j_b

cooperation and sharing have nothing to do with altruism, fuckwit. It's a survival strategy, not a matter of getting high on charity, moron.

so jackass, where did it say or implied anywhere in what I posted that chimps were "altruistic beings, incapable of violence to one another or the offspring of another male"?

sez the quasi-monosyllabic idiot who has graced these pages with his insults for years.

more evidence that our very own village idiot needs remedial reading comprehension.

“… don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or by keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also our closest relatives, the primates. In a study in Taï National Park, in Ivory Coast, chimpanzees took care of group mates wounded by leopards, licking their blood, carefully removing dirt, and waving away flies that came near the wounds. They protected injured companions, and slowed down during travel in order to accommodate them. All of this makes perfect sense given that chimpanzees live in groups for a reason, the same way wolves and humans are group animals for a reason. If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one. We would not be where we are today had our ancestors been socially aloof. “What we need is a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature. Too many economists and politicians model human society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere projection. Like magicians, they first throw their ideological prejudices into the hat of nature, then pull them out by their very ears to show how much nature agrees with them. It’s a trick for which we have fallen for too long. Obviously, competition is part of the picture, but humans can’t live by competition alone.” The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society by Frans de Waal. Harmony Books, 2009 Grieving elephants, sympathetic bonobos, grateful whales—nature is not always red in tooth and claw. In his latest book primatologist Frans de Waal draws on numerous examples from our fellow fauna, such as the chimpanzee in the anecdote below, to make his case that humans are hard-wired to be humane.

[video:youtube]L2iC-kVZYo8

Perhaps, the best I have seen is Wim Wenders' American friend. [video:youtube]pUGOMhevV70

Dogs Understand Fairness, Get Jealous, Study Finds by Nell Greenfieldboyce Dogs have an intuitive understanding of fair play and become resentful if they feel that another dog is getting a better deal, a new study has found. The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at how dogs react when a buddy is rewarded for the same trick in an unequal way. Friederike Range, a researcher at the University of Vienna in Austria, and her colleagues did a series of experiments with dogs who knew how to respond to the command "give the paw," or shake. The dogs were normally happy to repeatedly give the paw, whether they got a reward or not. But that changed if they saw that another dog was being rewarded with a piece of food, while they received nothing. "We found that the dogs hesitated significantly longer when obeying the command to give the paw," the researchers write. The unrewarded dogs eventually stopped cooperating. Scientists have long known that humans pay close attention to inequity. Even little children are quick to yell "Not fair!" But researchers always assumed that animals didn't share this trait. "The argument was that this is a uniquely human phenomenon," says Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta and a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. That changed in 2003 when he and a colleague named Sarah Brosnan did a study on monkeys. Monkeys had to hand a small rock to researchers to get a piece of food in return. Monkeys were happy to do this to get a piece of cucumber. But the monkeys would suddenly act insulted to be offered cucumber if they saw that another monkey was getting a more delicious reward, a grape, for doing the same job. "The one who got cucumber became very agitated, threw out the food, threw out the rock that we exchanged with them, and at some point just stopped performing," says de Waal. In that experiment, the monkeys considered the fairness of two different types of payment. But when Range and her colleagues did a similar study with their trained dogs, testing to see if dogs would become upset if they only got dark bread when other dogs received sausage, they found that dogs did not make that kind of subtle distinction. As long as the dogs got some kind of food payment, even if it wasn't the yummiest kind, the animals would play along. Dogs, like monkeys, live in cooperative societies, so de Waal was not surprised that they would have also some sense of fairness. He expects other animals do as well. For example, he says, lions hunt cooperatively, and he "would predict that lions would be sensitive to who has done what and what do they get for it." http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97944783&ps=rs

skip the anti-tax drivel to 2:20 mark: [video:youtube]KRY7wBuCcBY

The real cost of cheap oil by John Vidal Big Oil is holding its breath. BP's shares are in steep decline after the debacle in the Gulf of Mexico. Barack Obama, the American people and the global environmental community are outraged, and now the company stands to lose the rights to drill for oil in the Arctic and other ecologically sensitive places. The gulf disaster may cost it a few billion dollars, but so what? When annual profits for a company often run to tens of billions, the cost of laying 5,000 miles of booms, or spraying millions of gallons of dispersants and settling 100,000 court cases is not much more than missing a few months' production. It's awkward, but it can easily be passed on. The oil industry's image is seriously damaged, but it can pay handsomely to greenwash itself, just as it managed after Exxon Valdez, Brent Spar and the Ken Saro-Wiwa public relations disasters. In a few years' time, this episode will probably be forgotten – just another blip in the fortunes of the industry that fuels the world. But the oil companies are nervous now because the spotlight has been turned on their cavalier attitude to pollution and on the sheer incompetence of an industry that is used to calling the shots. Big Oil's real horror was not the spillage, which was common enough, but because it happened so close to the US. Millions of barrels of oil are spilled, jettisoned or wasted every year without much attention being paid. [..] There are more than 2,000 major spillage sites in the Niger delta that have never been cleaned up; there are vast areas of the Colombian, Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon that have been devastated by spillages, the dumping of toxic materials and blowouts. Rivers and wells in Venezuela, Angola, Chad, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Uganda and Sudan have been badly polluted. Occidental, BP, Chevron, Shell and most other oil companies together face hundreds of outstanding lawsuits. Ecuador alone is seeking $30bn from Texaco. The only reason oil costs $70-$100 a barrel today, and not $200, is because the industry has managed to pass on the real costs of extracting the oil. If the developing world applied the same pressure on the companies as Obama and the US senators are now doing, and if the industry were forced to really clean up the myriad messes it causes, the price would jump and the switch to clean energy would be swift. If the billions of dollars of annual subsidies and the many tax breaks the industry gets were withdrawn, and the cost of protecting oil companies in developing countries were added, then most of the world's oil would almost certainly be left in the ground. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/may/27/cheap-oil-cost-developing-countries

Future etymologists will have a field day tracing the origins of these linguistic turd-nuggets through the think tank/public relations firm nexus. although there was already plenty of propaganda around to analyze, Orwell could see well into the future (despite Luntz's best effort to make 'Orwellian' a positive attribute)

Have you paid your patriot tax today?

