China’s economy has become the second largest in the world, but its rapid growth may have created the largest housing bubble in history. Lesley Stahl reports…

Risk Santos, Chairman and Founder of CBRE Philippines disclosed on January 23 2013 the firm’s insight of the 2013 real estate industry.
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Gary Randall

Anti-gay campaigner and former televangelist Gary Randall is coming out of retirement to host a daily radio show which he hopes will help unite the warring factions within Washington state’s radical-right Christian wing.

There has been much strife and conflict within the Christian community with various agendas at play on the most important and defining issues. The result has been loss after loss. My singular purpose is to inform and motivate people of faith and conservatives to action—to reconnect the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity. And honor God in the process.

And, hopefully and prayerfully, this can contribute to helping bring some of the factions within the Christian community together so we can win, not lose, on the critical moral issues of our time.

It remains to be seen just how effective Randall will be in bringing together factions, since he has had a long-standing and very public feud with Washington state’s better-financed anti-gay activists, Pastor Joe Fuiten of Cedar Park Church in Bothell and Joseph Backholm of Family Policy Institute of Washington.

Randall accuses Fuiten and Backholm of putting personal ambition before the cause, and blames them for Washington voters’ approval of the state’s marriage equality law.  He has even gone so far as to reprint on his blog a letter of rebuke penned by Pastors Roy and Valerie Hartwell.  The letter rhetorically strips Rev. Fuiten of his credentials because he disagreed with the Hartwells, Randall and a few others on campaign strategy:

Hereafter, I will refer to Pastor Joe Fuiten as Joe Fuiten. I will no longer honor his name with the title Pastor.

Are fences mended with a swinging ax?

Apparently Randall thinks so, since he told listeners that his new show will “address issues including the dissension and the idiocy of some of the things that are going on within the Christian community around the state.  And I’m not afraid to address them.”

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Fire Dog Lake:

By Beverly Bell

March 8, 2013

On this International Women’s Day, we rerun a 2005 piece on one of our greatest heroines, Marie Simone Alexandre. Though she died eight years ago, her life and message remain as powerful and inspirational today as any we know. 

“It was thanks to God and Sister Simone.” I heard this over and over in the mid-1990s as I was interviewing rape survivors in one of Port-au-Prince’s shantytowns. The women were battling the devastating effects of rape, employed as a weapon of war by one in a decades-long series of U.S.-backed regimes.[i] My question to these women, which so often invoked Simone’s name, was “From where have you found the strength to go on?”

I resolved to meet this force whose name was regularly uttered next to God’s. When I did, I was – like the rape survivors – utterly inspired. Our close personal and political relationship lasted for more than a decade until June 29, 2005, when she slipped away from a coma after her third operation for a large brain tumor.

It turns out Simone and I had had a relationship long before we met, though each had been faceless and nameless to the other. That relationship had been forged during the years of the 1991-94 coup d’état against Haiti’s first-ever democratically elected president. My end of our partnership involved generating broad publicity and international pressure against the rape, as well as the other crimes of the illegal regime. Many of the chilling testimonies and statistics I used had been faxed out of Haiti under cover of night from constantly changing underground locations. And the origin of much of that information, I learned years later, was Simone. She had gathered it at tremendous risk to her life, venturing where all others feared to tread.

Simone told me in an interview for the book Walking on Fire, where she appeared under her chosen nom de guerre Louise Monfils: “I gathered information from many women, house after house. The [women] trusted me so much that if they learned of another woman, they would bring that woman to me. I couldn’t write anything, absolutely nothing, in front of them. My head had to be clear. When five or ten people were telling me the story of their rapes, I had to remember all the details. As soon as I got on the road, I’d look for a place I could stop. I’d sit down and write everything the women told me. Cheri, sweetheart, that was very difficult work, but I had to do it.”[ii]

Simone was not only a front-line human rights worker, she was also a self-taught therapist. It was easy to see why many survivors cited her as one of their two fonts of healing. In the evocative high theatric which she always used, she described how a woman “would start to cry. She’d put her head on my shoulder and cry and I’d rub her back. I’d say, ‘You shouldn’t be ashamed. It’s those guys who should be ashamed! They’re savages. Only beasts could do such a horrid act.’ I’d tell her, ‘Love is something too good, too precious, for you to feel ashamed when you’ve been a victim.’ I’d tell her not to cry because we’re there for her. We’re there!”

