In fact, the chance that what you are reporting is bogus is much higher than the 5% you so cheerfully claimed with your poignant asterisk. Because journals will only publish novel, interesting findings – and therefore researchers only bother to write up seemingly intriguing counterintuitive findings – the chance that what they eventually are publishing is BS unwittingly is vast.
As a writer, I’ve often said that, among the other things that we need to reclaim, other than the obscene wealth of billionaires, is language. Language has been deployed to mean the exact opposite of what it really means when they talk about democracy or freedom. So I think that turning the word “occupation” on its head would be a good thing, though I would say that it needs a little more work. We ought to say, “Occupy Wall Street, not Iraq,” “Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan,” “Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine.” The two need to be put together. Otherwise people might not read the signs.
America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.
Adam Lewis, one of the 17 accused conspirators in the G20 case, interjected, “Kill whitey!” The group chuckled. Lewis, like all but one of his co-accused, is white. When a Crown lawyer asked the officer what he thought Lewis meant, Showan said in complete seriousness, to “kill white people.” “Deliberately or accidentally, the undercover officers misinterpreted hyperbolic jokes as literal statements of belief,” said Kalin Stacey, a community organizer, friend and supporter of the defendants. “This undercover case highlights the incentive for undercovers to ensure that charges are laid.
I think one of the reasons that I liked Freud right from the beginning was because of his insistence on the reality of the human body. He was functioning at a time when the body was covered up—you had those stiff, white collars and corsets for women—and here was Freud talking about penises, vaginas, anuses, child incest, and things that were considered very shocking and unacceptable at the time. But Freud said, ‘Look, this is the reality of what we are. As bizarre as it sounds, all these orifices in our body have huge impacts in our lives as adults and how we interact with each other. We should acknowledge that, and if we do, we’ll have a much greater understanding of what the human condition is.’
I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested… As I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, ‘I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK.’ And he said, ‘Move on, lady.’ And they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head,” says Smith. “I walk over, and I say, ‘Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that.’ And he said, ‘Lady, do you want to get arrested?’ And I said, ‘Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer.’ He said, ‘You want to get arrested?’ And he pushed me up against the wall.
When discussing the worst sports scandals ever, Penn State is now in the discussion. Forget about Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson and Tiger Woods cheating on his spouse. That’s small stuff. Athletes have been convicted of murder, either in court, or in a nation’s collective mind (see O.J. Simpson). But if the charges against Sandusky hold – it’s telling that neither Paterno, nor anyone else right now, seems to be screaming about his innocence – how much worse are these crimes against children? And it’s because Paterno has been such a positive presence, for so many years, that his negligence here seems so unfathomable. Canning Paterno was the easy call. For Penn State, moving on will be much harder. Reaching out to the victims might be a start.
