Long Game

the conscious mind often seeks to rationalize what emerges from the unconscious.

Not only do we run alien subroutines [i.e., unconscious processes]; we also justify them. We have ways of retrospectively telling stories about our actions as though the actions were always our [i.e., our conscious mind's] idea.... We are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien processes running under the hood.

The chicken/shovel experiment led Gazzinga and LeDoux to conclude that the left hemisphere acts as an "interpreter," watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events.

About 5,000 graduate students from dozens of countries responded to the survey, which Nature publicized through its e-mail lists and website, the Naturejobs.com newsletter and social media. Respondents hailed from a variety of scientific fields, but the basic biological sciences were most heavily represented.

0 points = Congratulations, you are an Ayn Rand fan who while rightly inspired by her vision of productivity, reason, and human achievement is nonetheless sensible enough to have avoided her various cultic incitements.

1-6 points = Amber light: definite Randroid tendencies.

7-12 points = Ultra-Randroid, and proud of it. You are welcome to debate with us here at the ARCHNblog (despite the fact you would be giving your sanction to our evil by doing so) but to be honest you'd be better off talking to a deprogrammer.

At least 17 people have died and more have been injured in an explosion in downtown Oslo and a shooting at a Labor Party youth camp outside the Norwegian capital. Norwegian police arrested the shooter at the camp and believe he is connected with the explosion, though others could be involved.

The first scenario is that grassroots Islamist militants based in Norway are behind these seemingly connected attacks.

An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions -- provided he observes their proper relationship.

Rand's contentions in this paragraph not only go against the vast experience of mankind, which has found inner conflicts to be rooted in the very warp and woof of human nature, but of scientific brain research as well. A growing body of evidence compiled by neuroscientists suggests that the brain is made up of competing subsystems

There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain; each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something...

The cataclysmic extinctions that scoured Earth 200 million years ago might have been easier to trigger than expected, with potentially troubling contemporary implications.

“It could happen again. It’s only the boundary conditions that we don’t know.”

When it comes to health, it’s the hard outcomes we care about. We pay attention to measures like high blood pressure (hypertension) because of the relationship between hypertension and events like heart attacks and strokes. The higher the blood pressure, the greater the risk of these events. The relationship between the two is well established. So when it comes to preventive health, we want to lower blood pressure to reduce the risk of subsequent effects. Weight loss, diet, and exercise are usually prescribed (though often insufficient) to reduce blood pressure. For many, drug treatment is still required.

From a population perspective, interventions that dramatically lower salt intake result in lower blood pressure.

I think Mr Yglesias' proposal that the Fed target a 3-4% rate of inflation is indeed the single best thing Washington can do to create jobs today.

there's something that bothers me slightly about this whole "job creation" discussion. The implicit idea seems to be that policy should aim to increase employer demand for employees. But it occurs to me that perhaps some of the long-term unemployed want remunerative work, but are a bit sick of "employment".

Philosophical questions of self-ownership and the alienability of labour aside, I am convinced that autonomy is profoundly important to most of us, and that the sort of self-rental involved in the employment relation is regularly experienced as a lamentable loss of autonomy, if not humiliating subjection. I think a lot of us would rather not work for somebody else.

After he switched to the Republican Party in 1962, Ronald Reagan famously quipped: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.”

At Tuesday morning’s meeting of the House Democrats, caucus chairman John Larson rallied his colleagues for the day’s debt-limit debate by playing an audio recording of the 40th president.“Congress consistently brings the government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility,” Reagan says in the clip. “This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits. Interest rates would skyrocket, instability would occur in financial markets, and the federal deficit would soar. The United States has a special responsibility to itself and the world to meet its obligations.”

Tea Party Republicans say they would sooner default on the national debt than raise taxes; Reagan agreed to raise taxes 11 times.

Common mistakes Ducking does not confer any bonus in a combat, it just allows you to cower behind cover like, well, a coward. Furthermore, changing state from standing to ducking will actually make your unit incapable of defending itself for a fraction of a second. This is often long enough for your unit to lose a vital body part, like a head or torso. Partial line of sight does not provide a defensive bonus, I.E., peeking around a corner will not make you harder to hit. Cover bonuses are only granted when standing behind half height (light blue) objects.

