What’s On My Mind

This chain of events began when we refinanced our house in 2006. We are musicians by profession, and the unpredictability of our income has made it difficult to preserve a pristine credit score - although we are not always able to pay our bills exactly on time, we do pay them; nevertheless this negatively affects our credit score. Because of this, the loan we ended up with was a terrible one. We were told that if we made the payments on time on this overpriced loan for a year, at the end of that year we would be eligible for a more reasonable loan. This looked like a way to be able to improve our credit score and get the loan we wanted, so we agreed to it; even though a payment of $3500 a month (for our 2+1 house) was unsustainable and unaffordable, we figured it would be worth it if after a year we would get something we could afford.

Of course, the year goes by, we make every payment on time, and we are declined for another loan. Now we are struggling with a payment that we cannot possibly afford, and it makes all of our other bills more and more difficult to pay. Since 2006 we have been spiraling downward financially. When the Administration began its bank bailouts and loan modification programs, we hoped we would be eligible for this. About six months ago, our mortgage broker sent 65 pages of documents to IndyMac to begin negotiations, and never heard back from them. Then a couple of weeks ago we got a notice on the door that our house would be up for sale on Monday, March 15. They had simply ignored our broker and begun foreclosure proceedings.

My friend, the extraordinarily talented musician, and author of The Price of Right: How the Conservative Agenda Has Failed America (and Always Will) is about to lose her home. She and her husband fell prey to a horribly predatory loan. They were promised that if they made every single one of the incredibly high payments ($3,500 a month!) for a year that they would become eligible to refinance at a much lower rate.

Except it didn't work out that way. Even after making all ridiculous payments on time the bank would not work with them.

If you know what Alicia's family can do to keep their home, please head on over to her blog and let her know. Oh, and while you're at it, go buy her book. It's a great read and I know she sure could use the money.

"We know that the human tongue can detect five tastes -- sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (a savoury, protein-rich taste contained in foods such as soy sauce and chicken stock)," Russell Keast, from Deakin University, said Monday.

"Through our study we can conclude that humans have a sixth taste -- fat."

Researchers tested 30 people's ability to taste a range of fatty acids in otherwise plain solutions and found that all were able to determine the taste -- though some required higher concentrations than others.

They then developed a screening test to see how sensitive people were to the taste and found that, of the 50 people tested, their ability to detect fat was linked to their weight -- a finding which could help counter obesity.

"We found that the people who were sensitive to fat, who could taste very low concentrations, actually consumed less fat than the people who were insensitive," Keast told AFP.

"We also found that they had lower BMIs (Body Mass Indexes)."

Isaac Asimov One of the most prolific writers in history, on any imaginable subject.  Cared little for art but created lasting and memorable tales.

 

Finally, a result on one of these silly internet quizzes I would have picked for myself. Although I could never hope to remotely touch Asimov's prolific output. Seriously, I adored Isaac Asimov and unlike Heinlein I've never felt like I needed to qualify that statement. I would have been happy with Gregory Benford as a result too. Take the quiz here.

Very cool news from Futuruama's Facebook fan page. Turns out new episodes will begin airing on Comedy Central this June starring the entire original cast.

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined. Significantly, no community in the United States has ever voted to ban adult access to sexually explicit material. The only feature of a community standard that holds is an intolerance for materials in which minors are involved as participants or consumers.

In terms of the use of pornography by sex offenders, the police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless, since most men have at some time used pornography. Looking closer, Michael Goldstein and Harold Kant found that rapists were more likely than nonrapists in the prison population to have been punished for looking at pornography while a youngster, while other research has shown that incarcerated nonrapists had seen more pornography, and seen it at an earlier age, than rapists. What does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing. Richard Green too has reported that both rapists and child molesters use less pornography than a control group of “normal” males.

Now let’s look at attitudes towards women. Studies of men who had seen X-rated movies found that they were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men who didn’t see those movies, and studies by other investigators—female as well as male—essentially found similarly that there was no detectable relationship between the amount of exposure to pornography and any measure of misogynist attitudes. No researcher or critic has found the opposite, that exposure to pornography—by any definition—has had a cause-and-effect relationship towards ill feelings or actions against women. No correlation has even been found between exposure to porn and calloused attitudes toward women.

