I don't know about you but this didn't surprise me. I think?.
[b]THE MOST VIOLENT PEOPLE ON EARTH[/b]
[i]Teenagers are the usual targets of efforts to prevent violence and delinquency. But as ERIN ANDERSSEN and ANNE McILROY report, science has discovered that human viciousness actually peaks in toddlers. Luckily, two-year-olds can't do much harm. But if you don't help the worst cases by then, you might never be able to help them at all[/i] By ERIN ANDERSSEN, ANNE McILROY Saturday, April 3, 2004 - Page F1
There was a little boy named Maxim, who had brown eyes as big as loonies. And when he was good, he could name all the letters in the alphabet, and make spaghetti hair with Play-Doh, and sweetly sing the words to Peter Gabriel's love song, In Your Eyes.
But when he was bad, he was horrid. He slapped and screamed at his mom. He walloped a playmate with a plastic fire engine at the daycare centre, and spent long hours in the corner for pushing. Denied his wishes on the tiniest things, he would flip into such a rage that his face would turn bright purple and he would make himself vomit. "It is like he was choking himself," his young mother, Judith, says wearily.
But then her son is, after all, only 2˝ , and according to groundbreaking Canadian research, that plops him smack in the middle of the angriest, most violent age of the human animal.
For decades, aggression was seen as a problem of hormones and testosterone in teenagers. A 2002 poll found that the majority of Canadians believe that humans are at their most violent as early teens -- and that most resources should be spent on preventing aggression at that age.
But new discoveries are dismantling those assumptions. The "terrible 2s" are worse than we knew. Research is showing that for almost every little boy (or girl) such as Maxim, not even a rocky adolescence will come as close to the rapid-fire tantrums of the toddler years.
Researchers argue that society must stop excusing aggression in early childhood. Ignoring the problem could mean a child's path is set irrevocably toward delinquency, dropping out of school, and crime. Intervention, it seems, needs to come sooner than ever. If aggressive children don't learn to control their anger early, they might never learn at all.
The idea requires adults to face the worst of human nature in their own children -- that bad things can come in small packages. It goes straight to the age-old debate about the origins of evil: Are human beings born pure, as Rousseau argued, and tainted by the world around them? Or do babies arrive bad, as St. Augustine wrote, and learn, for their own good, how to behave in society?
Richard Tremblay, an affable researcher at the University of Montreal who is considered one of the world leaders in aggression studies, sides with St. Augustine, whom he is fond of quoting.
Dr. Tremblay has thousands of research subjects, many studied over decades, to back him up: Aggressive behaviour, except in the rarest circumstances, is not acquired from life experience. It is a remnant of our evolutionary struggle to survive, a force we learn, with time and careful teaching, to master. And as if by some ideal plan, human beings are at their worst when they are at their weakest.
On the day that conclusion struck him, Dr. Tremblay said, "I had the impression I was seeing the world in a completely different way."
His work asks not what makes us violent, but what make us peaceable. Aggression stops being a problem of treating a deviant group of young adults and teenagers, but a universal behaviour to be shaped from infancy.
"Physical aggression is not an illness one catches," Dr. Tremblay says, in an interview in the campus cafeteria. "It is a natural behaviour that one learns to control. But the learning is not perfect. Socialization is a thin veneer."
Which explains why, he says, it is so often the quiet, agreeable types who storm into their office building toting a rifle -- the veneer having cracked in a sudden explosion. But never, in all the studies, including those replicated in New Zealand and the United States, did he find a passive child who grew up to be an aggressive adult; the raging adults were the raging children who never leashed their anger.
If humans gradually become less aggressive as they age, then video games and action movies do not suddenly turn 12-year-olds violent. "If humans had to wait for television to aggress," Dr. Tremblay observes wryly, "humanity would not exist."
And if aggression is a trait to be unlearned, a society that ostracizes its bullies with "zero tolerance," especially when young, only serves to breed more of them.
What helps us unlearn it? Modern science is currently fine-tuning a complex -- and often surprising -- recipe of genes and environment, where the right neural connections are made in the brain at the optimal time, where fathers are encouraged to play-fight with their children (see sidebar) and parents, harking back to the days grandparents always talk about, are advised to teach manners with as much devotion as they teach math.