Here, then, would come her role as a tireless political organizer, helping the women form grassroots groups. She said, “Meeting with them as victims of rape wasn’t enough. When we finished taking their testimony, we needed to get them together and form a women’s organization. We gave them support and helped them understand their rights. Also, we wanted to help these women be the owners of their bodies. Nobody else can have authority over them.

“Cheri, I’m telling you: during those years of hell, people disappeared. And if someone talked, the attackers would beat them, take them away, kill them. The rapists always said to the women, ‘Don’t you go tell the radio station about this or we’ll come back and kill you.’ And I recorded all this information in a notebook.

“I could feel good during the day, but when the night came, I had trouble. I tell you, whenever I heard the noise of a straw breaking in the yard or a dog barking, I sat up in bed and lit a cigarette. I was shaking, I was so scared.”

Simone’s whole life was consecrated to helping marginalized people attain knowledge, voice, and power. In the l980s, she had organized peasant groups and Christian base communities. She had helped community members gain popular education, build collective silos to store grain and seeds, and organize themselves into the democracy movement.

Much of Simone’s life, then as later, was spent underground. When she was organizing in the 1980s, she repeatedly fled from one area to another, often running with nothing but the clothes on her back. ”I ran though the forest, through the woods and the bushes. I slept at different friends’ houses along the way: one night here, another night there. Once, oh! I was so hungry. I went into a stranger’s garden and pulled up a cassava plant. I took three cassavas. I said to myself, ‘Well, if they want to arrest me, now they can get me for stealing.’”

In l990, Simone’s home and all her belongings were burned by paid thugs in the village of Piatte during a massacre of farmers demanding land reform. Simone almost lost her life, but not her characteristic nerve or quick thinking. ”I ran and hid myself in some rocks beneath a waterfall. I saw all the killing, everything they did. Every little while I stuck my head out to see what they were doing, and I took notes. I unwrapped the paper from a cigarette and wrote down everything. I folded the paper, put it in the plastic wrapping from the cigarette pack, and stuck it in a hole in the hem of my dress. Even if they had searched me, they wouldn’t have found anything.

“I slipped among the killers and moved right along with them. People thought I had disappeared into thin air. It wasn’t true! I took a chance and walked right in the middle of the crowd that had just committed the massacre.”

Conversation with her was always dominated by stories of struggle. As hard as her life was, her focus was on those whose lives were much harder; she never forgot their fates for a moment. Often, thinking about her own plight, she would sigh heavily and cluck her throat in despair, but then would quickly move on to talking about the need for people – especially women – to organize to gain democracy and rights.

Recounting what she called her “true Calvary” of working with rape survivors during the coup d’état, Simone said, “It was like I was walking with my little coffin under my arm. But even if the [rapists] had beaten me, it wouldn’t have mattered. It would have been because I was part of something just and noble.

“I didn’t want to have a heavy heart when I was going to bed because my conscience was troubling me. With a conscience, when you do wrong, you know it. You can’t sleep at night. When you do good, frankly, you feel well. You lie down and say, ‘Dear God, I feel good,’ and then sleep carries you away.”

Sleep well, Sister Simone. Ou mewite sa a. You deserve it.

[i]     See, for example, Tim Weiner, “Haitian Ex-Paramilitary Leader Confirms CIA Relationship,” New York Times online, December 3, 1995; Allan Nairn, “Haiti under the Gun: How U.S.-Backed Paramilitaries Rule through Fear,” Nation, January 8–15, 1996, 11; John Kifner, “Haitians Ask If U.S. Had Ties to Attaché,” New York Times, October 6, 1994; Allan Nairn, “Our Man in Fraph—Behind Haiti’s Paramilitaries,” Nation, October 24, 1994; and Marcia Myers, “Claiming CIA Ties, Haitian Sues over Detention in U.S.: Paramilitary Leader Had Opposed Return of President Aristide,” Baltimore Sun online, December 12, 1995.

[ii]       Beverly Bell, Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2001).

Read more from Other Worlds here, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter!

Beverly Bell has worked for more than three decades as an advocate, organizer, and writer in collaboration with social movements in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the U.S. Her focus areas are just economies, democratic participation, and gender justice. Beverly currently serves as associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and coordinator of Other Worlds. She is author of Walking on Fire: Haitian Women Stories of Survival and Resistance and of the forthcoming Fault Lines: Views Across Haiti’s Divide.

