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An Easy Way to Increase Creativity
Over the past several years, however, social psychologists have discovered that creativity is not only a characteristic of the individual, but may also change depending on the situation and context. The question, of course, is what those situations are: what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others?

One answer is psychological distance. According to the construal level theory (CLT) of psychological distance, anything that we do not experience as occurring now, here, and to ourselves falls into the “psychologically distant” category. It’s also possible to induce a state of “psychological distance” simply by changing the way we think about a particular problem, such as attempting to take another person's perspective, or by thinking of the question as if it were unreal and unlikely. In this new paper, by Lile Jia and colleagues at Indiana University at Bloomington, scientists have demonstrated that increasing psychological distance so that a problem feels farther away can actually increase creativity.

The Iranian Election and Its Aftermath
Sasan Fayazmanesh is Professor of Economics at
California State University, Fresno.

We often have a tendency to reduce complex social situations to simplistic scenarios, where there is only black or white and no shades of gray, only heroes or villains and nothing in between. Such seems to be the attitude of many Iran analysts, particularly those on the progressive side, toward the recent election in Iran and the turmoil that followed it. The analysts can be divided mostly into two groups. The first sees the “reformist” candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, as the undisputed winner of the Iranian election and points to irregularities during the election, statistical discrepancies and the biased nature of those in charge of the election to vindicate its position. The second sees exactly the opposite. It views Mahmood Ahmadinejad, the “conservative” candidate, as the winner of the election, even if there were some irregularities and fraud, and points to the pre-election polls to prove its point. For the first camp, Mousavi is nearly a hero and Ahmadinejad a villain. For the second, it is perhaps the opposite. Also, the first sees the violence that followed the election as inspired largely by internal forces and, the second views it as orchestrated or manipulated mostly by forces outside of Iran.
Added to these is the continuous attempt by the US and Israel to demonize the man. From the beginning of his presidency Ahmadinejad was accused of many crimes. For example, immediately after his election in 2005, he was falsely accused of being one of the 1979 US Embassy hostage-takers, as well as being involved in an assassination of some Kurdish leaders in Vienna. Subsequently, many of his statements were either mistranslated or taken out of context to make him appear as a dangerous and ruthless anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a new Hitler who is out to “wipe Israel off the map.” Ahmadinejad became, especially for those who don’t read his speeches in Farsi, a loathsome character who many would love to hate.
Mir-Hossein Mousavi is also a product of the Islamic Republic. He, too, represents the dichotomy of the Islamic Republic, but not as much as Ahmadinejad does. As the Prime Minister of Iran from 1981-1989 he surely does not have the clean bill of health that his massive support in Iran seems to indicate. Looking at his past and some of the events that took place during his premiership, one has to conclude, as many Iran analysts have already done so, that he was the “accidental hero” of Iran’s last election, the man who was “anyone-but-Ahmadinejad.”
It was Ahmadinejad, the perfect “enemy,” who entered the calculation of the US and Israeli policy makers when planning for the next step in the containment of Iran.
The Obama Administration, under the leadership of Dennis Ross, had come up with what they thought to be a workable policy of containment. The main thrust of the policy was that the US would go through the motions of engagement with Iran in order to implement crippling sanctions against her, followed by a possible military attack if Iran does not capitulate.
Iran has a long history of fighting tyrannical rule and, at the same time, trying to preserve its independence and national sovereignty. When and how Iranian upheavals begin, and what their outcomes would be, have often been too difficult to predict. The last time that the President of the United States called Iran an “island of stability” a revolution ensued that overthrew an old and well-entrenched dictator.
The Johnny Procedure
Breaking the Silence on Israeli War Crimes
By URI AVNERY
Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the evil spirit of the Gaza War refuses to leave us in peace. This week it came back to disturb the tranquility of the chiefs of the state and the army.

“Breaking the Silence”, a group of courageous former combat soldiers, published a report comprising the testimonies of 30 Gaza War fighters. A hard-hitting report about actions that may be considered war crimes.

The generals went automatically into denial mode. Why don’t the soldiers disclose their identity, they asked innocently. Why do they obscure their faces in the video testimonies? Why do they hide their names and units?