The science says that there is no difference between the baby who snatches a toy from another child, and the burglar who fights you when you catch him stealing your television. "It is exactly the same behaviour," Dr. Tremblay suggests. "It is just done by a bigger gorilla."
At conferences, when he shows pictures of babies and toddlers pulling hair or throwing punches, the audience almost always chuckles -- until they hear his research.
One of his favourite lines: "If you put your four-month-old to bed one night, and went in in the morning and he was suddenly six feet tall and 200-plus pounds, you should just run away. Because he will really beat you up."
In his Montreal apartment one Tuesday afternoon, a young man named Steve yanks up his shirt to show the long, ugly scar where a knife sliced into his kidney, the sudden end to a fight on a city bus. He lifts his pant leg to reveal the puncture hole left behind by a bullet, a souvenir from a street fight when he was 15.
Now, at 25, he works as a busboy at a nightclub from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., and during the day, he writes violent rap lyrics and deals drugs.
Steve cannot remember much about his early childhood, but the life he does recount is dismal. His problems with school began from the start; he always had trouble concentrating, and in Grade 1, for reasons he doesn't know or won't say, he was sent to see a psychologist, and forced to repeat the year.
"After that," he says, "it went badly." He recalls being sent to detention "all the time" from that first year on. He did not finish high school.
At home, his parents split up when he was 12. His mother sent him to a youth home. "She told me I didn't obey," he says, with bitterness. "I wasn't that bad. But my mother got rid of me."
He portrays himself as a victimized child, the "fat kid with glasses" who was picked on by classmates, though there is no sign of that little boy in the lean, rapper pose he strikes today. He says his first major fight was in retaliation for being picked on at 12. "It is true," he adds, "I was violent. I beat up one of the little guys. I couldn't stop."
Steve now accepts violence as a part of his nature. He has hit people with bats, he admits, but draws the line at knives, which "cause too much damage." He shrugs off questions about his future. He has a criminal record for stealing a car -- a green Mustang when he was 18 -- and has served a short stint in jail for, he says, drinking beer in public and not having money for the fine. He now has no contact with his mother or two siblings, and little with his father. He is expecting to be evicted from his apartment.
"I have so much bad luck that happens to me all the time," he says. "I don't have time to think about the future."
Richard Tremblay knows stories like Steve's well, though it took him 40 years to figure out how far back to look. As a young psychologist in the 1960s, he started working with violent criminals, and then young offenders, but in both cases most of his attempts at rehabilitation failed. Discouraged, he began to wonder where the trouble started.
In Montreal in 1982, he launched his first long-term study, this time on kindergarten students. Ten years later, he had found the signs of an unexpected pattern: Almost every subject had been more physically aggressive at 6 than they were at 16. But was that where it began? Next, he turned to newborns.
What Dr. Tremblay and his colleagues around the world have now demonstrated is that the ability to feel rage exists the moment human beings take their first breaths. A four-month-old infant can show anger. And as they gain more control over their arms and legs, their mothers report increasing incidents of kicking and biting: They can also act in anger.
By the second year, aggressive behaviour peaks in temper tantrums, with slapping and pushing; according to Dr. Tremblay's work, a typical two-year-old, playing with others over the course of an hour, will commit one act of physical aggression for every four social interactions.
With teenagers, he says, researchers talk in terms of years or months or weeks between aggressive acts -- never hours -- though the incidents, obviously, are more severe. By their third birthdays, children have the motor skills to perform any of the acts of aggression an adult can. But at just that age, aggression begins to drop.
For almost everyone, it continues to drop for the rest of their lives. By Dr. Tremblay's calculation, only in about 5 per cent of men does the rate of aggression remain relatively stable into early adulthood. They are the most dangerous group to society.
While Dr. Tremblay was beginning to unravel the social roots of aggression, geneticists were pinpointing its biological source. That work has focused on the frontal lobes, particularly the prefrontal cortex -- the emotional circuitry of the brain that sits behind the forehead. This area is more highly evolved in humans than any other animal; without it, we wouldn't be much more than robots, reacting to stimulus by instinct, not thought.
The link between aggression and frontal-lobe injury dates back to 1848, when an explosion fired an iron rod through the skull of Phineas Gage, a foreman for a railway crew in Vermont. According to record, he became a "fitful and irreverent" man, a dramatic change from his previous personality.
