You can't fight violence with violence

Halting mass violence, including terrorism, requires a political will to address the problem at its roots. That requires western nations to revise their foreign policies in ways that do not generate and sustain cycles of violence. Unfortunately, such political will appears unlikely at this stage of human history.

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Conservatives Now Outnumber Liberals in All 50 States, Says Gallup Poll

At the same time, more Americans nationwide are saying this year that they are conservative than have made that claim in any of the last four years.

Ouch.

Read more unless you're over at Fox News.

Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

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Copyright laws threaten our online freedom

Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored.

File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file to another. The only way to even try to limit this process is to monitor all communication between ordinary people. Despite the crackdown on Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer services over the past decade, the volume of file-sharing has grown exponentially. Even if the authorities closed down all other possibilities, people could still send copyrighted files as attachments to e-mails or through private networks. If people start doing that, should we give the government the right to monitor all mail and all encrypted networks? Whenever there are ways of communicating in private, they will be used to share copyrighted material. If you want to stop people doing this, you must remove the right to communicate in private. There is no other option. Society has to make a choice.

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When it comes to the human race...

...yeah, I'm a pessimist.

But every once in awhile I find something that makes me smile.

Scientists Agree: It's in His Kiss

Over 90 percent of human society engages in what, if you get right down to it, seems like a very strange thing to do: putting faces together and trading spit. But because it is so pervasive, scientists think there must be a good reason for it, some kind of evolutionary advantage. And humans aren't alone in this ritual. Chimpanzees kiss, foxes and dogs lick each other's faces, some birds tap their bills together, and elephants put their trunks in each other's mouths.

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Why Does the World Feel Wrong?

Those of us who want little more than peace and freedom don’t run the world.  Pursuing freedom contradicts controlling others, so we can reason that people who pursue power have some motivations separate from our own.

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Too often, I have assumed that the people working for the state take the jobs only because of the easy hours and good pay, benefits, and retirement.  For the predator, though, it offers all these things with the appetizing fringe benefit of satisfying their criminal urges without the risk of retribution.

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After considering the possibility that psychopaths have taken control of society, we find volumes of evidence to support the hypothesis.  Did Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot sympathize with their victims or have any sense of guilt?  More recently, among Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, or Clinton , can we point to one who even exhibits a façade resembling normality?  Obviously not—these lists name one person after another who has zero accountability to a rational morality.  If people like this could make their way to the highest levels of power, what does that say about lower offices?

It suggests people like this have control over the levers of power everywhere.  We live at a time when the population at large cannot achieve its wants, yet few seem to know why.  As one example, polls consistently indicate that educational matters concern the public, yet decade after decade, schooling gets quantitatively worse.  What a mystery!  Evidently, if we believe our well-meaning masters, 2,000 years of Western civilization has not yet determined effective ways to transmit key knowledge to younger generations.   However, what happens if we suspend our belief in their benevolence for a moment and consider other possibilities?  If schools fail to achieve their stated goals over several decades, might some groups see this as a success?

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How the faceless and amoral world of cyberspace has created a deeply disturbing... generation SEX

Today’s teenagers are starring in the reality show of their own lives and doing all they can to make it as dramatic as possible.

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In today’s world of fast information and access to all areas, too many - particularly the young - are having to up the stakes to chase their particular dragon and get the high they crave.

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5 Psychological Experiments That Prove Humanity is Doomed

Psychologists know you have to be careful when you go poking around the human mind because you're never sure what you'll find there. A number of psychological experiments over the years have yielded terrifying conclusions about the subjects.

Oh, we're not talking about the occasional psychopath who turns up. No, we're talking about you. The experiments speak for themselves:

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Think about that when you're walking around the mall: Eight out of ten of those people you see would torture the shit out of a puppy if a dude in a lab coat asked them to.

Hopeless.

Humans are hopeless.

Read all five.

Working classes are less intelligent, says evolution expert

Bruce Charlton, an evolutionary psychiatrist at Newcastle University, has written a paper asserting the reason why fewer students from poor families are admitted to Oxford or Cambridge is not because of social prejudice, but lack of ability.

He suggests that low numbers of working-class students at elite universities is the "natural outcome" of "substantial" IQ differences between classes.

He told The Scotsman yesterday, in an interview conducted by e-mail at his insistence: "Poor people have lower average IQ than wealthier people... and this means that a much smaller percentage of working-class people than professional-class people will be able to reach the normal entrance requirements of the most selective universities."

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Women win right to children without fathers

It will stop fertility clinics turning away lesbians and single women because their children will not have a father or male role model. While the current law does not block such therapy, it is sometimes used to justify refusals.

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Video games cause violence, most children admit to Ofcom

Two thirds of those aged between 12 and 15 said that violence in games had more of an impact on behaviour than violence in television or films, the study by Ofcom found.

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But despite concerns over children accessing the web unsupervised, a rising number of parents said they had not installed blocking software to stop their sons and daughters watching unsuitable content.

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Parents said they did not feel the need to instal blocking software because they trusted their children to “self-regulate” their internet behaviour.

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What the Gay Marriage Ruling Won't Do

Gay couples in California will now be able to wed under state law, as those in Massachusetts can, but their marriages will still be something less than what straight Californians enjoy.

I am hoping for invitations to some lavish gay beach weddings in the next few months, but at the end of the year, the gays who stage those weddings will still be filing separate 1040s. That's not going to change any time soon, since both John McCain and Barack Obama (and, for that matter, Hillary Rodham Clinton) share the same position on equality for gay couples: they oppose it. Neither candidate would end federal discrimination against gays who want to marry.

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Have Scientists Discovered a Way of Peering Into the Future?

"It's Earth shattering stuff," says Dr Roger Nelson, Emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the USA. "But unfortunately we don't have a box for predicting the future that we can sell to the CIA. We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark."

Dr Nelson's Global Consciousness Project - originally hosted by Princeton University - is one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. It aims to ‘sense' whether all of humanity shares a single unconscious mind that we all tap into without realising it. Some might refer to it as the mind of God. But the machine has also thrown up another tantalising possibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of predicting the future.

Interesting read.

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Nomophobia is the fear of being out of mobile phone contact - and it's the plague of our 24/7 age

Millions apparently suffer from "no mobile phobia" which has been given the name nomophobia.

They have become so dependent on their mobile that discovering it is out of charge or simply misplacing it sends stress levels soaring.

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They add that you could also try to liberate yourself from the shackles of your mobile by simply switching it off.

The things we humans stress over.

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The Dumbing Of America

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

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That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place.

How depressing.

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Early to bed, early to rise depends on TV

After merging with sunrise and sunset data, the authors found that while natural daylight patterns have some effect on people's life patterns, the demands of global business such as market openings and regular television schedules create the boundaries of most Americans' lives.

In fact, Hamermesh said the researchers were "amazed how little daylight matters nowadays, and how much artificial time zones matter."

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Japan looks to a robot future

While robots are a long way from matching human emotional complexity, the country is perhaps the closest to a future — once the stuff of science fiction — where humans and intelligent robots routinely live side by side and interact socially.

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Vermont latest to eye lower drinking age

More than two decades after the country established a uniform drinking age of 21, a nascent movement is afoot to allow 18- to 20-year-olds to legally buy alcohol under some circumstances.

Proponents say the higher age hasn't kept young people from consuming alcohol and has instead driven underage consumption underground, particularly on college campuses.

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For the Bible Tells Me So

And that’s the subject of The Bible Tells Me So, an enlightening, hard-to-watch documentary about how the religious right has used the Bible to screw over the gay community.

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For the Bible Tells Me So (now in DVD) does not speak ill of religion; on the contrary, it uses the Bible — and an abundance of ministers and Biblical scholars — to attempt correct the record.

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It’s the church, the movie argues, not the Bible and not God, who have created this discriminatory fervor against homosexuality; in fact, this aspect of Biblical literalism is fairly modern, originating in the 20th century.

But what does the church have to gain by it? This is a question that’s always bugged the hell out of me: What Christian agenda does anti-homosexual discrimination serve? Writer/director Daniel Karslake looks into the origins of homophobia for that answer: Homophobia, the documentary posits is, in essence, just another form of misogyny — it stems from a hatred of women. The church doesn’t want men sleeping with other men because it emasculates them, which flies in the face of our patriarchal society, which I suppose threatens church leaders’ right to have a meal on the table when they get home(?) So, instead, the church has created an environment of intolerance, which — in a decidedly non-Christian twist — has not only fostered violence against gays and lesbians, it legitimizes it — empowering cruelty and hostility (thanks Reverend Falwell! You fuck).

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Here's the trailer: