WIP

For my part, I was taking a break from posting on Fukishima Daichi because the lack of consistent, verifiable information from the Japanese government and TEPCO was making it impossible for outside analysts to determine how the recovery effort was going. During a anti-nuclear protest in Tokyo yesterday, some of the protesters said that the Government has only issued one report on cesium levels since the crisis started, and has failed to provide updated numbers for radioactive cesium since then. And, the officials seem to have been following a pattern of trying to sell the most optimistic forecasts to the world, and backtracking and admitting to greater problems only when independent radiation measurements challenge their credibility. They have consistently tried to give us the impression that the leaks and radiation releases were just temporary setbacks, and everything would be brought under control soon. But, this disaster is still unfolding, and agreeing to finally increase the exclusion zone and the nuclear crisis alert level to 7, is something they should have done a week or two ago, since it was inevitable that the disaster, which has so far released radiation amounts about 10% of Chernobyl would eventually overtake Chernobyl, as TEPCO is now having to admit: Japan raises nuclear crisis alert level . The big difference between Chernobyl and Fukushima, is that the former involved a sudden meltdown and explosion of one reactor..releasing a massive amount of radiation in a short period of time. Fukishima involves three reactors in various stages of meltdown, and one high-level radioactive waste pool that has already caught fire and released large amounts of hazardous radiation -- and it is still possible that the other high-level radioactive waste pools will do the same. Another big problem is that Fukushima is located near densely populated areas, not out in the middle of the woods like Chernobyl. A Washington Post report on the Level 7 story states that there is a warning that more than one country may be effected by hazardous radioactivity releases. Does anyone actually have measurements and other evidence to verify this story? Or is this more wishful thinking with fingers crossed, like so many of the previous optimistic assessments!

I already pointed that out in the OP that authoritarian movements can develop on the left, and I consider it likely we will see more militant marxist groups rising up as socialists and liberals lose faith in democratic institutions. But, the minority of conservatives who are not authoritarian is the exception to the rule. Conservatism began as a political philosophy designed to preserve traditional social structures from change, and they've made their primary appeals to traditional values ever since. All we have to do is look at is look at the Harper Conservatives here in Canada, and how they focus on militarism, building prisons, "family values", and as we are seeing with each new revelation -- a complete disregard for democratic principles. Political leaders always want power, but the difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals and the NDP, is what the supporters will put up with. The Conservatives have a core of supporters who don't even believe in democratic principles to start with. They believe in power and respect for authority.

Exactly! There was an interesting show on last night...wish I had noticed the title...which was about two neuroscientists studying musicians, and comparing how their brains' function with non-musicians or hacks like the rest of us who never really get the hang of it! The same thing would be found in studying the brains of athletes or anyone and everyone who performs specialized tasks. Our brains' have developed and re-routed to adapt and make us better at what we are doing....or attempting to do!

Check out some of the work by neuroscientist - Antonio Damasio on neural plasticity. Many interviews and discussions on the subject are found here in the archives of the Brain Science Podcast; most of the episodes have transcripts in the show notes. As mentioned in the OP, check out the free online copy of Altemeyer's study "The Authoritarians"....and leave something in the tip jar! Altemeyer and other cognitive psychologists, make a convincing case for connecting personal worldview with degrees of authoritarianism and openness. The study also shows fascinating tidbits such as how children raised by fundamentalist parents will be more likely to be authoritarian in adulthood, and how the experience of going to university makes young people exposed to new ideas and people from other places in the world, more open and less authoritarian in their thinking.

What I'm getting at is that the murders did not occur in the U.S., so they are not an American justice issue. The only reason why it is related to the U.S. is because the Quran-burning provided a catalyst for mob violence against America, and unfortunately for anyone considered an American proxy in their absence. No, unfortunately our troops are cannon fodder for a mission that has no clear objectives or exit strategy; and all we are doing is trying to find local cronies to support. This has been the failure of past wars of occupation from Vietnam on down, and it will end up a failure here as well. And as I said before, if you want to impose an empire on others, you have to accept all of the costs. The people who are most adamant about finding some way to limit such outrageous displays of personal freedom are the military commanders who have troops on the front lines and at risk from increasing the amount of hatred they are exposed to from the locals. But, my own pov is that I would like to know why this sort of freedom of speech is declared absolute, so that burning Qurans, Bibles, flags, defiling sacraments (see P.Z. Myers), funeral protests, nazi and kkk marches, are all freedoms that have to be absolute and unrestrained. Just about every other freedom is restrained...some being effectively abolished, like our right to know what our governments are doing as they conduct business behind closed doors!

