People will believe it if told enough times that black is white. Unfortunately. It appears that the majority of Americans have painfully weak powers of observation and critical reasoning. Such is the embarassment of our land. The Canadians absolutely adore Obama, so I hear, and they can't understand why "we" despise him. I guess those of us ( Read more... )

I got enough responses to my bit about preparing to resist radiation that it occurs to me to wonder, is the media really working so hard to inflame panic? Or are they trying to keep us from panicking so that we will all just go to the mall and buy movie tickets instead of concerning ourselves with radiation? I have no idea what the media is up to ( Read more... )

I heard it on NPR. Wakefield is the doctor who linked autism to vaccines. They're blaming current outbreaks of measles and mumps on him. They're not discussing his actual research or findings, beyond saying that some of Wakefield's small sample were children who already had symptoms of autism. Wakefield's study involved looking at the microbes ( Read more... )

Here you can see the offending clip in which Williams admitted that he feels nervous when he sees people in Muslim garb on an airplane. I hadn't seen it until just now. Williams has a long history of working for human rights, and he is black. After he made this admission, NPR fired him, and he promptly got hired by FOX to the tune of a $2 ( Read more... )

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129931999
my goal: practice and become highly proficient at these 25 exams (plus a few):
http://stanford25.wordpress.com/

The most astute diagnosticians I encounter on a regular (weekly) basis are "Click and Clack, the Tappitt brothers", on NPR. They are immediately assessing every variable for any possible cause the moment they begin talking to a person with a car problem. They are insightful and compassionate about the foibles of people. They know their shit ( Read more... )

My favorite repeat presidential candidate was in the news yesterday. A group of conservatives in Washington DC had a straw poll and decided that they will support Dr Paul if he will run again. We sure could use his pragmatism and economic smarts about now. He is so much saner than most of his supporters. But now it appears that the Conservative ( Read more... )

Big news in Europe: the Swiss have consitutionally banned new minarets ( Read more... )

Humans need to believe in something to have some sense of control in difficult times. The more confusing the situation, the great our sense of loss of control, the greater our need for understanding. The understanding that we create may be based in relatively few facts, and it may be true, or untrue. But we perceive the patterns and act based on ( Read more... )

Listening to an old This American Life program (you can download them online) called Harold. It's about the first black man to serve as governor, in Chicago. It gives a little bit of history about Democracy in our country that gives me hope for Obama. Harold was "fairer than fair" and gradually began to win over racist whites by being a plain ( Read more... )