[Quote]:

A study out Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined attitudes about energy efficiency in liberals and conservatives, and found that promoting energy-efficient products and services on the basis of their environmental benefits actually turned conservatives off from picking them. The researchers first quizzed participants on how much they value various benefits of energy efficiency, including reducing carbon emissions, reducing foreign oil dependence, and reducing how much consumers pay for energy; cutting emissions appealed to conservatives the least.

The study then presented participants with a real-world choice: With a fixed amount of money in their wallet, respondents had to “buy” either an old-school lightbulb or an efficient compact florescent bulb (CFL), the same kind Bachmann railed against. Both bulbs were labeled with basic hard data on their energy use, but without a translation of that into climate pros and cons. When the bulbs cost the same, and even when the CFL cost more, conservatives and liberals were equally likely to buy the efficient bulb. But slap a message on the CFL’s packaging that says “Protect the Environment,” and “we saw a significant drop-off in more politically moderates and conservatives choosing that option,” said study author Dena Gromet, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

Got that? With all other factors being equal, conservatives were less likely to buy the exact same lightbulb if you told them it would help the environment.

Another source:

[Quote]:

In the second study, 210 volunteers were interviewed and then given $2 each to purchase a light bulb. The light bulbs offered for sale were either “normal” or an energy efficient variety (with a higher price.) The higher priced bulbs were identical but were advertised in two different ways: one made claims about how the light bulb was good for the planet, the other claimed to save the buyer money by using less electricity. The researchers found those with more conservative views were less inclined to buy the special bulbs when the labeling touted its planet-saving features. When it was labeled as a money-saver however, conservatives were quite willing to buy them. Those with a more liberal view were found willing to buy the special bulb regardless of which advertising was used. In another variant of the study, the researchers found that both conservatives and liberals bought the special bulb over the “normal” bulb if they were priced the same.

The researchers suggest that those people in the study with conservative ideology were not necessarily against buying so-called green products, but have been conditioned to associate such terms with liberalism, and thus, shy away from products labeled as such.

[Quote]:

Last year in Norristown, Pa., Lakisha Briggs’ boyfriend physically assaulted her, and the police arrested him. But in a cruel turn of events, a police officer then told Ms. Briggs, “You are on three strikes. We’re gonna have your landlord evict you.”

Yes, that’s right. The police threatened Ms. Briggs with eviction because she had received their assistance for domestic violence. Under Norristown’s “disorderly behavior ordinance,” the city penalizes landlords and tenants when the police respond to three instances of “disorderly behavior” within a four-month period. The ordinance specifically includes “domestic disturbances” as disorderly behavior that triggers enforcement of the law.

After her first “strike,” Ms. Briggs was terrified of calling the police. She did not want to do anything to risk losing her home. So even when her now ex-boyfriend attacked her with a brick, she did not call. And later, when he stabbed her in the neck, she was still too afraid to reach out. But both times, someone else did call the police. Based on these “strikes,” the city pressured her landlord to evict. After a housing court refused to order an eviction, the city said it planned to condemn the property and forcibly remove Ms. Briggs from her home. The ACLU intervened, and the city did not carry out its threats, and even agreed to repeal the ordinance. But just two weeks later, Norristown quietly passed a virtually identical ordinance that imposes fines on landlords unless they evict tenants who obtain police assistance, including for domestic violence.

[Quote]:

The Internet—the global system of interconnected networks that’s become an increasingly central means of commerce and communication capable of bringing far-flung civilizations together—reached its apex this week, after a man claiming to be the fiancé of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic character Twilight Sparkle contacted a user of online community DeviantArt to demand he stop drawing sexual pictures of his imaginary pony-bride. The request was made in a letter that was then published in full on the Internet, which no longer has any reason to exist, having achieved everything it has ever set out to do.

Given that ASCII has always had an asterisk character, why hasn’t the Unicode design committee had the sense of humor to add an obelisk character?

