Clipmarks | jklugman's clips

The true heart of the conservative movement

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 01:41:07 GMT

clipped by: jklugman
clipper's remarks:

Matt Yglesias said:

Of course as tends to be the case with Helms' most repugnantly racist bile, he said that a good ways back in the past. But even at that time, most Americans managed not to be repugnant racists. But not Helms. And unlike a lot of people who did take the white supremacist line in the 1950s and 60s, Helms never apologized and, indeed, never backed down doing things like mounting a filibuster against making Martin Luther King Day into a federal holiday. Remarkably, mainstream American conservatives are eager to tell us that this man is their hero. Even more remarkably, you sometimes hear conservatives talk about reaching out to black voters.

Clip Source: matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com

Politico: "To many on the right, it was Helms, not Reagan, who was the true heart of the conservative movement."

Mitch McConnell: "Today we lost a senator whose stature in Congress had few equals, . . . Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in.”

Jesse Helms: "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights."

Tags: race, jesse helms, republicans, conservatives, racism

ACLU: Massive Pentagon effort conceals human costs of war

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:53:04 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: ACLU charges unprecedented effort to "control and suppress information about the human cost" of the wars

Clip Source: thinkprogress.org

The ACLU today released documents regarding Navy investigations of civilians killed by coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report notes that the administration has gone to “unprecedented lengths to control and suppress information about the human cost” of the wars. Some of the key findings:

– Banning photographers on U.S. military bases from covering the arrival of caskets containing the remains of U.S. soldiers killed overseas

– Paying Iraqi journalists to write positive accounts of the U.S. war effort

– Inviting U.S. journalists to “embed” with military units but requiring them to submit their stories for pre-publication review

– Erasing journalists’ footage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan

– Refusing to disclose statistics on civilian casualties.

The New York Times revealed in April that the Pentagon also had used a domestic propaganda program to paint a rosy portrait of the war effort. See the documents here.

Tags: war on terror

ERISA Nags Universal Coverage

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 20:42:31 GMT

clipped by: revtj
clipper's remarks: Corporations use the Act to deny benefits...

Clip Source: www.npr.org

Spherion's decision to deny benefits to Amschwand-Bellinger turned on an odd set of facts. Spherion, which employs about 300,000 people, switched insurers after Thomas Amschwand was diagnosed with a rare form of heart cancer. The new policy did not take effect until an employee worked one full day. Spherion never informed Amschwand of the requirement.

Employers use federal law to deny benefits

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 12:49:02 GMT

clipped by: A53GG4

Clip Source: biz.yahoo.com

AP
Employers use federal law to deny benefits
Saturday July 5, 11:31 pm ET
By Mark Sherman, Associated Press Writer

Workers -- and some judges -- frustrated in legal fights over benefits with large employers

Dying of cancer, Thomas Amschwand did everything he was told to make sure his wife would collect on the life insurance policy he had through his employer.

"He was obsessed with dotting every `i' and crossing every `t'," Melissa Amschwand-Bellinger recalled about her husband, who died in 2001 at age 30.

But Spherion Corp., the temporary staffing company where Amschwand worked, told Amschwand-Bellinger she would not receive any of the $426,000 in benefits she believed she was due. When she went to court, Spherion succeeded in getting her lawsuit thrown out. The Supreme Court on June 27 refused to review the case.

Amschwand-Bellinger received a refund of the few thousand dollars in insurance premiums she and her husband dutifully had paid.

Tags: health

5 Psychological Experiments That Prove Humanity is Doomed

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:47:30 GMT

clipped by: CrazyRedHead
clipper's remarks: ...Think about that when you're walking around the mall: Eight out of ten of those people you see would torture the sh*t out of a puppy if a dude in a lab coat asked them to.

Clip Source: www.cracked.com

The Asch Conformity Experiment

Subjects were told that they would be taking part in a vision test

everybody else in the room other than the subject was in on it, and they were were told to give obviously wrong answers

32 percent of subjects would answer incorrectly if they saw that three others in the classroom gave the same wrong answer

The Good Samaritan Experiment

subjects would pass a person slumped in an alleyway, who looked to be in need of help.

only 10 percent would stop to give any aid

Bystander Apathy Experiment

Clip Source: www.cracked.com

Stanford Prison Experiment

volunteers were all male college students who were then divided arbitrarily into 12 guards and 12 prisoners.

It took about one day for every subject to suddenly go as insane as a shit-house rat.

Milgram Experiment

The subject was told that whenever the other guy gave an incorrect answer, he was to press a button that would give him an electric shock.

Subjects will mindlessly deliver pain to an innocent stranger

Tags: science, health, mental health, psychology

Newsweek - television minus electricity

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 02:38:00 GMT

clipped by: jklugman
clipper's remarks: Read the whole piece by Scott McLemee.

The Newsweek article declared Lincoln the winner, by the way.

(full disclosure: I am a "Facebook friend" of McLemee's, which is to say, I'm not really a friend of his at all)

CLARIFICATION: He friended me after I signed up as a fan of his blog. Other than that we have had no personal contact at all.

