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POPSGiant Turkey Chases Boston Woman, Pecks Bottom Repeatedly When dispatched to the scene of a turkey, Verrier offers advice instead. He tells people not to feed them, not to be intimidated by them, and to keep their distance. Still, some people cannot help themselves. They need to be near the turkeys. Distance-shmistance, we want to be near the turkeys. I, for one, am against the city of Boston trying to regulate mutually consensual human-turkey behavior. A light ass-pecking never hurt anyone, am I right? Even though this incident happened right near my apartment, I have not been lucky enough to experience any super-sized turkeys on my errands, sadly. Look at the size of that sucker...he's gotta be like 12 feet tall! :)
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POPSGo Home Wal-Mart - India Wants Traditional Marketplaces Yet another example of American retail giants moving into other countries. Like there is not enough money coming in where they are now! If you want to be disgusted, just read about the Walton family after the founder Sam Walton died. They split the companies fortune so that each family member had over 7 billion (yes ... billion) dollars each from their share of the company. How much more could any one person want in this life. How could you ever spend that much ... and why would you want more!? If they don't want you there, leave the Third World countries with their traditions alone.
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POPSAt The Airport, You Better Smile... We now know the sound of George Orwell rolling in his grave. "Here's where it gets really absurd. Apparently, these Behavior Detection Officers work in pairs. One scenario is that an officer might move in to "help" a passenger retrieve their belongings after they've been screened. And then the officer will ask where the passenger is headed. If the passenger's reaction sets off alarm bells in the officer's well-trained mind, another officer will move in and detain them." "So while TSA employees are confiscating our scissors and water bottles, they're going to secretly be staring at us, looking for some telltale sign of terrorist intent in a grimace, a sigh, a crinkled nose? Who knows what? In the end, the Behavior Detection Officers are the ones who are really acting suspicious. Which is the truth of the matter anyway."
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POPS6 US Sergeants: Ain't No Surge
This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias. Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda. However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fe
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POPSNew Math Theory Explains Toddler's "Word Spurt" A bell-shaped word distribution and a steady child learning rate turn out to be enough to bring about the extraordinary explosion seen in children's vocabularies around this age. McMurray notes that languages have only a small number of very easy-to-learn words and many more intermediate words. So when a baby has been exposed to enough language to learn the easy words, she will acquire just a few words. As she is exposed to more language, she begins to learn the medium words. And because there are a lot of medium words, she is likely to pick up a lot of words at this stage. This, McMurray says, is the vocabulary explosion.
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POPS"What terrorists want": Louise Richardson interview KQED (San Francisco) interviews Louise Richardson, Northern Ireland-born terrorism expert currently at Harvard and recent author of What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat . She is highly critical of the Bush administration. Program is an hour long; worth a listen.
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