The govt. would have you think that all terrorists belong to Al-Qaeda

Scores Killed in Madrid Train Explosions

Ten powerful explosions rocked three Madrid train stations Thursday just days before Spain's general elections, killing at least 173 rush-hour commuters and injuring more than 600 others.

Spain blamed the Basque separatist group ETA for the worst terror attack in its history, but a senior U.S. intelligence source told NBC News that that's still not conclusive and that the CIA is looking for any connection to the al-Qaida terrorist network.

(no subject)

Poetry has the ability to break time into micromoments.

That is an awesome ability. (I intend the fullest meaning of "awesome". That's not a word I use as slang.)

pandemonium

South Korea's opposition says Roh apology too late

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun apologised on Friday for an unprecedented political crisis in which he faces impeachment, but the opposition said he was too late and it would still try to unseat him.

Roh's dramatic apology came just as parliament had been due to reconvene to try to hold an impeachment session that was blocked on Thursday by pro-Roh Uri Party members who occupied the speaker's podium in the National Assembly.

[...] Even before Roh's apology there was drama in parliament.

In the middle of the night, opposition parliamentarians stormed yelling into the chamber to try to secure the occupied speaker's podium from sleeping pro-Roh Uri Party members.

Politicians fought, wrestled, argued and shoved. The Uri Party kept the speaker's chair but opposition parliamentarians gained a foothold on the podium. One report said one Uri Party member ran shoeless from the chamber with the speaker's gavel.

by way of lady_babalon and <lj site="livejournal.com" user="faded

Dave Blood, bass player for the Dead Milkmen, committed suicide today.

*sigh*

Hopefully, he's scrawled some metaphysical graffiti.

movies make a hive mind

Good, bad and ugly is same in brains of beholders

A brain imaging study showed people's brains reacted in a surprisingly similar manner as they watched the classic Clint Eastwood Western "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."

About 30 percent of brain activity in key visual, auditory and face recognition areas was virtually identical in five different people shown a sequence from the film, the researchers said.

"This strong intersubject correlation shows that, despite the completely free viewing of dynamical, complex scenes, individual brains 'tick together' ... when exposed to the same visual environment," they wrote in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

( Read more... )

an assessment, not an editorial

"War president" Bush more focused on September 11 than Iraq

One year after the war in Iraq, US President George W. Bush eagerly uses the September 11 attacks for his reelection bid while treating the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein as more of a liability.

( Read more... )

[...] [One] question is whether inquiries into the yawning gap between Bush's pre-war claims about Iraqi weapons and the failure to find them will vindicate charges from critics who say the president misled the public on the threat, said Davis.

The US leader inoculated himself against that danger last month, when he grudgingly appointed a panel to investigate Iraq intelligence but set its final report for March 2005, well after the November election.

And in speech after speech, he tackles charges that he overstated the danger, arguing that there was an international consensus even among nations that opposed the war that Saddam was "a threat".

Could you imagine a 1930s Germany

with the power of television? Think of the influence on its propaganda machine. And think of if they had over $100 million to spend on that propaganda?

by way of cogsci

Whose life would you save?

Primatologists have found that moral instincts have deep roots. In September, for instance, Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University reported that monkeys have a sense of fairness. Brosnan and De Waal trained capuchin monkeys to take a pebble from them; if the monkeys gave the pebble back, they got a cucumber. Then they ran the same experiment with two monkeys sitting in adjacent cages, where they could see each other. One monkey still got a cucumber, but the other one got a grape—a tastier reward. More than half the monkeys who got cucumbers balked at the exchange. Sometimes they threw the cucumber at the researchers; sometimes they refused to give the pebble back. Apparently, de Waal says, they realized that they weren’t being treated fairly.

In an earlier study, de Waal observed a colony of chimpanzees that only got fed by their zookeeper once they had all gathered in an enclosure. One day, a few young chimps dallied outside for hours, leaving the rest to go hungry. The next day, the other chimps attacked the stragglers, apparently to punish them for their selfishness. The primates seemed capable of moral judgment without benefit of human reasoning. "Chimps may be smart," Greene says. "But they don’t read Kant."