1. 65% of 3-year-old children are spanked at least once by their parents during the previous month.

2. The odds of using physical punishment doubled in households where parents used aggression against each other. This is not surprising, since physical punishment is a form of interpersonal aggression.

3. Maternal stress significantly increased the odds of using physical punishment. This is also not surprising since physical punishment is more likely to be used by parents who are angry.

4. Maternal depression significantly increased the odds of using physical punishment.

5. The odds using of physical punishment were not associated with maternal education, but when the father had a college degree, both the father and the mother were significantly less likely to use physical punishment.

{ Child-Psych | Continue reading }

Over the last century, 98pc of the world’s tiger population has been wiped out, first by big game hunters, and latterly by poachers, who kill these magnificent creatures and hack them to pieces.

And for what? Well, money, for one thing. The rarer tigers become, the more valuable they are to the poachers, who sell their bones and organs on the black market for traditional Chinese medicines. (…) which is said to have aphrodisiac qualities. (…)

Scientific studies have shown that the claims made for tiger penises are, if you’ll pardon the expression, bollocks. But so far that’s failed to prevent the carnage escalating.

There are only a few thousand tigers left in the wild. They could well disappear off the face of the planet within 10 years.

{ The Evening Herald | Continue reading }

From the perspective of an anthropologist, or a psychologist, or someone trying to understand humanness: What is that thing? What is that mental process where we invisibilize something that’s present all the time? (…)

Why have we developed, or, rather, why have we found ourselves implicated in a system that not only generates so much trash, but relies upon the accelerating production of waste for its own perpetuation? (…)

Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything. (…)

There’s a Buddhist saying about housework, that it’s invisible labor because you see it only when it’s not done.

{ Interview with NY sanitation depart’s resident anthropologist | The Believer | Continue reading }

Li Pingri remembers swimming with fish and shrimp as a boy in Guangdong’s Chigang waterway in China. Today, even after the city spent 48.6 billion yuan ($7.2 billion) on a cleanup, he can’t stand the canal’s smell.

“We are surrounded by black and smelly waterways, breathing the foul air every day and paying the price at the cost of our health,” said Li, 79, a former researcher at the Guangzhou Institute of Geography. “If we can’t breathe clean air or drink clean water, high economic growth is meaningless.”

China, the world’s worst polluter, needs to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product a year — 680 billion yuan at 2009 figures — to clean up 30 years of industrial waste, said He Ping, chairman of the Washington-based International Fund for China’s Environment. Mun Sing Ho, a senior economist at Dale W. Jorgenson Associates and a visiting scholar at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put the range at 2 percent to 4 percent of GDP.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

“There is really no debate about climate change in China,” said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China. “China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.” The push for green in China, she added, “is a practical discussion on health and wealth. There is no need to emphasize future consequences when people already see, eat and breathe pollution every day.”

So while America’s Republicans turned “climate change” into a four-letter word — J-O-K-E — China’s Communists also turned it into a four-letter word — J-O-B-S.

“China is changing from the factory of the world to the clean-tech laboratory of the world,” said Liu. “It has the unique ability to pit low-cost capital with large-scale experiments to find models that work.” China has designated and invested in pilot cities for electric vehicles, smart grids, LED lighting, rural biomass and low-carbon communities.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

The Gulf Oil Spill Disaster

First, let’s begin with the “good” news. The ecological destruction that was first feared is not going to be as bad as once thought, for a variety of reasons. It is not good, but it is not the unmitigated disaster it could have been.

Edward Overton, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Environmental Sciences, LSU, is an expert on oil spills. He was at the Exxon Valdez. The Exxon Valdez (EV) was a big, black, thick tide of oil. The Deepwater Horizon is a much bigger spill: every ten days the amount of the EV spill spewed into the Gulf, from April 20 to July 15. Professor Overton spoke mostly for the record. He is very much a concerned environmentalist, and he is also a very serious scientist.

He reminded us that the Louisiana wetlands are a very important part of the ecological system of the Gulf of Mexico. Oversimplifying, they are the nutrient source for the small animal world which feeds the larger. Without the wetlands much of the Gulf ecosystem dies. If they were destroyed, they would not come back very easily, as without their very root system the land would erode away. Bluntly, oil kills wetlands if it gets into it.

There are only three ways to get rid of an oil spill. You can mechanically remove it, chemically remove it, or burn it. They used all three methods. But not fast enough. The Obama administration dithered while Rome burned. (This is not from Overton.) (…)

What should have been a no-brainer decision to use the Dutch ships was delayed for whatever reason. What should have been a no-brainer decision to waive the water purity rules was delayed beyond reason. My personal opinion. Whoever participated in that decision should be allowed to return to the private sector. They only made the problem of the spill worse. They should not be allowed near the decision-making process again.

Please note, this is no defense of British Petroleum. As noted below, they were extremely negligent, and deserve the costs and more. We just don’t need to compound stupid, incompetent, irresponsible (choose several more adjectives, some with color) corporate acts with dumb government ones.

There is a chemical called Corexit that is a product line of solvents primarily used as dispersants for breaking up oil slicks. It is produced by Nalco Holding Company. Corexit was the most-used dispersant in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, with COREXIT 9527 having been replaced by COREXIT 9500 after the former was deemed too toxic. Oil that would normally rise to the surface of the water is broken up by the dispersant into small globules that can then remain suspended in the water.

In hindsight, Overton thinks the use of Corexit was the correct thing to do. It probably saved the wetlands. But it is not without its own bad effects.

When you put Corexit on an oil slick, the surface oil disperses but also drops into the ocean about 15 feet. While Corexit (basically a type of soap) itself is not toxic (an admittedly controversial claim), the resulting dispersed oil is quite toxic. Fish swimming through it can be and are harmed. Marine mammals like porpoises are seriously harmed when they rise to breathe through an oil slick.

But here is the good news. It turns out that there are about the equivalent of two Exxon Valdezes a year from natural oil seepage from the floor of the oceans. The Gulf has an ecosystem of bacteria that eat that oil, which are then eaten again by plankton. To those bacteria, dispersed oil is filet mignon. They thrive and grow rapidly, turning that toxic waste into nutrients, which are absorbed by the plankton. The bacteria keep on growing until they lose their source of nutrition (the toxic oil) and then die out over time. Note: once absorbed by the bacteria, the oil is no longer toxic. There are no toxic minerals like mercury introduced into the ecosystem.

{ John Mauldin | Continue reading | PDF }

update:

In his book, “The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls From Today’s Pressures,” Stephen Hinshaw, chairman of the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley, explains that sexualizing little girls — whether through images, music or play — actually undermines healthy sexuality rather than promoting it. Those bootylicious grade-schoolers in the dance troupe presumably don’t understand the meaning of their motions (and thank goodness for it), but, precisely because of that, they don’t connect — and may never learn to connect — sexy attitude to erotic feelings.

That ongoing confusion between desirability and desire may help explain another trend giving parents agita: the number of teenage girls — 22 percent according to a 2008 survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy — who have electronically sent or posted nude or seminude photos of themselves.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Although the current spill still limited to the US coasts of the Gulf, this accident is already unprecedented in history because its injury to such a large variety of ecosystems of uniquely rich biodiversity that is impossible to cleanup. As the oil asphyxiates mangrove trees, perturbs microbial communities and disrupts the ecological stability affecting animals and microbes throughout the food chain– It may be hundreds of year before these ecosystems recover, making it the worst and possibly the most far reaching of any previous oil disaster in the history of this planet.

{ Journal of Cosmology | The Gulf Oil Gusher Catastrophe: Toxic Chemicals, Undersea Oil Plumes, Currents of Death. | Tracking and Predicting the Gulf Oil Spill Plumes | Can We Learn From the Past? | Thanks Douglas }

artwork { Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-1852 }

General “Buck” Turgidson: Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.

President Merkin Muffley: You’re talking about mass murder, General, not war!

General “Buck” Turgidson: Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.

{ Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 1964 | imdb | Continue reading }

{ It’s not often that a US president has cause to declare that, given the chance, he would sack the boss of one of the UK’s leading companies. | The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe uncannily mirrors the global financial meltdown that was triggered by the September, 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. | Thanks Douglas! }

Seppuku (”stomach-cutting”) is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. Seppuku was originally reserved only for samurai. Part of the samurai honor code, seppuku was used voluntarily by samurai to die with honor rather than fall into the hands of their enemies, as a form of capital punishment for samurai who have committed serious offenses, or performed for other reasons that have brought shame to them.

The ceremonial disembowelment, which is usually part of a more elaborate ritual and performed in front of spectators, consists of plunging a short blade, traditionally a tantō, into the abdomen and moving the blade from left to right in a slicing motion. (…)

Women have their own ritual suicide, jigai.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Police searched Wednesday for a porn actor suspected of killing one colleague and injuring two others with a sword that was used as a movie prop at a production studio where the suspect had been living. (…)

“There was no indication that things were going to get violent, there was nothing that provoked this attack, but at some point Steven chose to arm himself with what can be best described as a sword,” Price said. “He then used that sword against those three victims.”

{ AP/Huffington Post | Continue reading | via Craig }

{ Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that the Justice Department had launched a criminal investigation into the BP oil spill, in New Orleans on Tuesday. | Image: Visualizing the BP Oil Spill | More: Fears oil may continue spewing into the Gulf of Mexico for another two months into the hurricane season wiped $23 billion off BP’s market value on Tuesday and sent the cost of protecting its debt soaring. | And: There Was ‘Nobody in Charge’ }

As Mr. Tahiri spoke, an Afghan soldier appeared carrying a large red trash bag. It was, he said, filled with human brains. “What do you want me to do with this,” he asked. “Do you want me to bury it, or do you want to take it?”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Psychopathy is a personality disorder manifested in people who use a mixture of charm, manipulation, intimidation, and occasionally violence to control others, in order to satisfy their own selfish needs. Although the concept of psychopathy has been known for centuries, the FBI leads the world in the research effort to develop a series of assessment tools, to evaluate the personality traits and behaviors attributable to psychopaths.

Interpersonal traits include glibness, superficial charm, a grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, and the manipulation of others. The affective traits include a lack of remorse and/or guilt, shallow affect, a lack of empathy, and failure to accept responsibility. The lifestyle behaviors include stimulation-seeking behavior, impulsivity, irresponsibility, parasitic orientation, and a lack of realistic life goals.

Research has demonstrated that in those criminals who are psychopathic, scores vary, ranging from a high degree of psychopathy to some measure of psychopathy. However, not all violent offenders are psychopaths and not all psychopaths are violent offenders. If violent offenders are psychopathic, they are able to assault, rape, and murder without concern for legal, moral, or social consequences. This allows them to do what they want, whenever they want.  Ironically, these same traits exist in men and women who are drawn to high-profile and powerful positions in society including political officeholders.

The relationship between psychopathy and serial killers is particularly interesting. All psychopaths do not become serial murderers. Rather, serial murderers may possess some or many of the traits consistent with psychopathy. Psychopaths who commit serial murder do not value human life and are extremely callous in their interactions with their victims. This is particularly evident in sexually motivated serial killers who repeatedly target, stalk, assault, and kill without a sense of remorse. However, psychopathy alone does not explain the motivations of a serial killer.

What doesn’t go unnoticed is the fact that some of the character traits exhibited by serial killers or criminals may be observed in many within the political arena. While not exhibiting physical violence, many political leaders display varying degrees of anger, feigned outrage and other behaviors. They also lack what most consider a “shame” mechanism. Quite simply, most serial killers and many professional politicians must mimic what they believe, are appropriate responses to situations they face such as sadness, empathy, sympathy, and other human responses to outside stimuli.

{ Examiner NY | Continue reading }

The Oswego man charged with fatally shooting his wife and their three school-age children told police he was having marital problems caused by his affair in Mexico seven months earlier and his wife’s lack of interest in adopting his Druid beliefs.

{ Chicago Breaking News | Continue reading }

A controversial alternative health guru is suing after a taste of his own medicine nearly killed him.

Gary Null - described on quackwatch.org as “one of the nation’s leading promoters of dubious treatment for serious disease” - claims the manufacturer of Gary Null’s Ultimate Power Meal overloaded the supplements with Vitamin D.

