Category — General

Your Meat is Smarter Than Your Pet.:
From the website:

Testing the IQ of a sheep may seem laughable. But at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England, they know better. One sheep who got a reward every time she recognized a human face correctly on a video screen scored a perfect 50 out of 50.

Link
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definitely more skilled….

Daily Kos: ESPN FAKED STADIUM CHEERS FOR BUSH SR.:
For several years, ESPN has been manufacturing fake cheers and fake boos for politicians. It’s a very simple rule. If you are a Democrat not named Joe Lieberman, ESPN will play a tape of boos previously recorded and insert them into the audio after the Democrat is announced. If you are a Republican and ESPN is expecting boos, ESPN will play a pre-recorded tape of cheers unrelated to the Republican.
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objective journalism… it does not exist, it should.. but it does not. this is a horrible debasement of sports…

we take it back – tribe.net:
It’s a new day for Tribe.net.

Thanks to recent management changes, we, the employees, are taking back the site and are happy to announce some real improvements (based upon the
tons
of
feedback
you’ve
given
us).

Here’s what’s changing with today’s release:

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tribe will be more tribe! yay

Line Rider – beta by ~fsk on deviantART:

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you draw a line, there is a little guy on the sled… he sleds down the line…. then.. at the end, he has either crashed, or, he falls off the end of the line and spins off into the Sartrian existentialist fugue.

Are We Really So Fearful? – washingtonpost.com:
Can’t the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the “intelligence” that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?
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well… can we. This has been my ongoing argument on torture for many posts… do you really want to be the nation, the person in the nation, that approves of torture? where does torture stop? it does not stop. one day you will wake up and realize that someone tortured a full grown man, someone tortured a full grown women and you will be shocked that someone tortured a child. But there is no difference in torture, the idea is that torture is about knowledge, and children and parents, and everyone have knowledge. If you think, for one minute, that only evil people will be tortured, you are wrong, there is no border between good an evil that torturers will not cross to ’save lives’.

Shame and Horror:

First option, block this horror — filibuster if needed — and risk paying a political price: For a taste of the ‘vote for us or die’ campaign that’s in the works, see this utterly repulsive ad already being run by Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-CT). And recall that Johnson is supposedly one of the nicer Republicans (and a new friend of Sen. Lieberman’s).

Second option, do the usual infective stuff and pay a different political price (the base will turn on you, as will anyone else with some decency). Plus earn a black spot in history.
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that is a horribly misleading ad, i’m sure we will see worse… i think it should be countered with one that goes like this… ‘nanna is calling her grandson fighting in afganistan, she tells him about some of her new medicines with opiates in them and giving one to her husband, the fbi are at her door…, the call was intercepted, the law was broken…. should there have been a warrant? nancy johnson says no.

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i am also ashamed that any senator or congressman would support a pro-torture stance. i think someone should really explain to them about the reality of torture and how, if the enemy knows we torture, they fight harder, more viciously and with less respect for us as human beings.

Tucson Weekly :

:
Halliburton, the notorious U.S. energy company, sold key nuclear-reactor components to a private Iranian oil company called Oriental Oil Kish as recently as 2005, using offshore subsidiaries to circumvent U.S. sanctions, journalist Jason Leopold reported on Globalresearch.ca, the Web site of a Canadian research group. He cited sources intimate with the business dealings of Halliburton and Kish.

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i wonder why this didn’t make it into the public view….

Average home has more TVs than people – Yahoo! News:
NEW YORK – The average American home now has more television sets than people. That threshold was crossed within the past two years, according to Nielsen Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said.
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this is sad….

New York Times Ad:

The National Council of Churches makes a statement, that I agree with.

Random Walk in Learning: Problem of Being an Expert and Having Expertise:
Is expertise pure “social-fact”, a socially recognised procession of a collection of “scientific fact” as in positivism, or a connection of nodes including other experts, databases or organisations?
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I’ll respond on corante sometime today, but… neither is true. expertise is not a fact, expertise is the process of developing and maintaining a base level of knowledges and practices. Without maintenance, you lose expertise, there are many people who were experts, just as there are scientific papers that contained ‘facts’. In the end, expertise is about learning and learning is a process that does not have an end of having ‘learned’ something that becomes an object, and thus a fact, instead learning is about the process of coming to be in the world and constructing ways of interacting with the world. expertise then… is not a social fact or an institutional fact, but it is a collaborative process.