How can we be sure that they are not actors reading a text prepared for them by the enemies of Israel? How do we know that this organization is not manipulated by foreigners, who finance their actions? And anyhow, how do we know that they are not lying out of spite?

One can answer with a Hebrew adage: “It has the feel of Truth”. Anyone who has ever been a combat soldier in war, whatever war, recognizes at once the truth in these reports. Each of them has met a soldier who is not ready to return home without an X on his gun showing that he killed at least one enemy. (One such person appears in my book “The Other Side of the Coin”, which was written 60 years ago and published in English last year as the second part of “1948: A soldier’s Tale”.) We have been there.

The testimonies about the use of phosphorus, about massive bombardment of buildings, about “the neighbor procedure” (using civilians as human shields), about killing “everything that moves”, about the use of all methods to avoid casualties on our side – all these corroborate earlier testimonies about the Gaza War, there can be no reasonable doubt about their authenticity. I learned from the report that the “neighbor procedure” is now called “Johnny procedure”, God knows why Johnny and not Ahmad.

The height of hypocrisy is reached by the generals with their demand that the soldiers come forward and lodge their complaints with their commanders, so that the army can investigate them through the proper channels.

First of all, we have already seen the farce of the army investigating itself.

Second, and this is the main point: only a person intent on becoming a martyr would do so. A solder in a combat unit is a part of a tightly knit group whose highest principle is loyalty to comrades and whose commandment is “Thou shalt not squeal!” If he discloses questionable acts he has witnessed, he will be considered a traitor and ostracized. His life will become hell. He knows that all his superiors, from squad leader right up to division commander, will persecute him.

This call to go through “official channels” is a vile method of the generals – members of the General Staff, Army Spokesmen, Army Lawyers – to divert the discussion from the accusations themselves to the identity of the witnesses. No less despicable are the tin soldiers called “military correspondents”, who collaborate with them.
BUT BEFORE accusing the soldiers who committed the acts described in the testimonies, one has to ask whether the decision to start the war did not itself lead inevitably to the crimes.

Professor Assa Kasher, the father of the army “Code of Ethics” and one of the most ardent supporters of the Gaza War, asserted in an essay on this subject that a state has the right to go to war only in self defense, and only if the war constitutes “a last resort”. “All alternative courses” to attain the rightful aim “must have been exhausted”.

The official cause of the war was the launching from the Gaza Strip of rockets against Southern Israeli towns and villages. It goes without saying that it is the duty of the state to defend its citizens against missiles. But had all the means to achieve this aim without war really been exhausted? Kasher answers with a resounding “yes”. His key argument is that “there is no justification for demanding that Israel negotiate directly with a terrorist organization that does not recognize it and denies its very right to exist.”

This does not pass the test of logic. The aim of the negotiations was not supposed to be the recognition by Hamas of the State of Israel and its right to exist (who needs this anyway?) but getting them to stop launching missiles at Israeli citizens. In such negotiations, the other side would understandably have demanded the lifting of the blockade against the population of the Gaza Strip and the opening of the supply passages. It is reasonable to assume that it was possible to reach – with Egyptian help - an agreement that would also have included the exchange of prisoners.

No only was this course not exhausted – it was not even tried. The Israeli government has consistently refused to negotiate with a “terrorist organization” and even with the Palestinian Unity Government that was in existence for some time and in which Hamas was represented.

Therefore, the decision to start the War on Gaza, with a civilian population of a million and a half, was unjustified even according to the criteria of Kasher himself. “All the alternative courses” had not been exhausted, or even attempted.

But we all know that, apart from the official reason, there was also an unofficial one: to topple the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. In the course of the war, official spokesmen stated that there was a need to attach a “price tag” – in other words, to cause death and destruction not in order to hurt the “terrorists” themselves (which would have been almost impossible) but to turn the life of the civilian population into hell, so they would rise up and overthrow Hamas.

