It's the Florida primary today......woop woop.....let's see who the I-4 corridor votes for, the unspeakable or the uneatable....
1/ Allrighty then.....may as well lead off with the most controversial article we have had in DDD for a while.
A Canadian University study has linked low IQ, conservative views and racism........and having read the article I can't fault their logic........
They should have gone further and asked if they watched Fox News......
There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.
The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate towardsocially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.
"Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factorscontributing to bias are uncovered and understood," he said.
The findings combine three hot-button topics.
"They've pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics," said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. "When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it's bound to upset somebody."
Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]
"The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this," Nosek said, referring to the new study. "It's not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists."
Brains and bias
Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured. [Life's Extremes: Democrat vs. Republican]
Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 1--.
..............................
Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.
"Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order," Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low intelligence. "Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice."
In another study, this one in the United States, Hodson and Busseri compared 254 people with the same amount of education but different levels of ability in abstract reasoning. They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link. [5 Myths About Gay People Debunked2/ Fascinating look at the worldview of the Republican Presidential candidates and their beliefs, driven by the rightwing drift of the GOP. This makes them spout soundbites and policies that are patent nonsense.....
Although written last week, it's applicable today with the Florida primary votes being counted......
Love the title - "Last Night's Debate was Bad 1950's Science Fiction"......
The GOP presidential candidates continue to play their parts in an implausible story of a world that could never exist, acting out nonexistent conflicts while delivering dialog that insults the intelligence. That's not because they're stupid. It's because they think you are.
It's like watching a low budget science-fiction movie from the fifties: Dr. Strange vs. The Vulture in the Caverns of the Moon. It's badly executed, even by the low standards of its genre, complete with cheap sets, bad special effects and wooden acting.
They're counting on their audience to provide that state of mind which literature professors call "the willing suspension of disbelief."
Three of the candidates are selling an nearly identical story of hardy earth people who are only able to save their planet once they've been freed from taxes and regulations.The fourth, Ron Paul, is offering a different script, a 10,000 Years BCscenario of unparalleled economic savagery.
Sure, Dr. Paul seems like a likable guy. And it's great that he's saying things about war, terrorism, and human rights that nobody else will, including Barack Obama. But he wants to lead us into a blood-drenched, kill-or-be-killed world. (Remember when he was willing to let an injured man die because he hadn't paid his health insurance premium?)
The candidates' scripted lines weren't all that was "retro,"either. In the year 2012, Wolf Blitzer actually asked them which of their wives would make the best First Lady. What would he have done if they hadn't answered -- held a pie-baking contest? As the scientists' young assistant said when the monster entered the laboratory: Eek!
What did we learn tonight about the Republicans' collective and individual economic fantasies?
We come from a distant planet with news of a world vastly unlike your own ...
3/ Onion News puts a compilation of news together including some of the stories you didn't see.....this could be any week, any time.....an amusing 2 minutes.....
4/ Newt Gingrich deconstructed - Timothy Egan dissects the Newster and finds a world class asshole underneath all of the bluster.....
When not holding forth from his favorite table at L’Auberge Chez François, nestled among the manor houses of lobbyist-thick Great Falls, Va., Dr. Newton L. Gingrich likes to lecture people about food stamps and how out-of-touch the elites are with real America.
Gingrich, as he showed in a gasping effort in Thursday night’s debate in Florida, is a demagogue distilled, like a French sauce, to the purest essence of the word’s meaning. He has no shame. He thinks the rules do not apply to him. And he turns questions about his odious personal behavior into mock outrage over the audacity of the questioner.
After inventing, and then perfecting, the modern politics of personal destruction, Gingrich has decided now to bank on the dark fears of the worst element of the Republican base to seize the nomination — using skills refined over four decades.
Deconstructed, Gingrich is a thing to behold. Let’s go have a look, as my friend the travel guide Rick Steves likes to say:
- The Blueprint. Back in 1994, while plotting his takeover of the House, Gingrich circulated a memo on how to use words as a weapon. It was called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Republicans were advised to use certain words in describing opponents — sick, pathetic, lie, decay, failure, destroy. That was the year, of course, when Gingrich showed there was no floor to his descent into a dignity-free zone, equating Democratic Party values with the drowning of two young children by their mother, Susan Smith, in South Carolina.Today, if you listen carefully to any Gingrich takedown, you’ll usually hear words from the control memo.He even used them, as former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams wrote in National Review Online this week, in going after President Reagan, calling him “pathetically incompetent,” as Abrams reported. And he compared Reagan’s meeting with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”
5/ "The Honey Badger", a nature video with narration by Randall......hilarious......3 minutes......