Interesting look at the numbers behind pornography, crime and male attitudes toward women. Of course, all of this is just correlation. I'm not sure this is any stronger evidence that porn is good for society than that bandied about by the 't3h pr0n is 3val!!!' crowd.

CALLER: If the health care bill passes, where would you go for health care yourself? And the second part of that is, what would happen to the doctors, do they have to participate in the federal program, or could they opt out of it? [...]

LIMBAUGH: My guess in even in Canada and even in the UK, doctors have opted out. And once they’ve opted, they can’t see anybody Medicare, Medicaid, or what will become the exchanges. They have to have a clientele of private patients that will pay them a retainer and it’ll be a very small practice. I don’t know if that’s been outlawed in the Senate bill. I don’t know. I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.

The vocal opponent of health-care reform in the U.S. steered largely clear of the topic except to reveal a tidbit about her life growing up not far from Whitehorse.

“We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada,” she said. “And I think now, isn't that ironic?”

Ironic indeed. Freaking hypocrite.

In Lake County, a vacant lot sits where IEDC claimed Plasmatronics would bring 221 new jobs. The company canceled its project to build a $2.3 million facility in Crown Point less than a year after the governor attended Plasmatronics' celebratory announcement.

In Perry County, you'll find a quiet boat ramp where the state announced Tell City Marine would create 243 jobs. All of those jobs sunk when company investors decided to take their plans across the Ohio River to Kentucky.

In Tipton County, a massive factory is empty and padlocked despite the state's claims of 1400 new jobs. Getrag Transmission Manufacturing declared bankruptcy before it could hire a single Hoosier to assemble dual clutch transmissions.

Indianapolis NBC affiliate 13 WTHR's 13 Investigates team did a fine piece of investigative reporting and looked into Mitch Daniels' and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation's claim of 100,000 new jobs created in Indiana in the last five years. What they found was that "many of the state's 'economic successes' aren't really successes at all."

In fact, in some cases, they were the exact opposite of a success with jobs being lost, not gained. For instance, in Bartholomew County, the IEDC reported successes that had various companies adding 1,500 new jobs but the reality was that those same companies laid off 2,000 workers.

13 Investigates was only able to obtain detailed information on 285 of the "Indiana Economic Success" stories but of the 43,495 jobs committed to by those companies, 40% are either dead or at risk of not happening according to company and county officials.

As always, the whole story is more complex so please do read it all at 13 WTHR's site but shouldn't we know how many actual jobs were created?

But it's otiose to point this out, of course; jeers like 'atheists are no more rational than anybody else' are part of the Sarah Palinization of discourse. Nyah nyah, you read too many books; neener neener, you think you're so smart; you New York latte-drinking elitists think you know everything.

Atheists aren't any more rational than anybody else.

I'm not sure what prompted Ophelia Benson's ire here. Probably some internecine blog fighting, or moronic remark by the likes of Madeline Bunting or Stanley Fish, of which I'm unaware. There are certainly enough people looking to get their digs in on atheists and for all I know, this may be one of the latest talking points by the usual crowd of apologetics who find no value in disbelief.

But, and I'm sure this comes as no shock to most of you, I happen to be one very vocal atheist who finds it necessary to make this statement all the time. In particular, because there is a subset of atheists who do conflate atheism with rationality. It's not. It's just plain old lack of belief in gods. Why a person doesn't believe, and whether or not they are active disbelievers, are whole other questions that have myriad answers depending on the actual person in question.

And even if a person does come to their disbelief through rationality and honest skepticism, it doesn't mean they apply that rationality and skepticism evenly. For example, there are a lot of atheists who believe very silly pseudo-historical things about the origins of Christianity (Dorothy Murdock aka Acharya S being the leader of one such school of nonsense).

So I don't think taking issue with the tendency of some atheists to conflate rationality with atheism makes me part of the "Sarah Palinization of discourse." Rather the opposite, I see myself as being firmly among those striving to maintain nuance and complexity against oversimplification and tribalistic "us vs. them" group-think.