Saturday, Jan 17th
Last update10:24:24 AM GMT
Reality can be defined as the 'norms' that your community agrees on.... Do you believe in witches and demons? How about 'trickle down economics?' Of course, some 'realities' work better than others.
The laws of nature tend to favor 'actual reality' over the ones that only exist in certain peoples' twisted world view, but over the short term utter nonsense can seem real, and even drive actual 'reality' to places we can't imagine.
People sure do have a talent for making things lots more complicated than they need to be. We spend so much time reading between the lines, looking for clues and clarity, it's a wonder anything gets done at all -- which, as you might guess, is a perfect cue to skewer Congress, the ultimate spot of wonder and awe should anything ever be accomplished.
Despite all the hoopla and hocus-pocus, nothing much has changed at all, not even with all the foaming and frothing at the mouth lately over finances. There are still a couple of brands of Republicans haggling and mule-trading with a couple brands of Democrats, everyone happily and heartily posing for the folks back home, as they do their Homeric, heroic battles in the homeland of D.C., shedding all their usual stalling and finally doing their jobs, albeit at the last possible moment.
America set an off-the-charts heat record in 2012.
A brutal combination of a widespread drought and a mostly absent winter pushed the average annual U.S. temperature last year up to 55.32 degrees Fahrenheit, the government announced Tuesday. That's a full degree warmer than the old record set in 1998.
Breaking temperature records by an entire degree is unprecedented, scientists say. Normally, records are broken by a tenth of a degree or so.
Sandra and William E. Armstrong’s 12-year-old daughter will never learn of the Supreme Court’s deliberations Tuesday, though the results could change her life.
The young Taylorsville, N.C., resident is deaf and blind. She cannot sit, crawl, walk or converse. She’s the victim, her parents say, of negligence by the troubled doctor who delivered her.
Just before Christmas, Truthout's Jason Leopold and the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund separately published a collection of about 100 pages of Federal Bureau of Investigation documents on Occupy Wall Street. The release shed some new light on how the FBI collaborated with other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and Naval Investigative Criminal Services, to keep tabs on the movement, which it considered a potential criminal and domestic terrorism threat.
Yet the documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, are also heavily redacted—including a curious report about a plot to identify and assassinate Occupy leaders with a sniper rifle—and leave much to the imagination.
People discharged from the military under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" since November 10, 2004 who had only received one-half separation pay following their discharge but who otherwise would have received full pay now will be entitled to that full separation pay, according to the terms of a settlement agreement reached Monday between the American Civil Liberties Union and the federal government.
"It makes no sense to continue to penalize service members who were discharged under a discriminatory statute that has already been repealed. The amount of the pay owed to these veterans is small by military standards, but is hugely significant in acknowledging their service to their country," said Joshua Block, staff attorney for the ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Project, in a statement.
In the wake of the tragic shooting deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last month, the National Rifle Association proposed that the best way to protect schoolchildren was to place a guard — a “good guy with a gun” — in every school, part of a so-called National School Shield Emergency Response Program.
Indeed, the N.R.A.’s solution to the expansion of gun violence in America has been generally to advocate for the more widespread deployment and carrying of guns.
Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the serious people have decided there's a problem. That's because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in slow currents. Since change by definition requires going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses.
Take, for instance, "the problem of our schools". Don't worry about whether there actually was a problem, or whether making every student devote her school years to filling out standardized tests would solve it. Just think about the timeline. In 1983, after some years of pundit throat clearing, the Carnegie Commission published "A Nation at Risk", insisting that a "rising tide of mediocrity" threatened our schools.
The number of members of Congress who don’t identify with any particular religion is on the rise, according to an analysis by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
In the 96th Congress (1979-80), not a single member of the House or Senate said they didn’t belong to any particular faith, didn’t know or refused to disclose their religion. But in the new 113th Congress, 10 members fall under that category.
That’s twice as many as in the 111th Congress (2009-10).
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