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POPS"Good Faith" Torture Deemed OK Interesting that they set a subjective standard for torture: viz., if the interrogator thought in "good faith" that the method wouldn't cause long-term mental harm. Note that it didn't require that the method would probably cause long-term mental harm, only that the interrogator didn't believe it would. By defining torture subjectively, the Bush administration: 1. Consigned the definition of torture to belief, thereby making it impossible to adjudicate by objective measures. 2. Totally marginalized the detainee's likely reaction to the method and, thereby, nullified the detainee's humanness and recognition as a rights-bearing being. This kind of sophistry one would expect of a brutal dictatorship.
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POPSOxygen may ease headache and migraine Breathing oxygen as opposed to what? I wonder if it has anything to do with the air being clean. Perhaps fresh air would have a similar effect. Fresh air is getting harder to find these days
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POPSWall Street Likes The Bailout Plus Drill, Drill, Drill
But my thought is that a Senate victory might just blow Pelosi out of the water and open the floodgates to Democratic defections in the House. If a drilling bill ever passes Congress, oil prices will keep on plunging — perhaps all the way to $75 a barrel, which is the profitable break-even point for lifting the extra barrel of oil. That would drive the Dow to somewhere between 15,000 and 16,000, and it would have a huge tax-cut effect on the economy. And, of course, it could completely change the November election outlook in a highly favorable way for the GOP. The conventional wisdom says Republicans are gonna get clobbered again this fall. But drill, drill, drill would overturn that wisdom. More drilling today would have the potency of the Reagan tax cuts 28 years ago in the 1980 landslide race. But the GOP has got to make the case. And deregulating oil, which is great policy, would offset much of the bad policy pain coming out of the Fannie-Freddie housing bailout.
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POPSHealth News : Cystitis Cystitis is a painful condition which is usually brought on by infection. The symptoms are a frequent desire to pass urine accompanied by severe burning and pain and sometimes passing blood in the urine.
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POPSDeath In A Bottle Should someone dying from terminal cancer have the right to end their life peacefully? Obviously, this is a very controversial subject, and some of the things that bother me are the depression, state of mind, and pain one is in when dying. Maybe because I had a NDE myself, I feel as though there is a certain wrongness to it, but I can't speak for anyone else.
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POPSShop or Drop? does it have physical correlates? some technicals citation from the article: "Researchers discovered that when the product first flashed on the screen it activated the nucleus accumbens, a section near the middle of the brain that has been implicated in the brain's reward center, effectively appraising the item. When the price appeared, the scientists noticed activity in the mesial prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain known for higher executive functions. Its activity seemed to vary according to the difference between what someone would pay for an item and its actual cost, as if in error adjustment. Finally, the response of the insula (a lateral section of the brain's cortex known to activate during responses to negative stimuli) depended on the purchasing decision--activity there increased when a participant nixed a purchase." what is interesting here is our human crave to understand more and more...
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POPSObama proposes bankruptcy changes Plus, he added, the mortgage and credit crisis facing the country has seen that "pain trickles up," hurting companies and individuals to reaped the rewards of a questionable decade of banking. "Our economy has gotten out of balance," he said. "The American people don't resent wealth, they want to be rich. America has historically rewarded innovation and accomplishment and free enterprise, and I want to ensure we continue to do that."