The factors that affect this time are listed in rough order below: Unit type - shotguns have the shortest time, snipers the longest. Distance to target - closer target: shorter time. Cover - target in cover: longer time. Stillness - the more quickly a unit was moving before they started firing, the longer it takes for them to get a kill shot.

When engaging another unit, the engaged unit will often attempt to shoot back, even if the engaged unit was not previously looking at the engaging unit. Indeed, a unit will only not do so if it is set to Continue on Sight or it is an indirect fire unit. In this case, there is one additional factor to those discussed earlier: first sight. If unit A engages unit B and B is not aiming at A, then B will suffer a penalty for not having first sight; that is to say, unit B will be at a disadvantage because it joined the combat a bit late.

The written evidence, such as it is, demonstrates no very great arguing skill on Rand's part. Quite the contrary, Rand, when she deigns to offer any sort of arguments at all, produces rather poor ones, afflicted with yawning gaps and blistering equivocations.

Inability of individuals to evaluate the quality of arguments made on behalf of conclusions they agree with.Intimidation tacticsSelection of debating opponentsReliance on explicit articulation of viewsAvoidance of empirical tests in favor of verbalism

Many of these prisoners have been sent to virtually total isolation and enforced idleness for no crime, not even for alleged infractions of prison regulations. Their isolation, which can last for decades, is often not explicitly disciplinary, and therefore not subject to court oversight. Their treatment is simply a matter of administrative convenience.

The Supreme Court, over the last two decades, has whittled steadily away at the rights of inmates, surrendering to prison administrators virtually all control over what is done to those held in “administrative segregation.”

In a “60 Minutes” interview, he went so far as to call it “far more egregious” than the death penalty.

For all China’s economic might, it’s worth remembering that it remains a) quite poor in per-capita terms and b) governed by an opaque, corrupt, oligarchic, anti-democratic single party apparatus that, for all the  dazzle of its economic accomplishments in recent decades, continues to immiserate large swathes of its population through internal migration controls, currency manipulation and, you know, large-scale denial of basic human rights.

I think it’s a bit too easy to let the U.S. off the hook, both in terms of the economics and the politics.

There really is a serious infrastructure problem in the United States, though, and not all of it can be explained by the fact that our infrastructure is old. Part of it can, to be sure. One of the advantages of developing late and/or having your entire continent reduced to rubble after the initial round of industrialization has run its course is that you’re allowed/forced to build new stuff rather than trying to upgrade/repurpose old stuff.

Let’s begin by trying to explain what it was that Putin in particular created. What he recognized was the problem of the Soviet empire, the problem with the czarist empire, was that they totally controlled surrounding territories. As such, they benefited from them, but they were responsible for them as well, and so that wealth was transferred into them to maintain them, to sustain the regimes, and so on and so forth. Putin came up with a new structure in which he had limited desires from countries like Ukraine. These were irreducible, that is to say, they could not be part of NATO, could not have hostile forces there, they had to cooperate on a bunch of issues. But Russia was not responsible for their future, and it was really a brilliant maneuver because it gave them the benefit of the Russian empire, of the Soviet Union, without the responsibilities, without the drain on the Russian treasury.

And what he has created in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, in Belarus, is sovereignty for these nations and yet alignment with Russia. And this has made Russia a very powerful player because its house is in order at the same time that, for example, as the European house is in massive disorder.

It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther. Art gives him that fuel; the pleasure of contemplating the objectified reality of one’s own sense of life is the pleasure of feeling what it would be like to live in one’s ideal world.

Now while anyone may have as narrow (or as wide) aesthetic tastes as they please, in a philosopher of aesthetics, such prejudices are deeply problematic. How can a philosopher provide insights on aesthetics applicable to all (or at least most) individuals when their tastes are so confined within the narrow bounds of their own narcissistic agendas?

They fall into a few categories.

Not long ago I attended an evening-long discussion group on this topic, comprised mostly of Russian emigrants and their spouses.  The Russians were generally keen to argue that they have deeper and closer friendships than do the Americans.  They also dislike that Americans will call their acquaintances “friends.”  In response I noted that: