Rodrigo Rosenberg knew that he was about to die. It wasn’t because he was approaching old age—he was only forty-eight. Nor had he been diagnosed with a fatal illness; an avid bike rider, he was in perfect health. Rather, Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, was certain that he was going to be assassinated.
World food prices rose to near a record in April as grain costs advanced, adding pressure to inflation that is accelerating from Beijing to Brasilia and spurring central banks to raise interest rates. ...
A middle-aged nonentity, a political failure outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding freedom and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday. And then the world went mad.
Since this is "Ding dong, bin Laden is dead" day, I'll note that we still have the same problems with energy depletion and financial shenanigans and unemployment that we had yesterday. Perhaps killing OBL will gain Obama some slack with people spending $50 to fill their compact cars. But for how long?
I had to add LEED language to some specifications today. My wife always urges me to drive in on weekends, but I'm never sure of parking, and it was nice, so I rode the bike down to the light rail. At the station, an MTA lady explained adding a fare to the Charm Card.
... an essay by Jeremy Grantham, the Chief Investment Officer of GMO Capital (with over $106 billion in assets under management). Normally, we wouldn't highlight an investment firm's quarterly newsletter, but when one of the world's largest asset managers articulates the same themes that have been debated on The Oil Drum for the past 6 years, such a watershed for biophysical awareness deserves to be highlighted.
One thing is clear from all of the extreme weather slamming the United States: We are ill-prepared for human-caused climate change, whose primary near-term impact on most Americans will be from the ever-worsening weather extremes.
A scene in the “new hit series” The Killing seemed déjà-vu familiar, until I realized it’s a standard moment in crime dramas. The victim’s parents are in the police station to answer some questions, and they accidentally come across the crime scene photos. The warm body of the daughter they knew and loved has become the cold corpse the police treat casually. Maybe they overhear a callous gallows-humor joke made by a detective.
Sheesh, they just broke into normal TV programming (Mythbusters) to advise us to seek shelter. A tornado in Baltimore? The worst seems to be around Alabama, but The Weather Channel says this could be the greatest outbreak of tornadoes in American history.
[NOAA Alert text deleted]
This climate change stuff is getting too real.
2nd Update: On The Takeaway this morning, they said it was the worst outbreak of tornadoes in 40 years.
If there remains any pretense that justice and rule of law exist in Moscow today, that notion should now be counted as pure fantasy. The case of Sergei Magnitsky -- a senior partner at my law firm who was imprisoned, tortured, and murdered after his efforts to shed light on a massive governmental fraud by Interior Ministry officials stealing subsidiaries of my client's company, the Hermitage Fund, and the $230 million of taxes they had paid -- has illuminated the cruelty and criminality of Russian legal enforcement.
By Donal on Tue, 04/26/2011 - 2:57pm | Arts & Entertainment
I read once that the original Phoebe Snow was a media creation. Railroads were trying to show that diesels were much cleaner than coal, so they invented this ephemeral socialite named Phoebe Snow who could travel the rails wearing white, and emerge unsoiled by soot. The name carried to an Erie Lackawanna passenger train, and Phoebe Ann Laub borrowed it for the stage.
Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” and the expression of positive emotions.
By Donal on Mon, 04/25/2011 - 1:40pm | Humor & Satire
No one has convinced me whether it derives from the Native American name Allatoona, or the German name, Altona, but Altoona is a funny name. George Burns used to quip, "They loved that joke in Altoona!" and I think that proves that Altoona rivals Walla Walla, OshKosh and Burbank for guffaw potential. And it just got funnier. I walked into my daughter's house last weekend, and heard, "Welcome to POM Wonderful."
The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment.