[Quote]:

The 75-page study, by oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, was based on a field-by-field analysis of most of the major oil exploration and development projects in the world, and it predicted a 20 per cent increase in global oil production by 2020.

Well if you can’t trust an oil executive that says it’s not necessary to switch to alternate fuels, then I guess you just can’t trust anyone.

[Quote]:

After wrapping up a Saturday afternoon segment on the impact climate change may have had on the extreme winter weather that hit the Northeast this weekend, CNN anchor Deb Feyerick turned to a feature on a large asteroid that will just miss earth as it passes by.

“We want to bring in our science guy, Bill Nye, and talk about something else that’s falling from the sky, and that is an asteroid,” said Feyerick. “What’s coming our way? Is this the effect of, perhaps, global warming? Or is this just some meteoric occasion?”

[Quote]:

According to an Amex Web page, the arrangement works like this. Amex cardholders first sync their card with Twitter. Then, when they come across products that are eligible to purchase under the plan — products that American Express will promote through a Twitter feed — they simply send out a tweet that includes a special hashtag. Amex will then send them an @-reply with a confirming hashtag. Finally, the buyer has to send out a second tweet with the special hashtag within 15 minutes.

I’m going to “synch” my credit card with my twitter account?

And I’m going to wait for them to send me tweets?

And then I’m going to tweet them back when I want to buy something?

Why would I want to do this?

[Quote]:

Messages have been spreading on Facebook claiming that the social network will be closed between February 29th and February 31st, 2013.

And, of course, it’s kinda true. You won’t be able to log into Facebook on February 29th, February 30th or February 31st this year. Nor will you have much luck, although the messages don’t mention this, on June 31st.

[Quote]:

Meet the HTC Mini. Though you might mistake it for the phone you had in 2006, it’s an accessory for the HTC Butterfly (known as the Droid DNA in the U.S.). Chinese Butterfly owners can use the Mini to make and take calls without removing their super-sized phones from their pockets.

[Quote]:

Al-Shihri, a “veteran jihadist,” traveled to Afghanistan shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks to fight coalition troops, only to be captured weeks later, according to West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. He was sent to the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he stayed for six years before being released to Saudi Arabia. There, he entered a so-called “jihadi rehab” program that attempted to turn terrorists into art students by getting them to get “negative energy out on paper,” as the program’s director told ABC News in 2009.

But just months after he supposedly entered the fingerpainting camp, al-Shihri reappeared in Yemen where he was suspected to have been behind a deadly bombing at the U.S. embassy there.

Wait, what? fingerpainting camp?

[Quote]:

Horse DNA has been found in some beef burgers being sold in UK and Irish supermarkets, the Republic of Ireland’s food safety authority (FSAI) has said.

The FSAI said the meat came from two processing plants in Ireland, Liffey Meats and Silvercrest Foods, and the Dalepak Hambleton plant in Yorkshire.

[..]

A total of 27 products were analysed, with 10 of them containing horse DNA and 23 containing pig DNA.

Thing is, there’s probably worse things in the burgers than a little bit of horse, of course. And no one can tell if it’s horse, of course.

[@GroverNorquist]:

The Bush tax cuts lapsed at midnight last night. Every R voting for Senate bill is cutting taxes and keeping his/her pledge.

Yes, I think all the tags I applied to this post are justified.

[Quote]:

The funniest poll of the afternoon comes from the folks over at Public Policy Polling, who have results that are new and legitimate results (if a bit heavy on the forced fantasy questions) finding that 49 percent of Republicans and six percent of Democrats believe ACORN stole the 2012 election for Barack Obama — despite the pesky fact that ACORN folded in 2010. How … wait … huh?

[Quote]:

This really took me by surprise. Just bought a new Naga 2012 mouse, installed the software and get greeted by a login screen right after. No option to bypass it to use the software to configure the mouse, set the options, sensitivity, shortcuts, macros etc.