No! What you are doing is bringing an unrelated issue in as an excuse to justify a personal attack.

Beauticians and telephone sanitizers! Really? There have been many studies over the years that show education level skews towards liberalism. It doesn't mean that every university graduate is a liberal, and I'm an outlier, since I have abandoned virtually all of the conservative beliefs I previously had in recent years. But, like they say: the exception doesn't prove the rule. Forget Al Gore! First of all, he's not a scientist, and 2nd of all he's a big business Democrat who had changed his ideological archetype to match the office he was campaigning for during his long political career. I'll take your word that Feynman is a conservative, but find me another prominent theoretical physicist! Stephen Hawking doesn't sound like a conservative when hee mentions environmental issues, and tells the hard truth that almost everyone on all sides is avoiding right now: the human race will become extinct within the next two centuries, if we continue on our present course of willful self-destruction. Michiou Kaku does a weekly radio show called Exploration, on the Progressive Radio Network....so I guess it wouldn't be worth my while to go through the trouble of finding and posting the link for you! All you have here is a plausible argument that engineers may be more conservative than pure scientific researchers; and there may be anecdotal evidence for that position, since whenever I see one of these bullshit lists of "scientists" who reject the theory of evolution, the evidence for harms of 2nd hand smoke, or reject the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming, I find name after name of people with engineering degrees, and few actual scientists...especially in actual related fields of research. Also, we have the problem that engineers are likely to know which side their bread is buttered on. That's what adds to the confusion and difficulty of trying to understand what is going on with the nuclear meltdown in Japan. We already have the problem of a government and a large utility company that are with-holding information, a Japanese press that traditionally does little if any investigative reporting...and then we have to deal with the claims and counter-claims of what are safe radiation levels. If all of the pro-nuclear engineers would walk the talk and move to just outside the Japanese Exclusion Zone, I might be more inclined to take them at their word! The study was based on small "l" liberals and small "c" conservatives who follow an ideology, not a political party. We all know that the Liberal Party has ranged anywhere from left to right over the years depending on who was in charge, and what was politically popular at the time. But the old P.C. Party also used to float around the ideological map with all of their Red Tories like Joe Clark, Kim Campbell and those Eastcoasters. I used to hate the way the two governing parties were so ideological flexible, that the only issue they were consistent on was Federal vs. Provincial powers....but now that the Harper Conservatives are a northern branch of the Republican Party, and the powers-that-be are trying to work behind the scenes to turn the Liberals into something of the Democratic alternative, I'm longing for those good old days when a conservative would have to vote for the Liberal, and the liberal would have to choose the Progressive Conservative candidate. And, as I mentioned in the OP, I would have preferred if they framed their report as studying authoritarian vs. liberal tendencies, since issues of the day will skew whether people identify themselves as conservatives or liberals. Right now in the U.S., Republican Party membership is on the decline, and a most shocking discovery...something almost worthy of starting a new thread....support for capitalism in America has fallen lower than China, Brazil, Germany, Italy, the Philippines and India. Obviously many Americans are feeling shell-shocked by the banking meltdown, foreclosures, and finally starting to realize that they have been getting poorer over the last few decades. If things were going great, support for free market fundamentalism would be right back where it was in the 80's and 90's.

Some liberal theologians like Karen Armstrong, can make a rather compelling case that anti-science fundamentalism started with those Christian scientists of the Enlightenment, who wanted to prove the Christian God through science. Many church leaders were opposed to this sort of approach from the start, since having a high degree of objective evidence would eliminate the necessity for needing faith. But, I'm not sure if I can buy Armstrong's contention that the Church would have remained pro-science if it wasn't for Newton, Kepler, Francis Bacon, Descartes etc.. The Catholic Church has adapted to a lot of discovery from science in biology and cosmology, but they still would like to constrain science from exploring black boxes they want left undiscovered....as I gather from the previous Pope's comments that physicists and cosmologists should not attempt to discover what happened before the Big Bang....since that would be attempting to learn how God created the Universe. In a different time, it's easy to envision Stephen Hawking, Ed Witten, Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, Sean Carroll, Alan Guth, Andre Linde....and I'm forgetting at least two other names I read about in recent years who are creating different sorts of multi-universe models. In Galileo's time, they might of all been burned at the stake for heresy! But, fortunately we live in an age when church authorities don't have the power of life and death over people...and I hope the fundamentalists are unsuccessful at trying to take us back to those days again.

