Reality: not just a concept anymore.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths | The Australian

Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths | The Australian:

"WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.

IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: 'In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.'

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public."

Thursday, November 25, 2010

The Globalizer Who Came In From the Cold

Greg Palast

"The Globalizer Who Came In From the Cold

Wednesday, October 10, 2001

JOE STIGLITZ: TODAY'S WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS

by Greg Palast

The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are eye-popping - including how the IMF and US Treasury fixed the Russian elections

'It has condemned people to death,' the former apparatchik told me. This was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from the cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now realizes has gone rotten.

And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy. Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent, the new world economic order was his theory come to life."

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Smart People Do More Drugs--Because of Evolution | The Atlantic Wire

Smart People Do More Drugs--Because of Evolution | The Atlantic Wire

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has this theory, which he calls the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis. Here's how it goes: intelligence evolved as a way to deal with 'evolutionary novelties'--to help humans respond to things in their environment to which they were, as a species, unaccustomed. Thus, smart people are more likely to deal with new things and try them. Those new things seem to include drugs."

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Male circumcision and it's biblical idiocy

The Gay Animal Kingdom § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection—she’s no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can’t explain the homosexuality that’s been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that same-sex sexuality—long disparaged as a quirk of human culture—is a normal, and probably necessary, fact of life. By neglecting all those gay animals, she says, Darwin misunderstood the basic nature of heterosexuality.

Darwin’s theory of sex has been biological dogma ever since he postulated why peacocks flirt. His gendered view of life has become a centerpiece of evolution, one of his great scientific legacies. The culture wars over evolution and common descent notwithstanding, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection has been thoroughly assimilated into mass culture. From sitcoms to beer ads, our coital “instincts” are constantly reaffirmed. Females are wary, and males are horny. Sex is this simple. Or is it?