The same phenomenon has been observed since then in injured war veterans and the survivors of car accidents. One of the most controversial findings came from a British scientist named Adrian Raines, who used a brain scanner to study 41 accused murderers in California. Compared with a control group of non-criminals, he reported that their prefrontal cortexes used less fuel (sugar) and didn't work as well. He went so far as to suggest that science may some day be able to identify criminals by weaknesses in their brains -- which caused an outcry in the scientific community.
Science is still working out how it all fits together. Many researchers believe that the prefrontal cortex evolved, in part, to give human beings a quick response to danger. When it is damaged, the message may get garbled. A person may not recognize obvious risks, a trait that can lead to the impulsive and socially awkward behaviour often noted in Dr. Tremblay's subjects. Or the person may see danger where none exists and overreact.
Seth Pollak, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, has discovered this phenomenon in young children victimized by abuse; when shown a series of faces representing different emotions, the brains of abused children reacted more strongly to angry expressions, and were more likely to see anger in fearful faces.
Working with a research team at the University of Montreal, Dr. Pollak is about to replicate his study with teenagers. His work explores an important question: If violence results because the brain is misinterpreting social cues -- the development that Dr. Tremblay's research says is so essential in childhood -- then what helps the brain get it right?
It seems to begin in the womb. Dr. Tremblay and other researchers have found, for instance, a significant link between aggression and prenatal smoking, already known to cause lower birth weight in babies.
In Quebec, one in four women smoke while they are pregnant. Dr. Tremblay's data have shown that among poor, young and uneducated mothers -- those at the highest risk for aggressive children -- smoking does not make a huge difference in reported levels of aggression. But among educated women who smoke, the study found that the chances of their child showing higher levels of aggression essentially doubled.
Nicotine, it is believed, prevents essential links from being made in the brain. "If you are affecting the brain at the start," Dr. Tremblay says, "it is almost impossible to control."
But not everything results from the quality of the prenatal environment: A hunt is also under way to pinpoint the genes that influence aggression. In a longitudinal study of 560 pairs of Quebec twins, Dr. Tremblay discovered that patterns of aggression among identical twins, who share DNA, were much more similar than between fraternal twins.
Now that his first group of subjects are beginning to have children of their own, he has been able to show that aggression tends to track by generation; parents prone to aggression tend to produce babies with the same characteristics.
But this is where genetics meets environment. It is not that children born with a biological disposition for aggression are destined to be completely out of control -- they just need more help developing stronger brakes for their accelerators, as Dr. Tremblay puts it.
Most children get this naturally; they learn from their parents and peers that there is a social cost to hurting people. It can be a painful lesson -- a child smacks another and gets smacked back. The research has shown that girls learn the fastest, a finding researchers credit to gender role and testosterone, and the biggest kids learn the slowest, likely because they win most fights.
But the lessons get confused when something breaks down in early socialization, when the brain is growing at its fastest rate. Parents who are overly punitive, or set the wrong example with their own impulsive behaviour, have more aggressive children. Children who are neglected are at a higher risk.
But neither biology nor sociology explain the whole picture. In a 2002 study, only children who both possessed an aggression-related gene and suffered abuse developed conduct problems. Neither the gene nor the environment alone was enough.
Last October, the girls at the McMaster University Student Union Day Care began to turn on each other. Instead of the typical hitting and toy-grabbing that the experienced caregivers had come to expect from their junior toddlers group, a more subtle form of aggression developed.
Girls would exclude other playmates if they weren't wanted in their group, turning their back in a huddle and moving away, ignoring their victim, who would often burst into tears.
Emma Miller, not yet 3, is already well practised in rolling her eyes with pointed disdain. When a little girl she didn't like tried to sit beside her, she would tell her bluntly, "I don't like you. Go away."
Her mother, Jessie, was horrified: She still smarts at the childhood memories of being the shy kid mistreated by her peers. "It was hard to watch my daughter do it."
If physical aggression makes human beings like other animals, then indirect or relational aggression, which requires a higher intelligence, sets us apart. Dr. Tremblay's work has shown that human beings tend to use indirect aggression, in contrast to kicking and punching, more as they get older (and smarter) and learn the social ropes.
And the female slant at the daycare is no coincidence: Boys may be more likely to kick and punch, but it is girls who lead the genders in the kind of backstabbing behaviour that fuels reality shows such as The Apprentice.