 Copyleft Beverly Bell. You may reprint this article in whole or in part.  Please credit any text or original research you use to Beverly Bell, Other Worlds.

Image by Valeri Pizhanski under Creative Commons license

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Category: Politics

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Fire Dog Lake:

Why do you do what you do?

Caitlin Perrone and Taylor Hampton, two University of Texas at Austin Journalism students spent a couple weeks in March following me around to activist events to create this video. The portrait they created answers why I spend time in the hot Texas sun (and sometimes travel to other places) to document and participate in street activism.

Last month, GetEqual TX & Equality Texas led a march to the Texas Capitol for LGBTQ Equality.

Taylor and Caitlin filmed me at three events, along with a brief interview in my home:

Occupy Austin General Assembly: though our numbers are still small, Occupy continues to meet weekly as a group and in multiple working groups on topics like education and ending homelessness. We are currently holding our weekly assembly on the south steps of the Texas Capitol, or sometimes inside the building itself as filmed here. Our next major event is for May Day, though other smaller autonomous actions are planned.

Texas My Medicaid Matters march and rally to fight cuts in medicaid and to support its expansion. This coalition will continue to put pressure on the Texas legislature for the remainder of its session.

The Texas March for LGBTQ Equality created by GetEqualTX and Equality Texas. Activists plan more Austin-area direct actions related to this cause.

I’m queer and disabled. Though I’m not on medicaid, many of my friends and activist comrades receive this assistance. I know how important it is to their lives — in the case of a number of my friends who now lead rich, independent lives with homes of their own, cuts to medicaid and other programs that provide them with personal care attendants and other necessary services could banish them to the prison of assisted living facilities. It’s easy to feel empathy and want to support their autonomy and freedom.

Once you start down that path of empathy and solidarity, you quickly realize how all our grievances are connected. If I identify with the plight of gays who can be fired for their sexual orientation, it becomes harder not to also identify with anyone whose freedom and autonomy depend on the whims of powerful men that do not deserve their power.

This is why I believe that the umbrella of movements and causes that forms around revolutionary moments like the Occupy encampments is one of the strengths of modern people’s movements, no matter how much the mainstream media and the pundits it inspires insist that it is weakness.

The other night a friend told me “these are exciting times to be alive.” As dire as it sometimes appears, I agree wholeheartedly. The reason I risk arrest and state violence, the reason I so often strain my health and meager budget to report on activist events, is because I really believe something important is happening both on the streets and in social media channels, and I want to be part of it — not just at the neutral remove of press releases or fair and balanced sound bites, but involved intimately as a gonzo journalist.

I do what I do to inspire more people to do the same, no matter the cause that inspires them to march for equality and social justice.

We must encourage loud voices that challenge our leaders.

Photos by Kit O’Connell released under a Creative Commons license.

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Author: Kit OConnell
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Category: Politics

SAN FRANCISCO — As is evident at its I/O conference in San Francisco this week, Google attracts attention for Android hardware (and software), Maps software, and for a certain pair of augmented reality spectacles known as Glass. But where Google originally became a household word was in search and search is still very much at the core of what the company does.

Google’s senior vice president for search Amit Singhal outlined some of the next steps in the “search engine of the future,” one that he says “can answer your questions, have a conversation with you, and even give you useful things without you ever having to ask.”

Google has already started delivering on that promise through Google Now, a search feature that only recently came to Apple’s iOS devices, after starting out as you’d expect on Android.

At I/O, Singhal announced some potentially important enhancements to Google Now, notably reminders that appear when you need them. You’ll be able to say to Google, “remind me to pick up milk when I get to Safeway” and such a reminder is supposed to appear when you get to that supermarket. Apple has built a Reminders feature in iOS and OS X as well where it can remind you of something when you arrive or leave an address.

“A note to buy milk, paper towels and food for the dog, is a lot more helpful when you’re actually at the grocery store,” Singhal writes in the Google blog. “Or if you’re about to miss the last train home, Google Now can remind you that you better leave. And if you’re interested in an upcoming book or there’s a new album you’re excited to listen to, Google Now will shoot you a reminder when it comes out, and even provide a recommendation.”

Google also announced improvements to the so-called Knowledge Graph, Google’s less than one-year-old map of people, places and things. When posing a query such as “what is the population of India?” you’ll not only get the answer, but you’ll also get the answers to natural follow-up questions, such as the population of China and the United States.

