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A few weeks ago, a journalist devoted a substantial part of a profile of yours truly to my failure to pay due attention to the "Austrian theory" of the business cycle-a theory that I regard as being about as worthy of serious study as the phlogiston theory

A new study by a University of Chicago professor reveals the obvious about what actually causes Terrorism

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Pentagon reporters on Tuesday that existing policies such as housing and spousal benefits for military service members "can and should be applied equally to homosexuals as well as heterosexuals."

Would O'Reilly be interested in running? He says no. "I have more power doing what I'm doing than getting involved with the political process," he told Stephanopoulos. "Plus you have to kiss butt to get money." As for frequent "O'Reilly Factor" guest Sarah Palin, O'Reilly says she absolutely wants to run but has to weigh whether she wants to put her family through the process. And, he added, she needs to study up. "Sarah Palin needs to go to college," O'Reilly said. "Political college, world affairs college, and she is. She's hired a bunch of advisers and they're giving her a whole bunch of tracks to learn, because it is a sophisticated deal."

Oh my goodness! Next he'll say Rush needs to lose weight. Then he will really be in trouble.

More than 6,000 different species living on the sea-floor have been identified so far and more than half of these are unique to the icy continent. A combination of long-term monitoring studies, newly gathered information on the marine life distribution and global ocean warming models, enable the scientists to identify Antarctica's marine "biodiversity hotspots". Researcher Griffiths describes how krill populations (the shrimp-like invertebrates eaten by penguins, whales and seals) are reducing as a result of a decrease in sea-ice cover. A much smaller crustacean (copepods) is dominating the area once occupied by them. This shifts the balance of the food web to favour predators, like jellyfish, that are not eaten by penguins and other Southern Ocean higher predators. Sea-ice reduction is also affecting penguins that breed on the ice.

Several weeks ago, a group of researchers published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documenting how relatively low-powered solar systems offer the potential to increase food supplies in impoverished arid regions while reducing demands for fertilizers and other costly (in fiscal and other terms) additives.

There are many solutions various governments have written into policies in counter-terrorism efforts as terrorists continue to dig their heals into a moral high ground that has consumed lives in many parts of the world. Many who study religious terrorism understand that the battleground was not drawn by religions, but by the interpretation of those whose fever for fanaticism prevails. In response, this ferocity has called upon itself moderates and centrists who want to write an epitaph to such self-righteousness, who want to see the end of the bloodshed.

Home-school mom Susan Mule wishes she hadn't taken a friend's advice and tried a textbook from a popular Christian publisher for her 10-year-old's biology lessons. Mule's precocious daughter Elizabeth excels at science and has been studying tarantulas since she was 5. But she watched Elizabeth's excitement turn to confusion when they reached the evolution section of the book from Apologia Educational Ministries, which disputed Charles Darwin's theory. "I thought she was going to have a coronary," Mule said of her daughter, who is now 16 and taking college courses in Houston. "She's like, 'This is not true!'"

Home Fooling.

In a new study, researchers measured both liberals' and conservatives' reaction to "gaze cues" -- a person's tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person's eye movements. Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to them by a face on a computer screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, did not

Nearly half of all day laborers in New Jersey have not been paid for their work at least once in the last year, according to a report released today by Seton Hall Law School that outlines widespread worker abuse around the state. Researchers interviewed more than 100 day laborers around the state and found the workers are routinely underpaid for their work and denied overtime. More than a quarter also reported being physically assaulted by their bosses.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan's first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand.

Right now, according to a number of studies, we are losing about $100 billion every year because corporate America and the very wealthy are stashing their money in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. We should be aware that in 2009, ExxonMobil made $19 billion in profits and not only did the company not pay anything in taxes, it got a $106 million refund from the IRS. We should also be aware that since 1997, we have almost tripled funding for the military. So if we are serious about reducing the deficit, those are things we need to look at-not at Social Security, not programs everyday Americans need.

This document presents details on the wealth and income distributions in the United States, and explains how we use these two distributions as power indicators. Some of the information may come as a surprise to many people. In fact, I know it will be a surprise and then some, because of a recent study (Norton & Ariely, 2010) showing that most Americans (high income or low income, female or male, young or old, Republican or Democrat) have no idea just how concentrated the wealth distribution actually is. More on that a bit later.