So I go ahead and create an account and try to log in. Nothing. Try several more times, and still nothing. Try to make new accounts with different email addresses and it still wont work.

Finally call Razer who tells me the activation server is down, and I wont be able to use the mouse until it goes back up and will only be able to use it as a standard plug and play mouse til then. I ask about a workaround to use the mouse offline and they say there is none. Supposedly once the mouse is activated on the computer offline mode will work, but it needs to upload my profile and activate my account first and since their server is down its not going to happen. I ask for a supervisor to confirm this is the case and ask again for a workaround to use it offline. He said sorry theres nothing they can do, tells me the call center is closing and hangs up on me.

I’m pretty shocked Razer thought it was a good idea to do this to customers. Nowhere on the box does it say anything about needing an internet connection to “activate” a mouse. If the servers go down in the future, anyone who buys this mouse is out of luck.

[Quote]:

“It’s scary to know that something like this can happen in a free country. You’re not accused of any crime. You haven’t been contacted by anyone. No investigation has been done. No due process has taken place,” he said.

He got a hotel room at the Pearl Harbor naval base while he worked things out. Being on the list didn’t stop him from staying on a base that’s home to submarines, cruisers and destroyers.

He’s way, way too dangerous to be allowed in a plane. But a naval base? No problem!

[Quote]:

Even if it turns out that programs like the Liverpool Pathway save big money, promoting end-of-life care on fiscal grounds just plays into fears that the medical-industrial complex is rushing our loved ones to the morgue to save on doctors and hospital beds.When I asked British specialists whether the Liverpool protocol cut costs, they insisted they had never asked the question — and never would.“I don’t think we would dare,” said Sir Thomas. “There was some very nasty press here in this country this year about the Pathway, saying it was a way of killing people quickly to free up hospital beds. The moment you go into that argument, you might threaten the whole program.”In America, nothing happens without a cost-benefit analysis. But the case for a less excruciating death can stand on a more neutral, less disturbing foundation, namely that it is simply a kinder way of death.“There are lots of reasons to believe you could save money,” said Emanuel. “I just think we can’t do it for the reason [that it saves] money.”

[Quote]:

In the last week of September alone, three companies — Dunkin’ Donuts, ConAgra Foods and Brinker International, which operates Chili’s — announced that over the next decade, they would no longer buy pork derived from pigs housed in gestation crates.

What does Dunkin’ Donuts fry their donuts in…?

[Quote]:

Today the United States Patent and Trademark office granted the domain name registrar a patent for “announcing a domain name registration on a social website”.

[Quote]:

A fact-challenged newspaper ad attacking President Barack Obama addresses some standard wedge issues: same-sex marriage, illegal immigration, Islamic law.

Then there’s this claim: “Barack Hussein Obama will move America to force doctors to assist homosexuals in buying surrogate babies.”

It’s one of those statements that’s so far outside reality, our experts wondered where to start.

[Quote]:

Investigators say a Georgia man took his stepson and put him on a bus for California. The teen was spotted by a security guard at the downtown Greyhound bus station.

It was last Tuesday at the downtown bus station that security guard Joe Gonzalez first noticed Mitch Comer, 18, looking like lost and scared 12-year-old. Alarmed by the teen’s frail appearance and the story he told, Gonzalez, a retired police sergeant, notified the LAPD.

“The story we got was that the stepfather took the kid to the bus depot, said ‘Here’s $200, here’s a list of the homeless shelters in Los Angeles, you’re a man now and don’t come back,’” said LAPD Commander Andrew Smith.

The teen told police he had been held captive by his parents, Paul and Sheila Comer, for four years after being taken out of school in the 8th grade. The Comers are now in custody after being arrested at their home in Dallas, an upscale Georgia suburb. They’re facing child abuse and false imprisonment charges, and their two younger daughters were removed from the home.