The habit takes hold early -- a national study has reported children regularly engaging in relational aggression at the age of 4 -- around the same time that children are learning not to use their fists to get their way.
"Girls learn early that nice girls don't hit," says Tracy Vaillancourt, a McMaster researcher who collaborates with Dr. Tremblay. "But that doesn't mean girls don't use aggression. It just means that they are a bit more savvy when they use it. So it goes underground. And it's not easily detected by parents or teachers, but the peer group is very much aware of what is going on."
At Emma Miller's daycare, the caregivers interpreted the behaviour as the beginning of bullying, and began to instruct their charges about kindness, and intervening when children were mistreated. They started an empathy tree on which children could hang an ornament if they were observed doing something nice for someone else. By the New Year, the problem had improved.
These kinds of programs are catching on at preschools and kindergartens. Some Toronto classrooms have adopted a baby to foster nurturing. A Norwegian program has preschoolers giving each other back rubs because research suggests that affectionate touch deflects aggression. An English primary school offered anger-management training to its kindergarten students -- then sent them into the playground to mediate disputes; since the program began, fighting reportedly has declined at the school and academic performance has improved.
Tthe program was the subject of some mockery in England, but these are approaches that Richard Tremblay applauds. They move beyond the old habit of excusing bad behaviour in young children because "they don't mean it," a suggestion he finds ludicrous.
"If aggression required you to mean it," he says, "we could conclude that none existed in the animal kingdom."
If the proper control of aggression is the result of good socialization, then that work must start early. Dr. Tremblay has come to believe that society does worse by children with problems when it removes them from the group and lumps them together -- away from the very examples that can teach them better behaviour.
"It's like you start putting children in prison the minute you see that they are hard to control," he says. "Very rapidly, they imitate each other and delinquent gangs are created already by 5 and 6."
But at the core of his study is a reassuring message for the parents of young toddlers who are biting and punching with abandon: Having a strong accelerator -- what Dr. Tremblay calls a "turbo motor" -- isn't a negative on its own. In fact, it can fuel ambition and drive, creating leaders and star athletes. What counts is how children learn to use their motors, and apply their brakes.
After all, it wasn't long ago that Canada had a prime minister with a turbo motor of his own. A few years back, when Dr. Tremblay was named to a Canadian research chair, he found himself at dinner with Jean Chrétien. The politician regaled the gathering of scientists with stories of his scuffles when he was young and his infamous troubles in school. When it came time for each academic to explain their research, Dr. Tremblay says with a twinkle: "He was watching me with a lot of interest."
In his adult life, there have been occasional reminders of the teenaged Jean, who was renowned for his fast fists -- most notoriously when he wrapped his hand around a protester's neck at a Flag Day ceremony in Hull in 1996.
But the scrapper in Mr. Chrétien is also credited with much of his success, and his ability to rise above the physical disadvantages of having been a small boy and deaf in one ear. With a supportive family and the strong guidance of a girlfriend named Aline, Mr. Chrétien could chart a different path than a man like Steve, languishing without hope back in his Montreal apartment.
"Nature is extraordinary," Dr. Tremblay says. "When you are your worst, you are at your smallest. What humanity is all about is that we have 20 years to grow up and learn to live in society."
How well we learn that lesson is what separates the prime ministers from the drug dealers.
Erin Anderssen is The Globe and Mail's social trends reporter. Anne McIlroy is the paper's science reporter.
I went and saw Jersey Girl last night. It was like watching people speak conversations from my own life. And remember these aren't your ordinary conversations. Most people don't get to mature, or have the gift of self awareness or insight to mature. That movie hit the issues in my life word for word, except I don't have a kid and haven't been married but I did have an ex die before.
This isn't the first time this has happened either. Remember Chasing Amy. The same thing happened then too. Except, I went and saw that with the person who was the equivalent of the female lead at the time. The conversations in the movie could have been replays of conversations we had and it would not have changed the movie at all.
Here's a pleasant report. The other day at the golf course, a bald eagle spent about an hour just sitting at the 10th tee on the sign post, chillin'. It was a quiet day without many people. It was a little chilly with some light misting rain. One of the putting greens is about 50 feet from where he was sitting, and a couple people went and putted while he just watched.