Clip Source: www.artsjournal.com

Every time I pass a magazine stand now, it's impossible not to try to imagine the dynamics of the editorial meeting where this seemed like a good idea:

As noted before, there was a time when the cultural coverage and middlebrow thumbsuckery of the major newsmagazines played a part in my own education. That period is long since over -- for me, of course, but even more dramatically for them. Both Time and Newsweek long ago gave up being anything except television minus the electricity. They exist as the farm leagues for the talk shows, mostly.

Tags: newsweek, time, media, abraham lincoln, charles darwin

US wavered over S. Korean executions

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:53:53 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

AP IMPACT: US wavered over S. Korean executions

SEOUL, South Korea - The American colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to stall at first. But the declassified record shows he finally told his South Korean counterpart it "would be permitted" to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces.

In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, in a few weeks in mid-1950.

The NYT On Avastin

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:38:37 GMT

clipped by: Matthew Herper
clipper's remarks: The New York Times has a long takeout in the Sunday paper on the conundrum raised by Genentech's Avastin: How much can society afford to pay for a treatment that, while beneficial, only extends median survival by a little bit?

An interesting bit of new information comes out in between the analysis and stirring narrative. Genentech and Roche have spent more than $2.25 billion to develop Avastin.

That's an interesting figure -- about as much as the drug made in sales last year. It does serve as a reminder that it is drug companies, not the government, that really pay for developing new medicines.

What makes the Avastin conundrum difficult is that it is one of the biggest sellers introduced in recent memory. If Avastin's not worth the money, there are some hard questions that need to be asked about the incentives currently at work in drug development.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Genentech, which has never before revealed what it spent to develop Avastin, now says that it and its partner Roche have spent more than $2.25 billion starting with Dr. Ferrara’s original work. The figure includes research, clinical trials and filing for regulatory approval and is well beyond what was spent by the federal government, which conducted important clinical trials of Avastin. Through May 2006, the government had spent $44.6 million on Avastin trials and related laboratory work, according to figures obtained from the National Cancer Institute by Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group.

Original "Metropolis" Found After 80 Years

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:26:28 GMT

clipped by: wiccantexan
clipper's remarks: "But a private collector carried an original version to Argentina in 1928, where it has stayed, Felix-Didier said. "

Clip Source: www.cbsnews.com

Lost scenes from the sci-fi classic "Metropolis," recently discovered in the archives of a Buenos Aires museum, were shown to journalists for the first time in decades on Thursday.

A long-lost original cut of the 1927 silent film sat for 80 years in a private collection and then in the Museum of Cinema in Buenos Aires, where it was discovered in April with scratched images that hadn't been seen before.

Museum director Paula Felix-Didier said theirs is the only copy of German director Fritz Lang's complete film.

"This is the version Fritz Lang intended," said Martin Koerber, a curator at the Deutsche Kinemathek film museum in Berlin, Germany.

"Metropolis," written by Lang and his actress wife Thea von Harbou, depicts a 21st century world divided between a class of underworld workers and the "thinkers" above who control them.

distributors cut Lang's three-and-a-half-hour masterpiece into the shorter version since viewed by millions worldwide.

Tags: movie, film, sci-fi, science fiction, history

Innumeracy's John Allen Paulos on credulity and love

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:05:52 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: A great post from 3quarksdaily (Feb. 2008) about the human desire to believe in something, even a fraud. Context: Paulos has put together a book debunking probabilistic arguments for God's existence. The clip doesn't do it justice -- RTWT ("read the whole thing").

Clip Source: 3quarksdaily.blogs.com

God and Girls in Thailand

I found myself at loose ends in a beach town in Thailand on Christmas morning, 2006. Away from my family in Philadelphia, I was visiting a friend who was planning an early retirement in Southeast Asia. While wandering near the edge of town, I spotted a spirit house, a sort of miniature temple mounted on a pedestal like a bird house. Although irreligious, I noted the fruit offerings strewn around it and was attracted to its makeshift beauty.

Pausing at the shrine, I saw a small Internet café just beyond it, empty except for three nubile young women who were giggling and periodically running up to one or another of the many computers in the room. The desire for my morning Diet Coke, the need to check my email, and the palpable mirth bubbling out of the women drew me into the place.

Despite the goings-on, I first took care of my caffeine and correspondence demands. Soon, however, I noticed there were Webcams on all the computers.

Tags: religion, atheism, mathematics, blogclip, love, romance

The Case Against Meat

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 20:57:08 GMT

clipped by: jklugman
clipper's remarks:

Ezra Klein said:

Animals also need land. Even if they're penned up in industrial agriculture settings. And it turns out they need a lot more of it than do most crops. The following graph (which comes from this pdf) tracks usable protein yield per acre for a host of foods. Meat doesn't fare well:

Clip Source: www.prospect.org

I've been getting a lot of links along the lines of, "if meat becomes more expensive, everyone will starve! Is that what liberals want!?" The point of talking about meat in an energy context, however, is not simply that it's extraordinarily resource intensive; it's that it's extraordinarily resource intensive compared to other foods. People are starving because so many of us eat meat. If meat were to become more expensive, and folks began trending towards plant-based diets, world hunger would be substantially alleviated.

