Former president George W. Bush weighed in on the release of Dick Cheney’s new book during an appearance on Fox and Friends on Thursday morning. Cheney has harsh words for some former Bush administration officials in his memoir, In My Time. Former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have both taken issue with the former vice president’s portrayal of matters related to their respective tenures. Bush said that it doesn’t bother him that some members of his former White House team are disputing accounts Cheney relays in his book. “I’m glad members of my family are giving their version of what it was like to serve the country,” said the former president. Referring to his own memoir, which was released last year, he added, “I did the same thing. I put my version out there.” Bush explained, “Eventually objective historians will analyze our administration and draw objective conclusions.” On the campaign front, the former president weighed in on the race shaping up for the Republican presidential nomination ahead of 2012. “I’m going to support our party’s nominee,” he said. “In the meantime I am going to remain an observer, an interested observer. I also follow baseball.” WATCH: (6:25) Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
Continue reading …Former president George W. Bush weighed in on the release of Dick Cheney’s new book during an appearance on Fox and Friends on Thursday morning. Cheney has harsh words for some former Bush administration officials in his memoir, In My Time. Former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have both taken issue with the former vice president’s portrayal of matters related to their respective tenures. Bush said that it doesn’t bother him that some members of his former White House team are disputing accounts Cheney relays in his book. “I’m glad members of my family are giving their version of what it was like to serve the country,” said the former president. Referring to his own memoir, which was released last year, he added, “I did the same thing. I put my version out there.” Bush explained, “Eventually objective historians will analyze our administration and draw objective conclusions.” On the campaign front, the former president weighed in on the race shaping up for the Republican presidential nomination ahead of 2012. “I’m going to support our party’s nominee,” he said. “In the meantime I am going to remain an observer, an interested observer. I also follow baseball.” WATCH: (6:25) Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
Continue reading …One of my kids spent a few days in the hospital not long ago. Being in the hospital is stressful, but it is also boring. When your condition is being monitored, there isn’t a lot to do. You sit for long periods of time. It is hard to concentrate, which makes it difficult to read, write or even pay attention to the television. Every few hours, somebody comes by and takes your vital signs. Mostly, though, it is a lot of waiting. While you’re there in the hospital, everything feels like it takes forever. The clock ticks slowly forward as you wait and wait and wait. If you look back at a hospital stay, though, it doesn’t feel as long in your memory as it did when you were there. How does your perception of time really work? There is some nice research by Dinah Avni-Babad and Ilana Ritov in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General from 2003 that addresses this question. They found that people judge the duration of a period of time from memory differently than they judge the duration of a time period as it is going on. Basically, the busier you are during a time interval, the faster that time interval will feel like it passed. That shouldn’t be surprising. We all know that time flies when you’re having fun. When you are cognitively busy, you are focused on each task you are performing, and so you don’t have the opportunity to notice the passage of time. As a result, the interval feels like it passes quickly. When you are bored, there is not much to occupy your time, and you are much more likely to keep thinking about the time and check the clock. So time feels like it passes slowly when not much is happening. When you look back on time periods, though, things reverse. How can you decide how long a time period was in retrospect? You have to retrieve events from memory in order to judge durations. When you think back on an interesting time that had lots of new experiences, you are able to retrieve a lot of events from memory. So, interesting time periods feel like they have taken a long time. A trip to a foreign country that felt like it flew by when you were on it feels like a long full and rich experience when you look back on it later. In contrast, boring time periods do not add much new information to your memory. A day spent in the hospital has few interesting landmarks in memory. Mostly, you’re staring at the ceiling and waiting. As a result, when you think back on those boring or routine periods of your life, they will feel like they flew by, even though they were excruciatingly slow at the time. I guess the mark of a successful life, then, is that the days have flown by, but the years feel long and full.
Continue reading …One of my kids spent a few days in the hospital not long ago. Being in the hospital is stressful, but it is also boring. When your condition is being monitored, there isn’t a lot to do. You sit for long periods of time. It is hard to concentrate, which makes it difficult to read, write or even pay attention to the television. Every few hours, somebody comes by and takes your vital signs. Mostly, though, it is a lot of waiting. While you’re there in the hospital, everything feels like it takes forever. The clock ticks slowly forward as you wait and wait and wait. If you look back at a hospital stay, though, it doesn’t feel as long in your memory as it did when you were there. How does your perception of time really work? There is some nice research by Dinah Avni-Babad and Ilana Ritov in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General from 2003 that addresses this question. They found that people judge the duration of a period of time from memory differently than they judge the duration of a time period as it is going on. Basically, the busier you are during a time interval, the faster that time interval will feel like it passed. That shouldn’t be surprising. We all know that time flies when you’re having fun. When you are cognitively busy, you are focused on each task you are performing, and so you don’t have the opportunity to notice the passage of time. As a result, the interval feels like it passes quickly. When you are bored, there is not much to occupy your time, and you are much more likely to keep thinking about the time and check the clock. So time feels like it passes slowly when not much is happening. When you look back on time periods, though, things reverse. How can you decide how long a time period was in retrospect? You have to retrieve events from memory in order to judge durations. When you think back on an interesting time that had lots of new experiences, you are able to retrieve a lot of events from memory. So, interesting time periods feel like they have taken a long time. A trip to a foreign country that felt like it flew by when you were on it feels like a long full and rich experience when you look back on it later. In contrast, boring time periods do not add much new information to your memory. A day spent in the hospital has few interesting landmarks in memory. Mostly, you’re staring at the ceiling and waiting. As a result, when you think back on those boring or routine periods of your life, they will feel like they flew by, even though they were excruciatingly slow at the time. I guess the mark of a successful life, then, is that the days have flown by, but the years feel long and full.
