littlelazer's tumblog

ON Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as “undeliverable,” and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost.

Horrifying.

If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.

As good a defense of Obama’s first term as any I’ve read.

chase jarvis LIVE: Ramit Sethi (by achaser123)

Interesting interview, and one that is important for people that make a living selling their work, which is really everybody, when you think about it. I was skeptical of this guy just because of the name of his book, but he actually has some pretty good advice.

One day last February, a judge in Lago Agrio, presiding over a spare, concrete courtroom in a shopping mall on the edge of town, issued an opinion that reverberated far beyond the Amazon. Since 1993, a group of Ecuadorans had been pursuing an apparently fruitless legal struggle to hold Texaco responsible for environmental destruction in the Oriente. During the decades when Texaco operated there, the lawsuit maintained, it dumped eighteen billion gallons of toxic waste. When the company ceased operations in Ecuador, in 1992, it allegedly left behind hundreds of open pits full of malignant black sludge. The harm done by Texaco, the plaintiffs contended, could be measured in cancer deaths, miscarriages, birth defects, dead livestock, sick fish, and the near-extinction of several tribes; Texaco’s legacy in the region amounted to a “rain-forest Chernobyl.”

Neither side is clean, but only one side ruined the environment and possibly a lot of people’s lives. It’s soul-crushing to think that the people that work in a company would allow something like this to happen to other people.

Lawmakers and their aides have also been targets. A photograph of a 25-year-old aide for the House Judiciary Committee was superimposed into pornography by a group related to Anonymous, according to another aide who was briefed on security threats to lawmakers and their staffs. “Why can’t they just hire a lobbyist like everyone else?” this aide said.

Crazy that the aide doesn’t even see how problematic that statement is for regular people.

Seeing so many places I’ve never been and want to someday visit all in one list makes me wonder what I’ve been doing with my life for the past 32 years.

It makes me shake with rage, and weep with frustration, that in the year 2012 we still allow the madness of denouncing homosexuality. My wife and I aren’t religious - indeed, as thinking, rational people who can so easily see its human-fabricated nature and the many evils it has visited on the world, we’re contemptuous of and embarrassed by it - yet we’re permitted by the state to be married. We opted-out from the insidious influence of religion, with its exhortations to switch off our brains and mindlessly ‘believe’, yet our rights haven’t changed. Why then should homosexuals be impeded by religion’s febrile influence, if even I wasn’t? Where’s the morality in that?

I can’t fully agree with his unqualified assailing of religion (due to the many examples where holding on to their religion or faith has actually helped people), but I do agree with most of this.

The neuroscientists found different activity patterns on each side of the brain. On the left, the activity patterns changed very gradually as images became more like faces and there was no clear distinction between faces and non-faces. The left side would flare if someone was looking at a human or an eerily face-like formation of rocks.

But on the right side, activation patterns in the fusiform gyrus were completely different between genuine human faces and face-like optical illusions. There was no fooling the right side of the brain, no matter how much they resembled a face.

Love reading about cognitive psychology.