Arguably the most interesting development in search is in how you can increasingly approach your queries in a conversational manner, especially when you use smartphones and tablets. At I/O Singhal demonstrated conversational search through the Chrome browser on a computer.

Soon, you’ll be able to just say, hands-free, “OK Google, will it be sunny in Santa Cruz this weekend?” and get a spoken answer. Then, you’ll be able to continue the conversation and just follow up with “how far is it from here?” if you care about the drive or “how about Monterey?”

As Singhal conceded in an interview, not every search lends itself to the kind of succinct answer required of a conversation. “Why did the Beatles split up?’ requires a deeper analysis.

“We will experiment with it. How it feels in the wild and modify as we learn more,” he says. The usual Google way: “Launch and iterate.”

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Category: Economy, Money

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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

When it comes to the 2016 Presidential race Hillary Clinton is the sun and everything else in politics revolves around her. Not only does the polling show this is the case, but now even potential candidates are quietly admitting it. The New York Post is reporting that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) has told associates he won’t even try to take on Clinton. From the Post:

Gov. Cuomo has quietly told associates that he is resigned to the fact that he can’t run for president in 2016 if Hillary Rodham Clinton enters the race, as is widely expected, sources told The Post.

“The governor has told people in recent weeks that there’s not a chance for him to run if Hillary gets in the race because she’ll easily wrap up the Democratic nomination,’’ said a Cuomo administration insider with direct knowledge of the situation.

If Clinton doesn’t run we will likely have an open race with several governors and senators all competing to define the future of the Democratic Party. If she does she will probably scare off anyone else with a decent shot.

I hope at the very least Clinton takes a long time to make an official decision. In the past few years possible 2016 candidates, like Cuomo and Gov. Martin O’Malley, have moved forward on many progressive priorities including marriage equality, marijuana reform, and gun control. It would be nice if they continued to have an incentive to appeal to Democratic primary voters for a while longer.

Photo by Pat Arnow released under Creative Commons License

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Category: Politics

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Van Jones

Van Jones“You elected this president. You reelected this president. . . . Stop being chumps!” –Van Jones

Going in, I was of mixed views regarding Sunday’s rally in Washington, D.C., to save the earth’s climate from the tar sands pipeline.  I still am.

Why on a Sunday when there’s no government around to protest, shut down, or interfere with?

And why all the pro-Obama rhetoric?  Robert Kennedy, Jr., was among the celebrities getting arrested at the White House in the days leading up, and his comment to the media was typical.  Obama won’t allow the tar sands pipeline, he said, because Obama has “a strong moral core” and doesn’t do really evil things.

As a belief, that’s of course delusional.  This is the same president who sorts through a list of men, women, and children to have executed every other Tuesday, and who jokes about it.  This is the guy who’s derailed international climate protection efforts for years.  This is the guy who refused the demand to oppose the tar sands pipeline before last year’s election.  If he had been compelled to take a stand as a candidate there would be no need for this effort to bring him around as a lame duck.

As a tactic, rather than a belief, the approach of the organizers of Sunday’s rally is at least worth questioning.  For one thing, people are going to hear such comments and take them for beliefs.  People are going to believe that the president would never do anything really evil.  In which case, why bother to turn out and rally in protest of what he’s doing?  Or if we do turn out, why communicate any serious threat of inconvenience to the president?  On the contrary, why not make the protest into a campaign rally for the president through which we try, post-election, to alter the platform on which the actual candidate campaigned?

The advantage to the expect-the-best-and-the-facts-be-damned approach is clear.  Lots of people like it.  You can’t have a mass rally without lots of people.  The organizers of this event are not primarily to blame for how the U.S. public thinks and behaves.  But, then again, if you’re trying to maximize your crowd at all costs, hadn’t you better really truly maximize it?  Sunday’s rally probably suffered from being held on a bitterly cold day, but I suspect that most people who planned to come did come; and I’ve seen more people on the Mall in the summer for no reason at all, and many times more people on the Mall in the winter for an inauguration (which, in terms of policy based activism, is also nothing at all).

What if the celebrities generating the news with arrests at the White House were to speak the truth?  What if they committed to nonviolently interfering with the operations of a government destroying the climate?  What if they committed to opposing the Democratic and Republican parties as long as this is their agenda?  What if they said honestly and accurately that the personality of a president matters less than the pressures applied to him, that this president can do good or evil, and that it is our job to compel him to do good?

