Clipmarks | tabsey's Comments

Is money part of human nature??

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:38:44 GMT

clipped by: einbar

Why Money is Part of Human Nature: Money as Both Tool and Drug

Money is more than just a useful tool, as some economists have argued; while money is certainly useful, human behaviour towards it can't be explained just by its utility. The drug metaphor helps demonstrate how the motivation for money often extends past its actual utility. This ties in with many sociological analyses that emphasise money's social meaning and symbolic nature over and above its simple utilitarian applications.

Thinking of money as a drug highlights the biological basis of money. An evolutionary account underlines this biological perspective by suggesting that money addiction might be built on our drive to trade and play.

What Lea and Webley are implicitly arguing against is a purely cultural understanding of humans' relationship with money. Their view is that culture on its own is not powerful enough to explain the human motivation for money. Money, they argue, whether for good or evil, is part of human nature

It's Not Ethical?

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:01:28 GMT

clipped by: thisnamecantbetaken

Clip Source: www.tompaine.com

It�s Not Ethical?

President Pro-Life George W. Bush

“Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical.” He called the United States “a nation founded on the principle that all human life is sacred.”

Apparently,

it’s OK to destroy human life to alter geopolitics, to enhance the power of the United States, to seek revenge on collaterally-placed victims, to try out new weapons and tactics, to give our untested armies a chance to see actual combat, or, just for the holy Hell of it.

When a fundamentalist-posturing, millennial, faith-based militarist says "human life," he means undifferentiated clumps of cells;

not mean dark, moneyless foreigners.

And, if the United States has surmounted its bloody history and moved into a period in which all life is sacred, then a fine way to show it would be to, now and today, stop shooting in Iraq.

indifference to human suffering in the defense of nation-building is

equivalent to any other military dictator

Sacred life, indeed.

Who doesn't need more brain power!

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:46:03 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik
clipper's remarks: Does that mean that in near future we would be having doping tests before exams to filter out those students who have taken these drugs to take (illegal?) edge over those who have not?

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Increasing numbers of people are using prescription drugs like Ritalin to boost alertness and brain power, say experts.

Up to a fifth of adults, including college students and shift workers, may be using cognitive enhancers, a poll of 1,400 by Nature journal suggests.

Professor Sahakian's own work shows 17% of students in some US universities admit to using the stimulant Ritalin (methylphenidate) - a drug designed to treat hyperactive children - to maximise their learning power.

One in five of the 1,400 people who responded to the Nature survey said they had taken Ritalin, Provigil (modafinil) or beta-blockers for non-medical reasons. They used them to stimulate focus, concentration or memory.

Of that one in five, 62% had taken Ritalin and 44% Provigil - a drug normally prescribed to alleviating daytime tiredness in people suffering from the rare sleep disorder narcolepsy.

Most users had somehow obtained their drugs on prescription or else bought them over the internet.

Tags: brain, drugs

Fiber that tasty!

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:54:11 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik
clipper's remarks: Fiber or not! Those are foods that never fail to matter my mouth. Tasty, colorful and nice smelling!

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

A fibre found in most fruit and vegetables may help ward off cancer, experts believe.

An ongoing study by the Institute of Food Research suggested pectin, a fibre found in everything from potato to plums, helped to fight the disease.

Foods such as blueberries and spinach have been linked to a host of benefits.

But Professor Morris said it was probably better to eat a wide range of fruit and vegetables.

He has been leading research on pectin with lab work using hi-tech microscopes suggesting the fibre inhibits a cancer-causing protein called Gal3.

The amount of pectin in fruit and vegetables varies with apples and oranges having particularly high amounts and strawberries and grapes low.

Data collected by market analyst AC Nielsen found that sales of blueberries rose by 132% in the past two years.

"But certainly we should not be focussing on these types and ignoring other fruit and vegetables. There are still not enough people getting their five-a-day intake."

Tags: fiber, fruits, cancer

Why Your Boss Is White, Middle-class And A Show-off

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:48:39 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: A very nice study!
Pointing just to the point of how things have not changed since men appeared. The more we will not attend to it, individually and otherwise, the more the gaps in relation to the advancement in technology and philosophy... will widen.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Why Your Boss Is White, Middle-class And A Show-off

Prehistoric behaviours, such as male domination, protecting what is perceived as their "turf" and ostracising those who do not agree with the group is more commonplace in everyday work situations than many of us want to accept

This tribal culture is similar to what we would have seen in hunter gather bands on the savannah in southern Africa

Groups were territorial in the past because it helped them survive. If you weren't in a tight band, you didn't get to pass on your genes," he says. "Such tribalism is not necessary in the same way now, yet we still have those characteristics because they have evolved over two million years

"It's a surprise just how hard-wired this behaviour is,"

We need to stop being simplistic and realise that changing behaviours and encouraging teamwork is much harder than we think

We also need to re-think education

based on hundreds of interviews

over a 15-year period.

evolutionary psychology approach

Tags: society, evolution

McCain Campaign Sends Out Fake Absentee Ballots

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 05:33:16 GMT

clipped by: dulios
clipper's remarks: FLORIDA, IOWA, NORTH CAROLINA, OHIO, OREGON, MINNESOTA, MISSOURI, PENNSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA, WISCONSIN

Clip Source: www.ickypeople.com

The McCain campaign and the Republican Party continue to prove they are not interested in doing what is best for the country. Instead they are increasing their tactics to actually try and prevent American citizens from voting this November.

