The environmental argument

Protesters turn attention from 4x4s to meat-eating

US activists are turning their fire from four-wheel drives and focusing on meat eating as the greater culprit in global warming.

To get the point across, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Peta, are preparing a Hummer car with a driver wearing a chicken suit and banner proclaiming meat as the main cause of global warming. They plan to park it near a White House-sponsored climate forum in Washington in September.

As proof, they cite a 2006 UN report, which concluded that raising animals for food generates more greenhouse gases than all the cars, trucks, planes and ships in the world combined. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation report concluded that the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions – 18 per cent as measured in CO2 equivalent which is greater than that produced by all other forms of transportation.

Another reason not to mass process our animal friends.

Bananas!

Does make me wonder what the design of the pineapple was all about.

The intertubes

Will probably never cease to amaze me.

Top 10

Letterman top ten reasons why Gonzales stepped down.

Visual pollution

Your Ad Here, on My S.U.V.? And You’ll Pay?

Why not?

Overcompensation

GOP Senator Convicted of Lewd Conduct

Man, they just keep confirming my general belief that the more you bark about it, the more you are trying to cover it up. I just hate that these conservative social conservatives try to legislate for their own personal foibles. Join a support group or something, just leave the rest of us out of it.

more details here

Update: of course, this is nothing new:

Krugman

A Socialist Plot

I've been waiting for someone to say make this comparison. People don't think of universal education as a socialist plot - so why health care?

Suppose, for a moment, that the Heritage Foundation were to put out a press release attacking the liberal view that even children whose parents could afford to send them to private school should be entitled to free government-run education.

They’d have a point: many American families with middle-class incomes do send their kids to school at public expense, so taxpayers without school-age children subsidize families that do. And the effect is to displace the private sector: if public schools weren’t available, many families would pay for private schools instead.

So let’s end this un-American system and make education what it should be — a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn’t have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either. As a Republican presidential candidate might say, the future of America’s education system lies in free-market solutions, not socialist models.

O.K., in case you’re wondering, I haven’t lost my mind, I’m drawing an analogy. The real Heritage press release, titled “The Middle-Class Welfare Kid Next Door,” is an attack on proposals to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Such an expansion, says Heritage, will “displace private insurance with government-sponsored health care coverage.”

And Rudy Giuliani’s call for “free-market solutions, not socialist models” was about health care, not education.

But thinking about how we’d react if they said the same things about education helps dispel the fog of obfuscation right-wingers use to obscure the true nature of their position on children’s health.

The truth is that there’s no difference in principle between saying that every American child is entitled to an education and saying that every American child is entitled to adequate health care. It’s just a matter of historical accident that we think of access to free K-12 education as a basic right, but consider having the government pay children’s medical bills “welfare,“ with all the negative connotations that go with that term.

And conservative opposition to giving every child in this country access to health care is, in a fundamental sense, un-American.

Here’s what I mean: The great majority of Americans believe that everyone is entitled to a chance to make the most of his or her life. Even conservatives usually claim to believe that. For example, N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chairman of the Bush Council of Economic Advisers, contrasts the position of liberals, who he says believe in equality of outcomes, with that of conservatives, who he says believe that the goal of policy should be “to give everyone the same shot and not be surprised or concerned when outcomes differ wildly.”

But a child who doesn’t receive adequate health care, like a child who doesn’t receive an adequate education, doesn’t have the same shot — he or she doesn’t have the same chances in life as children who get both these things.

Gonzo is outta here

Gonzales Resigns as Attorney General

I've seen a rumor that Chertoff will be put up as his replacement.

36 Hours in Ottawa

Ottawa: A lovely place to visit

Slide show here.

They say that Ottawaonians are nice people too.

Whistleblowers on Fraud Facing Penalties

This isn't the country I thought I grew up in

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers - all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

"It was a Wal-Mart for guns," he says. "It was all illegal and everyone knew it."