Sunday’s rally, MC’d by former anti-Republican-war activist Lennox Yearwood, looked like an Obama rally.  The posters and banners displayed a modified Obama campaign logo, modified to read “Forward on Climate.”  One of the speakers on the stage, Van Jones, declared, “I had the honor of working for this president.”  He addressed his remarks to the president and appealed to his morality and supposed good works: “President Obama, all the good that you have done . . . will be wiped out” if you allow the tar sands pipeline.

The pretense in these speeches, including one by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, was consistently that Obama has not already approved part of the pipeline, that he is guilty of inaction, that the government is failing to act, that what’s needed is action — as if our government were not actively promoting the use of, and using vast quantities of fossil fuels, not to mention fighting wars to control the stuff.

Van Jones ended his remarks by addressing himself to “the next generation.”  And this is what he had to say: “Stop being chumps! You elected this president. You reelected this president.  You gave him the chance to make history. He needs to give you the chance to have a future. Stop being chumps!  Stop being chumps and fight for your future, thank you very much.”

Reading these words, one would imagine that the obvious meaning they carry is “Stop electing people like this who work for parties like this and serve financial interests like these.”  What could be a more obvious interpretation?  You elected this guy twice.  He’s a lame duck now.  You’ve lost your leverage.  Stop being such chumps!

Nothing could be further, I think, from what Van Jones meant or what that crowd on Sunday believed he meant.  This was a speaker who had, just moments before, expressed his pride in having worked in Obama’s White House.  The fact that this crowd of Obama-branded “activists” had elected him twice was not mentioned in relation to their chumpiness but as grounds for establishing their right to insist that he not destroy the planet’s atmosphere.  They would be chumps if they didn’t hold more rallies like this one.

Wait, you might ask, doesn’t everyone have the right to insist that powerful governments not destroy the earth’s atmosphere?

Well, maybe, but in Van Jones’ thinking, those who committed to voting for Obama twice, no matter what he did, and who have committed to voting for another Democrat no matter what he or she will do, deserve particular attention when they make demands.  Paradoxically, those who can be counted on regardless, who demand nothing and therefore offer nothing, should be the ones who especially get to make demands and have them heard and honored.

Needless to say, it doesn’t actually work that way.

Our celebrity emperors attract a great deal of personal affection or hatred, so when I suggest an alternative to packaging a rally for the climate as a belated campaign event, it may be heard as a suggestion to burn Obama in effigy.  What if there were a third option, namely that of simply demanding the protection of our climate?

We might lose some of those who enjoyed burning Bush in effigy and some of those who enjoy depicting themselves as friends of the Obama family.  But would we really lose that many?  If the celebrities and organizers took such an honest policy-based approach, if the organizations put in the same money and hired the same busses, etc., how much smaller would Sunday’s unimpressive rally have really been?

(And couldn’t such a crowd be enlarged enough to more than compensate for any loss, by the simple tactic of promising ahead of time to keep the speeches to a half-hour total and to begin the march on time?  I’d pay money to go to that rally.)

The problem, of course, is that the celebrities and organizers themselves tend to think like Obama campaign workers.  It’s not an act.  It’s not a tactic aimed at maximizing turnout.  And it’s not their fault that they, and so many others, think that way.

But imagine a realistic, policy-based approach that began to build an independent movement around principled demands.  It would have the potential to grow.  It would have the potential to threaten massive non-cooperation with evil.  It would have the energy of Occupy.  It would have the potential to make a glorious declaration out of what now appears to be self-mockery when oversmall crowds of hungover campaign workers shout “This is what democracy looks like!” as they plod along a permitted parade route.

No.  It really isn’t.

Photo by Earthworm under Creative Commons license

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Money News:

Amtrak, the U.S. intercity passenger railroad supported by taxpayers, asked Congress to more than double its capital budget so it can buy more trains and improve infrastructure.

Amtrak, in a letter Wednesday to Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner, asked for $ 2.1 billion in U.S. funds for its capital budget and $ 212 million for debt service for the 2014 fiscal year. In the 2013 fiscal year, Amtrak is receiving $ 905 million for those expenses.