I don't see anything complicated about it! From what I gather on the derivatives-fueled financial meltdown, a lot of people and entire nations lost real economic value because of CDO's that bundled bad debt in with other mortgages and declared them to be triple A rated. Back in the 80's, a similar misrepresentation of mortgage values led to the Savings and Loan collapses, and several S&L directors prosecuted in criminal courts. The difference is that now, the investor class on Wall Street is so wealthy, and has purchased so much good will from politicians of both parties, that they have been leveraging how the bail out was handled right from the start. It could have been handled in a similar manner as the S&L Collapse; the fact that it isn't shows us that rich and powerful players are above the law...and in fact write the laws....and that makes it a conservative issue, since conservatives respect authority more than equality and democratic principles.

Because the ice sheets in Greenland are pushing ice into the sea. It's the melting of land-based glaciers that leads to sea level rise. The Antarctic ice sheets are larger, and have not received as much heat energy as the Arctic, but they are on the move also. It is the melting of Antarctic ice sheets that will have the most devastating effects on sea level rise. A page at Skeptical Science deals with the issues involved with measuring sea levels, which are not exactly uniform across all of the oceans on the planet. The studies of tide data show conclusively that sea levels are rising, and at an accelerating rate. And the main source is the land-based ice sheets which will eventually melt even if the brakes are put on rising carbon levels now: Greenland And Antarctic Ice Sheet Melting, Rate Unknown The difference is that they were prior to civilization and before there were even modern humans on Earth. For most of human history, we have been living through an inter-glacial period, where sea levels have been slowly rising, since the maximum of the last ice age. So, that last time a swampy, low level region like the Florida Everglades was under water, was before there were any people around to be concerned about it! When Florida becomes threatened by rising sea levels, it is possible that Florida and other coastal areas can take the steps necessary for adaptation, as the Dutch are doing over in the Netherlands to deal with future large increases when the Antarctic starts losing ice on a grand scale. But there is no capacity in a poor nation struggling to feed its large population - like Bangladesh, to build expensive, large scale sea walls. They may literally end up trapped and condemned to death as rising seas bring salt water into low lying rice paddies. The Indian Government is building a wall around it's eastern borders to stop the flow of Bangladeshi refugees that are already trying to leave for various reasons. Of all of the places on Earth, their future looks the bleakest and most disturbing. Somewhere in the middle! They are not as wealthy as Australia - the most economically developed nation in the Global South...and one that is already having to deal with the destructive effects of climate change, since their agriculture has been severely degraded over the last decade due to extreme floods and droughts. At least nations like Australia and Thailand have the resources to buy food on the world market as global food prices rise; but, the poorest nations do not have the purchasing power to feed their populations from foreign food sources.

Yes, but the next question is: have those taxes been high enough to pay the environmental costs of petroleum, or alter transportation choices? The quick answer would be No, since gas taxes that people bitch about frequently, did not influence them to buy smaller vehicles, move closer to work, or use public transit. If we compare North America to Europe, we have a clear example of how decisions to keep gas prices high changed public buying decisions. Europe decided to keep the prices high after the oil crises of the 70's, largely because most European nations realized that they did not have the open spaces to build the kind of car culture, with more and more highways that North Americans expect here. Today, most Western European nations have equivalent or higher standards of living than Canada or the U.S., even though they use half the amount of energy as the average Canadian or American. Public transit, including the development of high-speed rail (something we have never been able to get off the ground) has made owning a private car unnecessary for many. Over here, many people living in smaller towns and cities have no way to get to work without having their own vehicle. In my area, I can see the sprawl of new suburbs that have been built over the years, because highways made long commutes feasible. Some of the recent additions to the roads...such as the 403 extension, can be seen for how they benefit homebuilders, and people willing to drive 50 or 60 miles everyday to work, but the net effect was to turn the Toronto area into the kind of sprawling megalopolis's you find in the U.S. And when a new highway is built, under the excuse that the present situation is over-congested, the new highway only provides temporary relief, as more and more people join the flight to the suburbs. My father used to say that when he was working on the building of the 401 section through Toronto, it was intended to travel around the city of Toronto....but that was the early 50's! Since then, the urban planners allowed the builders to fill in all of the green spaces around the 401, and keep expanding it with extra lanes and a system of feeder lanes, until they realized that the 401 would be destined to be congested again anyway.....again, it is up to a democratic society to decide how they want their city and province to develop in the future. If we want to get serious about reducing oil consumption, it has to be priced in at the pump so that the incentives move in the other direction.

It's just one of the ways that many people lose their inhibitions when they get drunk, but they don't learn that booze doesn't improve fighting ability until it's too late. There are a lot of guys who can't learn how to throw a decent punch, so it doesn't surprise me that a majority of women -- who have smaller hands and less upper body strength than men, would not be good in a fist fight. I have a good friend who does some martial arts instruction in Aikido and Wing Chun, and also teaches some basic self defense classes for novices who want to learn a few things to protect themselves. Anyway, he usually advises women and the majority of men he trains, to learn how to do effective palm strikes rather than throwing punches....less risk of injury to the hands, and most of the non-boxers can strike harder with the palms than with fists. Plus, a palm strike provides a better opportunity of finding something to grab hold of in an actual fight. Certainly MMA is not streetfighting as soon as grappling gloves are put on! Before the gloves came into it, there was a lot more grappling and a lot less punches thrown. It was usually impossible for a fight to stay standup in the pre-glove era. The way it appears now is that the UFC and other MMA organizations want the knockouts and grappling to be a secondary option, rather than days of Royce Gracie and Dan Severn, who never threw punches in any of their fights. I'm sure this is also a problem for the ranking systems in boxing. It can never be perfectly scientific. Nevertheless it would be possible for the UFC to set up a ranking system if they really wanted it. Then, the fighters and their managers could be deciding who they want to fight, instead of having everything choreographed by Dana White. The challenge for the UFC and MMA in general, is that it has only become a recognized sport very recently. With the octogon cage, grappling gloves, and paying fighters enough money to make a career out of it, the sport has changed from being one of amateurs and specialists in various martial art disciplines trying to figure out what to do, to a new hybrid sport...a combat version of the triathalon, where fighters have to train year round and the ones who will become superstars, such as the ones you mentioned above, are those who are able to be good at both standup and ground fighting. The days of strikers who are helpless on their backs, and grapplers who can't throw a punch are long gone. Most of them are still really good at one thing, and try to learn the other stuff when they start in MMA. But the superstars of MMA will be the generalists who are good at everything. Maybe she panicked and was in too much of a hurry to find some submission hold. A knee bar is usually an option to go for if you have an opponent on their back, but are having a little trouble establishing control. The problem with that execution was that Cyborg was already sitting up, so Shayna had no opportunity to use her weight and lean in to the knee bar. I wonder if the constraints of not having enough quality opponents will end up lead Chris Cyborg to fighting against male opponents. As a side note, I found this to be a fascinating little story: George Lucas’ daughter returns to the cage this weekend It seems that Amanda Lucas is just getting back into the cage after taking a long leave of absence to recuperate from a knee injury, and so that she didn't "look like a battered woman" on her wedding day! Anyway, looking at George Lucas, I'm thinking that she must have learned how to fight from her mom!

90 sq. feet! It looks more like 90 cubic feet!

My thoughts may have been skewed by watching PJ O'Rourke at the time I was writing that post!

You are just playing a stupid game of making counter-accusations...something you do ad nauseum as a global warming denier elsewhere! I expect government to be able to function and do what it was intended to do. And until we fire this prime minister, who is trying to destroy the effectiveness of government institutions by following the Republican strategy of appointing incompetent boobs to be department heads, or firing those who actually try to do the jobs they were hired for -- case in point would be the firing of Linda Keen as nuclear safety watchdog for refusing to allow the Chalk River nuclear station to re-open until it met safety standards, we will not have much success at improving how government functions and serves the people. I'm not running for election anywhere, so I don't care who agrees or doesn't agree with me on any issue. You have some personal stake in denying climate change evidence provided by the 97% of scientists who do climate research. Your capacity to deny a strong expert consensus on the evidence puts you squarely in that conservative, authoritarian camp that follows its leaders without question.

Your free market fundamentalism is as much a fantasy as the 6000 year old universe of the fundamentalist creationists. According to this religious fantasy, companies need to make a profit...so if we cut their taxes and they make huge profits, that money is going to trickle down and benefit the rest of us.........so why the hell isn't it happening? It was one thing to believe this bullshit when Ronald Reagan brought Milton Friedman's Chile Experiment to Washington; but to still believe it today, when Canada is following in America's footsteps of seeing wealth decline at every income level except for the top 1%, is a refusal to admit the truth -- that the rightwing economic agenda was only intended to benefit those with wealth and power.

