“If we are to have another contest in our national existence I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixons, but between patriotism & intelligence on the one side, & superstition, ambition, & ignorance on the other [...] Resolve that either the state or Nation, or both combined, shall support institutions of learning [...] sufficient to afford to every child growing up in the land the opportunity of a good common school education.
[...] Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and private schools entirely supported by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.”

– Ulysses S. Grant, 1822 – 1885, 18th president of the United States of America

(via spacegirl)

“Guns require a finger to pull the trigger. The sad young man who did that in Newtown was clearly haunted by demons and no gun law could have saved the children in Sandy Hook Elementary from his terror. There is evil prowling in the world — it shows up in our movies, video games and online fascinations, and finds its way into vulnerable hearts and minds. As a free people, let us choose what kind of people we will be. Laws, the only redoubt of secularism, will not suffice. Let us all return to our places of worship and pray for help.”
- Texas Governor Rick Perry

It is very hard for me grasp that a person who (1) has these beliefs and (2) has openly shared them for decades was actually somehow elected into one of the highest political offices in the US, and even ran for presidency.

(Source: nydailynews.com)

One of the most insightful 10 minute talks I have seen in the last years. Sir Ken Robinson about the education system and the way we think about learning, growth, and success.

The economist posted an overview about the rockets fired from Israel into Gaza and vice versa, both for the last years and the last days since the conflict broke out.

In case you don’t know, there are two great things about voting in the States.
(1) Americans vote on the first Tuesday in November.
(2) The lines can be long, waiting several hours is something that many people here have experienced.

This is amazing because conservatives like seniors have plenty of time to cast their vote, whereas people like single mothers, people with small businesses who have to work their 10 or 12 hours a day to keep it running, and other generally more liberally minded people do not get to vote at all.

Furthermore, the voting went very smoothly.

• New Jersey: “Voters were being asked for I.D. even though the state has no law requiring it, voting locations opened late and some locations didn’t have ballots [...] While the state is allowing voters to return their absentee ballots electronically, servers in at least three counties had shut down
• Florida: “Reports of malfunctioning machines and broken scanners were reported throughout South Florida on Tuesday [...] Voters at the location told NBC 6 South Florida the scene was chaotic and frustrating with poll workers unprepared to handle any issues properly. They said staff didn’t explain what the hold up was and many voters ended up leaving the line because they couldn’t wait any longer. Residents who had already voted left their filled out ballots with staffers who put them in a bag. They were told ‘just trust us, that will be done at the end of the night’”.
• Florida 2: Voting no actually means yes, and sample ballots run over 12 pages and even lawyers have problems figuring out what the text means. What happened? “Backed by Republican state lawmakers, the proposed amendments …” … no more questions.
• Conneticut: Republican candidate Linda McMahon with one of the ballsiest false-flag operations in voting history. She had minorities dressed up in TShirts stating that they would vote for “Obama & McMahon”, and had other voting PR materials prepared as well. Nowhere was stated that she was, in fact, Republican, and voting herself for Mitt Romney.
• Florida: robo-calls tell voters they can cast their vote on Wednesday – one day after the election.
• Mississippi: “An unknown number of voter registrations have gone missing”
• Ohio: “Last Minute Directive by Ohio’s Jon Husted Could See Legal Votes Discarded & Swing the Election”.
• Ohio 2: last minute, unauthorized changes to voting software (some people suspect that they need to make sure Romney wins, and not Bush)
• Ohio 3: “Thousands of absentee-ballot requests may have been erroneously rejected statewide”
• Thousands of employees of several large companies have received a letter or email from their director / chairman, urging them to vote for Romney. This is a legal procedure in the United States. E.g. Mike White, the chairman and owner of Rite-Hite, a major Milwaukee manufacturer of industrial equipment, wrote each employee “should understand the personal consequences to them of having our tax rates increase dramatically if President Obama is re-elected, forcing taxpayers to fund President Obama’s future deficits and social programs (including Obamacare), which require bigger government.” Some of the claims in the emails are mails are outright lies, e.g. that Obama is raising the tax-rates for companies to 65%.
• Obama saved Chrysler. Romney said originally that it should just go bankrupt. Later he lied about what he said. Then he ran an ad making up that Chrysler was going to move operations overseas. Chrysler had enough now and gives its workers a full day off to vote
• Special voting machine (video): You vote for Obama, the machine counts your Romney vote.