“If we truly want to realize our vision of what rail can offer America, in terms of real mobility improvements and rational modal choices, policy decisions must be made and funding provided to match them,” Amtrak Chief Executive Officer Joseph Boardman said in a statement. “These are big decisions, and will require bold thinking, but they will deliver value for the money.”

While Amtrak gets U.S. aid every year, this request comes as its authority from Congress to operate is due to expire in September. Amtrak is looking for more money in legislation to expand service and increase speeds between Washington and Boston, where its share of the rail-air market has doubled in the past decade. The subsidies have been criticized by some congressional Republicans.

“Only in America could we pour more taxpayer dollars into a Soviet-style passenger rail system,” Representative John Mica, a Florida Republican who previously headed the House transportation committee, said Wednesday in an e-mailed statement.

The Washington-based railroad reduced its request for operating assistance by 16 percent after recording its smallest annual loss in 38 years.

No Profit

Amtrak is seeking $ 373 million in operating support, compared with the $ 443 million it’s getting this year.

The railroad, created in 1971 to take over money-losing passenger operations from freight carriers, has never made an annual profit.

Amtrak has said it wants to expand its Acela fleet serving the U.S. Northeast and replace the 20 existing Acelas, which were built by Bombardier Inc. of Montreal and Alstom SA, based in Levallois-Perret, France. It also plans to upgrade its wireless Internet service, or Wi-Fi, to faster 4G technology on its trains.

California Acelas

The railroad said in January it will work with California, the only U.S. state planning to begin construction on a high-speed rail project this year, to buy Acela equipment. In January, it began asking companies for information on building as many as 60 trains to add units on the Northeast Corridor, replace Acelas and buy equipment for California. It hasn’t said from whom it will buy those trains.

After automatic budget cuts, Amtrak is getting $ 1.3 billion in taxpayer money for fiscal 2013, Amtrak spokesman Steve Kulm said. That’s less than the $ 1.4 billion the railroad received the previous year.

Amtrak says its share of the rail-air market between Washington and New York has risen to 76 percent from 69 percent in 2010 and 37 percent before the Acela began service. The comparison doesn’t include buses, the fastest growing mode of U.S. transportation. Ridership throughout the Amtrak system rose 3.5 percent in the year that ended Sept. 30 to a record 31.2 million passengers.

The Washington-based railroad said Jan. 10 that its loss for the year ended Sept. 30 fell to $ 361 million, the lowest since 1975, from $ 1.34 billion in the previous 12 months.

The Brookings Institution, in a report issued this month, found 83 percent of passengers ride Amtrak routes of less than 400 miles. The Washington-based public policy group suggested Amtrak share costs for money-losing long-distance routes of more than 750 miles with states.

© Copyright 2013 Bloomberg News. All rights reserved.

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Source: http://www.moneynews.com/Economy/Amtrak-Buy-Trains-Tracks/2013/03/27/id/496615

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The bloggers are not testing the scientific method, they are testing methods that are scientific. Those are two vastly different concepts. Their work is important, but not epic.

I’m not so sure about that.

We believe in a scientific method founded on observation and reproducible results, but for a great number of papers the results are not reproduced.

Taking soft sciences into consideration (psychology, social sciences, medical), most papers hinge on a 95% confidence level [explainxkcd.com]. This means that 1 out of every 20 results arise from chance, and no one bothers to check.

Recent reports tell us depression meds are no better than chance [www.cwcc.us] and scientists can only replicate 11% of cancer studies [nbcnews.com], so perhaps the ratio is higher than 1 in 20. And no one bothers to check.

I’ve read many follow-on studies in behavioral psychology where the researchers didn’t bother to check the original results, and it all seems ‘kinda fishy to me. Perhaps wide swaths of behavioral psychology have no foundation; or not, we can’t really tell because the studies haven’t been reproduced.

And finally, each of us has an “ontology” (ie – a representation of knowledge) which is used to convey information. If I tell you a recipe, I’m actually calling out bits of your ontology by name: add 3 cups of flour, mix, bake at 400 degrees, &c.

This assumes that your ontology is the same as mine, or similar enough that the differences are not relevant. If I say “mix”, I assume that your mental image of “mix” is the same as mine.…but people screw up recipes, don’t understand assembly instructions, and are confused by small nuanced differences in documentation.

Does this happen in chemistry?