Annoyingly, animals live for awhile before they become steaks, and that period turns out to require a lot of energy. This means it takes about 16 pounds of grain to "produce" one pound of animal flesh. That's grain, of course, that the poor can't eat, because it's bought by richer countries in order to feed livestock. And what grain remains is pricier, because the market for grain is tightened by the 756 million tons going to animal feed.

Tags: food, meat, animals, energy, environment

Deficiencies in right-wing patriotism

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:18:34 GMT

clipped by: jklugman
clipper's remarks:

The last example is especially strange -- despairing about the political culture of the South in the 1920's, where disenfranchisement, lynching, and even slavery were routine practices, is a sign of insufficent patriotism? If that doesn't show the deficiencies of the right's style of patriotism, nothing does.

Via Matt Yglesias

Clip Source: blogs.tnr.com

in yesterday's USA Today, Jonah Goldberg offers up a perfect specimen of the undistilled conservative patriotism

Oddly, Jonah ofers up this strange example of liberalism's alleged contempt for the United States:

Many progressives in the 1920s considered the American hinterlands a vast sea of yokels and boobs, incapable of grasping how much they needed what the activists were selling.

The Nation ran a famous series then called "These United States," in which smug emissaries from East Coast cities chronicled the "backward" attitudes of what today would be called fly-over country. One correspondent proclaimed that in "backwoods" New York (i.e. outside the Big Apple): "Resistance to change is their most sacred principle." If that was their attitude to New York, it shouldn't surprise that they felt even worse about the South. One author explained that Dixie needed nothing less than an invasion of liberal "missionaries" so that the "light of civilization" might finally be glimpsed down there.

Tags: conservatives, jonah goldberg

Jesse Helms - Dead at 86 years

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:03:19 GMT

clipped by: BartendingBear
clipper's remarks: He won't be missed in these quarters.

Clip Source: www.wral.com

Jesse Helms, the firebrand U.S. senator whose outspoken, conservative views polarized North Carolina and U.S. voters for decades, died at 1:15 a.m. Friday in Raleigh, according to John Dodd, president of the Jesse Helms Center.

He joins the second and third presidents of the United States – Thomas Jefferson and John Adams Jr. – who both also died on Independence Day.

He was 86. His cause of death was not released. Funeral arrangements will be forthcoming, Dodd said.

Study: Open-Minded Blog Readers Much More Likely To Be Left-Wing

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 23:11:56 GMT

clipped by: jklugman
clipper's remarks: I ordinarily stay away from "liberals are x; conservatives are y" stories but what the hell, we've seen a lot of that lately on Clipmarks and this study looks well-designed.

Clip Source: papers.ssrn.com

Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation and Polarization in American Politics

HENRY FARRELL
George Washington University - Department of Political Science
ERIC LAWRENCE
George Washington University-Department of Political Science
JOHN SIDES
George Washington University - Department of Political Science

June, 25 2008

Clip Source: crookedtimber.org

blog readers seem to exhibit strong homophily. That is to say, they overwhelmingly choose blogs that are written by people who are roughly in accordance with their political views. Left wingers read left wing blogs, right wingers read right wing blogs, and very few people read both left wing and right wing blogs. Those few people who read both left wing and right wing blogs are considerably more likely to be left wing themselves; interpret this as you like.

Clip Source: crookedtimber.org

Tags: politics, liberals, conservatives

Political Junkies: Why it Feels Good to Be an Extremist

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 02:28:12 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: In The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Western summarizes fMRI experiments exploring the neuro-psychology of systematic bias and rationalization in the brains of political extremists. Finding ways to dismiss contradictory evidence triggers pleasant emotional releases in partisans' brains, eventually becoming a pleasurable, learned behavior.

Once partisans had found a way to reason to false conclusions, not only did neural circuits involved in negative emotions turn off, but circuits involved in positive emotions turned on.

The partisan brain didn't seem satisfied in just feeling better. It worked overtime to feel good, activating reward circuits that give partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement for their biased "reasoning."

These reward circuits overlap substantially with those activated when drug addicts get their "fix," giving new meaning to the term political junkie.
Clip Source: daily.sightline.org
How is it that even smart people can ignore a pile of evidence that contradicts their deeply-held beliefs. Why is it I get a rush when I'm making fun of a politician I don't agree with -- even if it's his flubs or quirks I'm mocking, not necessarily his ideas?
According to the research of Drew Western, political partisans -- and especially the smart, well-informed ones -- not only feel better when their brains downplay contradictory political information, they actually get a little emotional "high" when the brain (unconsciously) rejects evidence that contradicts their deeply held political beliefs.
In a series of brain scans of political partisans asked to consider contradictory statements by the politicians they supported, Western found that the brain reverted to the comfort zone of its long-held biases -- and doing so actually made people feel good.

Tags: science, politics, neuroscience, psychology, brain, reason, extremism, bias, beliefs