The Scientific American, April 2005, about giving up on being persuaded by “mere evidence”.

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

A hilarious article worth reading.

(– via brainchallenged spacegirl)

“Although the law and the discussion has been on the statute book for over 25 years, it is indicative of a culture that has taken hold of the programs of successive governments, that with a reasonable and well intentioned ambition to contain obnoxious elements in society has created a society of an extraordinarily authoritarian and controlling nature. That is what you might call the ‘new intolerance’: A new and intense desire to gag uncomfortable voices of descent.

I am not intolerant, say many people. Say many softly spoken, highly educated, liberal minded poeple.
I’m only intolerant of intolerance. [...] But thinking about this for more than 5 seconds make you realize that all it is advocating is replacing one kind of intolerance with another. Underlying prejudices and justices or resentments are not addressed by arresting people, they are addressed with by the issues being aired, argued and dealt with, preferably outside of the legal process.

For me, the best way to increase society’s resistance to insulting or offensive speech is to allow a lot more of it.”

Spiegel Internationall managed to get an interview with Prof Joseph Stiglitz about inequality in the US, in which he presents some terrifying numbers:

“In 2008, President George W. Bush claimed that we did not have enough money for health insurance for poor American children, costing a few billion dollars a year. But all of a sudden we had $150 billion to bail out AIG, the insurance company. That shows that something is wrong with our political system. It is more akin to “one dollar, one vote” than to “one person, one vote.”

“Many of those in the financial sector got rich by economic manipulation, by deceptive and anti-competitive practices, by predatory lending. They took advantage of the poor and uninformed, as they made enormous amounts of money by preying upon these groups with predatory lending. They sold them costly mortgages and were hiding details of the fees in fine print.”

“In 2011, the six heirs to the Walmart empire commanded wealth of almost $70 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of US society.”

“More than a quarter of all homeowners owe more money than the value of their houses. We need a growth strategy to stimulate the economy. We haven’t invested enough for 30 years — in infrastructure, technology, education.”

“One corporation alone, AIG, got more than $150 billion — more than was spent on welfare for needy families from 1990 to 2006.”

“Europe’s crisis is not caused by excessive long-term debts and deficits. It is caused by cutbacks in government expenditures. The recession caused the deficits, not the other way around. Before the crisis Spain and Ireland ran budget surpluses. They cannot be accused of fiscal profligacy. More fiscal discipline will only worsen the downturn. No economy ever recovered from a downturn through austerity.”

Joseph Stiglitz is …

… “recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is also the former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls “free market fundamentalists”) and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.”

His latest book “The Price of Inequality” (2012) hit the New York Times best seller list.

The Guardian published an edited extract from “Bad Pharma”, by Ben Goldacre, published next week.

I don’t know what to say. These are facts, and I read a lot of the papers he talks about. We really need to do something about this. It’s one of the greatest and most dangerous crimes of our times.

Just one example:

“When GlaxoSmithKline applied for a marketing authorisation in children for paroxetine, an extraordinary situation came to light, triggering the longest investigation in the history of UK drugs regulation. Between 1994 and 2002, GSK conducted nine trials of paroxetine in children. The first two failed to show any benefit, but the company made no attempt to inform anyone of this by changing the “drug label” that is sent to all doctors and patients. In fact, after these trials were completed, an internal company management document stated: “It would be commercially unacceptable to include a statement that efficacy had not been demonstrated, as this would undermine the profile of paroxetine.” In the year after this secret internal memo, 32,000 prescriptions were issued to children for paroxetine in the UK alone: so, while the company knew the drug didn’t work in children, it was in no hurry to tell doctors that, despite knowing that large numbers of children were taking it. More trials were conducted over the coming years – nine in total – and none showed that the drug was effective at treating depression in children.

It gets much worse than that. These children weren’t simply receiving a drug that the company knew to be ineffective for them; they were also being exposed to side-effects. This should be self-evident, since any effective treatment will have some side-effects, and doctors factor this in, alongside the benefits (which in this case were nonexistent). But nobody knew how bad these side-effects were, because the company didn’t tell doctors, or patients, or even the regulator about the worrying safety data from its trials. This was because of a loophole: you have to tell the regulator only about side-effects reported in studies looking at the specific uses for which the drug has a marketing authorisation. Because the use of paroxetine in children was “off-label”, GSK had no legal obligation to tell anyone about what it had found.”

Please read the full article, and consider looking into the book.

– Source: guardian.co.uk