Those are some amazing animals. Last year and idiot Republican NRA card carrying ass cut down a tree with an eagle's nest in it in my county. Yeah, and Republicans like to think they're moral.
One woman was severed in half recently. She was cut in half by a sign post. This happens every so often I suppose.
Once a couple of years ago, a man on a motorcycle lost his head. His head was destroyed by a tractor trailer wheel. The rest of his body didn't have a scratch on it though.
The word hysteria comes from the root word hyster, which if you haven't picked up on it yet means uterus. That's right. The word hysteria and hysterical was derived from a thought that an emotionally out of control state or mind resulted from having a uterus.
Well, It was four days off again and four days of golf in the good weather. I so like my job. Life is so easy like this. I've been shooting scores in the low 90s consistently. That's several strokes better than last year. Movin' on up. Watch out pros.
Tiger started out today 3 strokes over the number to make it to the weekend, but did he ever come through under pressure once again. He shot 3 under par to make it to the weekend for the 120th time in a row. That is eight years without being cut from a tournament. The next longest current streak is 19. That might give you an idea of what he's done.
Sometimes it amazes me how disconnected the people in power or the people in the media are from reality. The example for today are the exciting (woophee!) 9/11 comittee hearings.
The Dumbya party line is to try and discredit his best critic by saying what he is doing is shameful, scurrilous, partisan, and all sorts of tisk tisk tisk. What a sad and unpresidential, fascist, zealot-fundamentalist way to do things. Call what somebody is doing all sorts of immoral terms, like it were true, despite all the evidence and witnesses they have to prove their point. Even the Republicans on the committee were trying to do Dumbya a favor and play the party line during the hearing.
Alas, Clarke received a STANDING OVATION from the crowd. There is the disconnect. There is where they are so far gone from reality. Who wants to hear a bunch of politicians kissing each other's asses covering things up and not actually speaking bluntly. When someone actually speaks something that actually sounds real, I have to believe it, far more than anything I would ever believe from Dumbya's people. And on top of that there attempts to discredit him are pathetic.
The same thing goes for the media. Instead of mentioning how much people want to hear someone like Clarke, they such have "the reaction from the White House". Give me a break. I know the simple minded things the White House is going to say, and it won't be anything honest. They like to lie about things, and I suspect they will continue to lie about things.
It amazes me that suicide could be illegal. It amazes me that euthanasia could be illegal. It amazes me that there aren't more abortions in the world. It amazes me that the rich people of the world are allowed to have children. It's amazing to me that the poorest people in the world are allowed to have as many children as they want. It amazes me that we create medicine to keep people alive longer than they should be alive. It amazes me that when we fight a war, we don't kill as many people as possible to lower the population. It amazes me that the Palestinians don't just commit mass suicide all at once. The world would be better off. I think there should be a death penalty passed out to any person who takes only half of a prescription for antibiotics, because they contributed to the creation of a super germ. I think we we should become energy sufficient despite Dumbya's best efforts, and then say fuck you to OPEC and let them rot in their poverty and watch them overthrow their own governments and kill each other. I think we should not allow any Arab man into the country. I think we should sue all the foreign media outlets for slander, and pressure their governments to make them use higher journalistic standards. I think we should do that with Fox News Channel. I think that anything that kills lots of people, like millions, or hundreds of millions would be a good thing right now.
Dumbya is getting some of what he deserves right now in the criticism about his handling of terrorism. It sounds like he had an agenda to attack Iraq since the day he was elected and was going to do so regardless of what he happened. So much for good leadership.
It's funny when this administration tries to pass the buck to the Clinton administration for not doing anything about terrorism. That's funny. I guess terrorism didn't become a major priority in the 90s. I guess there weren't major homeland nuclear, chem, and bio plans, teams and preparations made here in the US during the 90s. Aren't they forgetting something?
As far as not retaliating against attacks, well I think they should have started decades ago in Lebanon, during the Regan years, when the precident was set by the Republicans, who by the way negotiated with terrorists for the release of plane hijacked victims, and then did not respond when an embassy was bombed, or when over 200 Marines were killed. That's when the bad precident started with Regan and his Defense Secretary and every one else.
First the founder of Hamas is dead. Thank goodness! More Palestinian terrorists need to die, and less need to be allowed to live. This is a great step in the right direction.
