People in Oklahoma finally decide that haters have gone too far: two thousand people picket the Westboro Baptists at elementary school

For years, the only people who have been standing up to the Westboro
Baptists have been motorcycle gang members and liberals. It took a lot
for regular folks in Oklahoma to become outraged.

The main issue of the Westboro Baptists is hating homosexuals. Liberals in Santa Monica chased them off (see video), but conservative Christians should do more about the haters than merely protecting their own children when the Westboro Baptists show up at the temporary elementary school of tornado victims. All children should be protected all the time. And so should adults.

Conservative Christians should worry about their own sins, and let God deal with homosexuals as he sees fit. Apparently, God sees fit to leave them alone. The tornado that killed seven children at Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore Oklahoma wasn't caused by God deciding to smite children. It was an act of nature.

The truth is that the Westboro people are just doing openly what the Republican-controlled House of Representatives does with much more powerful effect. The congressmen simply use (slightly) more controlled vocabulary to talk about it. Instead of picking very personal locations to vent their ugly feelings, socially acceptable haters do it on national television and talk radio. I think that's really worse. So why don't 2000 people picket them??? Because the 2000 people don't seem to mind the other stuff, they just got mad when the Westboro folks were attacking white kids. Shame on the public for accepting the haters who are the most harmful, and for accepting the Westboro bullies most of the time.

Westboro Baptist Church Picketers Run Off By 2000 Protestors In Oklahoma (Video)
by Leslie Salzillo
Daily Kos member
Apr 06, 2014

It was a 'no contest' showdown, when thousands of folks in Moore, Oklahoma, came out in the cold and rain, to counter-protest the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC). The vile WBC group was scheduled to picket a school, where children had died in last year's horrific tornadoes. Their allotted time was 2:00 - 2:30 on Sunday, April 6 [2014]. The police were there to enforce free speech, but were hardly a deterrent when the large crowd began crossing the road towards the hate group. Within two minutes, the WBC picketers realized the danger, stuffed themselves, and their signs, into their vehicles - and left the scene rather quickly. Smart move on their part. No arrests were made.

See KOCO News Video

YouTube Video of Oklahoma Protest Against WBC (by AJVegas)

Good for the folks of Oklahoma. This isn't a first. Communities around the country continue to trump the WBC's odious agenda. Last year the residents of Santa Monica, California, formed a human chain to border a pro-LGBT high school. The WBC had no choice but to slither away on that day as well.

Video of Santa Monica Protest Against WBC (by Ben Ross) [Maura Larkins note: the Santa Monica video has music.]

Speaking of the House of Representatives, there's a new theory about what motivates them:

Tough life: After working four straight days, House GOP plans 18-day vacation
by Jed Lewison
Daily Kos
Apr 07, 2014

Today is Monday, April 7. Election day is Tuesday, November 4. There are 212 days between now and then. Yet:

Once the House adjourns on Thursday, it’s in recess until April 28, giving members time back home to run for reelection. House GOP leaders have scheduled only 55 more days of legislating (less than two full months in session) for the year prior to Election Day, according to the House calendar issued by Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s office.

So here's the question: Are they merely lazy? Or are they trying to run out the clock until election day? After all, as we learned last fall during the shutdown, when House Republicans show up for work, they tend to make problems for themselves.

Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?

Study: Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?
By John Cloud
Feb. 26, 2010

The notion that liberals are smarter than conservatives is familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. The College Democrats are said to be ugly, smug and intellectual; the College Republicans, pretty, belligerent and dumb. There's enough truth in both stereotypes that the vast majority of college students opt not to join either club.

But are liberals actually smarter? A libertarian (and, as such, nonpartisan) researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has just written a paper that is set to be published in March by the journal Social Psychology Quarterly. The paper investigates not only whether conservatives are dumber than liberals but also why that might be so. (See the top 10 political gaffes of 2009.)

The short answer: Kanazawa's paper shows that more-intelligent people are more likely to say they are liberal. They are also less likely to say they go to religious services. These aren't entirely new findings; last year, for example, a British team found that kids with higher intelligence scores were more likely to grow into adults who vote for Liberal Democrats, even after the researchers controlled for socioeconomics. What's new in Kanazawa's paper is a provocative theory about why intelligence might correlate with liberalism. He argues that smarter people are more willing to espouse "evolutionarily novel" values — that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers (liberalism, as Kanazawa defines it), which never would have occurred to us back when we had to hunt to feed our own clan

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1968042,00.html#ixzz0giCHiKMB

Conservatives are happier; they are better at rationalizing inequalities

Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?
AOL News
Jeanna Bryner
2008-05-07
provided by Live Science

Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

The rationalization measure included statements such as: "It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others," and "This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are."

To justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic status in society based on hard work and good performance. In that way, one's social class attainment, whether upper, middle or lower, would be perceived as totally fair and justified.

If your beliefs don't justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings.

"Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives," the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, "apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light."

The results support and further explain a Pew Research Center survey from 2006, in which 47 percent of conservative Republicans in the U.S. described themselves as "very happy," while only 28 percent of liberal Democrats indicated such cheer.

The same rationalizing phenomena could apply to personal situations as well.

"There is no reason to think that the effects we have identified here are unique to economic forms of inequality," the researchers write. "Research suggests that highly egalitarian women are less happy in their marriages compared with their more traditional counterparts, apparently because they are more troubled by disparities in domestic labor."

The current study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/are-conservatives-happier-than-liberals/20080507160009990001

A fine balance

We're a nation of Santas and Scrooges, the statistics tell us. A nation of opposites. Liberal and conservative, rich and poor, right and left, devout and debauched, anorexic and obese, educated and ignorant, honest and deceitful, greedy and generous.

