Archive for the 'Dictatorship' Category
Empathy Declining: ‘The American Personality Is Shifting In An Ominous Direction’
December 30th, 2010Via: Scientific American: Humans are unlikely to win the animal kingdom’s prize for fastest, strongest or largest, but we are world champions at understanding one another. This interpersonal prowess is fueled, at least in part, by empathy: our tendency to care about and share other people’s emotional experiences. Empathy is a cornerstone of human behavior […]
Dawn of the Age of the Robot
December 30th, 2010This article reminded me of reading OMNI magazine in the 1980s, when I should have been doing my homework. Hopefully, much of this stuff will remain as science fiction / grant swindles for another 20 years… but I doubt it. Via: Guardian: The robots are coming. The second decade of the 21st century will see […]
Europe to Ban Hundreds of Herbal Remedies
December 30th, 2010Via: Independent: Hundreds of herbal medicinal products will be banned from sale in Britain next year under what campaigners say is a “discriminatory and disproportionate” European law. With four months to go before the EU-wide ban is implemented, thousands of patients face the loss of herbal remedies that have been used in the UK for […]
U.S. Government Wants to Archive Information on All Bank to Bank Overseas Money Transfers for Ten Years
December 30th, 2010Via: EFF: What do an online donation to the International Red Cross, a bank transfer to family members living in Vietnam, and a payment sent through PayPal for an expensive rug in Turkey have in common? The government wants to know about them. And, if new rules proposed by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or […]
Homeland Security Trolling ‘We Won’t Fly Blog’
December 30th, 2010This is just some troglodyte with bits of gas station deli meat down the front of its shirt and undiluted non dairy creamer on its upper lip. Wait until they start showing up in teams, and from different, normal looking ISP IPs (not proxies). The admin will be wondering whether the site needs an enema […]
China Matches U.S. Space Launches for First Time
December 27th, 2010Via: Wired: Outwardly, it looked like just another big space launch — and those happen about once a week, from spaceports all around the world. But Friday’s blast-off of a rocket, carrying a Chinese GPS-style navigation satellite, from the Xi Chang Satellite Launch Center was different. It set a record for successful Chinese launches in […]
Companies That Made And Maintained Blow Out Preventer Have Had Hands-On Access To It
December 24th, 2010Via: AP: A federal board allowed to monitor testing of a key piece of Gulf oil spill evidence — the blowout preventer — demanded Thursday that the analysis stop, saying representatives of the companies that made and maintained the 300-ton device have been getting preferential and sometimes hands-on access to it. The U.S. Chemical Safety […]
Sacramento-Area Pilot Punished By Feds for YouTube Video
December 24th, 2010Via: News10: An airline pilot is being disciplined by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for posting video on YouTube pointing out what he believes are serious flaws in airport security. The 50-year-old pilot, who lives outside Sacramento, asked that neither he nor his airline be identified. He has worked for the airline for more than […]
Nearly 1 in 4 Students Too Stupid to Pass U.S. Army Entrance Exam
December 22nd, 2010It’s actually much worse than the headline indicates. Check out this sentence: Pentagon data shows that 75 percent of those aged 17 to 24 don’t even qualify to take the test because they are physically unfit, have a criminal record or didn’t graduate high school. Via: AP: Nearly one-fourth of the students who try to […]
The New, NEW! Terrorists
December 21st, 2010Via: ABC News: “The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens — raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born,” […]