6/ I was in a trivia contest recently and won first prize with the question "What was Robert Palmer's first big hit in the 80s?"
The answer is of course "Addicted to Love", a groundbreaking video at that time that even holds up today..... five beautiful models, bright red lipstick, vacant faces and there's smarmy Robert in a tie.......delicious video......pretty good song too........
7/ By the time you read this Rick Santorum may have been thrashed in the Florida primary and will be slinking back to wherever planet he's from.....but dwell on this - he has a strong following in the fundamentalist Christian community which has propelled him to one of the top three candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination......and let's not forget he won the Iowa primary!
A fascinating article about Santorum and his weirdness.....and what he says on TV about abortion even if his daughter was raped....
Also look at the last paragraph of the article....says it all......
As a lapsed Catholic turned atheist, a staunch feminist and someone who has a strong general aversion to sleazy, disingenuous men, I was shocked yesterday to find myself feeling something like respect for Rick Santorum, Pope Benedict XVI and Piers Morgan all in the space of three minutes.
The three minutes in question are a clip from Morgan's interview with Santorum on the former's CNN talk show. In it, Santorum declares that even if his own daughter were raped – a hypothetical scenario both men manage to discuss with remarkable calm – the Roman Catholic presidential candidate would maintain his adamantly pro-life position regarding abortion.
I sincerely feel a tiny, grudging mote of respect for that degree of consistency. As anti-choice zealots go, those who will take the "baby killer" argument to its extreme appeal to me slightly more than those who can say with a straight face that abortion is murder, except when the woman didn't want to have sex.
Of course, that's the beginning and the end of my respect for Santorum, who had the gall to tell Morgan that his opposition to legal abortion is "not a matter of religious values". He insists that it's founded on his interpretation of the US constitution, as opposed to his interpretation of the teachings of Jesus Christ: "[L]ife begins at conception and persons are covered by the constitution, and because human life is the same as a person, to me it was a pretty simple deduction to make that that's what the constitution clearly intended to protect."
8/ But here is the real reason Rick Santorum has never had even a remote chance of being President.....this is what comes up if you Google him.....
9/ Wow - this looks like a cool movie, coming in June......"Snow White and the Huntsman" starring Charlize Theron, Kristen Stewart and some hunk.......
10/ To appropriately follow on from Rick Santorum.......interesting essay on Christianity and how the original beliefs of Jesus have been twisted over the centuries to justify war and violence.......if Jesus were here today he would be horrified at what is being justified in His name.....
Altogether too many religions sects of both major and minor religions, despite verbally professing a desire for peace and justice in the world, are actually pro-war, pro-homicide and pro-violence in practice (or they may be silent on the subject, which is, according to moral theology, the same as being pro-violence).
Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount (painting by Carl Bloch)
I use the term fundamentalist in the sense that the religious person, who ascribes to a fundamentalist point of view, believes, among other dogmatic belief, that their scriptures are inerrant and thus they can find passages in their holy books that justify homicidal violence against their perceived or fingered enemies, while simultaneously ignoring the numerous contradictory passages that forbid violence and homicide and instead prescribe love, hospitality, mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation.
Behind the scenes, of course, there are hidden elites — amoral, politically and financially motivated operatives who are embedded in these religious organizations — who, through the strength of their political power, can easily manipulate the followers into clamoring for war, not against their enemies, but rather against the enemies of the ruling elites: the politicians, the financiers and the other exploiters of natural resources.
And so nonviolent portions of the various religions – and they are there, albeit often hidden and censored – can be erroneously painted with the same brush that justifiably condemns the hypocrisy and the violence.
It is certainly true that the Catholic Church endorsed and/or orchestrated the genocide of the Crusades, the Inquisition and many wars of colonization and exploitation — with the origins of these atrocities in fundamentalist interpretations of “holy” scripture.
But I do have to take exception to the blanket condemnation of the entirety of the religion by pointing out one reality — that the original form of Christianity, the church of the first generation after Jesus and even most of the first three centuries was a religion of pacifists, oppressed women, orphans, those forced into prostitution, despised people of all stripes and others of those called “the least.”