Secondly, the former terrorism czar is revealing the truth about the Dumbya administration and how it dropped the ball on the fight on terrorism. If you didn't see Clarke's interview on 60 minutes, you missed one incredibly damning interview. To sum it up. The administration wanted to start a fight Iraq, took the terrorism adviser off the cabinet and demoted him, refused to meet and discuss policies about how to deal with Al Qaeda until 1 week before 9-11. After 9-11, Bush told his people to find a connection to Iraq from 9-11. When he was told there wasn't, he told them to go find some connection. Sounds about par for the Dumbya course.
Tuesday Clarke the former terrorism czar testifies before the 9-11 comittee.
I have to say that in my family, we like to give my dad a hard time for being sort of a ham. He's an introvert by nature, and literally grew up in a house that his dad built in the woods in the hills of Southern Illinois on the Ohio River. His dad's, my granddad's, first job was running moonshine at the age of 14 during prohibition. My dad coudn't play basketball after school, because they couldn't afford to buy him shoes to play in. He's a bit of a success story though. He went to college, got a Master's, and now is a co owner in the engineering firm he works at.
Well, my dad tells stories when people are around, like the one about his uncle. His uncle used to float down the river like he was dead whenever any strangers were in town, so they would go tell the sheriff. Now in his more respectable life, he goes to awards functions, and society gatherings, where he loves telling his quaint hillbilly stories. On occasion he has written a story or two for a state or regional, or even national publication. He also makes banjos that have made their way all the way around the world.
Recently, he wrote and article for the Department of natural resources magazine, which is actually popular here in Delaware. The article he wrote was about a turtle he caught and made turtle soup out of according to an old recipe. He brought the soup to a special dinner with all these society acquaintances, and the soup was a smash hit.
I know it is hard to believe that actual turtle soup at a classy function would be very popular, but apparently it was, and there were requests to have other such special occasions. The magazine the article was in received more response than any other issue in their 30 year history.
Well, more often than not at work, I see people faking seizures. Over the past two days, I saw two people who actually had real seizures. I actually saw one of the people have a seizure. It's been about 25 fake ones since the last real seizure patient, and what a relief it was to see that not all people lie.
I have good news. I shot an 89 yesterday on my round of golf. However, I followed it up with a 98 today. That's symetrical, don't you think?
Anywho, the 89 was my best round ever, in less than 2 years of playing. I shot the 98 when I was playing with someone else. I play better alone. there's less pressure. No one to make me nervous. It's funny how that works. it's not like I get that nervous, but it's just enough to make a difference like that.
Another anywhoo, You know how growing up teachers would say you would use all that stuff in real life when you were older. Well, I never questioned it, but every else did. I always understood the stuff. Golf is a perfect example.
The golf swing is a sort of a circle with the length of the arms and club as the radius. The point is to create as much speed with the club head through the right area with the correct angles. Now, remember in math and physics, the properties of pendulums and circles and arcs. If a golfer swings the same way with a short club and then with a long club, the difference in physics will create a consistency that the golfer can take advantage of. A ball struck with a short club goes shorter, because the distance travel in the same amount of time of the swing is shorter. Therefore the speed is less. With the longer club swung the same way will travel a longer distance in the same amount of time and therefore have travel at a faster speed.
And that is just one little piece of understanding Physics that helps a golfer.
I just thought I would share a thought. If someone argues that it would be unfair to raise taxes on the richest 1% in America, here is the correct response to that. Over the past 30 years, only one income level has seen an increase in income. It's hard to believe, but only the richest 1% of America have averaged a tripling of yearly income over the past 30 years from 24 to 82 million, roughly. They however only pay about 30% more in taxes. That is also hard to believe, because if it logic applied one could expect, roughly, a 300% increase in taxes on the wealthiest 1%, who make 82 million dollars per year. Follow me here, but that is a tax cut of 270%, while the rest of us?
So, you see, to stay on par with the rest of us, the richest 1% in America could have their taxes raised about 270% and be about even with the rest of us.
Well, I am slowly falling down the list of hot blogs. It must be lack of originality and effort. Or is it the right wing conspiracy?
I have a vast lack of inspiration and energy to do much with myself most of the time. I usually just sit around and watch TV. What a great invention, and all the programs on TV that are so entertaining. I can often find something that I enjoy watching.