We should play the same game and present paying taxes as patriotic duty, then we could accuse regressives of being unamerican scumbags, which wouldn't be too far off the truth

Right, their pour billions in think tanks to come up with regressive propaganda: "nanny state", "big government", "tax relief", "death tax", "free market", ... and to think it is otherwise well accepted that "taxes are the price to pay to live in a civilized society"

it feels especially good to tell morons to fuck off.

it's not even needed since the entire corporate media and neoliberal elites are already singing that tune in one form or another.

fuck off, Adolf.

only a first class moron doesn't know that budgets are made of spending AND revenue.

Back to California Per capita State spending adjusted for inflation decreased ~17% over the last decade. So spending per capita went down while the Groperator eliminated a 60 year old car license fee worth several billions of revenue (yet gave the money to cities as if the tax were still in place). The only part of the budget that increased over that period is the prison budget (it doubled to ~$9 billions) thanks to the conservative 3 strikes law. It seems pretty clear to me that spending isn't the major cause of California's deficit.

Who said I didn't see a failure? quit making stuff up.

I certainly don't think China is progressive. Why is it that scoundrels always resort to red baiting when they run out of arguments?

I'd hope that everyone has ditched their older plastic bottle by now. I also ditched all the plastic food containers I use for home and use glass only.

I think he is saying that he was trolling for me. You are right the troll was low quality.

Help me Mr Math! How long will the current spill need to flow to create that kind of damage......? I think you may be interested in that bridge for sale in Fremont. It's really nice quality construction, it has many years of use left on it, and it requires minimum maintenance. A good deal all around. Let me know and i can hook you up for a small fee.

California’s Tax System Corporate income taxes have declined over time as a share of General Fund revenues and as a share of corporate profits. If corporations had paid the same share of their profits in corporate taxes in 2006 as they did in 1981, corporate tax collections would have been $8.4 billion higher.– The yield of the state’s sales tax has declined over time, reflecting the shift in economic activity from goods to services and the rise of Internet and mail- order sales that escape taxation. If taxable purchases accounted for the same share of personal income in 2007-08 as they did in 1966-67, the state would have collected an additional $16.4 billion in sales tax revenues. http://www.cbp.org/pdfs/2009/0902_Californias_Tax_System.pdf Who pays taxes in California Over the past two decades, the cost of funding state services has shifted from corporate to personal income taxpayers. Forecasters estimate that personal income tax receipts will provide 54.9 percent of General Fund revenues in 2008-09, up from 35.4 percent in 1980-81. Corporate tax receipts are expected to provide 11.6 percent of General Fund revenues in 2008-09, down from 14.6 percent in 1980-81. New, increased, and expanded corporate tax breaks and the 1996 corporate tax rate reduction are responsible for the decline in the share of state revenues provided by the corporate income tax. Tax cuts have limited growth in state revenues as a whole, with tax cuts enacted since 1993 reducing 2007-08 General Fund revenues by an estimated $12 billion. http://www.cbp.org/pdfs/2008/0804_pp_taxes.pdf All Gain, No Pain: California’s “No Tax” Corporations All California corporations are required to pay at least an annual minimum franchise tax of $800 for the privilege of doing business in the state.1 Profitable corporations pay income taxes at a rate of 8.84 percent. However, many profitable corporations – including some very large ones – are able to avoid paying corporate income taxes by using deductions, credits, and other preferential tax treatment. In fact, in 2001, 72.8 percent (378,344) of the corporations doing business in the state paid just the $800 minimum franchise tax. Even more startling, over half (52.0 percent, 153,441) of the state’s profitable corporations paid no more than the $800 minimum franchise tax, including 46 corporations with over $1 billion in 2001 receipts. Many Corporations Pay No Federal Income Taxes A recent study by the US General Accounting Office found that 73.3 percent of foreign controlled and 63.0 percent of US-controlled corporations paid no federal income taxes in 2000.4 These “no federal tax” corporations included 37.5 percent of foreign-controlled and 45.3 percent of US-controlled large corporations. The percentage of “no tax” foreign-controlled corporations has increased slightly in recent years, rising from 67.6 percent in 1996 to 71.3 percent in 2000, while the percentage of “no tax” US-controlled corporations has remained relatively steady, increasing from 60.3 percent in 1996 to 61.3 percent in 2000.5 http://www.cbp.org/pdfs/2004/0409allgain.pdf As for Texas, it is expected to have a $20 billion deficit next year (20% of the budget), which is California's deficit this year. This despite the fact that California gets 78cents back for every dollar sent to the feds, whereas Texas gets 94cents back which amounts to several more 10's billion dollar returning to Texas.