January 2012
79 posts
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The Coming Collapse of China: 2012 Edition →
What cannot go on forever must stop. China has, in recent history, outperformed other countries because it was in a three-decade upward supercycle, principally for three reasons. First, there were Deng Xiaoping’s transformational “reform and opening up” policies, first implemented in the late 1970s. Second, Deng’s era of change coincided with the end of the Cold War, which brought about the...
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It’s Not Just Obama: Twenty elections that could... →
If 2011 was the year when governments were overthrown in the streets, 2012 could be the year when politics plays out at the ballot box. A third of the world’s nations will be holding local, state, or national elections; a number of Arab Spring countries will be putting their democratic aspirations into action; and four out of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council —...
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December 2011
59 posts
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Bachmann: Gays ‘can marry a woman if they’re a... →
Please smash your face against a wall.
“The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war,...”
– Cory Doctorow (via azspot)
Did you know?
White American males constitute only 33% of the population. Yet, they occupy approximately:
80% of tenured positions in higher education
80% of the House of Representatives
80-85% of the U.S. Senate
92%of Forbes 400 executive CEO-level positions
90% of athletic team owners
97.7% of U.S. presidents
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Why do women menstruate? →
[…] as many women can tell you, it’s uncomfortable, awkward, and sometimes debilitating. So why, evolution, why?
One assumption some people might make is that that is just the way mammalian reproduction works. This isn’t true! Most mammals do not menstruate […] Of the mammals, only most primates, a few bats, and elephant shrews are among the lucky animals that menstruate […]
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The End of Free Will? →
The field of neuroscience evolved so rapidly in the past twenty years that it will pose unprecedented challenges to the legal system in the decades to come, changing the way we understand crime and punishment, says neuro-pioneer Joy Hirsch, director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Center at Columbia.
Functional imaging, for instance, has given scientists the ability to identify...
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“I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the...”
– Noam Chomsky
Growing wealth widens distance between lawmakers... →
Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home equity.
Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel...
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Should we be searching for dinosaur vomit? →
Much of what paleontologists have learned about dinosaurs—especially about how they lived—has been deduced from evidence other than just the fossilized bones they have found. Big breakthroughs in the field arrived, for example, after researchers learned how to spot dinosaur footprints, dinosaur eggs, imprints of dinosaur feathers, and even fossilize dinosaur scat.
In a new paper, Nathan...
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Ron Paul Would Have Allowed Hitler To Achieve... →
Along with stories of Paul refusing to use a gay man’s bathroom, and Paul being anti-Israel and believing that saving the Jews during World War II was “none of our business,” it turns out that Paul also believes that America should have left Hitler alone.
According to one of his former aides:
Ron Paul is most assuredly an isolationist. He denies this charge vociferously. But I can tell you...
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The 15 Most Dangerous Conservative Politicians And... →
All in all, the four Supreme Court Justices on this list are by far the most dangerous conservative government officials. They aren’t elected by the people and they never will have to answer for their extreme decisions. They will be on the high court for life which means they are in a position to strike down anything as unconstitutional that the extreme right-wing doesn’t like, from Social...
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Democratic Strategist Pranks Bachmann Campaign →
“I’m having some fun with it today, but if she can’t catch a little prank like this, it shows that she’s not who we need as president,” said Jones, whose organization has been poking fun at GOP candidates and their supporters for more than a year.
Though Jones is an ardent Democrat, he said his support of Bachmann for the Republican nomination is genuine.
“I...
“War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery.”
– Murray Rothbard
17-year-old wins 100k for creating cancer-killing... →
Angela Zhang’s creation is being heralded as a “Swiss army knife of cancer treatment.” Zhang managed to develop a nanoparticle that can be delivered to the site of a tumor through the drug salinomycin. Once there it kills the cancer stem cells. However, Zhang went further and included both gold and iron-oxide components, which allow for non-invasive imaging of the site through MRI and...
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Christmas: Brought to You by Chinese Slave Labor →
Wages paid late, mandatory overtime, denial of rest days, the prohibiting of talking or going to the toilet, punitive fines, sexual discrimination, harassment: this investigation reveals an impressive list of abuses and violations of basic rights.
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LulzXmas isn't over
occupyallstreets:
Today Anonymous dumped “30,000 additional names, credit cards, addresses, phone numbers, and md5 hashed passwords” from their recent stratfor hack.
Tomorrow, Anonymous will drop an enormous dump (lulz) on our next target: the entire customer database from an online military and law enforcement supply store.
This could be avoided if Bradley Manning is given a meal from...