I once heard of a list of the greatest inventions. What do you think topped the list? Was it the car, airplane, computer.... How about the electromagnet? That's right. It's the one thing that allows us to use magnetism and electricity to create circuits and memory and is the key invention to oh so many inventions. Let's see. Simple batteries don't need an electromagnet, but an alternator to recharge that battery, like in any car or other form of transportation, would use one. The electromagnet is key to communications devices. Speakers and microphones were based on electromagnets. Are you gettin' the picture? It's one thing that harnesses electicity and magnetism together and makes them functional and practical. It's also what seperates this age from the ancient times. Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and China all had great mechanical creations, but they weren't able to control and harness electricity and magnetism in a vast and practical way.
So that's it. that's my entry for tonight.... call me cliff
I have to say that my prayers and sympathies go to the people of Spain.
I agree, caving in to terrorists was never a good idea. That's why the marines died in Beirut, and the planes were hijacked, and the cruise ships, and the embassy bombings, and the night clubs in Germany and Bali, and the kidnappings of innocent people in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and South America and particularly Columbia. Oh, yeah and let's not forget Hitler and the appeasers of WWII, which is pretty much the same thing but turned out to be so much worse than anything else in the end.
But of course we know now, Bush chose to highlight intelligence reports that he was told were wrong by his head of intelligence, just to make a case for going to war on the basis of WMD stockpiles in the realm of thousands of tons, instead of actual and truthful reasons. Apparently, the Spanish people didn't like being made targets because of Aznar's alignment with Bush against 90% the people's wishes. I think it's fair that they retaliate against Aznar, like we should retalitiate against Dumbya for his lying and bad policies, which have made the majority of the world hate America, which invariably causes problems in the global "free trade" markets that are dependent on favorable climates, like that which Clinton was able to establish with just about everyone.
All that being said, the old policy of speak softly and carry a big stick would seem to be in order, particularly after Dumbya's piss everybody off, get in a fight with who ever, and then argue about it later policy. For a man whose policies depend on business and corporate prosperity, he has let the trade agreements of this country be abused by countries like China, who artificially fix the price of their currency and give unfair tax breaks to companies. What does Dumbya do? He let's 2.6 million jobs sail overseas.
Will Dumbya ever stop lying? I don't think so. But there will probably always be people who are stupid enough to believe his lies.
Recently, Dumbya said Kerry would raise our taxes by 900 billion dollars. It was never said by anyone. Quite the contrary. Kerry wants to increase tax relief for the middle class (that's always the Us in politics), while raising taxes on the upper 1 or 2 % who are Dumbya and himself. Not that is a HUGE lie.
Have you heard the quote about the Foreign leaders that Dumbya is harping on about? The audio tape of the actual conversation was just released on the news. It was a misquote! Kerry said "some" leaders, not foreign. Dumbya loses out again. Poor GDB.
The commercial that makes Kerry sound anti US troops is a huge lie, especially from a deserter. When Kerry voted no on the appropriations, it was over making 10 billion dollars that wasn't originally supposed to be there a loan instead of a grant. Hmm, That's a huge discrepancy from reality in Dumbya's attack ads.
Dumbya once again should go to jail for Fraud. Well, at least he is steadily misleading America with lies.
How about all his cronies out selling lies about the lies they told before the Iraq war. Just remember, the rest of the world fears Dumbya more than anyone else.
The CDC used to do studies of cancer clusters. These were groups of people that got cancer in a partucular area or had a particular association that might have caused the disease. They would study the group in order to figure out what was causing the disease. In this way they figured out that cancer had a multi faceted set of causes.
Well, in my experience, I run into clusters of patients where for a short period of time I'll see people sick with the same thing over and over. Right now, it's people sick with congetive heart failure. That's when the heart can't keep up with it's responsibilities of pumping blood. The result, typically, is water in the lungs where it shouldn't be. You can imagine the problems that will cause.
The oddest cluster I've run into is a cluster of vertigo from middle ear infections. Now that's about weird. You just see a bunch of people sitting still not moving there heads at all costs, because to move there head will make them vomit.
Good evening. Tonight, a man was found in his car. His car, however, was found upside down in the canal leading to the Bay. The man was a river pilot, and he had been missing for about a day. Apparently he just drove straight at the end of one road instead of turning when he should have.