Though this history has long since been forgotten or ignored, the earliest followers of Jesus rejected violence, tried to return good for evil, fed the hungry, did acts of mercy and unconditional love and tried to make friends out of their enemies (by caring for them, feeding them, praying for them and certainly refusing to kill them or pay for somebody else to kill them).
11/ And speaking about religion, Scott Maxwell with an excellent column on the hypocrisy and cynical posturing of the anti-abortion loonies - "protect the foetus" they scream, but when the child is born they walk away.....
More evil cloaked in the veil of Christianity........
1) It doesn't really matter what I say or how passionately I say it. On a topic like this, most folks have their minds made up.
But one thing I do find remarkable is how politicians in Florida continue to invoke God's name on sanctity-of-life issues — yet only when it's convenient.
Right now, there are at least three different anti-abortion bills zipping through the state legislature — all of them championed by hard-line Republicans who claim to have a righteous respect for children and human life.
Yet their concern for human life seems to decline precipitously as soon as a child is born.
In recent years, legislators have cut programs to prevent child abuse and underfunded others meant to keep kids healthy. They have turned away money for the disabled — and even hospice funding meant to comfort children during the final days.
Forget cradle to grave. The "sanctity of life" that many of these politicians seem committed to protecting lasts merely from conception to birth.
After that, they lose interest.
12/ If, as expected, Newt will come in second in Florida it may be because even Republican voters have taken a look at him and seen a real sleazebag.....as Stephen Colbert points out in a fairly serious segment....
Note - even a subdued Stephen is still very funny........
13/ An amusing and skeptical look at banks and their practices, with some real life examples.....not really a news article, more like a story on one woman's experiences with evil banks......quite good.....
Why are the banks paying only 0.4 percent interest on a savings account if they can afford to open offices on every other block in Greenwich Village?
The other day I was catching up on balancing my account and realized that, for the last six months, I had earned about $4 in interest but had been charged $35 a month for service.
I went to the bank at the corner (the southwest corner). “This is insane,” I said.
The banker explained that I had a service charge because I didn’t maintain a high enough balance.
“At this rate I will have no balance. Besides, what about my C.D.? I have a C.D. here.”
“Oh,” he said, looking it up on the computer. “Someone forgot to bundle that in.”
“Reverse the charges,” I said, and he said that they would reverse three months but not six. To get all six reversed I had to go to my originating branch.
“This is my originating branch,” I said.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is. I opened my account here. I live down the block.”
“Sorry. You have to go to your originating branch at 79th and Broadway.”
“Just call them and tell them to reverse it.”
“You have to do it in person.”
Now, I had shut down an account on the Upper West Side about a decade ago and, after a six-year break, opened a new one when I moved downtown. But even if there was some justification for their confusion, that wasn’t the point.
“There are three branches within walking distance, but I have to take two subways to reverse my charges? That is insane.”
Insane is what I said, but actually it was fishy.
At that point I threatened to withdraw my meager savings from the bank. The bank manager appeared and reversed the charges for all six months, and gave me his card. “Let us invest for you,” he said.
“Why would I let you do that?”
“Because you’re not earning anything on your money.”
14/ Great marionette show.....very talented little piano player.....a French artist, and one of the best puppet acts......ever.......5 minutes....
15/ And more on evil banks - The title of this article from Reuters is "Old Mortgages Rise From the Dead, Haunt Homeowners".....people who think [and have documentation] their old mortgage is paid off are threatened with foreclosure.....
n July 2009, Roy and Sheila Bowers refinanced the mortgage on their suburban ranch home in Topeka, Kansas. The couple wanted to take advantage of the low interest rates that were all the rage at the time.Roy, a truck driver, and Sheila, a former hotel housekeeping supervisor, knew their new loan from Wells Fargo would enable them to save $198.86 a month - a nice chunk to help with gas and groceries.
But what the Bowers never imagined was that their old loan, the one Wells Fargo told them was paid off, would resurrect itself, trashing their credit report, scotching their son's student loans and throwing the whole family into foreclosure. All, they say, even though they didn't miss a single mortgage payment.
The Bowers are not alone.
More and more, homeowners say that mortgages they thought were dead and buried are springing back to life, sometimes haunting them all the way into foreclosure.
"It's the most egregious manifestation of an industry that's seriously broken," said Ira Rheingold, a lawyer who is the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocate.
