Short Takes
- Lip Reading Babies: Utter nonsense!
January 17, 2012 | 8:54 pmSays psychologist David Lewkowicz of Florida Atlantic University, who led [a] study published yesterday…
’The baby in order to imitate you has to figure out how to shape their lips to make that particular sound they’re hearing,’’
Can you “figure out” why this is utter nonsense? I should as obvious as monkey see, monkey do. With this sort of thing passing for science, we are surely doomed.
- The Mark of Cain
November 9, 2011 | 3:13 amWatching Herman Cain duel with his female accusers is like watching the Jerry Springer Show. Not a pretty picture. If you partake, be sure an wash you hands afterwards.
- The Truth About Sovereign Debt
November 1, 2011 | 4:01 pmDuring the housing bubble people bet on rising home prices by taking out loans on to-good-to-be true terms and investment banking made bets on the rising home prices by lending on to-good-be-true terms. Everyone drank the Kool Aid. Prices went down. Having made bad bets, home owners should default on their loans and bankers should take their losses. This is the simple-minded logic of every-man-for-himself market economics.
The nations that joined the EU placed bets on rising economic prosperity that would come from joining the EU and adopting the Euro and borrowing from the EU banks on to-good-to-be-true terms. The EU investment bankers made speculative bets on EU member nations by lending them billions on to-good-to-be-true terms. The borrower economies went down not up. Everyone drank the Kool Aid and having made bad bets the borrowers should default on their loans and the bankers should take their losses. This too, is the simple-minded logic of every-man-for-himself market economics.
So how do the bankers hold the world hostage to their bad bets? They claim they are too big to fail. In other words, the only game they know is heads they win, tails we lose.
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Archive for Short Takes »
- Lip Reading Babies: Utter nonsense!
Category Archives: Science of Consciousness
Data-ISM by David Brooks
David Brooks is one of the most frustrating columnists I now and then read. He takes what is often a brilliant insight, launches a train of thought and then he’s off to the Milky Way.
In his NYT column today, “The … Continue reading
Causes of Freewill
In the article “Scientific evidence that you don’t have freewill,” Sam Harris denies that we have freewill, saying:
“Recognizing that my conscious mind is always downstream from the underlying causes of my thought, intentions and actions, does not change the fact … Continue reading
The Will of Guns
In my previous post I entertained the idea that guns don’t kill innocent people, evil or mentally ill people who have guns do the killing. In point of fact, I do not subscribe to the “mental illness” explanation of the … Continue reading
Reliable test to determine who is unfit to own semi-automatic weapons
One of the things we keep hearing in the aftermath of the latest instance of gunning down innocent people with assault weapons is that the cause of these tragedies is mental illness.
“How,” asks a reporter, “do we know the assailant … Continue reading
The Mind of Guns
“The gunman [a man and a gun] in the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting forced his way into an elementary school in Connecticut, where he shot 26 people, 20 of them children…”
Guns have a mind, a mind to kill–it’s as simple … Continue reading
Science v. Magic
I did not know that at the root of the word SCIENCE was the idea of taking the world apart. I also had not realized that at the root of the word SYSTEM was the idea of putting the world … Continue reading
Mind and Desire
Human consciousness is a process — the process of acting to obliterate desire. It is the endless cycle of our warring on want, the negation of which is un-conceivable.
Intentionality is not a condition of life. We humans alone are bedeviled … Continue reading
How many ways can you spell “fire”?
Brian Stauffer writes for the Washington Post,
“…The much-misconstrued statement of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that free speech does not give you the right to shout fire in a crowded theater is now being used to curtail speech that might provoke … Continue reading
Knowing Everything There Is To Know
According to a NYT Sunday Review piece, “Just the Facts. Yes, All of Them“, Gilad Elbaz wants…
“…to identify every fact in the world, and to hold them all in a company he calls Factual.”
He also wants to get rich and … Continue reading
Our Market Society
The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public life and personal relations? How can we decide … Continue reading
Falling Foward
The subtitle of my blog is “surfing the brink of chaos” because I believe that even in the most mundane of our activity, this is exactly what we are doing.
We are confronted in our every INTENTIONALLY conscious moment with a … Continue reading
What is Honor?
KABUL, Afghanistan — Another two United States soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on Thursday when an Afghan soldier in league with a civilian Afghan literacy instructor killed a tower guard and attacked with gunfire and a rocket the barracks where … Continue reading
Humans are not Evolving
Here’s an interesting idea: Humans are not evolving.
For humans to evolve we would have to allow variation to run wild and then stand by and watch while most variations wither on the vine to see some very few selected for, … Continue reading
Heresies
About one week ago I wrote a blog entry suggesting that Democracy and Capitalism were inherently incompatible. Thanks to some commenters, it soon became clear to me that the post was dangerously heretical and that I could end up getting … Continue reading
Brain Porn
Alva Noe, philosopher, author and NPR blogger, has a fine post on the long overdue backlash against purveyors of brain porn who claim to be able to use neural imaging technologies to peek under our psychic dresses and see the … Continue reading →