So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn't know whom to trust in Iraq.

For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Mechabolic

This year Burning Man participants will encounter a 120-foot long slug crawling across the desert floor, spewing columns of fire and ingesting garbage. Named Mechabolic, this monstrosity has been created by a team from Berkeley, California to demonstrate a novel way of creating energy: gasification. As it slowly moves across the dust of the playa, participants will be encouraged to dump anything that burns into its intake. The material is burned in a special chamber that restricts oxygen flow, with only three simple byproducts: water, inert fixed carbon and hydrogen gas. The hydrogen gas is then fed into an internal combustion engine, which powers the machine. The water drips out the tailpipe, and the carbon can be turned back into the soil. This giant art car is actually carbon-negative. The principles can be applied to any vehicle with a carburetor, without modifications to the engine. "This thing can run on coffee grounds," laughs Price.

See Catalyst magazine article

Leo

Physical exercise

Good for the body, and apparently, it builds your brain

This spring, neuroscientists at Columbia University in New York City published a study in which a group of men and women, ranging in age from 21 to 45, began working out for one hour four times a week. After 12 weeks, the test subjects, predictably, became more fit. Their VO2 max, the standard measure of how much oxygen a person takes in while exercising, rose significantly.

But something else happened as a result of all those workouts: blood flowed at a much higher volume to a part of the brain responsible for neurogenesis. Functional M.R.I.’s showed that a portion of each person’s hippocampus received almost twice the blood volume as it did before. Scientists suspect that the blood pumping into that part of the brain was helping to produce fresh neurons.

The hippocampus plays a large role in how mammals create and process memories; it also plays a role in cognition. If your hippocampus is damaged, you most likely have trouble learning facts and forming new memories. Age plays a factor, too. As you get older, your brain gets smaller, and one of the areas most prone to this shrinkage is the hippocampus. (This can start depressingly early, in your 30’s.) Many neurologists believe that the loss of neurons in the hippocampus may be a primary cause of the cognitive decay associated with aging. A number of studies have shown that people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia tend to have smaller-than-normal hippocampi.

The Columbia study suggests that shrinkage to parts of the hippocampus can be slowed via exercise. The subjects showed significant improvements in memory, as measured by a word-recall test. Those with the biggest increases in VO2 max had the best scores of all.

And other interesting things that encourage neurogenesis:

The human brain undergoes neurogenesis — the creation of new cells — throughout a person’s life, although the amount depends on a variety of factors, not just exercise.

MARIJUANA: A 2005 study on rats found that stimulation of the brain’s receptors for marijuana increased neurogenesis.

ALCOHOL: A 2005 study found that mice that swallowed a moderate amount of ethanol showed more neurogenesis than teetotalers. Other studies on mice have suggested that heavier drinking can be damaging to the brain.

SOCIABILITY: One study suggests that rats that live alone and have access to a running wheel experience less neurogenesis than those that have access to a running wheel and live in group housing. So go ahead and join that singles running club you’ve been avoiding.

DIET: A diet high in saturated fat and sugar sharply diminishes the brain’s production of the proteins and nerve-growth factors necessary for neurogenesis. Exercise may mitigate that effect somewhat.

STRESS: Mice that are subjected to uncontrollable stress (like electric shock) suffer substantial deterioration in their ability to produce new neurons.

CHOCOLATE: In a study published this year, an ingredient in cocoa, epicatechin, was shown to improve spatial memory in mice, especially among those that exercised. Epicatechin can also be found in grapes, blueberries and black tea. “I plan to start ingesting more epicatechin,” says Henriette van Praag, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, “as soon as I can’t find my car keys anymore.”

So go smoke a doobie and have a glass of wine with your vegetarian meditation running group and you will have like totally a massive brain.