Of course, I missed this call because the other crew was out on another call before I got to the station tonight. So, I didn't see the body. I have it on good information though that the body was hard to get into the body bag, because his arms were stuck out and stiff as if it were still holding on to the steering wheel.
I'm guessing he was unconscious, or very drunk, or dead when all this happened. Because, he drove over a hundred feet of rough ground and a small dock and made no atempt to get out of the car. That doesn't sound like a healthy, living person to me.
It's also similar to the last dead people I saw in an accident that just drove straight off a road instead of turning around the bend of the curve in the road. They ended up upside down and dead against some trees.
LONDON (Reuters) - A scientist dubbed the "Safeway poisoner" and jailed for trying to poison his wife has been employed by a British university to lecture students on ethics, the institution said on Thursday.
Paul Agutter served seven years of a 12-year sentence for attempted murder after he laced his wife's gin and tonic with deadly nightshade in 1994 and then tried to cover his tracks by spiking drinks in a Safeway supermarket.
The University of Manchester said it followed "due process" in hiring Agutter to teach adult education classes, including a one-day course on "Therapeutic Cloning: Ethics and Science."
Medical ethics lecturer Piers Benn told Reuters criminal convictions and teaching ethics were not necessarily mutually exclusive.
"Normally people who get into moral philosophy do so because they care about making the world a better place or putting things right," said Benn, of Imperial College London.
"But I can't see any logical contradiction between being able to think about ethical questions and being able to do rather criminal acts."
Manchester University said it had not decided whether an April course on evolution taught by Agutter would go ahead.
Here's something I didn't know about Freud and Hitler.
"...it may be noted with some irony that both Sigmund Freud and Adolf Hitler lived in Vienna around the same time. It is open to speculation whether or not they had a (sub-conscious) influence on each other. Hitler maintains in Mein Kampf that he never entertained an anti-Semitic thought in his head until he encountered these people, and experienced their behavior patterns, when he moved to the "big city"...." link
So what if Freud was a cocaine addict, and a plagiarizer, and a man with an Oedipus complex. He described the human psyche in a strange way, but with some modern and liberal interpretation, it is still relevant in a lot of ways. Plus he was one of the first big names in the whole field, from which we way so many wonderful and business friendly studies.
As I logged in I just remembered that I wanted to write down an idea earlier and I didn't. Now, I can't remember it. Go figure.
I think it would be cool to have Dean Kaman's job. That's the guy who invented the Segway personal transporter. He also invented a portable kidney dialysis machine and a cardiac stent. I would just have to go around working on creating great inventions every day. How cool would that be?
Thank goodness for television. Or else, where would I learn things or learn about things to go learn about things. If you know what I mean.
Who doesn't love Egyptian and Roman and Greek shows on Discovery and the History channel? They've been sharing the amazing inventions of the ancient Egyptian/Roman from Alexandria, Heron.
This is the man who invented the first mechanical clocks, not just relative time keepers. He invented the first vending machine that dispensed holy water to wash your hands with. He invented temple doors that opened after a fire was lit in honor of the gods. He invented a machine gun for arrows. He programmed mechanical theatrical productions with fantastic arrangements of set changes and other productions all pre determined by his mechanical invention. Perhaps most remarkably unfortunate of all, he nearly invented a steam engine. He only had to combine a couple of his inventions together, and he would have had a steam engine.
Imagine being in ancient Egypt during the Roman Empire, prior to the Chritstians. This is the time of the library of Alexandria. Chances are with my luck I would have been a slave or poor worker of some kind, uneducated, lucky to have any kind of training if any, probably farming fields on the Nile, maybe fishing. In the city would be a clock kept by running water. THere would be water dispensers to drink from that would automatically refill themselves. Entering the temple, there would be a jar to place a coin in that would dispense a predetermined amount of water to wash one's hands. Someone would make an offering and light a fire in front of the doors to a sanctuary. After maybe 20 or 30 minutes of praying, calling for the the god to appear, the doors would just open and reveal the statue of the god. When the ceremony was done, the sacrifice burned out, the doors would then close by themselves.
Imagine if the library of Alexandria hadn't been destroyed, or if the Romans were interested in recreating and continuing the study of Alexandria. Short of the electromagnet, they could have had an Industrial Revolution 2000 years before our times did.
