republic Party

Branson offers US$25M global warming prize

Remove 1 billion tonnes and win

Airline tycoon Richard Branson announced on Friday a US$25-million prize for the first person to come up with a way of scrubbing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere in the battle to beat global warming.

Flanked by climate campaigners former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and British ex-diplomat Crispin Tickell, Branson said he hoped the prize would spur innovative and creative thought to save mankind from self-destruction.

"Man created the problem and therefore man should solve the problem," he told a news conference to reveal the Virgin Earth Challenge.
...
The prize will initially only be open for five years, with ideas assessed by a panel of judges including Branson, Gore and Tickell as well as U.S. climate scientist James Hansen, Briton James Lovelock and Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery.

The winner will have to come up with a way of removing one billion tonnes of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years -- with US$5 million of the prize being paid at the start and the remaining US$20 million at the end.

Reith Lectures 2005

The Triumph of Technology

Quality of life living survey

Ottawa is 18th in the world (pdf), Vancouver is tied for 3rd, and Toronto is 15th. (Montreal 22 and Calgary 25, that is 5 in the top 25). Not bad (Germany has 6 in top 26, and Switzerland 3 in top 10.) U.S. comes in with Honolulu and S.F. at 27&28 and Paris is only 33rd.

Grab some popcorn and a chair

And listen to a podcast talk on Karl Popper

Karl Popper is one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th Century, whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day. He strongly resisted the prevailing empiricist consensus that scientists' theories could be proved true.

Popper wrote: “The more we learn about the world and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance”. He believed that even when a scientific principle had been successfully and repeatedly tested, it was not necessarily true. Instead it had simply not proved false, yet! This became known as the theory of falsification.

He called for a clear demarcation between good science, in which theories are constantly challenged, and what he called “pseudo sciences” which couldn't be tested. His debunking of such ideologies led some to describe him as the “murderer of Freud and Marx”.

He went on to apply his ideas to politics, advocating an Open Society. His ideas influenced a wide range of politicians, from those close to Margaret Thatcher, to thinkers in the Eastern Communist bloc and South America.

So how did Karl Popper change our approach to the philosophy of science? How have scientists and philosophers made use of his ideas? And how are his theories viewed today? Are we any closer to proving scientific principles are “true”?

Britain to host climate change economics meetings

to quantify Bangladesh under water.

Well, if you want to get anything done politically in this world it sure helps to speak the language of economics...

A bit on critical realism

some audio things here

Incompetence

I believe this is the definition of insanity

WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 — In June, short of people to process cases of incompetence and fraud by federal contractors, officials at the General Services Administration responded with what has become the government’s reflexive answer to almost every problem.

They hired another contractor.

It did not matter that the company they chose, CACI International, had itself recently avoided a suspension from federal contracting; or that the work, delving into investigative files on other contractors, appeared to pose a conflict of interest; or that each person supplied by the company would cost taxpayers $104 an hour. Six CACI workers soon joined hundreds of other private-sector workers at the G.S.A., the government’s management agency.

If you want to really pull out your hair, read the whole thing.

Humvee Traffic Driving in Baghdad

Nothing new here

Rupurt says

Asked if his News Corp. (i.e. Fox et al.) managed to shape the agenda on the war in Iraq, Murdoch said: 'No, I don't think so. We tried.' Asked by Rose for further comment, he said: 'We basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East...but we have been very critical of his execution.'

Damn, they also own myspace...

3He

China looks to the moon for energy

What are they after? A limitless source of clean, safe energy to feed their voracious economy. The stable isotope helium 3 (3He), a potential fuel for nuclear fusion, was first found in moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions. It is one constituent of the "solar wind" constantly given off by the Sun. The stuff bounces off Earth's magnetic field, but the moon has no magnetic field, and its surface has been soaking up 3He for billions of years. If you could dig it up and put it into a fusion reactor you would get ordinary helium 4 (as in balloons), ordinary hydrogen (as in H2O) and an abundance of radioactivity-free energy. According to Gerald Kulcinski, director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a mere 40 tons would be roughly enough to serve America's electrical needs for a year.

This reminds me of those games where you send out your peons to mine for gold so you can build a city. The whole point in those games is to control the resources... When are we going to start having wars over the moon?

Canada: The Cell Next Door

Frontline video on Toronto terror plot

hmm

what dick cheney really said

Ironic

Alanis Morissette Modified

More Gore?

Brazile Thinks Gore Might Run

First he wins an oscar, then the nobel peace prize and with all that attention - he announces.