It seems that the human race was designed to be constantly finding new ways to balance opposing tendencies. Maybe a leader who won't compromise is not the wisest leader in such a world.

U.S. Is Nation of Santas and Scrooges
By John Blake,CNN
Posted: 2007-12-25

Click here to see the original post.


Which statement is true?


Americans are some the most generous people on the planet. Or: Americans are some of the stingiest.

Both are correct.

America is a country of Santas and Scrooges -- it just depends on how you look at the numbers. Americans, it turns out, are as divided by their attitudes toward giving as they are by politics.

Some numbers hint at the divisions. Americans, for example, gave $8.4 billion to Hurricane Katrina and tsunami victims in 2005, according to The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. Americans give more to private philanthropy than any other country, a Johns Hopkins University study concluded.

But during the same year as Katrina, the U.S. government gave 0.22 percent of its Gross National Income to foreign aid, ranking near the bottom -- 20th out of 22 -- of all Western nations, according to the Organization for Economic Development and Co-operation, an international agency that measures international economic data. Norway and Sweden were the top two.

The truth is that Americans are generous when it comes to private aid, domestic or overseas. But the U.S. government is comparatively stingy when helping the poor, here and abroad.

The disparity is nothing new. It's a reflection of a political debate over the role of government in America that dates to the 18th century, scholars say. Americans have long clashed over what's the most effective way to help the poor -- through government or charity.

"America is firmly rooted in the idea of the rugged individual -- you do it on your own and you don't turn to the government for help," says Mark Robert Rank, author of "One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All."

This debate divides philanthropic leaders as well. Several philanthropic and poverty experts were recently asked about the role of charity versus government in helping the poor. They couldn't agree either.

Some say the most effective way to help the poor is through charity, or private sources. Their argument: Charities are cheaper and more efficient because they depend on volunteers and personal contact.

"Americans know they're not stingy people," says Carol Adelman, a director at the Hudson Institute, a private research center that champions charitable giving.

"They've always preferred working though private institutions," she says. "Private aid doesn't try to do it all for people. It also works more at the local level because it works more people-to-people."

Charities also transform the giver, not just the recipient, says Arthur Brooks, author of "Who Really Cares," a book that says that conservatives care more for the poor than liberals because they give more money to charity.

Brooks says studies show that people who volunteer and donate to charity are happier than people who simply write a check -- though that, too, has its benefits.

"You don't become a better person when you pay taxes but you do when you give," Brooks says. "When we're responsible for voluntarily taking care of private needs in this country, we are in control. We are empowered."

Yet others say that government does a better job of helping the poor because it has the economic and public policy clout to attack poverty's root causes.

Lester Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University, says people often think that American's generous charitable donations compensate for any deficiency in government aid.

Charities just can't do as much for the poor because they don't have the economic muscle of the U.S. government, he says.

"There's such an enormous difference between the two that it's ludicrous to argue that one makes up for the other," Salamon says.

Besides, much of the money that goes to charity doesn't go directly to poor. It goes to administrative costs or other philanthropic endeavors that have little to do with feeding, clothing and housing the poor, he says.

"Most of the [charitable] money goes to places that aren't typically focused on the poor," Salamon says. "Only about 12 percent of our giving goes to the poor."

Rank, author of "One Nation, Underprivileged," says charities also aren't equipped to address the "structural failings" that cause poverty: the lack of affordable health care, the disappearance of manufacturing jobs and underfunded school districts.

Americans may love to give to the poor, but they don't do a good job of lifting people out of poverty, Rank said. He said America has the highest rate of poverty in the industrialized world, though it is the wealthiest nation.

The country's economic system is rigged against poor people no matter how hard some work, Rank says.

"We're playing a large-scale version of musical chairs," he says. "We have 10 people playing and only eight chairs available. We can say individual things like you need to be quicker, you need to listen to the music better, but we've set this up so that some people are going to lose out, regardless."

There's a place for donating to food pantries during the holiday season, Rank says, but people shouldn't stop there.

"We can't lose sight," Rank says, "of why people are turning to those food pantries in the first place."

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/us-is-nation-of-santas-and-scrooges/20071225083009990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

Conservatives, liberals and the anterior cingulate cortex

Can you withhold your habitual response when it's necessary? Then your anterior cingulate cortex is in good working order.

When human beings find themselves at a dead end, their anterior cingulate cortex tells them that they need to change course. Or at least that's what it should do.

But in some people, this part of the brain is less sensitive, causing these individuals to ignore new information.

43 college students were hooked up to electroencephalographs and given a button to press when a computer flashed the letter M. They weren't supposed to press the button when the computer flashed W.

The computer usually showed M, so the subjects got in the habit of pressing the button. It turned out that some people just can't let go of a habit, even when the situation calls for them to change course.

Those who did best on the test had the most electrical activity in their brains when the "No Go" cues were presented, according to researcher David Amodio.

Some people, it seems, will just keep on doing the same thing, even when they are receiving information that tells them they aren't getting anywhere.

Students who had identified themselves as most liberal were the most accurate in pressing the button, and had the most electrical activity in their brains.

See articles:
Los Angeles Times
September 10, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-politics10sep10,0,5982337.story?coll=la-home-center

Chicago Tribune
September 10, 2007
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-politicalbrain_bothsep10,1,6328755.story

All this makes me wonder how it would have changed history if George W. Bush had a more sensitive anterior cingulate cortex.