WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? By Jonathan Haidt What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. Diagnosis is a pleasure. But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. I began to study morality and culture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. This research led me to two conclusions. The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures.
How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly Translations: Belorussian Introduction: Four Types of Discursive Writing From time to time people express amazement at how I can get so much done. Begin by writing - in your head, at least - your second paragraph (that would be the one you just read, above). But how do you write this paragraph? You have more options because there are four types of discursive writing. These are your choices of types of article or essay: Argument: convinces someone of something Explanation: tells why something happened instead of something else Definition: states what a word or concept means Description: identifies properties or qualities of things An argument is a collection of sentences (known formally as 'propositions') intended to convince the reader that something is he case. An explanation tells the reader why something is the case. A definition identifies the meaning of some word, phrase or concept. Finally, a description provides information about some object, person, or state of affairs. Argument:
The Origin of America’s Intellectual Vacuum - Chris Hedges' Columns The Origin of America’s Intellectual Vacuum Posted on Nov 15, 2010 By Chris Hedges The blacklisted mathematics instructor Chandler Davis, after serving six months in the Danbury federal penitentiary for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), warned the universities that ousted him and thousands of other professors that the purges would decimate the country’s intellectual life. “You must welcome dissent; you must welcome serious, systematic, proselytizing dissent—not only the playful, the fitful, or the eclectic; you must value it enough, not merely to refrain from expelling it yourselves, but to refuse to have it torn from you by outsiders,” he wrote in his 1959 essay “...From an Exile.” “You must welcome dissent not in a whisper when alone, but publicly so potential dissenters can hear you. But they did not take Davis back. “Political discourse has been impoverished since then,” Davis said. “Repression does not target original thought,” Davis noted.
The year 2008 in photographs (part 1 of 3) 2008 has been an eventful year to say the least - it is difficult to sum up the thousands of stories in just a handful of photographs. That said, I will try to do what I've done with other photo narratives here, and tell a story of 2008 in photographs. It's not the story of 2008, it's certainly not all stories, but as a collection it does show a good portion of what life has been like over the past 12 months. This is a multi-entry story, 120 photographs over three days. Watch for part 2 and part 3 tomorrow and the next day. (40 photos total) Lightning bolts appear above and around the Chaiten volcano as seen from Chana, some 30 kms (19 miles) north of the volcano, as it began its first eruption in thousands of years, in southern Chile May 2, 2008.
With Wealth Highly Skewed Toward the Top, US Ranks 12th in New Measure of Human Development | World December 1, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Twenty years ago, in 1990, the United Nations began publishing an annual Human Development Report. To register social progress, economic orthodoxy held back then, nations needed to simply hike their “GNP,” their sum total of economic goods and services. But real human development, Sen and his colleagues countered, involves much more than economic growth. GNP cannot measure this real human development. The UN has been releasing an annual “Human Development Index” ever since, grading almost every nation in the world by a single number that reflects people’s capacity to live life to the fullest. “It is now universally accepted that a country’s success or an individual’s well-being cannot be evaluated by money alone,” as UN Development Program director Helen Clark writes in her intro to the UN Human Development Report’s just-published 20th anniversary edition.
Risky Business Comment Risky business Health-scare stories often arise because their authors simply don’t understand numbers Ben Goldacre Monday June 20, 2005 The Guardian Competence always looks better from a distance, but I have a confession to make: I’m a doctor, and I just don’t understand most of the stories on health risks in the news. Last week, we were told that red meat causes bowel cancer, and Nurofen causes heart attacks, but I was no wiser. Article continues HG Wells, 150 years ago, said that statistical thinking would one day be as important as the ability to read and write in a modern technological society. Let’s say the risk of having a heart attack in your 50s is 50% higher if you have high cholesterol: that sounds pretty bad. Natural frequencies are readily understandable, because instead of using probabilities, or percentages, they use concrete numbers, just like the ones you use every day to check if you’ve lost a kid on a coach trip, or got the right change in a shop.