And if Hilary keeps on leaving all options on the table, she won't get the Democratic nomination. Edwards did the same thing recently

So, I just want to get it very clear, you think that attacking Iran would be a bad idea?

I think would have very bad consequences.

So when you said that all options are on the table?

It would be foolish for any American president to ever take any option off the table.

Yes, sticking my head in a lawnmower is horrible, but I would just hate to rule it out. The thing is, he isn't president right now. When Cheney orders the attack on Iran, they will be partially responsible.

and meanwhile, our reverence of all things warlike means that the new budget proposed by Bush is military plus and domestic spending, not so much. Times of war and all that... make the tax cuts permanent! We may be hitting the downside of the "starve the beast strategy" - time to cut all entitlements.

I'm going back to bed.

H5N1

The avian flu which killed 2,600 turkeys at a Suffolk farm has been confirmed as the H5N1 virus.

On Cheney

As I read this I had a thought. If this is Cheney's mindset, then the Iraq war is indeed going well. The war itself is the ends, not the means. Having forces in the middle east is the goal. In other words, "Mission Accomplished". I'm sure he wishes it was a little smoother, but we can hold on... from now until the end of oil in, say, 80 years.

Damn

Google bombs defused

bummer. i liked google bombs.

An IS failure

Florida turning away from touch-screen voting

Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting machines that many of Florida's largest counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.

Voting experts said Florida's move, coupled with new federal voting legislation expected this year, could be the death knell for the paperless electronic machines. If, as expected, the Florida Legislature approves the $32.5 million cost of the change, it would be the nation's biggest repudiation yet of touch-screen voting, which was widely embraced after the 2000 recount as a state-of-the-art means of restoring confidence that every vote would count.

The Candidates' Performances At The DNC

On Video

Can it be any worse?

Mahdi Army gains strength through unwitting aid of U.S.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. military drive to train and equip Iraq's security forces has unwittingly strengthened anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, which has been battling to take over much of the capital city as American forces are trying to secure it.

U.S. Army commanders and enlisted men who are patrolling east Baghdad, which is home to more than half the city's population and the front line of al-Sadr's campaign to drive rival Sunni Muslims from their homes and neighborhoods, said al-Sadr's militias had heavily infiltrated the Iraqi police and army units that they've trained and armed.

"Half of them are JAM. They'll wave at us during the day and shoot at us during the night," said 1st Lt. Dan Quinn, a platoon leader in the Army's 1st Infantry Division, using the initials of the militia's Arabic name, Jaish al Mahdi. "People (in America) think it's bad, but that we control the city. That's not the way it is. They control it, and they let us drive around. It's hostile territory.
...
"All the Shiites have to do is tell everyone to lay low, wait for the Americans to leave, then when they leave you have a target list and within a day they'll kill every Sunni leader in the country. It'll be called the `Day of Death' or something like that," said 1st Lt. Alain Etienne, 34, of Brooklyn, N.Y. "They say, `Wait, and we will be victorious.' That's what they preach. And it will be their victory."

Shocker!

Blame for global warming placed firmly on humankind

The most authoritative scientific report on climate change says with 90% certainty that the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities are driving climate change.

The report, from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says the rise in global temperatures could be as high as 6.4°C by 2100. The report also predicts sea level rises and increases in hurricanes.

The new IPCC report is the work of 3750 climate experts, who have spent six years reviewing all the available climate research. It was released in Paris, France, on Friday (read the 21-page summary here).

Apparently Al Gore was nominated for a peace prize. Some conservatives "nominate" Rush Limbaugh - even though they, uh, can't nominate anyone.

Terror Toon Controversy

What the heck happened to Bostonians? Well, apparently they got the two men who were arrested for the "terror scare". They were arrested for placing "blinking devices around boston"

Today's Front Page

555 front pages from 55 countries

Some people I know will be excited

Final Harry Potter book to be released on July 21

5 minutes electrical rest

The 1st of February 2007: Participate in the biggest mobilization of Citizens against Global Warming!

The Alliance for the Planet [a group of environmental associations] is calling on all citizens to create 5 minutes of electrical rest for the planet.

People all over the world should turn off their lights and electrical appliances on the first of February 2007, between 1.55 pm and 2.00 pm in New York, 18.55 for London , and 19.55 for Paris, Bruxelles, and Italy, 1.55pm in Ottawa, 10.55am on the Pacific Coast of North America.

You've been bad, Mr. President... now go on your way.

"hard work" for a whole lot of nothing. great. a resolution of disapproval. I don't have enough knowledge of the system, but why spend time on any non-binding resolutions like this?

The wrestler

Comedian Al Franken to Run for Senate in Minnesota