"For the first time, researchers have demonstrated the ill effects of mindless reading — a phenomenon in which people take in sentence after sentence without really paying attention.Well, now... Maybe we could all, oh, I don't know, pay attention?
Ever read the same paragraph three times? Or get to the end of a page and realize you don't know what you just read?
That's mindless reading. It is the literary equivalent of driving for miles without remembering how you got there — something so common many people don't even notice it.
In a new study of college students, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of British Columbia established a way to study mindless reading in a lab.
Their findings showed that daydreaming has its costs.
The readers who zoned out most tended to do the worst on tests of reading comprehension — a significant, if not surprising, result. The study also suggested that zoning out caused the poor test results, as opposed to other possible factors, such as the complexity of the text or the task.
The researchers hope their work inspires more research into why zoning out happens, and what can be done to stop it.
Those Maoist rebel "democrats" have what they wish. Are they ready for it?: "All that ended June 16 with an agreement to establish an interim government to replace the current national parliament as well as the 'people's government' that rules territory under rebel control.
The Maoists say they will abide by the decisions of a yet-to-be-formed constituent assembly, which will decide what type of government Nepal will have.
But after so many years of living as guerrillas, fighting the government and demanding goals steeped in a Marxist ideology much of the world has long forgotten, the big question is what their leader, known to all as Prachanda, wants for the nation.
The schoolteacher-turned-militant has few democratic credentials, tolerating no dissent as the leader of the guerrillas who call their overriding philosophy 'Prachandapath' — 'Prachanda's Way.'
In interviews since he emerged from hiding, his pronouncements about Nepal's new government have been vague and sometimes contradictory.
'There shouldn't be parliamentary republicanism' in Nepal, he recently told the weekly magazine Nepal. He ruled out an autocracy, but said that 'we need a republicanism of our own kind.' He didn't elaborate.
His plans for the struggling economy are equally hazy.
Despite the basics of the creed named after Mao Zedong, the Chinese communist leader, Prachanda says the rebels will encourage industry, job creation and the quest for profits.
"
Pentagon won't hide interrogation tactics : "Under pressure from Congress, the
Pentagon has dropped plans to keep some interrogation techniques secret by putting them in a classified section of a military manual, defense officials said Tuesday.
...descriptions of interrogation techniques initially planned for the classified section are either being made public or are being eliminated as tactics that can be used against prisoners.
...Military leaders have argued that disclosing all the interrogation techniques public would make it easier for enemy prisoners to resist questioning.
...any interrogation technique not included in the manual would be considered illegal."
Communist Party USA Online -: "A Call to Action: Defend Democracy, Change Congress in the 2006 Elections!It's pretty common to talk about the Democratic Party in the USA as "the left" and the Republican Party as "the right".
by CPUSA National Committee, 03/10/2006 15:11
The Bush-Cheney Administration has plunged our nation into the worst Constitutional crisis since the Civil War. The abuses of power they have committed are legion: an illegal pre-emptive war, lying to Congress and the people, warrant-less spying, mass incarceration of innocent people here and around the world, torture, corrupt no-bid contracts with crony corporations like Halliburton, criminal negligence in abandoning the victims of Hurricane Katrina..."
The American Nazi Party: "The year is 2025, White people HAVE become a MINORITY in America. On our streets hang Aryan men who refused to accept the 'New Way,' or perhaps they just looked too White. Perhaps they never thought MUD RULE would really come.
White girls who refuse the advances of Negroids, are publicly gang-raped so as to serve as examples to other shuddering Aryan females. Children are now taken from their houses, by force, to be brought up in a 'Multi-Cultural' home of Negroids, Arabs, Muslims and Gooks, all in the name of 'brotherhood and love'...
And yet, some fight back! Alone or in small cells, Aryans...men and boys...but most of all women who stand the most to lose, since the decline of real men among the White Folk, strike back...at night and with any weapon near at hand."
Aryan Attack (a publication of the National Socialist Movement, a NAZI organization):
"A nation’s economy dramatically influences the daily lives of all of its citizens. Today we suffer under a greed based Jewish economy. From the Jew Alan Greenspan, who heads the nation’s financial decision making body, the Federal Reserve, to the average sheeple who’ve bought into the Jew lie of Wall Street swindler and Jew Ivan Boesky that “greed is healthy,” altruism and the good of the whole is a dead thought. What’s important in today’s society is greed and its accompanying individualism. “It’s all about me” is the prevailing attitude.
In sharp contrast to this self-centered destructive worldview is National Socialism. National Socialism offers the only long term workable economic system. And it’s proven. When the world was suffering through a terrible economic depression, National Socialist Germany was not! What made the Nazi economy work, while the Jew based economies of the rest of the world failed?"
King Gyanendra sacked the government and assumed full power in February 2005, vowing to crush a decade-old Maoist revolt in which more than 13,000 people have died.
At least five people have been killed and hundreds wounded in police action against pro-democracy protesters, who are into the 13th day of a general strike that has brought the impoverished nation to a standstill.
King Gyanendra has offered to hold elections by April next year, but activists say he cannot be trusted and should immediately hand over power to an all-party government.
....The United States and India, Nepal's giant neighbour, have both called repeatedly for the restoration of democracy.
This is typical MSM reporting, casting MAOist (likely Chinese backed) rebels as pro-democracy insurgents, and providing no background that really helps anyone to understand the players. Does the USA really back Maoist "freedom fighters"? Doubtful.
