Free Republic

What else can we do with the $1.25 trillion we'll save by eliminating these obsolete financial middleman parasites? A lot. Technology has leapfrogged the banking sector, rendering it as obsolete as buggy whips. So why are we devoting 9% of our economy to an obsolete parasite? Financial sector profits now total a staggering 4.5% of GDP (gross domestic product), while the expenses generated by financial churning account for another 4.5% of the economy....

WASHINGTON — One of the latest Obamacare pitches to get young adults to sign up for health insurance starts out with a mother's kitchen note reminding her grown son to enroll. "Mom, you know I can't afford it," the young black man protests, as he sits down at a kitchen table next to a bespectacled woman with a laptop computer linked to the U.S. federal enrollment website, HealthCare.gov. "But for the first time you can," she replies reassuringly. "You go to the HealthCare.gov website, compare quality plans and you could get help paying for it."

This Wednesday the governor of Kuzbass Mr. Aman Tooleyev urged the State Duma’s lawmakers attending the meeting of the provincial parliament to pass a bill against freeloaders and “professional unemployed” who number 4.4 thousand people in the province. “This is dangerous from the both economic and moral point of view. A stratum of “professionals” who don’t work, don’t want to work, won’t work has emerged. There are 4.4 thousand of such ‘professional unemployed’ in Kuzbass’, said Tooleyev. The governor added that there are 22 thousand of unemployed while the local labour registry offices offer 30 thousand jobs. “They [the professional...

. . . left my chainsaw in the driveway to use the restroom inside the house. Someone driving buy saw it. He slammed on the brakes, stole it, and drove off. Neat, quick, easy. Mind you there was only a 5-minute hiatus in between my cutting. And the driver was a random passer-by. That suggests to me that a high number of rural Fresno County motorists can prove to be opportunistic thieves at any given moment. The saw was new; I liked it — an off-the-shelf $400 Echo that ran well. I assume it will be sold off at a...

Defeating the Cuckoo Brood parasite-host interactions show ongoing antagonistic coevolution. What mediates rapid behavioral changes that do not reflect genetic change? Davies and Welbergen show that reed warblers learn from their neighbors to behave aggressively toward models of the parasitic common cuckoo. Furthermore, reed warblers seem to be predisposed to learn to respond to cuckoos as enemies: Hosts that witnessed neighbors mobbing a harmless parrot model did not increase their aggression toward a cuckoo model. Thus, birds have templates for threats, and relevant antithreat behaviors can be turned on or off depending on social experience.

There's no helping you. This site is now just a diversion -- like a train wreck. This site is inherently for and about raving egomaniacs, and Jim's site policies -- which amount to excluding reality and actual dialogue in favor of political/militaristic pornography -- is conducive to cognitive dissonance, which at the times your worldview is threatened leads you into psychotic breaks (on the political cognitive plane, that is, and just maybe in other realms too). Not to mention that your baseline politics is based in mythology about American demographics, science, economics, ethics etc. You spoonfeed each other in the...

Researchers have found stronger evidence for a link between a parasite in cat faeces and undercooked meat and an increased risk of schizophrenia. Research published today in Procedings of the Royal Society B, shows how the invasion or replication of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii in rats may be inhibited by using anti-psychotic or mood stabilising drugs. The researchers tested anti-psychotic and mood stabilising medications used for the treatment of schizophrenia on rats infected with T. gondii and found they were as, or more, effective at preventing behaviourial alterations as anti-T. gondii drugs. This led them to believe that T. gondii...

VB Films/CNRS Images Media A grasshopper was tricked into jumping into water by a hairworm that had infected it and had eaten most of its insides. In the water, the worm left the insect to start the next portion of its life. The grasshopper drowned. Only in science fiction do people's minds get possessed by alien beings. For grasshoppers, zombification is an everyday hazard, and it obliges them to end their lives in a bizarre manner. Biologists have discovered and hope to decipher a deadly cross talk between the genomes of a grasshopper and a parasitic worm that infects...

<p>House Democrats yesterday proposed granting legal residency and the eventual option of U.S. citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants now working in the United States.</p> <p>Laying out their own principles for revamping the nation's immigration laws in response to what House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called President Bush's "political ploy," Democrats went beyond Mr. Bush's plan for a temporary-worker program and called for a system of "earned legalization" for illegal aliens.</p>