-
BBC News – Joking and pretending ‘key to toddler learning’
Parents who joke and pretend with their children are giving them a head start in life, researchers at Stirling University have found.
The study suggested that both activities are important in building social and life skills children need.
It also showed that pretending and joking are two very different things and that children as young as two can tell them apart.
-
Women lawyers who wonder why they didn’t make partner, despite glowing narratives in their performance reviews, may find some clues in a recent study.
Law professor Joan Williams of the University of California at Hastings joined with two other researchers to analyze performance evaluations of 234 junior lawyers at an unnamed Wall Street law firm. Their study found that the narrative comments either favored the women being rated, or treated them no less favorably than men. But in the numerical ratings that mattered for promotion, men did better.
-
Yemeni women burn veils in crackdown protest – Middle East – Al Jazeera English
Hundreds of Yemeni women have set fire to traditional female veils in protest against the government’s brutal crackdown on the country’s popular uprising, as overnight clashes in the capital and another city killed 25 people, officials said.
-
Political Animal – Reality ruins another GOP talking point
It’s one of those observations that Republicans repeat so often, it’s often just assumed to be true: President Obama and his big-government agenda have imposed a wave of regulations that’s overwhelming society and crushing the economy.
The notion that regulations are hurting the economy has already been so thoroughly debunked, it’s safe to conclude that anyone who repeats it is not to be trusted. But there’s another angle to the talking point that’s equally important: Obama hasn’t approved massive new regulations.
-
Feds Asked Polar Bear Researcher To Take Polygraph : NPR
In 2006, Monnett and Gleason published a report describing their sightings of apparently drowned polar bears in the Arctic. The report drew public attention to the plight of the bears as the climate changes and ice melts. …
Last year, someone at the Department of the Interior alleged that acts of scientific misconduct may have been committed in relation to that report. Some critics of the investigation charge that the scientists were targeted for special attention because of their work’s political implications; they say this investigation will have a chilling effect on other researchers. -
The Turkey earthquake | The Big Picture
The effort to save any remaining earthquake victims continues around the clock in the eastern province of Van in Turkey after an earthquake reduced many of its buildings to rubble on Sunday, Oct. 23. A two-week old baby girl, her mother and grandmother were rescued in Ercis on Tuesday, but most teams are finding only bodies among the ruins. The 7.2 magnitude quake has reportedly killed at least 450 people as of Tuesday night and damaged more than 2,000 structures. Survivors live on the streets and in tents provided by the government. — Lloyd Young (28 photos total)
-
Daily Kos: Derivatives, Counterparties, BofA. and OWS
One frequent sign at OWS rallies and marches is “Restore Glass-Steagall.”* (Or “Repeal Gramm-Leach-Bliley” or “Repeal The Financial Services Modernization Act.) Equally important would be the repeal of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.
Democratic Party high-muckety-mucks have been telling the hoi-polloi that Dodd-Frank is as good as restoring Glass-Steagall. However, the dead-of-night transfer of BofA’s Merrill Lynch unit’s derivatives to a federally insured deposit subsidiary is proof that it isn’t so. Before explicating this move, let’s review what it was like in the bad old days of financial regulation.
1) Investment brokers didn’t sit on huge piles of unregulated derivatives for the simple reason that they didn’t exist much outside commodity markets (Chicago Board of Trade). High risk stuff. …
-
Daily Kos: Open thread for night owls: The limits of free speech
Most of all, however, the revolution will not be allowed to interfere with a nice, pretty lawn. I admit, I never saw that one coming. If told me that politicians around America would choose “we need to protect that lawn” as their most insistent argument against prolonged public protest, the one requiring the most aggressive police intervention, I would never have believed you.
-
A Framing Memo for Occupy Wall Street | George Lakoff
All politics is moral. Political figures and movements always make policy recommendations claiming they are the right things to do. …
A Moral Focus for Occupy Wall Street
I think it is a good thing that the occupation movement is not making specific policy demands. If it did, the movement would become about those demands. If the demands were not met, the movement would be seen as having failed.