(Ignoring the view that reactions can depend on aspects that the researchers were unaware of, or didn’t think were relevant. One researcher told me that one of her assistants could always make the reaction work but no one else could. Turns out that the assistant didn’t rinse the glassware very well after washing, leaving behind a tiny bit of soap.)

It’s good that people are reproducing studies. Undergrads and post-grads should reproduce results as part of their training, and successful attempts should be published – if only as a footnote to the original paper (“this result was reproduced by the following 5 teams…”). It’s good practice for them, it will hold the original research to a higher standard, and eliminate the 1 out of 20 irreproducible results.

Also, reproducing the results might add insight into descriptive weaknesses, and might inform better descriptions. Perhaps results should be kept “Wikipedia” style, where people can annotate and comment on the descriptions for better clarity.

But then again, that’s a lot of work. What was the goal, again?

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Author: Unknown Lamer
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/2I7zNGJ1lNQ/story01.htm

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By Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse Blog
December 17, 2012

What in the world is happening to America?  I have written many articles about how society is crumbling right in front of our eyes, but now it is getting to the point where people are going to be afraid to go to school or go shopping at the mall.

Just consider what has happened over the past week.  Adam Lanza savagely murdered 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

42-year-old Marcus Gurrola threatened to shoot innocent shoppers and fired off more than 50 rounds in the parking lot of Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach, California.

After police apprehended him, he told them that he “was unhappy with life”.  Earlier in the week, a crazy man wearing a hockey mask and armed with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire on the second floor of a mall in Happy Valley, Oregon.

He killed two people and injured a third.

On Saturday morning, a lone gunman walked into a hospital in Alabama and opened fire.  He killed one police officer and two hospital employees before being gunned down by another police officer.

So have we now reached the point where every school, every mall and every hospital is going to need armed security?  How will society function efficiently if everyone is constantly worried about mass murderers?

In response to the horrible tragedy in Connecticut, many in the mainstream media are suggesting that much stricter gun laws are the obvious solution.

After all, if we get rid of all the guns these crazy people won’t be able to commit these kinds of crimes, right?

Unfortunately, that is not how it works.  The criminals don’t obey gun control laws.  Banning guns will just take them out of the hands of law-abiding American citizens that just want to protect their own families.

Adam Lanza didn’t let the strict gun control laws up in Connecticut stop him from what he wanted to do.  Connecticut already has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, and Adam Lanza broke at least three of them.

However, if there had been some armed security officers or some armed teachers at that school, they may have had a chance to protect those dear little children from being brutally gunned down.

If gun control was really the solution to our problems, then cities that have implemented strict gun control laws should be some of the safest in the entire country.

But sadly, just the opposite is true.

For example, Chicago has very strict gun laws.  But 10 people were shot in the city of Chicago on Friday alone.  Chicago is now considered to be “the deadliest global city“, and the murder rate in Chicago is about 25 percenthigher than it was last year.

So has gun control turned Chicago into a utopia?

Of course not.

And it won’t solve our problems on a national level either.

You can find more statistics about the futility of gun control right here.

Well, how would things be if we did just the opposite and everyone had a gun?

Would gun crime go through the roof?

That is what liberals were warning of when the city of Kennesaw, Georgia passed a law requiring every home to have a gun.  But instead of disaster, the results turned out to be very impressive…

In March 1982, 25 years ago, the small town of Kennesaw – responding to a handgun ban in Morton Grove, Ill. – unanimously passed an ordinance requiring each head of household to own and maintain a gun. Since then, despite dire predictions of “Wild West” showdowns and increased violence and accidents, not a single resident has been involved in a fatal shooting – as a victim, attacker or defender.

The crime rate initially plummeted for several years after the passage of the ordinance, with the 2005 per capita crime rate actually significantly lower than it was in 1981, the year before passage of the law.

Prior to enactment of the law, Kennesaw had a population of just 5,242 but a crime rate significantly higher (4,332 per 100,000) than the national average (3,899 per 100,000). The latest statistics available – for the year 2005 – show the rate at 2,027 per 100,000. Meanwhile, the population has skyrocketed to 28,189.

When criminals know that everyone has guns, they are much less likely to try something.  And often armed citizens are able to prevent potential mass murderers from doing more damage.  You can find several examples of this right here.

But of course most of our politicians are not interested in common sense.  Instead, they are obsessed with the idea that gun control will make our country “safe” again.

