naked capitalism

rjs says:

re: Researchers Close in on Technology for Making Renewable Petroleum Science “opens the door to making petroleum-like hydrocarbon fuels using only bacteria, sunlight and carbon dioxide”

very much an over simplifaction; the bacteria themselves need nitrogen & phosphorus to produce their DNA, and at minimun the building blocks of chloroplasts for photosynthesis..

Dave of Maryland says:

I’m no fan of Obama, but why this birther nuttiness? There are more than enough legitimate grounds for going after him.

The reason for birther nonsense is that the Big O smells of fraud & nothing he can do or say will take that away. Which, like ants at a picnic, will go on annoying.

If you work it through very closely, if you followed the (weekly) updates to his mommy’s Wiki page back in 2007, if you know the criteria for fake IDs – really good fake IDs – (birth in a distant land, missing daddy, carefully selected mommy), if you study his personal habits (diet, his left hook), you may come to the same conclusion I did, which is that

Obama was born & raised in Chicago. Not Hawaii & certainly not Kenya. The fruit does not fall far from the tree that bore it.

You wanna find his real records & settle this? If I’m right, search the mid-1970′s Illinois penal records (as an adult). And the Chicago-based Nation of Islam. You’re looking for a mug shot of that iconic face, though probably with a bit more hair.

dearieme says:

“why this birther nuttiness”: put aside the nuttiness of those who claim to have proof that he was borne elsewhere. There are two legit reasons for discomfort.

(1) The Constitution requires the Pres to be a natural-born citizen, but Congress has never passeds a statute to effect a suitable test before a Presidential election. That should be an embarrassment to anyone who takes all the Constitutionality fol-de-rol seriously.
(2) O has made energetic and expensive efforts to hide his birth certificate. It follows that there is something embarrassing on it (which may have nothing to do with his being, or not being, a natural-born citizen) and it is entirely natural to want to know what it is.

For myself, I think that a much more interesting question is “Who knows what that embarrassing thing is and what has been their price for silence?”

Philip Pilkington says:

That empathy article is really good – even though I’m not inclined toward the good doctor’s methodology.

What is really interesting – and was noticed years ago by the Marxist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (of all people) – is that empathy rests to a certain extent on sight and mimicry. (I believe this was also recognised to some degree by that wacky French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan…).

Adorno was, like many of his Jewish and Marxist peers, chased out of Germany by the Nazis. He and his generation saw the pogroms and sought to understand them.

What he noticed was that in humans mimicry played a fundamental part in their ability to empathise. Thus, empathy is traceable to the animal instinct for mimicry – that is, the simulation of the Other through the observation of their movements etc. First we, as children and like animals (think monkeys etc.), attempt to mimic the Other (the fireman, the housewife, the dancer etc.) and then as we mature we use the same psychological mechanism to try to simulate the Other’s emotional states within ourselves and adjust ourselves (or not) accordingly.

Note that on the internet people – myself included – are often quite cruel to others when engaged in an argument, far more so than they would be in the ‘real world’. I think that this is partially because on the interweb we don’t ‘see’ other people and so our instinct for mimicry and thus empathy breaks down.

Oh, and regarding this from the article…

“Zero degrees of empathy does not strike at random in the population. There are at least three well-defined routes to getting to this end-point: borderline, psychopathic, and borderline personality disorders.”

…shhhh! Don’t tell the Randroids. After all, you might hurt their feelings!!!

Cynthia says:

Don’t you think we oughta find out exactly who these so-called anti-Qaddafi “rebels” are and what sort of government they want for the people of Libya before we decide to arm them to the hilt? For all we know, they could be just another despotic group of trigger-happy, torture-loving rebels no different from Qaddafi and his gang of thugs. Or worse, they could be the Libyan equivalent of al Qaeda or the Taliban. But if these Libyan rebels do turn out to be our enemy or evolve into our enemy, this won’t be the first time that we have found ourselves aiding and abetting the enemy.

As to why we continue to make military decisions that invariably come back to bite us in a never-ending cycle of blowbacks, all I can figure is that our top priority isn’t to win wars, but to keep them in a perpetual state. Because if we were to win any of our wars in the Middle East or elsewhere in the world, we would be forced to downside our military, which would slow down the pork-laden gravy train going to defense contractors and lobbyists.

You know that you’re living a country that views war as nothing more than money-making machine when it refuses to put a stop to its wars for the sake of protecting profits for the K Street-Wall Street axis of evil.