Fumesucker
Fumesucker's JournalA 21st Century Mother and Child
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2015/12/24/a-21st-century-mother-and-child/A mother cradling her infant child.
If the better angels of human nature were to prevail, this picture could become one of those pictures a single frame that captures an essential piece of the 21st century.
Two human beings, stripped way past bare: two brains, connected in a universal human pose, a mother cradling her infant child.
Rebecca Saxe, a neuroscientist (and my colleague) at MIT, is a maestro of the camera that can make such images, the functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, or fMRI. To create an fMRI portrait, a subject must lie still inside a narrow cylinder, the inside of a giant electromagnet. The artful manipulation of electromagnetic fields catches the brain in the act not quite the act of thinking, but of working, nerve cells grabbing oxygen to power the action that ultimately adds up to an idea, a gesture, a feeling.
What's in a Watt?
In our modern world with powered devices at our fingertips it's very easy to lose track of just how much civilization depends on power other than and far in excess of human energy.
Smooth Criminal M Jackson
A lot of low information voters supported the Iraq War
It came to me recently that one of the attractions of Hillary Clinton with some voters is that she supported and voted for the same colossal screwup they were for, letting Dubya have his horrific way in Iraq. "Well, you see Hillary Clinton was fooled too and that excuses me being wrong because she is smart and knows foreign policy and she still got it wrong."
Those who were wrong about Iraq greatly resent those who correctly called it, the gloating over getting people to vote for someone who violates their sense of ethics has a lot to do with desire to humiliate anyone who makes the gloaters feel guilty/stupid/naive about Iraq.
"Well you voted for them and you knew they supported the Iraq War which makes you just as dirty/stupid/naive as them, you hypocrites." will be the next stage.
Human beings aren't rational animals, they are animals that rationalize.
Elizabeth Warren and the Flaming Marshmallows
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2015/11/28/saturday-morning-open-thread-leftovers/
I buy all sorts of things for Thanksgiving that no one in the family eats much during the rest of the year. Jell-O for Aunt Bees special dish (shes gone, but the green Jell-O salad lives on). Canned onion rings. Marshmallows.
Id stopped doing the sweet potatoes with toasted marshmallows on top, only to get protests from the family. I said I wasnt going to keep making it. You dont eat more than a few nibbles, and I end up throwing most of it out.
My daughter Amelia and son Alex dissolved into gales of laughter. No, no, youve got to keep making it. Even Bruce was in on the joke.
Finally they confessed why they looked forward to the dish. The last thing I do, once all the dishes are laid out and the turkey is on the table, is put the sweet potato casserole topped with carefully arranged marshmallows under the broiler, while everyone heads to the table.
And about half the time, I get distracted and remember the sweet potatoes only after the marshmallows have caught fire.
Amelia and Alex claim that, while they were growing up, that was the highlight of Thanksgiving: Would mom set the marshmallows on fire again this year? And, if I did start a fire, how exciting would it be? Would I scream? Would I set the kitchen towels on fire again? Would I carry the flaming dish to the sink while everyone rushed into the kitchen and yelled advice?
Thanksgiving is a time to be grateful. As I look around this morning at my own kids and grandkids, making new traditions and hopefully not setting the house on fire, Im deeply thankful to have the opportunity to fight for families in Massachusetts and all across the country and Im thankful to have you with me for those fights.
Should moderate Christians address the violent extremist terrorist factions within Christianity?
Do you think signs like this encourage or discourage violent Christian extremism?
Taibbi: America Is Too Dumb for TV News
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/america-is-too-dumb-for-tv-news-20151125This is a horrible thing to have to say about one's own country, but this story makes it official. America is now too dumb for TV news.
It's our fault. We in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that's basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games. You want bigger margins, you just cram the product full of more fat and sugar and violence and wait for your obese, over-stimulated customer to come waddling forth.
The old Edward R. Murrow, eat-your-broccoli version of the news was banished long ago. Once such whiny purists were driven from editorial posts and the ad people over the last four or five decades got invited in, things changed. Then it was nothing but murders, bombs, and panda births, delivered to thickening couch potatoes in ever briefer blasts of forty, thirty, twenty seconds.
What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism. The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it's just that the Fox version is a little kinkier.
<snip>
"I saved a bundle on Christmas presents this year by discussing politics on Facebook"
And BOOM! goes the dynamite...
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Member since: Sat Mar 29, 2008, 10:11 PMNumber of posts: 45,851