Senator Diane Feinstein says that she is ready to introduce a strict gun control bill in January that will “ban the sale, the transfer, the importation and the possession” of many types of firearms.

Will such a law keep the criminals from getting guns?

No way.  Just look at what is happening with the cartels down in Mexico.  The criminals are always able to get guns.

If our “leaders” were really interested in stopping these mass murders, they would take a look at the role that mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs play in these incidents.  If you look at the mass murders that have occurred over the past several decades, in the vast majority of them the murderer had been using mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs…

The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) has raised concerns about severe acts of violence as side effects of anti-psychotic and antidepressant drugs not only on individuals but on society as well.

Just a month ago PRWeb described drug induced violence as ”medicine’s best kept secret.”

And the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHRI) is calling for a federal investigation on its web page which links no less than 14 mass killings to the use of psychiatric drugs such as Prozac and Paxil.

And guess what?

According to the Washington Post, one neighbor says that Adam Lanza was “on medication”.

But will our politicians ever consider a law against such drugs?

Of course not.  The big corporations that produce those drugs give mountains of money to the campaign funds of our politicians.

So the focus of the debate will remain on guns.

And a lot of liberals would have us believe that our society could be transformed into some type of “utopia” if we could just get rid of all the guns.

Unfortunately, that is simply not true.  Our society is in an advanced state of moral decay, and this moral decay is manifesting in our society in thousands of different ways.  The corruption runs from the highest levels of society all the way down to the lowest.

For those that believe that gun control would somehow “fix America”, I have some questions for you…

Down in Texas, one set of parents kept their 10-year-old son locked in a bedroom and only fed him bread and water for months.  Eventually he died of starvation and they dumped his body in a creek.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

A pastor in north Texas was recently assaulted by an enraged man who beat him to death with an electric guitar.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

Police up in New Jersey say that a man kept his girlfriend padlocked in a bedroom for most of the last 10 years.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

A 31-year-old man up in Canada was found guilty of raping an 8-year-old girl, breaking 16 of her bones and smashing her in the face with a hammer.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

According to the FBI, a New York City police officer is being accused of “planning the kidnap, rape, torture and cannibilization of a number of women”.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

A Secret Service officer that had been assigned to protect Joe Biden’s residence has been charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

Over in Texas, a very sick 29-year-old man stabbed his girlfriend to death and then burned his one-year-old baby alive because she had gone to court and filed for child support.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

Over in Utah, a 21-year-old man is accused of stabbing his grandmother 111 times and then removing her organs with a knife.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

There are more than 3 million reports of child abuse in the United States every single year.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

An average of five children die as a result of child abuse in the United States every single day.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

The United States has the highest child abuse death rate on the entire globe.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

It is estimated that 500,000 Americans that will be born this year will be sexually abused before they turn 18.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

In the United States today, it is estimated that one out of every four girls is sexually abused before they become adults.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

If there was a way to take all of the guns away from all of the criminals, I would be all in favor of it.  Unfortunately, no government on the planet has been able to do that.

Instead, we have seen that criminals thrive whenever gun bans are instituted and the guns are taken away from law-abiding citizens.

But the bottom line is that our social decay will not be solved either by more guns or less guns.

Our social decay is the result of decades of bad decisions.  We have pushed morality out of our schools, out of government and out of almost every aspect of public life.  Now we are experiencing the bitter fruit of those decisions.

And this is not a problem that our government is going to be able to fix.  Violent crime increased by 18 percent in 2011, and this is just the beginning.

As our economy gets even worse, the rot and decay that have been eating away the foundations of America are going to become even more evident.  The number of Americans living in poverty grows with each passing day, and millions upon millions of people are becoming very desperate.

Desperate people do desperate things, and crime, rioting and looting are going to become commonplace in the United States in the years ahead.

So you can pretend that the government is going to be able to keep our society from crumbling all you want, but that is not going to help you when a gang of desperate criminals has invaded your home and is attacking your family.

We definitely should mourn for the victims in Connecticut.  It was a horrible national tragedy.

But this is just the beginning.  The fabric of our society is coming apart at the seams.

The feeling of safety and security that we all used to take for granted has been shattered, and the streets of America are going to steadily become much more dangerous.

I hope that you are ready.

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Author: Alex
Source: http://theintelhub.com/2012/12/17/society-is-crumbling-right-in-front-of-our-eyes-and-banning-guns-wont-help-2/

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