We will not stop the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we will not end this slaughter of innocents, unless we are willing to rise up as have state workers in Wisconsin and citizens on the streets of Arab capitals. Repeated and sustained acts of civil disobedience are the only weapons that remain to us. Our political system is as broken and dysfunctional as that once presided over in Egypt by Hosni Mubarak. We must be willing to accept personal discomfort, to put our bodies in the way of the machine, if we hope to expose the lies of war and blunt the abuse by corporate profiteers. To do nothing, to refuse to act, to be passive, is to be an agent of injustice and to be complicit in murder. The U.N. report estimates that during the two-year period it studied almost 1,800 children were killed or injured in conflict-related violence, but numbers can never transmit the reality of such suffering.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 7, 2011) - Despite the fears of some, a new study suggests that use of the internet in general does not make people more likely to believe political rumors.

The rapid and terrifying acceleration of global warming, which is disfiguring the ecosystem at a swifter pace than even the gloomiest scientific studies predicted a few years ago, has been confronted by the power elite with two kinds of self-delusion. There are those, many of whom hold elected office, who dismiss the science and empirical evidence as false. There are others who accept the science surrounding global warming but insist that the human species can adapt. Our only salvation-the rapid dismantling of the fossil fuel industry-is ignored by both groups. And we will be led, unless we build popular resistance movements and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, toward collective self-annihilation by dimwitted pied pipers and fools.

The supply of secure, clean, sustainable energy is arguably the most important scientific and technical challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. Rising living standards of a growing world population will cause global energy consumption to double by mid-century and triple by the end of the century. Even in light of unprecedented conservation, the additional energy needed is simply not attainable from long discussed sources these include nuclear, biomass, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric. The global appetite for energy is simply too much. Petroleum-based fuel sources (i.e., coal, oil and gas) could be increased. However, deleterious consequences resulting from external drivers of economy, the environment, and global security dictate that this energy need be met by renewable and sustainable sources. The dramatic increase in global energy need is driven by 3 billion low-energy users in the non-legacy world and by 3 billion people yet to inhabit the planet over the next half century. The capture and storage of solar energy at the individual level personalized solar energy drives inextricably towards the heart of this energy challenge by addressing the triumvirate of secure, carbon neutral and plentiful energy. This talk will place the scale of the global energy issue in perspective and then discuss how personalized energy (especially for the non-legacy world) can provide a path to a solution to the global energy challenge. Daniel G. Nocera is the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Director of the Solar Revolutions Project and Director of the Eni Solar Frontiers Center at MIT. His group pioneered studies of the basic mechanisms of energy conversion in biology and chemistry. He has recently accomplished a solar fuels process that captures many of the elements of photosynthesis outside of the leaf. This discovery sets the stage for a storage mechanism for the large scale, distributed, deployment of solar energy. He has b

We've studied a century's worth of social unrest and the data suggests austerity measures can lead to riots.

A new study by Northwestern University economists, called The "Jobless and Wageless" Recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-2009," found that the economic recovery is highly uneven: corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than one percent. In other words, the average American worker has been left behind by the recovery, which officially began in June 2009. "The economic recovery through 2011 I has failed to create any net new jobs since the quarter marking the end of the recession in 2009 II

Gilens examines the extent to which different social groups find their policy preferences reflected in actual government policy and the variation in these patterns across time and policy domains. For example, when Americans with low and high incomes disagree on policy, are policy outcomes more likely to reflect the preferences of affluent Americans? If so, does the advantage of more affluent Americans differ over time (e.g., depending on which party controls the congress and presidency) or across policy domains? Similarly, are Republicans or Democrats in the population more likely to get the policies they prefer when their party is in control of national political institutions? Because his database contains policy preferences broken down by income, education, partisanship, sex, race, region, religion, and union/non-union status, Gilens will be able to address a multitude of questions concerning government responsiveness to public preferences. For this study, Gilens uses data on public preferences and policy outcomes based on 754 national survey questions from 1992 through 1998 and restrict his attention to divergent policy preferences of low- and high-income Americans. Each of these survey questions asks respondents whether they support or oppose some proposed change in U.S. national policy, and he has used historical information sources to determine whether each proposed change occurred or not (within a four-year coding window from the date of the survey question). When Gilens looks separately at respondents with different incomes, he finds that the higher an individual's income, the more likely it is that government policy will reflect his or her preferences. This relationship, however, does not increase in a linear fashion: the difference between poor and middle-income Americans is modest compared with the difference between those with middle and high incomes. In other words, it is not that the poor are especially less likely than middle-income Americans to get