If my curiosity was greater, I might cough up the $31.50 it costs to buy a copy of the research paper, since the blurbs I was able to find, like the one on CTV News or an almost identical brief piece from the LA Times are short on substance. I mentioned Robert Altemeyer previously because his psychological test results using carefully selected survey data, identified the basic difference as how a person rates on a scale of authoritarian thinking in his book (which I have plugged many times here) that's still available free online: The Authoritarians In a general sense conservatives are going to tend to be more likely to be authoritarian in their thinking, because they follow a political ideology based on notions of adhering to traditions, whereas liberals are supposed to embrace change and new discovery. But, an authoritarian movement could develop on the left if democracy and civil society start to breakdown....which may not be that far off from the looks of things....while there is a contingent of secular, dope-smoking libertarians who quote Ayn Rand, and do a lot of the intellectual heavy-lifting for their more dull-witted rightwing brethren. So, if the political situation changes in the coming years, it may be harder to figure out which side has the most fear-driven authoritarian followers, and who has the most open-minded, cosmopolitan liberals.

I live in an uncertain world with no gods or supernatural forces, that is heading towards a secular apocalypse with no rapture or Jesus coming back to fix everything! That's facing reality. You call it fearmongering because you don't have the courage to deal honestly with world as it is.

Oil, gas and coal are subsidized by our tax dollars, and some industries like nuclear power, are completely funded out of the public trough, yet for some reason there is outrage if we start talking about taxing dirty energy sources and subsidizing the clean ones instead. It's not rocket-science to figure out that there is huge money to be made in oil (7 of the 10 world's largest corporations are oil companies), and they want to keep their good times going.

This study published in a biology journal is just starting to be noticed by some of the press, as here on CTV site A quick read reveals that the neuroscientists are talking about neuro-correlates with conscious activity, which does not necessarily mean that the differences in brain activity are the source of the conscious effect...here being the difference in attitudes and interests between conservatives and liberals, but there is already a long history of psychology research (Robert Altemeyer's studies on authoritarian thinking for one) which would corroborate the analysis that there are differences in information processing going on. Since I mentioned Altemeyer, I should add that he found evidence from external events can skew the numbers, at least temporarily...so many of us who were horrified by the events of 9/11 were inclined to go along with authority-thinking without question, and rally round the flag. The difference is that those of us who are not by nature authoritarian conservatives at heart, are inclined to jump off the conservative bandwagon when we start discovering lies, deceit and hypocrisy that were used to motivate the public....while there remains a dedicated core of conservative followers who will blindly follow what their leaders tell them to do, regardless of contrary evidence.

I quit drinking years ago, largely because of having to work a couple of years as a bartender, and getting sick of the smell of the stuff, and the smell and the stupidity of its frequent consumers. In my older years, I have become curious about the frequent claims that a moderate consumption of wine provides protection against heart disease, since my LDL levels are borderlinem in spite of maintaining a high fitness level. Anyway, not that I am all of a sudden going to become a drinker again, I am still curious about where (if anywhere) the actual science is in these claims and counterclaims over the last 30 years.

Oil is not overpriced! Along with coal, it is negligently underpriced, since virtually all of the environmental costs involved with obtaining, refining, and using oil byproducts as fuel have been externalized as collective costs for everyone to pay. I have mentioned on another thread the unfairness of this, since many of the places in the world that have been the most negatively affected by the cheap petro age, have contributed the least to the increase in greenhouse gas levels over the last 150 years. If the tax burden had been properly applied to make carbon-based energy sources pay for their environmental damage, we would have invented and developed clean, alternative energy sources decades ago!

Many atheist activists talk about atheists and agnostics as if they are one and the same thing, and can be lumped together in the same category...may be to bump up the poll numbers a little; and I still feel that this does a disservice to people in that middle ground who aren't sure whether God exists or not. It's worth noting that there are agnostics on the believing side too. A Christian agnostic perhaps wants to believe, but is unsure if his God exists. Someone like that does not belong in the same category as atheists. For my part, I can't say I can prove God doesn't exist either; I just haven't found any compelling arguments for any features of the universe as we know it, needing a supernatural creator to explain it.

Feel free to fund some research looking for ESP if you believe it's real; the question is: should the sciences remain neutral on the likelihood of the existence of psi phenomena when so much research effort has found nothing? If there's any mathematicians here, you might be able to help me with this: I've heard from a couple of interviews that Bayes Theorem for determining conditional probabilities would apply here; so that each one of these 380 studies showing no evidence of psi, would keep reducing that slim possibility right out of any plausible chance of its existence.

I know kimmy didn't intend it as a serious question, but the fact that there are people who will bid thousands of dollars for a cracker that looks like the Virgin Mary means that a rational explanation is needed to inform some people not to be so quick to believe they've seen a miracle.