Battle at Kruger

"Asset Deployment Teams"

Waxman Confirms Existence Of Rove’s Politicization ‘Teams’

In practical terms, that meant Cabinet officials concentrated their official government travel on the media markets Rove’s team chose, rolling out grant decisions made by agencies with red-carpet fanfare in GOP congressional districts, and carefully crafted announcements highlighting the release of federal money in battleground states.

This is the same kind of thing (only more extensive it seems) as what brought down the Liberal party in Canada.

Sleights of Mind

Magic and cognitive science - taking advantage of our innate desire for impose patterns and cause and effect.

Red State Update

Stopping food dumping

CARE Turns Down Federal Funds for Food Aid

Rudy, Bush foriegn policy on steroids

This guy has a serious authoritarian streak with all the ego issues that go with it. If he gets a hold of this country... man oh man.

Big News on Congress's iPhone Hearings

Chenguin vs. Peaceman

So far I like the way online video is impacting the dynamic of presidential elections.

A metaphor

Blurry Expats

Americans

This is what some of them look like.

Great quotes

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends
- George Bernard Shaw

Probably to spend more time with his hell hounds

Karl Rove to Resign At the End of August

Dick Cheney gives himself some advice

Happiness Formula

A BBC report

Positive psyc 101

As I am watching the video lectures (instead of working) of the positive psychology course at Harvard I can't help but think that it is (and will be) a major blow against the conservative, strict-father, punishment oriented model of child rearing. If Lakoff is right (linking value systems with, positive pysch could be a boon for more liberal oriented politics. Oprah should do a show on this course rather than on "The Secret".

If this becomes more legitimate watch as it is disparaged and labeled as cooky far-left hippy happy self-help blah blah by the religious right.

Pray Bush stays healthy

Cheney urging strikes on Iran

Or, better yet, lets get the impeachment process going.

Positive psychology

Harvard's crowded course to happiness

The course (Psychology 1504: Positive Psychology) is all online here including lecture videos and readings and more. How cool is that?

Lecture video 16 is on mindfulness and happiness (lecture power point #10). He argues that one of the few interventions that work to bring about change to one's life is mindfulness meditation - good stuff.

A bigger threat than bears

http://view.break.com/345028 - Watch more free videos

The Power Memo

"Barack Obama Was Right"

August 3, 2007
To: Interested Parties
From: Samantha Power -- Founding Executive Director, Harvard University Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
Re: Conventional Washington versus the Change We Need

It was Washington's conventional wisdom that led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of US foreign policy. The rush to invade Iraq was a position advocated by not only the Bush Administration, but also by editorial pages, the foreign policy establishment of both parties, and majorities in both houses of Congress. Those who opposed the war were often labeled weak, inexperienced, and even naïve.

Barack Obama defied conventional wisdom and opposed invading Iraq. He did so at a time when some told him that doing so would doom his political future. He took that risk because he thought it essential that the United States "finish the fight with bin Laden and al Qaeda." He warned that a "dumb war, a rash war" in Iraq would result in an "occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences."

Barack Obama was right; the conventional wisdom was wrong. And today, we see the consequences. Iraq is in chaos. According to the National Intelligence Estimate, the threat to our homeland from terrorist groups is "persistent and evolving." Al-Qaeda has a safe-haven in Pakistan. Iran has only grown stronger and bolder. The American people are less safe because of a rash war.

Over the last few weeks, Barack Obama has once again taken positions that challenge Washington's conventional wisdom on foreign policy. And once again, pundits and politicians have leveled charges that are now bankrupt of credibility and devoid of the new ideas that the American people desperately want.

On each point in the last few weeks, Barack Obama has called for a break from a broken way of doing things. On each point, he has brought fresh strategic thinking and common sense that break with the very conventional wisdom that has led us into Iraq.

Diplomacy: For years, conventional wisdom in Washington has said that the United States cannot talk to its adversaries because it would reward them. Here is the result:

The United States has not talked directly to Iran at a high level, and they have continued to build their nuclear weapons program, wreak havoc in Iraq, and support terror.
The United States has not talked directly to Syria at a high level, and they have continued to meddle in Lebanon and support terror.
The United States did not talk to North Korea for years, and they were able to produce enough material for 6 to 8 more nuclear bombs.