Diane Thompson, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, says she has defended hundreds of foreclosure cases, and in nearly all of them, the homeowner was not in default. "The record-keeping on the part of the mortgage servicers is not to be trusted."v
The problems grew from a lot of sloppy recordkeeping that began during the housing boom, when Wall Street built a quick-and-dirty back-office operation to process mortgages quickly so lenders could sell as many loans as possible. As the loans were later sold to investors, and then resold around the world, the back office system sidestepped crucial legal procedures.
Now it's becoming clear just how dysfunctional and, according to several state attorneys general, how fraudulent the whole system was.
16/ Mitt Romney - common man who worked hard for all of his fortune? - BS.
Robyn Blumner from the St. Petersburg Times takes a look at the Mittmyth and finds him exactly what we think he is - a rich kid, born with a silver spoon up his ass who became a Bain vulture capitalist.
Good story.....
This year's presidential race will be about America's fairness deficit. President Barack Obama featured it in his State of the Union speech. "The defining issue of our time," said Obama, is whether America will be a nation for everyone who works hard or only for "a shrinking number of people who do really well." Add "like Mitt Romney" here.
The fact that America has become rigged for the rich is a problem that has finally penetrated the American psyche. Two-thirds of the public now thinks there are "very strong" or "strong" conflicts between the rich and poor, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Americans are starting to realize that their middle-class security has been sabotaged by the 1 percent who play by a different set of rules.
If Mitt Romney wins the Republican nomination, his biggest challenge will be to overcome a resume that seems to personify this unfair spoils system. With his 2010 tax return showing he and his wife paid an effective tax rate of just 13.9 percent on $21.6 million in adjusted gross income, Romney has to fight the mounting examples of how his wealth has given him a special deal in life.
At Monday night's NBC/Tampa Bay TimesRepublican debate, Romney claimed he "did not inherit" what he has, but that he built his wealth "the old-fashioned way, by earning it." But Romney was a child of privilege who graduated from Harvard with a law degree and MBA. His father, George Romney, was a wealthy auto industry executive and governor of Michigan.
No matter how hard Romney tries to portray himself as understanding the economic troubles of everyday Americans (remember the "pink slip" gaffe in New Hampshire, or when he claimed to be "unemployed"?) he has no idea what it is like to live without a comfortable safety net.
Todays video - top ten golf commercials
Todays D&D joke
I would like to share an experience with you, to do with drinking and driving.
As you know some of us have had brushes with the authorities on our way home in recent months.
As you know some of us have had brushes with the authorities on our way home in recent months.
I for one have done something about it.
The other night I was out for a dinner and drinks with some friends.
The other night I was out for a dinner and drinks with some friends.
Well, after having far too much vino, and knowing full well I was totally wasted, I did something I've never done before. I took a bus home.
I arrived home safely and without incident, which was a real
surprise, as I have never driven a bus before.
surprise, as I have never driven a bus before.
Todays senior citizen joke
An old man, Mr. Wallace, was living in a nursing home.
One day he appeared to be very sad and depressed.
Nurse Tracy asked him if there was anything wrong.
'Yes, Nurse Tracy ,' said Mr. Wallace.
'My Private Part died today, and I am very sad.'
Knowing her patients were a little forgetful and sometimes a little crazy,
she replied, 'Oh, I'm so sorry, Mr. Wallace. Please accept my
condolences.'
The following day, Mr. Wallace was walking down the hall with his Private
Part hanging out of his pajamas.
He met Nurse Tracy. 'Mr. Wallace,' she said, 'You shouldn't be walking down
the hall like that. Please put your Private Part back inside your pajamas.'
'But, Nurse Tracy I can't,' replied Mr. Wallace. 'I told you yesterday that my
Private Part died.'
'Yes,' said Nurse Tracy, 'you did tell me that, but why is it hanging out of your pajamas?'
'Well,' he replied, 'Today is the viewing.'
Todays middle aged texting jokes
ATD - at the doctor.
BFF - best friend fell.
BTW -bring the wheelchair .
BYOT - bring your own teeth.
FWIW - forgot where I was.
GGPBL - gotta go, pacemaker battery low.
GHA - got heartburn again.
IMHO - is my hearing aid on?
LMDO -laughing my dentures out.
OMMR - on my massage recliner.
ROFLACGU - rolling on floor laughing and can't get up.
epublicans are worried sick about Newt Gingrich's ascendance, while Democrats are tickled pink.