The buff “Joy of Juicing” author, whose products include Red Stuff Powder and Gary Null’s Heavenly Hair Cleaner, claims he suffered kidney damage and was left bloodied and in intense pain from two daily servings of the supplement.

{ NY Daily News | Continue reading }

A Newport Beach man attempting to steal a pornographic magazine shoved a liquor store owner so fiercely that the man flew through the air and landed on the back of his head.

The owner died the day after the vicious attack on July 28, 2007 from a fractured skull and massive bleeding in the brain.

{ The Orange County Register | Continue reading }

related { Man killed in bizarre high speed crash. }

Did you hear about the Bangladeshi brick company that beheaded an employee to improve the color of its bricks?

This tragic incident raises many questions. The article is vague, but I assume a supervisor or some sort of boss was leading this strategy. So I wonder how the employee was chosen? Was he the worst worker, the biggest complainer, or the guy who looked the most like a brick? (…)

I wonder how the boss broke the news to the employee. Did he work up to it with a list of criticisms about the employee’s job performance? As a boss, you don’t want to start that sort of conversation with the beheading part. Begin with something like “I noticed you’ve been late twice this week.” That way it isn’t such a cruel shock when you get to the decapitation scenario.

{ Scott Adams | Continue reading }

{ For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island’s gone. }

photo { Christophe Kutner }

Climate scientists have long warned that global warming could unlock vast stores of the greenhouse gas methane that are frozen into the Arctic permafrost, setting off potentially significant increases in global warming.

Now researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and elsewhere say this change is under way in a little-studied area under the sea, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, west of the Bering Strait.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Building a nuclear weapon has never been easier. NATO’s Michael Rühle provides step-by-step instructions for going nuclear, from discretely collecting material to minimizing the fallout when caught. These simple steps have worked for the likes of Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea, among others. The nuclear club is open to your country, too.

{ IP Global | Continue reading }

{ Ministry of Defence defendes its use of more than 100 pigs in explosive tests. }

The average American, according to the Clean Air Council, creates 4.6 pounds of trash per day. Much of the trash is non-biodegradable, meaning that it will accumulate, and not necessarily where we’d like it to, if left unchecked.

Californians Against Waste estimates that Americans consume some 84 billion plastic bags a year (the product of roughly 12 million barrels of oil)—many of which, along with many other forms of terrestrial waste, are collecting in an area in the northern Pacific Ocean known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, a floating mass now more than twice the size of Texas.

The mandate of consumerism requires a certain amnesia about what we waste: It encourages us to forget the old and buy the new. Confronting the physical reality of our waste, however, might force a reexamination of our relationship to rampant consumerism.

The sudden interest in found-object art at the recent exhibitions seemed to suggest that the art world was prepared to encourage precisely that sort of reexamination —or so I thought before I actually attended them. (…)

What, however, is one to make of Richard Prince’s pieces, around the corner from Arman’s? The photographs are of Marlboro ads, carefully cropped to remove any ad copy. Prince argues that the iconic Marlboro cowboy, when removed from its original advertising context, encapsulates a certain segment of the American mythos. Perhaps, but the images never are removed from their advertising context—Marlboro’s images are enough of a cultural mainstay that we’re perfectly capable of identifying them without the Marlboro logo. The brand is far stronger than Prince’s effort at artistic dislocation. The primary effect of Prince’s appropriation, rather than rescuing our detritus from obscurity, is merely to extend the reach of advertising into the gallery and the museum. One can hardly claim this is a radical political act, certainly not one that runs counter to consumerism.

{ Pop Matters | Continue reading }

somehow related { Damien Hirst, Appropriation | Wikipedia }

painting { Zhong Biao, Dark Lens, 2002 }

Where will the next food crisis strike and how to face it? (…)

Satellite observation is the key instrument that will allow to double in 2010 the number of countries monitored in real time for detecting first indications of adverse agricultural outcomes. (…)

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, more than 1 billion people go to bed each night with an empty stomach.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

related { Premier Foods declares war on own-label goods. }