Wednesday night’s AFC Champions League clash between Iranian side Sepahan and Saudi Arabia’s Al-Ahli produced no goals, but there was certainly some explosive action at the Foolad Shahr Stadium.

[Quote]:

When Apple founder Steve Jobs died after a long fight with cancer last year, software engineer Tony Tseung sent an email to a Buddhist group in Thailand to find out what happened to his old boss now that he’s no longer of this world.

This month, Tseung received his answer. Jobs has been reincarnated as a celestial warrior-philosopher, the Dhammakaya group said in a special television broadcast, and he’s living in a mystical glass palace hovering above his old office at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif. headquarters.

You can laugh now, but in a year all the dead founders will have suspiciously similar glass palaces over their former headquarters, and you’ll all be claiming the design is obvious and no one could design a decent afterlife without it.

[Quote]:

Despite recent negative press, a majority of Americans, 54%, think the U.S. Transportation Security Administration is doing either an excellent or a good job of handling security screening at airports. At the same time, 41% think TSA screening procedures are extremely or very effective at preventing acts of terrorism on U.S. airplanes, with most of the rest saying they are somewhat effective.

There is an old joke from the Soviet era:
“Why do we like Lenin? Because he played football with the children, when instead he could just have had them executed.”

Quote

A newlywed woman from Quebec drowned Friday during her session in a river in Rawdon, about 75 kilometres north of Montreal.

Maria Pantazopoulos, 30, of Laval was standing at the edge of the Ouareau River when her gown became heavy as it soaked up the water and the current pulled her away.

A recent wave of “Trash the Dress” copycat photoshoots shows us that equality for women extends to the Darwin Awards.

[Quote]:

Danny Tarkanian is the Republican nominee in a newly created congressional district in Nevada. He also seems to think his opponent has a very good makeup artist. During a speech to a GOP club earlier this week, Tarkanian went into a lengthy rant about how “all these black Democrats” have accused him of making a racist comment. He then levied an unusual allegation against state Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, his Democratic opponent, claiming that “[w]e could be like Steven Horsford who’s not doing anything with [the African-American] community and, you know, pretend we’re black and maybe try to get some votes if that’s where it is.”

This is the man Tarkanian accused of pretending to be black:

Quote

Belarus’ top security agency, the KGB, has summoned a Swedish advertising team for questioning after the group air-dropped hundreds of parachute-wearing teddy bears that carried pro-human rights messages onto the soil of the authoritarian former Soviet state.

The summons, signed by an investigator named P Tsernavsky and posted on the KGB’s website on Saturday, said the agency was investigating the “criminal case” of the advertising group’s “illegal crossing” into Belarusian airspace.

The agency threatened the Swedes with fines or “correctional work for up to two years, or imprisonment for up to six months” if they did not show up in 10 days.

Mr. Lukashenko has never heard of Ms. Streisand?

[Quote]:

Officials in east Mississippi operate a “school-to-prison pipeline” that incarcerates students for disciplinary infractions as minor as dress code violations with a policy that affects mostly black and disabled children, the U.S. Justice Department said Friday.

The Justice Department said police in the city of Meridian routinely arrest public school students without determining if there’s probable cause when the school wants to press charges for a violation. Federal authorities say the students are then denied due process in youth court and on probation. The Justice Department did not outline specific allegations of wrongdoing against the school district in a letter to state and local authorities. Instead, it appears from the letter that the problems begin once a student is arrested.

Once arrested, the youth court puts the students on probation, sometimes without proper legal representation, according to the letter. If the students are on probation, future school violations could be considered a probation violation that requires them “to serve any suspensions from school incarcerated in the juvenile detention center,” the department said.

That means if a student is on probation and then gets suspended for a minor infraction like “dress code violations, flatulence, profanity, and disrespect,” the student could have to serve that suspension in the detention center.

“The students most severely affected by these practices are black children and children with disabilities in Meridian,” the Justice Department said.