“Jaw-dropping aerial photography by David Maisel. Taken from his website:
(BOOOOOOOM!)
Catastrophic fall in numbers: 45 per cent of common European birds are declining; resident Australian wading birds have seen population losses of 81 per cent in the same period; twenty common North American birds have more than halved in number in the last four decades…
(Independent.UK)
…says leading geneticist Steve Jones. Survival of the fittest is now a moot point, no longer exerting selective pressure. (Times of London)
…In his brilliant new book, Burton systematically and convincingly shows that certainty is a mental state, a feeling like anger or pride that can help guide us, but that doesn’t dependably reflect objective truth… In the polarizing atmosphere of the 2008 election, On Being Certain ought to be required reading for every candidate — and for every citizen.” — ForbesLife (Amazon)
This goes beyond refusing to look at Obama in the first debate. With this slightly dehumanizing phrase, McCain may have just played into the emerging narrative of Obama-hate that has been sprouting at McCain-Palin rallies.
Darren Davis, a professor at Notre Dame who specializes in the role of race in politics, sent a comment to the Huffington Post about McCain’s “that one” remark. “It speaks volumes about how McCain feels personally about Obama. Whomever said the town hall format helps McCain is dead wrong,” Davis wrote.’
Obama Hatred At McCain-Palin Rallies: “Terrorist!” “Kill Him!”
Arianna Huffington: McCain’s Desperate Claim: Obama is Dangerous. Vote for Me If You Want to Live!
Jeffrey Feldman: Is Palin Trying To Incite Violence Against Obama?
…(All from Huffington Post)
I have never had more fear that the level of rancor in the population being tapped into against a presidential candidate will get him assassinated.
Bruce Schneier takes note of successful experiment sending faked GPS signal with off-the-shelf equipment that can be carried in the back of a car. (Schneier on Security) The implications for national security are evident.
…feds warned hospitals in a nonpublic 2006 communique recently published by the government sunshine site Wikileaks.
…In fact, the feds suggest (.pdf) that there’s already been a totally terrorism-fear-created illness in California where no one was actually sick from an attack.
In that case, a man walked into a California bank in October 2003, sprayed an aerosol can into the air and then left. Employees and customers became ill, though investigators found there were no biological or chemical agents in the air. (Note proof of this incident is attributed to a November 2003 FBI report that is also considered too sensitive for the public’s eyes.)” (Wired)
In the advance online edition of Nature Medicine, scientists from Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center, the Université de Montréal and the Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (INSERM) in France report how the GPR91 receptor contributes to activate unchecked vascular growth that causes vision loss in common blinding diseases. These findings could also have wide-ranging and positive implications for brain tissue regeneration.” (Science Daily)
The results of this study suggest that what has been selected as major signs by psychiatric nosography is regarded as manifestations induced by perceptive peculiarities and strong emotional reactions by the autistic persons who expressed themselves.” (Science Daily)
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Years ago, there was a psychiatric paper I can no longer dig up proposing that belief in ESP was correlated with a history of sexual abuse and other trauma, the link being the experience of the lack of control in abuse. It is more comforting to believe that the skill to foresee, and potentially avoid, disastrous events exists (even if one failed dismally at foreseeing events in the abuse situation; one can believe in the possibility one may not fail the next time…) than to believe that no foresight is possible and that disastrous things defy our abilities to control them.
And on a cultural level, I recall being fascinated by attempts to explain ritual and religion as efforts to exert an illusory control over contingent events. (If we perform our rituals perfectly, the gods won’t send that famine. When it comes, it is because we were imperfect in our observance.)
So some distorted, “magical thinking” can come from experience, but it can also come from neurochemical imbalances or abnormalities of neural network formation, as in schizophrenia and other psychoses, especially of the paranoid type, in which too much credence is given to coincidence and patterns are found where there are none. And this amped-up ability to see patterns may not, of course, always work against one. A gifted few seem to have an enhanced ability to make order out of chaos, as per an article from New Scientist to which I blinked in March of 2002.
I have also written further about this on FmH in a discussion of pareidolia and apophenia which touched, among other things, upon William Gibson‘s preoccupations in the aptly-titled Pattern Recognition (2003).
Related
Watch this video to get the firsthand accounts of LBGT people from Palin’s hometown and find out why they fear a Palin Vice Presidency.” (Tell-A-Friend)
Officials have called the abandonments a misuse of a new law that was mainly intended to prevent so-called Dumpster babies — the abandonment of newborns by young, terrified mothers — but instead has been used to hand off out-of-control teenagers or, in the case of the father of 10, to escape financial and personal despair.
The spate of abandonments has prompted an outcry about parental irresponsibility and pledges to change the state law. But it has also cast a spotlight on the hidden extent of family turmoil around the country and what many experts say is a shortage of respite care, counseling and especially psychiatric services to help parents in dire need.” (New York Times)
![//ngm.nationalgeographic.com/wallpaper/img/2008/10/oct08-19-1280.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/ngm.nationalgeographic.com/wallpaper/img/2008/10/oct08-19-1280.jpg "Man Meets Whale")
For those for whom getting smashed is the only way to make any sense of what is going to happen tonight.
National Geographic‘s Map of the Day: “Browse through history using our daily maps of historical news events and milestones. Navigate the map using our zoom tool.”
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