By any measure, not talking has not worked. Conventional wisdom would have us continue this policy; Barack Obama would turn the page. He knows that not talking has made us look weak and stubborn in the world; that skillful diplomacy can drive wedges between your adversaries; that the only way to know your enemy is to take his measure; and that tough talk is of little use if you're not willing to do it directly to your adversary. Barack Obama is not afraid of losing a PR battle to a dictator - he's ready to tell them what they don't want to hear because that's how tough, smart diplomacy works, and that's how American leaders have scored some of the greatest strategic successes in US history.

Barack Obama's judgment is right; the conventional wisdom is wrong. We need a new era of tough, principled and engaged American diplomacy to deal with 21st century challenges.

Terrorist Sanctuaries: For years, we have given President Musharraf hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, while deferring to his cautious judgment on how to take out high-level al Qaeda targets - including, most likely, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Here is the result:

Bin Laden and Zawahiri - two men with direct responsibility for 9/11- remain at large.
Al Qaeda has trained and deployed hundreds of fighters worldwide from its sanctuary in northwest Pakistan.
Afghanistan is far less secure because the Taliban can strike across the border, and then return to safety in Pakistan.

By any measure, this strategy has not worked. Conventional wisdom would have us defer to Musharraf in perpetuity. Barack Obama wants to turn the page. If Musharraf is willing to go after the terrorists and stop the Taliban from using Pakistan as a base of operations, Obama would give him all of the support he needs. But Obama made clear that as President, if he had actionable intelligence about the whereabouts of al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan - and the Pakistanis continued to refuse to act against terrorists known to be behind attacks on American civilians - then he will use highly targeted force to do so.

Barack Obama's judgment is right; the conventional wisdom is wrong. We need a new era that moves beyond the conventional wisdom that has brought us over-reliance on an unreliable dictator in Pakistan and an occupation of Iraq.

Nuclear Attacks on Terrorist Targets: For years, Washington's conventional wisdom has held that candidates for President are judged not by their wisdom, but rather by their adherence to hackneyed rhetoric that make little sense beyond the Beltway. When asked whether he would use nuclear weapons to take out terrorist targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Barack Obama gave the sensible answer that nuclear force was not necessary, and would kill too many civilians. Conventional wisdom held this up as a sign of inexperience. But if experience leads you to make gratuitous threats about nuclear use - inflaming fears at home and abroad, and signaling nuclear powers and nuclear aspirants that using nuclear weapons is acceptable behavior, it is experience that should not be relied upon.

Barack Obama's judgment is right. Conventional wisdom is wrong. It is wrong to propose that we would drop nuclear bombs on terrorist training camps in Pakistan, potentially killing tens of thousands of people and sending America's prestige in the world to a level that not even George Bush could take it. We should judge presidential candidates on their judgment and their plans, not on their ability to recite platitudes.

Vision: American foreign policy is broken. It has been broken by people who supported the Iraq War, opposed talking to our adversaries, failed to finish the job with al Qaeda, and alienated the world with our belligerence. Yet conventional wisdom holds that people whose experience includes taking these positions are held up as examples of what America needs in times of trouble.

Barack Obama says we have to turn the page. We cannot afford any more of this kind of bankrupt conventional wisdom. He has laid out a foreign policy that is bold, clear, principled, and tailored for the 21st century. End a war we should never have fought, concentrate our resources against terrorists who threaten America. End the counter-productive policy of lumping together our adversaries and avoiding talking to our foes. End the era of politics that is all sound-bites and no substance, and offer the American people the change that they need.

Barack Obama's judgment is right. It is conventional wisdom that has to change.

