Yet new research in the field suggests that there are universal triggers, behaviors that almost all of us find inappropriate. Overhearing a one-sided cellphone conversation, for example, tops the list of irritants, transcending generations, gender and cultures.While this may seem unsurprising — people tend to raise their voices on cellphone calls, and their migratory nature can feel as though someone is cavalierly invading our personal space — there’s a cognitive reason they particularly grate: Our survival once depended on predicting what someone would say or do next.“You might think that when you’re having a conversation with someone, your brain is focused on listening,” the authors write. “In fact, your brain is focused on guessing what the person is going to say.”It’s unconscious and automatic — as is the desire to predict when something is going to end. The excruciation of overhearing a cellphone call isn’t just related to the banality of the conversation, or the pitch and volume of the voice — it’s hoping to God that it’ll be over soon, but having no sense how likely that is.
Vex and the city - NYPOST.com - 0 views
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To be a New Yorker is to be in a perpetual state of annoyance. Leaving doesn’t help — if anything, it only exacerbates the tendency to be annoyed.
The true cost of 9/11: Trillions and trillions wasted on wars, a fiscal catastrophe, an... - 0 views
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The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks by al-Qaida were meant to harm the United States, and they did, but in ways that Osama Bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W. Bush's response to the attacks compromised America's basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security.
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The attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks was understandable, but the subsequent invasion of Iraq was entirely unconnected to al-Qaida—as much as Bush tried to establish a link. That war of choice quickly became very expensive—orders of magnitude beyond the $60 billion claimed at the beginning—as colossal incompetence met dishonest misrepresentation.
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Indeed, when Linda Bilmes and I calculated America's war costs three years ago, the conservative tally was $3 trillion to $5 trillion. Since then, the costs have mounted further. With almost 50 percent of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans' medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health care costs will total $600 billion to $900 billion. The social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.AdvertisementEven if Bush could be forgiven for taking America, and much of the rest of the world, to war on false pretenses, and for misrepresenting the cost of the venture, there is no excuse for how he chose to finance it. His was the first war in history paid for entirely on credit. As America went into battle, with deficits already soaring from his 2001 tax cut, Bush decided to plunge ahead with yet another round of tax "relief" for the wealthy.
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Occupy Wall Street's 'Political Disobedience' - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Our language has not yet caught up with the political phenomenon that is emerging in Zuccotti Park and spreading across the nation, though it is clear that a political paradigm shift is taking place before our very eyes. It’s time to begin to name and in naming, to better understand this moment. So let me propose some words: “political disobedience.”Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of what could be called “political disobedience,” as opposed to civil disobedience, that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War.
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Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.
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Occupy Wall Street, which identifies itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many … political persuasions,” is politically disobedient precisely in refusing to articulate policy demands or to embrace old ideologies. Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.
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