The latest illegal, and let me emphasis that, illegal tactic, is mailing out applications for absentee ballots to registered Democrat voters at least 10 states. The ballots the McCain campaign are mailing out in every state contain at least one error meant to disqualify the voter when the application is submitted. The McCain camp say they have sent out over 1 million applications in Ohio alone.

Voters in the following states should be on the lookout for the phony ballots sent by McCain: Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Minnesota, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The phony ballots could show up anywhere, so please let your friends and family, especially older members, know to throw the ballots in the garbage.

'Toxic waste' behind Somali piracy

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 05:05:48 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Won't read about this in too many mainstream rags.

Clip Source: english.aljazeera.net

Somali pirates have accused European firms of dumping toxic waste off the Somali coast and are demanding an $8m ransom for the return of a Ukranian ship they captured, saying the money will go towards cleaning up the waste.

The ransom demand is a means of "reacting to the toxic waste that has been continually dumped on the shores of our country for nearly 20 years", Januna Ali Jama, a spokesman for the pirates, based in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, said.

"The Somali coastline has been destroyed, and we believe this money is nothing compared to the devastation that we have seen on the seas."

The pirates are holding the MV Faina, a Ukrainian ship carrying tanks and military hardware, off Somalia's northern coast.

According to the International Maritime Bureau, 61 attacks by pirates have been reported since the start of the year.

Dumping allegations

Tags: pollution

Palin Plays Desperate Housewife for Votes

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:38:38 GMT

clipped by: blueridge
clipper's remarks: Sarah lets her hair down. The final move of desperation, which was seen by her obvious flirting and winking directly into the camera during the VP debate, has now gone into full swing, in a desperate attempt to draw MEN voters for the ticket. (Vote for Sarah, if not for McCain).

I thought I was the only one that noticed this (I can read her like a book) until I saw that Arianna Huffington was saying the same thing I was thinking. Woman are likely to see this more than men (from their own playbooks).

(Arianna would know (look), their is a similarity in the "sexy hair" look.)

"Only her hairdresser knows for sure"--and they quote her!

Clip Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Sarah's Sexy Hair: A Desperate Bid For Votes? (SLIDESHOW)

**SCROLL DOWN FOR SLIDESHOW**

It looks like Sarah Palin has traded her librarian hair for something a little more sexy: loose locks. Why the sudden switch?

In an interview with Vogue in December 2007, Palin said she was trying to underplay her good looks and be "as frumpy as I could by wearing my hair on top of my head and these schoolmarm glasses."

Palin's hometown hairdresser, Jessica J. Steele of Wasilla's Beehive Beauty Shop, told The New York Times that the governor is very hair-aware.

"She's very involved in her look and how she's perceived," Mrs. Steele said. "We would talk a lot about how if she looked too pretty or too sexy, people wouldn't listen to her. How important it was for people to see her as an intelligent, smart woman. It was comical when her hair was down, how big a difference that would make, especially when she was running for governor."

Could this be a last-ditch effort to boost her sagging popularity?

Tags: sarah palin, mccain

AFFORDABLE HOUSING BLAMED FOR CRISIS

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:36:58 GMT

clipped by: klippety
clipper's remarks: The facts as they represent themselves are very different. More spin and propaganda convulsions by conservatives to put the blame on democrats. Not that they don't have to take their share of responsibility.

Clip Source: mediamatters.org

Myths and falsehoods about the purported link between affordable housing initiatives and the financial crisis

Conservative and other media figures -- echoing a reported strategy on the part of Republicans -- have attempted to lay blame for the financial crisis on proponents of the expansion of affordable housing. Those attacks are premised on several myths and falsehoods. Read More

Media conservatives baselessly blame Community Reinvestment Act for foreclosure spike

On Dobbs, radio host claimed HUD said "about 5 million illegal alien home mortgage loans ... have gone bad," but HUD reportedly says stat is bogus

Hannity again misled on Raines' purported role with the Obama campaign

O'Reilly falsely claimed that Rep. Frank "sat by" while "Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae made bad loans"

Mind the gap -Why We Say One Thing But Do The Opposite ??

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:22:29 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks: The exact way in which people's attitudes and behaviour are connected remains a mystery. All we can say with certainty is that people are frequently extremely inconsistent.

Clip Source: www.spring.org.uk

Why We Say One Thing But Do The Opposite

t's only natural to think a person's attitudes and behaviours are directly related

the link between a person's attitudes and their behaviours is not always that strong. In fact people have a nasty habit of saying one thing then doing the opposite, even with the best of intentions.

You see it all the time. People say they're worried about global warming and yet they drive around in a big gas guzzler. They say that money isn't their God, yet they work all the hours. They say they want to be fit but they don't do any exercise.

The question is: why?

In some ways an attitude is like a snapshot of the prejudices the respondent has available to memory just at the moment they are questioned.

Despite these findings, the picture is extremely complicated and frustratingly inconclusive

The exact way in which people's attitudes and behaviour are connected remains a mystery. All we can say with certainty is that people are frequently extremely inconsistent.

Jews Protect Palestinians in Harvest of Hate

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:15:19 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: It is always good to find examples of Godliness and humanity beneath the global hurricane of violent hatred, vicious condemnation, shrill hysteria and poisonous anger.

Clip Source: www.independent.co.uk

In the shade of the trees where they have been picking olives all morning, in this wadi, south-east of Nablus, a Palestinian farmer, Jamal Otman Koarik, and two of his daughters share a lunch of home-baked bread, zatar, oil, courgettes and salad with three visitors. It's a bucolic scene that could have happened any time in the past century. But what makes it notable in 2008 is that the guests who have been helping Mr Koarik pick the olives are Israeli Jews: a rabbi, an anthropologist and a youth worker, Hellela Siew.

Asked why he and his volunteers make this often risky mission each year, the US-born rabbi says "if we really believe" the Biblical text that all human beings are made in God's image, "we have got to put our money where our mouth is and be here in an active way to defend human rights". And he also cites the "dialogue of the olive groves" in which Israelis and Palestinians who "have to live and die here together" have "no choice but to communicate"

Tags: palestine-israel

Nature loss 'dwarfs bank crisis'

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:33:55 GMT

clipped by: vk2yoc
clipper's remarks: It's only money, could be worse, we could lose our planet.

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

The global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis, according to an EU-commissioned study.

The figure comes from adding the value of the various services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide

"It's not only greater but it's also continuous, it's been happening every year, year after year," he told BBC News.

"So whereas Wall Street by various calculations has to date lost, within the financial sector, $1-$1.5 trillion, the reality is that at today's rate we are losing natural capital at least between $2-$5 trillion every year."

The greatest cost to western nations would initially come through losing a natural absorber of the most important greenhouse gas.

A number of nations, businesses and global organisations are beginning to direct funds into forest conservation, and there are signs of a trade in natural ecosystems developing, analogous to the carbon trade,

Bill Maher's Religulous

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 13:18:12 GMT

clipped by: keith0718

Clip Source: article.nationalreview.com

Of course, Maher never pauses to consider what heading in the direction of an irreligious society might mean. If you apply Maher’s logic, one could note that Stalin, Mao, and Hitler were far and away the most murderous tyrants in history and their societies were correspondingly totalitarian and hostile to religion. Nor does he contemplate or address in any meaningful way the societal good religion is responsible for, as anyone who has ever had need of a hospital can testify to.

Oral sex

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 04:08:41 GMT

clipped by: dakotayii
clipper's remarks: "Well," Grandpa said, "She goes to bed in her bedroom, and I go to bed in my bedroom ... And she yells, 'Fuck You!!!!!' and I holler back, 'Fuck You too.' "

Clip Source: losangeles.craigslist.org

A young fellow was about to be married and was asking his grandfather about sex. He asked how often you should have it.

His grandfather told him that when you first get married, you want it all the time ...and maybe do it several times a day.

Later on, sex tapers off and you have it once a week or so.

Then as you get older, you have sex maybe once a month. When you get really old, you are lucky to have it once a year..... maybe on your anniversary.

The young fellow then asked his grandfather, "Well how about you and Grandma now?"

His grandfather replied, "Oh, we just have oral sex now."

"What's oral sex?" the young fellow asked.

Tags: jokes

It's Called Hubris

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:13:50 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

WASHINGTON — George W. Bush began his presidency with the worst terrorist attack on American soil and he is ending it with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. In between, he confronted a hurricane that nearly wiped New Orleans off the map as his administration showed ineptitude in its response.

Now, as he spends his last months in office trying to avert a global economic collapse, Mr. Bush has been telling people privately that it’s a good thing he’s in charge.

Mr. Bush has always been confident of himself, even when the American public was not, and that has not changed. Just as he is convinced he did the right thing in Iraq, he is convinced he is doing the right thing on the economy — despite job approval ratings at historic lows and a presidential campaign in which both candidates have used him as kind of a battering ram.