4 Scenarios for the Coming Collapse of the American Empire | World December 5, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America's downfall. But have no doubt: when Washington's global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. Significantly, in 2008, the U.S. No such luck. By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire.
Guardian Unlimited | Life | Don't dumb me down Talk about bad science here. OK, here's something weird. Every week in Bad Science we either victimise some barking pseudoscientific quack, or a big science story in a national newspaper. Now, tell me, why are these two groups even being mentioned in the same breath? Why is science in the media so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong? It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and "breakthrough" stories. Wacky stories don't end there. A close relative of the wacky story is the paradoxical health story. At the other end of the spectrum, scare stories are - of course - a stalwart of media science. And last, in our brief taxonomy, is the media obsession with "new breakthroughs": a more subtly destructive category of science story. But enough on what they choose to cover. Why?
52 Year Old Who Came to US as a Toddler to be Deported | Immigration December 6, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Mike Burrows came to America when he was two years old, and has lived here for 50 years. I was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Mike Burrows is the poster child demonstrating the hysteria surrounding the immigration debate in the United States. The Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) was passed in 1996, stating that those in the country without proper documentation would be deported for a period of time (3 years, 10 years, or permanently). Mike was convicted of receipt of a stolen 8-track tape deck worth $50, a misdemeanor in 1978, when he was 18 years old. In the past nine years I’ve written thousands of pages of motions and petitions; I’ve held off 4 Attorneys General and countless government lawyers.
The Big Fish Ten years later, the story of Suck.com, the first great website By Matt Sharkey In August 1995, HotWired, the online publishing division of Wired magazine, was just 10 months old, making it, by the accelerated pace of the early web, both a pioneer and a latecomer. Prior to the HotWired launch in October 1994, Wired had an Internet presence, via Gopher, a text storage and retrieval system, and an email delivery mechanism, which processed requests for specific magazine articles. These systems were handled by a small cadre of engineers, who, with the burgeoning popularity of a new method of online publishing, the World Wide Web, and the release of the first graphical browsers, helped convince founder and publisher Louis Rossetto that Wired needed to get on the web. The obvious and popular solution was to sell advertising, but this being the web—and this being Wired—it would be a completely new breed of advertising. Steadman was hired as production director for all of HotWired.
Nation of Pill Poppers: 19 Potentially Dangerous Drugs Pushed By Big Pharma | Personal Health December 5, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Since direct-to-consumer drug advertising was legalized 13 years ago, Americans have become a nation of pill poppers -- choosing the type of drug they desire like a new toothpaste, sometimes whether or not they need it. But if patients want the drugs, doctors and pharma executives want them to have the drugs and media gets full page ads and huge TV flights (when many advertisers have dried up), is the national pillathon really a problem? Yes, when you consider the cost of private and government insurance and the health of patients who take potentially dangerous drugs like these. Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon, atypical antipsychotics Atypicals carry warnings of death in demented patients but are widely used in nursing homes. Ritalin, Concerta, Strattera, Adderall and ADHD drugs
Information for Healthcare Professionals: Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), Selective Serotonin-Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors (SNRIs), 5-Hydroxytryptamine Receptor Agonists (Triptans) FDA ALERT [7/2006]: Potentially Life-Threatening Serotonin Syndrome with Combined Use of SSRIs or SNRIs and Triptan Medications There is the potential for life-threatening serotonin syndrome (a syndrome of changes in mental status, autonomic instability, neuromuscular abnormalities, and gastrointestinal symptoms) in patients taking 5-hydroxytryptamine receptor agonists (triptans) and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) or selective serotonin/norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) concomitantly (see drug names at the bottom of this sheet). This information is based on reports of serotonin syndrome occurring in patients treated with triptans and SSRIs/SNRIs, and the biological plausibility of such a reaction in persons receiving two serotonergic medications. This information reflects FDA’s preliminary analysis of data concerning this drug. FDA is considering, but has not reached a final conclusion about this information. Considerations Data Summary