- Thunderstorms Shoot Beams of Antimatter Into Space
- The newly discovered antimatter beams “gives us some very important information that we can use to piece together what is going on when lightning initiates and propagates,” Cummer said.
- Earliest Known Winery Found in Armenian Cave
- In the same Armenian cave where the oldest known leather shoe was found, barefoot winemakers were likely stomping grapes 6,000 years ago.
- Haiti Earthquake Anniversary: Pictures Show Slow Recovery
- A year after the Haiti earthquake that killed 220,000, nearly a million remain homeless, and before-and-after images are sadly similar.
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- Invisibility: After several years of research, it’s just gotten weirder
- Is it possible to hide something within an invisible cloak? It has already been over four years since the first groundbreaking theoretical papers on invisible cloaking devices were published, stirring up a near frenzy in the physics and optics communities. Since then, new results have come at a rapid and genuinely surprising pace…
- Parenting getting a little more equal
- This got buried a few days ago with all the news around the Tucson shooting, but there was an important court decision in Connecticut. The state Supreme Court ruled in Raftopol v. Ramey that the names of two men can be entered on the birth certificate of their child who was conceived with the help of a surrogate. According to ProudParenting.org, this is the first time in the history of the country that a state high court has acknowledged the legality of the parentage of two men.
- "Stochastic Terrorism"–A powerful, highly accurate new meme
- [Open Left - Paul Rosenberg]
…Sadie Baker called attention to a very important DKos diary with a powerful new meme, "Stochastic Terrorism". The diarist has been using the term for some time now, and many others have described this process as well. But the time has never been ripe before for this particular picture-perfect formulation to gel…
"Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable…
"The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official is not the stochastic terrorist, they are the 'missile' set in motion by the stochastic terrorist…
"The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media to broadcast memes that incite unstable people to commit violent acts."
[Wow. The phrase "statistically predictable but individually unpredictable" is my new lifepartner. -L]
- Downturn’s Ugly Trademark: Steep, Lasting Drop in Wages – WSJ.com
- Even at times of high unemployment in the past, wages have been very slow to fall; economists describe them as "sticky." To an extent rarely seen in recessions since the Great Depression, wages for a swath of the labor force this time have taken a sharp and swift fall.
The only other downturn since the Depression to see similarly large wage cuts was the 1981-82 recession. But the latest downturn is already eclipsing that one.
- Since When Do Conservatives Believe Words Don’t Have Consequences?
- [Firedoglake - Blue Texan]
The same wingnuts who are insisting today that there’s absolutely no connection at all between speech and actions have spent an awful lot of time over the past several decades saying exactly the opposite.
I’m old enough to remember when rap music inspired negroes to kill police officers [link] and a TV sitcom was to blame for the L.A. riots. [link]
- Fair critiques of libertarians
- [Balloon Juice - E.D. Kain]
I think that mistermix’s post, wondering at the absence of libertarian writing on the subject of foreclosures, is very fair.
..libertarians are not proposing meaningful solutions to the foreclosure problem as far as I can tell. I do take issue with DougJ’s follow-up however. Simply writing off all libertarians as people who could care less about corporate abuse is a ludicrous assertion.
[Bookmarking to read later. -L]
- Let's Just Say…
- [Shakesville - Melissa McEwan]
…for shits and giggles that Jared Lee Loughner grew up in a void and the violent rhetoric and imagery that permeates our national political discourse had no relation whatsoever to his actions…
Now answer me this: In that magical world, why would anyone feel inclined to vociferously defend their use [of] violent rhetoric and imagery?
Sure, the answer is "free speech." …
There are many ways to express the same idea.
The only idea that must be conveyed using violent rhetoric and imagery is violence.
- What is “violent rhetoric”? : Lawyers, Guns & Money
- Typically, then, we are left in a situation in which politicians, as rhetors, design speeches whose pathos is general enough to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. It stands to reason that if we want to understand what “violent rhetoric” entails, we must focus on whose images and stories are stoking whose imaginations and to what effect.
…are we to believe that Olbermann is encouraging liberals… to join a military-like organization and wage an Afghanistan-type offensive against Fox News? Given that his audience is… opposed to war, does that make any sense? …His rhetoric here is pathetic and inflammatory, but from the perspective of what it is intended to persuade its audience, it is also incoherent.
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- More Thoughts on Equality of Opportunity – NYTimes.com
- If you admit that life is unfair, and that there’s only so much you can do about that at the starting line, then you can try to ameliorate the consequences of that unfairness.
My vision of economic morality is more or less Rawlsian: we should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn’t know in advance who we’d be…
It’s a very non-Utopian compromise. But it works, and it’s a pretty decent arrangement (more decent in some countries than others.)
That decency is what’s under attack by claims that it’s immoral to deprive society’s winners of any portion of their winnings. It isn’t.
- Gender, power, and the Giffords shooting
- [Pandagon - Amanda Marcotte]
One aspect of this whole discussion about violent language that’s going under-discussed is the role that anxious masculinity plays it. Finally, Jessica Valenti broke out and talked about it. [link -- although iirc I saw Sady at Tiger Beatdown also talking about it yesterday. -L]
…it creates a self-defeating loop… Acting childish is unmanly, but the only way they can think of to “man up” is to redouble the violent posturing, homophobia, and misogyny…
Gender is an issue with this specific shooting. Just as you can’t claim that shooting a congressperson and a judge at a political event is a non-political event, you can’t really just pretend there aren’t gender implications to a young man shooting one of the sadly too few women in Congress…
Sady nabbed a detail from the WSJ that chilled me to my bones…
[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. Signal boosts are awesome! --L.]
The Of interest (Tue, Jan 11th, 11am) by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.