Continue reading …One of my kids spent a few days in the hospital not long ago. Being in the hospital is stressful, but it is also boring. When your condition is being monitored, there isn’t a lot to do. You sit for long periods of time. It is hard to concentrate, which makes it difficult to read, write or even pay attention to the television. Every few hours, somebody comes by and takes your vital signs. Mostly, though, it is a lot of waiting. While you’re there in the hospital, everything feels like it takes forever. The clock ticks slowly forward as you wait and wait and wait. If you look back at a hospital stay, though, it doesn’t feel as long in your memory as it did when you were there. How does your perception of time really work? There is some nice research by Dinah Avni-Babad and Ilana Ritov in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General from 2003 that addresses this question. They found that people judge the duration of a period of time from memory differently than they judge the duration of a time period as it is going on. Basically, the busier you are during a time interval, the faster that time interval will feel like it passed. That shouldn’t be surprising. We all know that time flies when you’re having fun. When you are cognitively busy, you are focused on each task you are performing, and so you don’t have the opportunity to notice the passage of time. As a result, the interval feels like it passes quickly. When you are bored, there is not much to occupy your time, and you are much more likely to keep thinking about the time and check the clock. So time feels like it passes slowly when not much is happening. When you look back on time periods, though, things reverse. How can you decide how long a time period was in retrospect? You have to retrieve events from memory in order to judge durations. When you think back on an interesting time that had lots of new experiences, you are able to retrieve a lot of events from memory. So, interesting time periods feel like they have taken a long time. A trip to a foreign country that felt like it flew by when you were on it feels like a long full and rich experience when you look back on it later. In contrast, boring time periods do not add much new information to your memory. A day spent in the hospital has few interesting landmarks in memory. Mostly, you’re staring at the ceiling and waiting. As a result, when you think back on those boring or routine periods of your life, they will feel like they flew by, even though they were excruciatingly slow at the time. I guess the mark of a successful life, then, is that the days have flown by, but the years feel long and full.
Continue reading …In 2006, a group of US soldiers burst into a house in Ishaqi, Iraq, where they handcuffed and executed at least 10 people—including an infant and four other children, none older than five years old—then called an airstrike to cover up the evidence. Or at least that’s the…
Continue reading …Strokes in children, teens, and young adults are increasing at an alarming rate in the U.S., according to a new study.
Continue reading …JCPenney has just pulled an offensive t-shirt from its website after social-media backlash. Aimed for girls ages 7 to 16, the shirt reads “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.” Uh, seriously? Marketing copy for the garment stated, “Who has time for homework when there’s a new
Continue reading …Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller uses BBC lecture to criticise ‘unhelpful’ term, attack Iraq invasion and suggest al-Qaida talks Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, delivered a withering attack on the invasion of Iraq, decried the term “war on terror”, and held out the prospect of talks with al-Qaida. Recording her first BBC Reith lecture on the theme, Securing Freedom, she made clear she believed the UK and US governments had not sufficiently understood the resentment that had been building up among Arab people, which was only compounded by the war against Iraq. Before an audience which included Theresa May, the home secretary, she also said the 9/11 attacks were “a crime, not an act of war”. “So I never felt it helpful to refer to a war on terror”. Young Arabs, she said, had no opportunity to choose their own rulers. “For them an external enemy was a unifying way to address some of their frustrations.”They were also united by the plight of Palestinians, a view that the west was exploiting their oil and supporting dictators. “It was wrong to say all terrorists belonged to al-Qaida,” added Manningham-Buller. Pursuing a theme which some in the audience may have been astounded to hear from a former boss of MI5, she said terrorist campaigns – she mentioned Northern Ireland as an example – could not be solved militarily. She described the invasion of Iraq as a “distraction in the pursuit of al-Qaida”. She added: “Saddam Hussein was a ruthless dictator but neither he nor his regime had anything to do with 9/11.” The invasion, she said, “provided an arena for jihad”, spurring on UK citizens to resort to terror. September 11 was a “monstrous crime” but it needed a considered response, an appreciation of the causes and roots of terrorism, she said later in answers to questions. She said she hoped there were those – she implied in western governments – who were considering having “talks with al-Qaida”. Some way must be found of approaching them, she suggested, though she said she did not know how, at the moment, that could be done. Manningham-Buller, who retired in 2007, attacked the invasion of Iraq in an interview with the Guardian in 2009. However, she has never before expressed such antipathy towards the prevailing policies and rhetoric of the government which she had to endure when she was in office. The lecture is to be broadcast on Radio 4 on 6 September, and entitled Terror. MI5 Terrorism policy Middle East Global terrorism Iraq Richard Norton-Taylor guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Abortion bans based on “fetal pain” are highly controversial , but until now, no one is believed to have filed a lawsuit challenging their constitutionality. Jennie Linn McCormack of Idaho became the first when she filed suit against her state’s new law, which bans abortions after the 20-week mark on the…
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