It seems to me that the OWS movement is moral in nature, that occupiers want the country to change its moral focus. It is easy to find useful policies; hundreds have been suggested. It is harder to find a moral focus and stick to it. If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands. If the moral focus of America changes, new people will be elected and the policies will follow.
-
Daily Kos: The City of Irvine Grants Occupy OC the Right to Camp Overnight
You heard it, Orange County, California, considered one of the most conservative Counties in the Country… green light to Occupy over night [given] by the Irvine City Council, unanimously.
-
Lesson Plan | Who Are the 99%? Ways to Teach About Occupy Wall Street – NYTimes.com
-
Daily Kos: Postal Savings System
100 years ago, the United States Post Office Department (forerunner of the USPS) operated small neighborhood banks that allowed people who had no confidence in banks to make deposits and withdrawals.
-
Daily Kos: (Un)Occupy/Occupy Albuquerque October 26 – The Day After
UNM Campus Police have just informed us that anyone associated with Occupy Albuquerque are not allowed in the park at ANY time, day or night even though the public is allowed to be in the park from 7 am to 10 pm.
-
Daily Kos: Requiem for a Democracy: Medic, Medic!
This is the funny thing about the right to assemble. You have that right, but there is no place to assemble. There is no public street, no park, no soapbox, no small crust of ground, no voice for the voiceless, no straight spine for the subjects in subject position.
A video of a man, a war hero. Brought down wounded on the streets of Oakland. Pieta’ through the sad and sickened streets. Medic, Medic. This man is down!
-
Daily Kos: I didn’t mean to become one of the long term unemployed.
-
Daily Kos: South Dakota kidnaps Indian children and sticks them in white foster care
While Indian children make up less than 15 percent of the state’s population, they are more than half the children in foster care. South Dakota receives thousands of dollars from the feds for every child it takes from a family, and typically gets more money if a child is Indian.
…why should lawsuits be necessary? There is a law against what’s being done. It’s just not being enforced. A good deal of the reason for that is because the centuries-long efforts to make Indians disappear, to make us invisible, has succeeded. Our political clout in such matters, even in places where we can still be found in substantial numbers, is next to zero. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act appears to us to be just another ignored bit of paper, like hundreds of treaties, and nobody official is doing squat about it.
-
Daily Kos :: Comments: Occupy Oakland, before and after it was torn down by police
The oakland ga is 3000 people right now
Discussing calling a general strike. Oakland was the last city in the us to have a general strike and from the info I have it sounds like they have some union support.
-
Daily Kos: Herman Cain says he wasn’t joking about that electric fence after all
-
Last night I was arrested in my home town, outside an event to which I had been invited, for standing lawfully on the sidewalk in an evening gown.
Let me explain; my partner and I were attending an event for the Huffington Post, for which I often write: Game Changers 2011, in a venue space on Hudson Street. As we entered the space, we saw that about 200 Occupy Wall Street protesters were peacefully assembled and were chanting. They wanted to address Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was going to be arriving at the event. They were using a technique that has become known as “the human mic” – by which the crowd laboriously repeats every word the speaker says – since they had been told that using real megaphones was illegal.
In my book Give Me Liberty, a blueprint for how to open up a closing civil society, I have a chapter on permits – which is a crucial subject to understand for anyone involved in protest in the US. In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of “overpermiticisation” – requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances… -
For those who are curious, the organization collecting and distributing suits to protesters is called the Proper Business Attire Working Group. The suits were apparently given out on Oct. 15, the big global protest day. They have a nice little video montage on their site of well-dressed activists throughout history. I applaud any protester who shows up for #OWS, but I agree that it’s more effective to look dignified, especially in the current Big Dumb Cable News Era. (You’d think, given their track record, that bald guys in suits would no longer be taken seriously, but alas, they still are.)
-
Solidarity Statement From Cairo | OccupyWallSt.org
…we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? …
These are public spaces. Spaces forgathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting – these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst .
What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”…
…the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for.
-
Daily Kos: Occupy Wall Street roundup: Day 40
The events in Oakland made for the majority of headlines today, as the Oakland Police statements continue to “evolve” in justification of what seems, from available evidence, to have been an excessive and perhaps outright incompetent police action yesterday.
…plenty of video and photographic evidence showing these weapons being used against protesters, but no video has yet come forward matching the Oakland Police Department’s other major claim: that the violence against protesters came after officers had rocks and/or bottles thrown at them. And we have multiple instances of protesters being hit in the head with non-lethal weapons, which could very well render those weapons lethal… Hopefully we will get a clearer picture of what happened, but as of the moment the Oakland Police is left with a serious credibility problem.
The reason for all that police action? To allow the city to clean the park. Yeah, sorry we shot you in the head, Mr. Veteran, but you’ve really been messing up that lawn. …
A common refrain, during these protests: hey, your free speech is nice, but the lawn is more important. The latest version comes from Los Angeles: fine, citizens, you’ve made your point, but think of the damn lawn already: …
A statement of solidarity from Cairo. [link] While you read through that, I’d just like you to reflect a moment on how a group of people in Egypt were able to come up with a clear description of the motivations of the Occupy movement long before professional expert-guy Bill Kristol ever will.
Readers of the Washington Post illustrated a picture of the Oakland violence with a nice picture of a police officer petting a kitten. Sigh.
-
Are you F***ing kidding me? The Mayor gives the orders for the occupation to be cleared, an act that any sane individual could see had the potential to lead to massive protests, violence, or even a Kent State style tragedy, and then she skips town while it happens???
This is not the act of a leader. Whatever the pros and cons of the action, she should have been there when it came down.
Fortunately for the people of Oakland, a recall petition has already been initiated. In an suitably ironic twist, the people who have filed the petition seem to be law-and-order types, believing that Quan has not done enough to insure public safety.[A commenter reports that a fence has been erected around the occupy site, but later it was taken down. -L]
-
Daily Kos: A Voice From the 1%
Here is a secret about rich people: we wouldn’t have noticed a 3.5% tax increase. That is not only because there isn’t a material difference between having $1 million and $965,000, which is obvious, but also because most of us don’t actually know how much money we are going to make in a given year. Most income at that level is the result of profits rather than salary… Profits are unpredictable and they tend to vary wildly. At my own firm, the general rule of thumb is that if we are within 5% of our budget for the year, everyone is happy and no one complains. A variation of 3.5% is merely a random blip. …
I got my first job at 13, working as a bus boy for $2 an hour, and I have never been unemployed in the 37 years since. I worked my way through college, which I paid for myself. When I started my career I worked 60+ hour weeks every week for nearly 15 years before that effort began to pay off. I employ nearly 20 people, I have no debts, and I have no doubt that I have earned every penny I have.
And yet, I am living proof of Elizabeth Warren’s maxim that no one gets rich on their own. If not for the UMWA helping to secure a living wage for my grandfather, I would probably have had to leave school to help support my family, as he had done.
-
Wall Street Isn’t Winning It’s Cheating | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
Cain said he believed that the protesters are driven by envy of the rich.
“I find the one thing [the protesters] have in common revolves around the human emotions of envy and entitlement,” he said. “What you have is more than what I have, and I’m not happy with my situation.”
Cain seems like a nice enough guy, but I nearly blew my stack when I heard this. When you take into consideration all the theft and fraud and market manipulation and other evil shit Wall Street bankers have been guilty of in the last ten-fifteen years, you have to have balls like church bells to trot out a propaganda line that says the protesters are just jealous of their hard-earned money.
Think about it: there have always been rich and poor people in America, so if this is about jealousy, why the protests now? …
Americans for the most part love the rich, even the obnoxious rich. And in recent years, the harder things got, the more we’ve obsessed over the wealth dream.
…Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that’s just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they’re cheating.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
The Of interest (Oct 27) by Lee (via Diigo) , 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.