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Is There a Rooftop Solar Bubble? And Is It About... →
Most people are aware of the government subsidies that offset 30 percent or more of commercial and residential rooftop solar — more than $10,000 for a typical solar home in California. Less known is that those up-front savings, as big as they are, still aren’t enough to generate the double-digit investment returns that solar promoters promise. In fact, for residential solar panels to pay for...
meow i dont celebrate christmas because all cats are ATHEIST
that’s right, the interweb’s favourite animal doesn’t believe in god!
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GOP Voter Suppression Plan: Seven Tactics To Block... →
truth-has-a-liberal-bias:
If you are a member of a racial minority, student or young voter, working poor, elderly or disabled, your ability to vote may be a lot harder in 2012—especially if you live in states that have a history of racial repression during the Civil Rights Movement. Simply put, the Republican Party knows which segments of society helped to elect President Obama and other...
Pennsylvania Supreme Court rules that saying a...
wanderingdame:
[Source]
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Pharmacists routinely misinform young women about... →
Researchers posing as 17-year-old women called pharmacies around the country to ask about getting EC. First off, nearly 20% of the callers were told straight-up that they couldn’t get EC that day–whether because it wasn’t in stock or they didn’t want to give it out or maybe the person who answered the phone hadn’t been trained yet. Regardless, tough luck for the caller who’d really, really like...
Keep #SOPA out of Firefox with DeSopa add-on for... →
anonymissexpress:
To say that the vast majority of geeks oppose SOPA would be an understatement. The name “Stop Online Piracy Act” may suggest a noble cause, but the tech-savvy amongst us see it as a clever mask for legislation that would put copyright holders’ interests over internet freedom. While the act’s passage isn’t certain, measures are already being taken to bypass its potential...
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Report: Why we need more immigrants- immigrants... →
Currently, the United States issues a paltry 40,000 visas a year to highly skilled immigrants. Yet 59 percent of Americans oppose letting more highly skilled immigrants into the country despite the remarkably low level of legal immigration.
The low number of visas granted is further sabotaged by other bad policy decisions, like giving work visas to the families of highly skilled workers—whose...
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Scientifically speaking, liberals are smarter than...
This comes off the back of two recent studies.
The first study concludes empirically that liberals cope better with complex situations while conservatives are quicker to feel threatened. This is because liberals have larger anterior cingulate cortexes while conservatives have larger amygdalas. In other words, the liberal brain tends to be bigger in the section dealing with ambiguity and...
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Shell spills 13,000 gallons while drilling near... →
cultureofresistance:
Shell International spilled 13,000 gallons of oil and drilling fluids into the Gulf on Sunday while drilling an exploratory well near the site of last year’s Deepwater Horizon accident, according to a federal report on the spill.
The area where the well was being drilled is about 20 miles from the site of the BP oil spill. Shell is working in water more than 7,000 feet...
50 Economic Numbers From 2011 That Are Almost Too... →
baseballlibertarian:
Here’s a sample, click through for the rest of them.
#1 A staggering 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.
#2 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be “low income” or...
i’m not an american so tbh the only reason i follow american politics is because i find the republicans… fascinating.
Ron Paul introduced a bill in 1984 to allow... →
panasonicyouth:
steviemcfly:
STILL TOTALLY NOT RACIST BRO
Just to remind folks that Ron Paul is one of the worst things ever.
Are Slower Cities Better? →
For generations, velocity has defined the urban experience: screeching subways, maniacal taxis, hustling crowds. Life in the fast lane.
But look around (if you have a second) and you might notice that a lot of the new ideas seeping into cities are aimed not at making them faster, but slowing them down. The buzziest mode of transport now is a bicycle. Streetcars, a pokey throwback, are...
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How Finance Vultures Feed off the Poor As They... →
For decades, the myopic national debate on this deeply racialized poverty has invoked images of poor people as passive victims or self-defeating freeloaders. But the poor have struggled frantically for generations to yank up their individual and communal bootstraps. They have not succeeded because the poverty they live in is not accidental. It’s the result of decades of political choices that...
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How hackers gave Subway a $30 million lesson in... →
infoneer-pulse:
For thousands of customers of Subway restaurants around the US over the past few years, paying for their $5 footlong sub was a ticket to having their credit card data stolen. In a scheme dating back at least to 2008, a band of Romanian hackers is alleged to have stolen payment card data from the point-of-sale (POS) systems of hundreds of small businesses, including more than 150...
Kim Jong Il Dead →
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Study of fish suggests that democracy depends on... →
Using a type of fish known as golden shiners, the researchers trained two groups of the fish to associate a food reward with two different color targets. A larger group of fish was trained to associate food with a blue target and a smaller group was trained to associate food with yellow, a color the fish more naturally prefer. one yellow, one blue.
The fish, like humans and other animals, have...