Sim-O

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The Economist September 2008:

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The Washington Post:

“Palin was loosely on topic, but a couple of times she really bungled the pivot,” said Daniel J. Simons, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has studied how people can miss things that are right under their nose. “In one case, she made it explicit she was going to switch topics. That was not a smooth transition, whereas if you had watched a McCain or an Obama or a Biden make that transition, they would not have said, ‘I want to talk about taxes,’ they would have answered the question in a way that led into taxes.”

A review of the debate transcripts shows Obama, McCain and Biden all repeatedly dodging questions, adroitly transitioning from questions they were asked to questions they wanted to answer.

In a series of particularly relevant experiments, psychologists Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton recently showed that most people are extremely poor at spotting even dramatic discrepancies between questions and answers. They found the failure was especially acute when answers were semantically linked to questions — for example, when a question about the war on drugs is parried by an answer about health care. Audiences seemed to notice dodges only when answers were completely unrelated to the question — such as responding to a question about illegal drugs by discussing terrorism.

The psychologists found that irrelevant answers delivered fluently and with poise scored higher with audiences than answers that were accurate, on-topic, but halting. And when they had actors deliver the same answers to audiences — once fluently and once with “ums” and “ahs” — audiences judged the hesitant responses as intellectually inferior to the fluent ones.

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Protect the Human (Amnesty):

This autumn the Government wants to push through a Bill allowing police to lock people up for 42 days without charge if they are suspected of a terrorism-related offence. When the Counter-Terrorism Bill comes back to the House of Commons, your MP will have a chance to help defeat it: the Bill only passed by nine votes last time, so it will be close.

Allowing police to lock people up for a month-and-a-half without charge will undermine basic human rights to which everyone in the UK is entitled. It will also damage community relations, make intelligence gathering more difficult and possibly ruin the lives of innocent people. This Bill needlessly sacrifices important civil liberties but gains nothing in the way of security.

The only way to convince MPs to vote against 42 days is to show them how many of their constituents are against this unnecessary and counter-productive piece of legislation.

42 days detention is completely unneccesary, sign the petition, and a copy with just an MPs’ constituents signatures will them as well as full copy to the government.

BBC:

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair has announced his resignation after three years in the job.

He said London mayor Boris Johnson, who took over as chairman of the police authority on Wednesday, had told him he wanted a “change in leadership”.

Sir Ian said that “without the mayor’s backing I do not think I can continue in the job”.

Update:

“I am resigning in the best interests of the people of London and of the Metropolitan Police Service.”

It a bit fucking late for that, isn’t it.

Elsewhere:
Chicken Yoghurt – Sir Ian Blair resigns
Mike Power – The second Blair goes
Tory Troll – Boris Johnson, power politics and the end of Blair
Bloggerheads – Ian Blair resigns

Via

The Market Ticker:

If you think the cost of this bill is $700 billion, you’re wrong. The cost is actually infinite and the entire bill constitutes a giant money-laundering scheme.

Paulson can (and presumably will) buy up to $700 billion of these “assets”, then sell them. Let’s say he decides to buy them at 60 cents on the dollar and sell them for 10. You, the taxpayer, will eat the fifty cents, for an immediate cost of $350 billion dollars.

Having done so, he is then authorized to do so again, since the $700 billion is no longer on the government’s balance sheet.

In fact, he can do this without limit, other than possibly due to the federal debt ceiling, which of course Congress will raise any time we get close to it. Oh yeah, this bill does that right up front too. No need to bother with it the first time around.

Folks, $700 billion isn’t even close to the total cost of this monster.

I don’t know if the above is true or not as I’m not really understanding it all (does anybody?), but what would be cheaper is a suggestion by an American stopped in the street and asked about it on the news the other night, would be for the US government to give every citizen* a million dollars.
I reckon that would do a fuck lot more good than pouring bucketfuls of money down the drain like there’s no tomorrow.

*There’s only 303,824,640 US citizens.

Mr Angry:

I look back to just over three years ago to the Live 8 concerts, and I wonder if the Government completely misunderstood the stated aim of Making Poverty History. Because right now, it looks like they could be about to do just that.

No, Nadine. Don’t stop. Get more involved by opening comments, open a discussion on what you post, defend what you say, listen to what others have to say and you might:

1. learn something
2. get more respect from your political opponents
3. get more out of it