The immorality of this strategy is matched by its inefficacy: our own experience has taught us that such methods only serve to harden the resolve of the population and unite them around their courageous leadership.
WE SHALL not evade the hardest moral question of all: is it permissible to risk the lives of our soldiers in order to save the old people, women and children of the “enemy”? The answer of Assa Kasher, the ideologue of the “Most Moral Army in the World”, is unequivocal: it is absolutely forbidden to risk the lives of the soldiers. The most telling sentence in his entire essay is: “Therefore…the state must give preference to the lives of its soldiers above the lives of the (unarmed) neighbors of a terrorist.”Kasher states explicitly that it is justified to kill a Palestinian child who is in the company of a hundred “terrorists”, because the “terrorists” might kill children in Sderot. But in reality, it was a case of killing a hundred children who were in the company of one “terrorist”.

If we strip this doctrine of all ornaments, what remains is a simple principle: the state must protect the lives of its soldiers at any price, without any limit or law. A war of zero casualties. That leads necessarily to a tactic of killing every person and destroying every building that could represent a danger to the soldiers, creating an empty space in front of the advancing troops.

9 Google Labs Projects You Must Try Out!
Oh Good. Google Labs Adds 1,000 More Emoticons

Why are we alone?
When you look up to the skies on a bright evening you wonder. Wouldn't "there" be other life? Millions of stars unfold for our eyes the longer we stare. The Milky Way as a nebulous banner spreading from horizon to horizon is a reflection of our own galaxy. Nearly invisible already but a few of the billions times billions other galaxies in the Universe. We can hardly see some faint nebulas where stars are born. Clouds of colorful gases, sources of violent cosmic activities, are invisible for our naked eyes. Mysteriously rotating powerful radio-stars with funny names like quasar and pulsar can only be watched with special telescopes. Astronomy has changed so much the last 10 years, that our schoolbook wisdom about the stars has become totally obsolete.

Popularity of Bamboo Bikes Grows
Thanks to its shape and remarkable vibration damping, bamboo practically begs to be made into bicycles.

“Look at nature,” Calfee says. “A lot of my work’s already been done. Here are these straight, resilient tubes growing out of the ground.”

I've got mail!
Hi John -
cowboss has sent you a message:

G'day all...............
In Order Of Stupidity...

In case you needed further proof that the human race is doomed through stupidity, here are some actual label instructions on consumer goods.

On a Sears hairdryer -- Do not use while sleeping. (Darn, and that's the only time I have to work on my hair).

On a bag of Fritos -- You could be a winner! No purchase necessary. Details inside. (the shoplifter special)?

On a bar of Dial soap -- "Directions: Use like regular soap." (and that would be how???.....)

On some Swanson frozen dinners -- "Serving suggestion: Defrost." (but, it's "just" a suggestion).

On Tesco's Tiramisu dessert (printed on bottom) -- "Do not turn upside down." (well...duh, a bit late, huh)!

On Marks & Spencer Bread Pudding - "Product will be hot after heating." (...and you thought????....)

On packaging for a Rowenta iron -- "Do not iron clothes on body." (but wouldn't this save me more time)?

On Boot's Children Cough Medicine -- "Do not drive a car or operate machinery after taking this medication." (We could do a lot to reduce the rate of construction accidents if we could just get those 5-year-olds with head-colds off those forklifts.)

On Nytol Sleep Aid -- "Warning: May cause drowsiness..." (and...I'm taking this because???....)

On most brands of Christmas lights -- "For indoor or outdoor use only." (as opposed to...what)?

On a Japanese food processor -- "Not to be used for the other use." (now, somebody out there, help me on this. I'm a bit curious.)

On Sainsbury's peanuts -- "Warning: contains nuts." (talk about a news flash)

On an American Airlines packet of nuts -- "Instructions: Open packet, eat nuts." (Step 3: maybe, uh...fly Delta?)

On a child's Superman costume -- "Wearing of this garment does not enable you to fly." (I don't blame the company. I blame the parents for this one.)

On a Swedish chainsaw -- "Do not attempt to stop chain with your hands or genitals." (Oh my God...was there a lot of this happening somewhere?)

( The author of The Bovine has headlines selected too )

Fossilized Dung Balls Reveal Secret Ecology Of Lost World
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090716093524.htm
New Zealand Industry Challenged over Welfare
http://www.themeatsite.com/meatnews/10093/new-zealand-industry-challenged-over-welfare
Missouri Dairy Graziers Cut feed Costs
http://www.thedairysite.com/news/27858/missouri-dairy-graziers-cut-feed-costs