I had no idea that the election of the first openly gay mayor of a major US city happened in Houston, Texas of all places. And this is her second term, having been first elected to that post in 2009 although she has held other elected posts in the city, such as city councilor and city controller, since 1998. [Read more…]
I got a Twitter account when it first started but have never sent a tweet. It is like Facebook and LinkedIn. I was one of the early people to get accounts on both but don’t use either anymore. With Twitter my reason for not using it is that I do not see what I could possibly say in less than 140 characters that would be worth saying. [Read more…]
When you read classics like Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, A Study in Scarlet, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The Three Musketeers, I am sure the thought crosses your mind, “These books have great stories, excellent writing, and strong characters but there’s something missing. What they need to be really great are some explosive and graphic sex scenes.” [Read more…]
At one time there was a flurry of articles and books around the theme of why some women seemed to be loyal to husbands and partners who abused them, with titles such as Women Who Love Psychopaths, Angry Men and the Women Who Love Them, and Women Who Love Too Much, all exploring the strange attraction that some people have for those who seem to hate them. [Read more…]
I am extremely conservative in my food tastes, tending to favor a few favorite things and eating them over and over again, rather than experimenting with new items. I am not particularly fond of sweet foods but once in a while I get the desire for them and on those occasions my selection has always been for Breyers cherry vanilla ice cream and Cadbury’s chocolate. [Read more…]
Now that they are back from a two-week hiatus, you could be sure that they would pick on the juiciest of political topics, the one with the most comedic potential, that took place during their absence and they did not disappoint. [Read more…]
Ken Silverstein has a good article in the June 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine (p. 58-59, behind a paywall) looking closely at the resume of one Matthew Levitt, one of the many so-called ‘terrorism experts’ who on closer examination do not seem to have the kind of expertise they claim to have. Their main function seems to be to hype the terrorist threat beyond all recognition and it is easy for them to do so because everyone, except the general public, benefits: They get paid to give their opinion as ‘expert witnesses’ in the government’s prosecution of terrorism cases, the media get to write sensationalistic stories, and the government achieves its goal of keeping the population terrified and docile.
In the past decade, the federal government has brought to trial hundreds of alleged terrorists. Some of these cases have been deadly serious and others decidedly dubious, but regardless of the indictment’s plausibility, prosecutors often rely on an “expert witness” to frame and buttress their charges. In their constellation of star witnesses, few have shone brighter than Matthew Levitt, Ph.D., who has testified or submitted written opinions in at least thirteen terrorism-related trials.
…
Terrorism experts often have professional, ideological, and financial incentives to side with the government. For his turns as an expert witness, Levitt typically bills the government $200 an hour. Not coincidentally, his role also dovetails neatly with the policy objectives of his employer, the Washington Institute, which was founded by the powerful pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. These gigs are, of course, self-reinforcing, each one serving to further legitimate Levitt as an expert. Less well served by this arrangement are defendants, whose cases can be won or lost on the basis of witness testimony that is all the more convincing when the government withholds so much of the hard evidence from the jury.
And so it goes.
Americans tend to be obsessed about how they look, especially their weight. Now there is a tool to further feed that obsession for those who may have wondered how they might compare if they happened to live in another country. When you insert your personal data into this global body mass index calculator, it returns your own BMI along with the ranges of BMI for 177 other countries in the world,
It turns out that the US is sixth in average BMI, being beaten by Micronesia, Tonga, Croatia, Samoa, and Argentina. I was wondering what it might be about these small Pacific islands that might cause three of them (rank 176, 178, and 173 respectively out of 193 countries in terms of population) to rank in the top four.
I have not been to any of these countries and so have no first hand experience but my wife who has been to Argentina says that she would never have guessed that they ranked above the US because she saw hardly any overweight people there, unlike what she sees here. This should serve as a warning that using our personal impressions (which are always based on small and usually unrepresentative samples) to infer the characteristics of entire populations can lead to wildly erroneous conclusions.