You wonder why the super-rich are getting wealthier and the rest of us comparatively poorer? Matt Taibbi’s perspective matches the one I gained in corporate and government legal work. If you are averse to occasionally crass language, however, don’t read what he wrote. Citation Matt Taibbi, Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?, Rolling Stone (03 [...]
Tagged: banks, depression, financial, government, home values, Matt Taibbi, real estate, recession, regulation, SEC, Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?
A sprinkling of Press Secretary quotations says it all President’s Obama’s passivity is, by now, an established character trait. I’ve taken to not listening to much of what he has to say because, whatever it is, it will be a gloss on doing nothing, too little, or the wrong thing. Dana Milbank’s column yesterday contrasted turmoil [...]
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Dana Milbank, Jay Carney, Libya, Middle East, mouthpiece, North Africa, oil, passivity, President Obama, press secretary, state government, turmoil, White House
A blow to childhood fantasies of gobbets of gore A fossil census found that Tyrannosaurus was comparatively too numerous to hold the position of a top predator in its Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek (eastern Montana) ecosystem: The relatively high abundance of Tyrannosaurus contradicts earlier suggestions that it was a very rare taxon in the Hell [...]
Categories: Science
Tagged: Dinsosaur Census Reveals, Hell Creek Formation, hyenas, Jack Horner, Maastrichtian, Mark Goodwin, Montana, Nathan Myhrvold, Tyrannosaurus, Upper Cretaceous
Publish anything, no matter how badly done? My last blog post spoke harshly about three badly designed, mostly irrelevant psychology experiments. Here’s an even worse one from “sports medicine.” The study was intended to see whether using portable pedal machines would reduce (mostly overweight) desk workers’ sedentary ways. Done correctly, that is obviously a reasonable [...]
Categories: Public Health,Science
Tagged: Bess Marcus, Feasibility of a portable exercise machine for reducing sedentary time in the workplace, Kristen Walaska, Lucas Carr
You wonder why psychologists have a bad reputation with many people? ScienceDaily had this to say about the studies in question: The study’s authors, psychological scientists Gráinne M. Fitzsimons of Duke University and Eli J. Finkel of Northwestern University, call this phenomenon “self-regulatory outsourcing” — the unconscious reliance on someone else to move your goals [...]
Categories: Psychology,Science
Tagged: Eli Finkel, goal attainment, Grainne Fitzsimons, Outsourcing Self-Regulation, significant others
Eradication of invasive species may not always be a good idea Research in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania has demonstrated that invasive honeysuckle (Lonicera species) is supporting up to 3 to 4 times more fruit-eating birds than the previous human-disrupted environment did. Honeysuckle populations also seem to boost seed dispersal for some nearby native plants: [Professor Tomás] [...]
Categories: Environment,Science
Tagged: American nightshade, catbirds, frugivores, Fruit quantity of invasive shrubs predicts, fruit-eating, Happy Valley, honesuckle, James Gleditsch, Lonicera, Penn State, Pennsylvania, robins, Tomas Carlo
Activist Gustavo Esteva wrote about short-sighted Mexican agricultural policy and its effect on the United States China and Mexico both seem to have created dislocation problems for themselves with peasant-slighting policies. These difficulties result from misapplying urbanized thinking to landscapes where they don’t yet belong. Mexican activist Gustavo Esteva had this to say yesterday about [...]
Categories: Agriculture,Economy
Tagged: agricultural policy, agro-plutocrats, China, gustavo Esteva, Mexico, Mexico goes back to the land, peasants, subsidies, sustainable
Robert J. Samuelson nailed this one with logic Economics columnist Robert Samuelson is skeptical about the financial sense of high-speed rail: [T]he Obama administration proposes spending $53 billion over six years to construct a “national high-speed rail system.” There’s something wildly irresponsible about the national government undermining states’ already poor long-term budget prospects by plying [...]
Categories: Economy
Tagged: Amtrak, business populations, Cato Institute, grants, High-speed rail a fast track to government waste, President Obama, Randal O'Toole, Robert Samuelson, subsidies
China’s authoritarian-capitalism hybrid continues its challenge to the United States Nature reported that China has a plan for how it wants its 2020 scientific endeavors to look: Innovation 2020 will kick off with new projects this year in seven key areas, including nuclear fusion and nuclear-waste management; stem cells and regenerative medicine; and calculating the [...]
Categories: Science
Tagged: Beijing, biomedicine, carbon cycle, carbon flux, China research centers, China sets 2020 vision for science, environment, Guangdong, information technology, IT, Jane Qiu, materials science, nuclear fusion, nuclear waste management, public health, regenerative medicine, renewable energy, Shanghai, stem cells
We’re so used to deceitful politicians that sometimes it helps to remind ourselves of their enormously fertile hypocrisies The Republican Party, particularly, loves to rant about “American” values and the close historical relationship between American government and Christianity. Every time one turns around, one of these (usually self-righteous) people is spouting about the evils of [...]
Categories: Economy
Tagged: American values, budget cuts, Christianity, corruption, deficit, evangelical, hypocrisy, Jim Wallis, Republican, What Would Jesus Cut?