Predictability and propoganda

Iraq Timeline: The Broken Record on "the Next Few Months"

a Theory of Affluence

for you social scientist / economist types: In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence. here is a synopsis.

Historians used to accept changes in people’s behavior as an explanation for economic events, like Max Weber’s thesis linking the rise of capitalism with Protestantism. But most have now swung to the economists’ view that all people are alike and will respond in the same way to the same incentives. Hence they seek to explain events like the Industrial Revolution in terms of changes in institutions, not people.

Dr. Clark’s view is that institutions and incentives have been much the same all along and explain very little, which is why there is so little agreement on the causes of the Industrial Revolution. In saying the answer lies in people’s behavior, he is asking his fellow economic historians to revert to a type of explanation they had mostly abandoned and in addition is evoking an idea that historians seldom consider as an explanatory variable, that of evolution.

Everybody is a hero

Heroism and the language of fascism

Banning visual pollution

São Paulo: A City Without Ads

In 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis and Brazil’s most important city, São Paolo, became the first city outside of the communist world to put into effect a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Known on one hand for being the country’s slick commercial capital and on the other for its extreme gang violence and crushing poverty, São Paolo’s “Lei Cidade Limpa” or Clean City Law was an unexpected success, owing largely to the singular determination of the city’s conservative mayor, Gilberto Kassab.

I hope this idea spreads far and wide... kindof like banning smoking.

A reason to live in Canada

Warrantless Surrender

Administration officials, backed up by their Republican enablers in Congress, argued that they were being dangerously hamstrung in their ability to collect foreign-to-foreign communications by suspected terrorists that happen to transit through the United States. The problem is that while no serious person objects to intercepting foreign-to-foreign communications, what the administration sought -- and what it managed to obtain -- allows much more than foreign-to-foreign contacts. The government will now be free to intercept any communications believed to be from outside the United States (including from Americans overseas) that involve "foreign intelligence" -- not just terrorism. It will be able to monitor phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens or residents without warrants -- unless the subject is the "primary target" of the surveillance. Instead of having the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court ensure that surveillance is being done properly, with monitoring of Americans minimized, that job would be up to the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The court's role is reduced to that of rubber stamp.

So much for New Hampshire's, Live Free or Die motto. The Dems really caved on this one.

Global warming

Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car’

The argument is that the CO2 production in the food production and delivery processes is so high that the food we burn by walking (and thus requiring more food) creates more C02 and relaxing behind the wheel.

So, what to do? Well a good start is to 1) realize that food production system is harmful, 2) try to buy local products (flying in foods is costly), 3) stop eating beef, and 4) don't buy pre-made meals (refrigeration is expensive)

Free Tibet

China tells living Buddhas to obtain permission before they reincarnate

The 14-part regulation issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs is aimed at limiting the influence of Tibet’s exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama, and at preventing the re-incarnation of the 72-year-old monk without approval from Beijing.
...
For the first time China has given the Government the power to ensure that no new living Buddha can be identified, sounding a possible death knell to a mystical system that dates back at least as far as the 12th century.

Unfriggin' believable.

Meditation as your psychologist

Mindfulness meditation & Depression

I chatted this weekend with my clinical psychologist uncle who told me all about how mindfulness meditation techniques are being used to treat several "disorders" including depression and even schizophrenia!

Anyway, I don't have any data on it, but he says it has a great impact on reducing recurrent episodes, like a jump of 60% over just drug treatments alone.

Is our children learning?

The answer must be yes. Just now I walked into the lobby and overheard someone talking about how someone "misunderestimated" something.

I guess the question should really be, what is our children learning?

Green-collar jobs

Green Jobs Act of 2007

This ground-breaking legislation will make $120 million a year available across the country to begin training workers (and would-be workers) for jobs in the clean energy sector. When the bill becomes law, 35,000 people a year will benefit from cutting edge, vocational education in fields that could literally save the Earth.

Vermont

Who knew? It is one pretty place.