Stuff You Should Know
The digital duo Josh and Chuck deconstruct your world.
Buenas Noches From Guatemala
by Charles W. Bryant | February 10, 2010
Hello folks, or more appropriately… Buenas Noches! Yes, team SYSK is south of the border as we speak. Way south. So far south that I’m in a hotel watching a Spanish language episode of Seinfeld.
Our day — we landed in Guatemala City at about mid-day and after a little cambio action headed to the hotel. [...]
Podcast Goodness: SWAT Teams and Urban Legends
by Charles W. Bryant | February 5, 2010
Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Busy day today, so not much to do about life here in Atlanta, as we’re busy getting ready for the big trip to Central America. Just know that we’re cold and wet.
This week on the Stuff You Should Know podcast program we had a little fun with some not too [...]
SYSK Takes the Show on the Road…to Guatemala
by Charles W. Bryant | February 4, 2010
Hello there, folks. We’ve been sitting on this to keep from jinxing it, but we wanted to let everyone know about a special opportunity that team SYSK is partaking in. A few months ago a very nice person named Ann, who works with a great Cincinnati, OH non-profit organization, e-mailed us with an invitation to [...]
Live Webcast – Watch it Right Here, Right Now
by Charles W. Bryant | February 3, 2010
Hey there, folks. Thanks for tuning in this week. Joshers and I have some pure webcast goodness planned out and we hope you can all tune it to give it a look see. Enjoy, and let’s hear from you – we’ll respond to as many comments as we can, live on the air.
It all goes down at 1 p.m. EST.
Thanks for all the support, everybody!
Check it out here:
How Booze Gave Rise to Civilization
by Josh Clark | February 2, 2010
Somewhere around 10,000 or so years ago something big happened to humanity. We stopped wandering around, pulling berries from shrubs and jumping out of trees onto gazelles to feed ourselves. We settled down. We chose the most desirable plants from our surroundings and cultivated them into crops that could reliably produce sustenance for us. We chose the tastiest, least dangerous animals we could find and taught them to stay in pens until we got around to slaughtering them. This moment in human history (a moment that developed over thousands of years) is called the Neolithic Revolution, and not for nothing.
The True Story behind “The Men Who Stare at Goats”
by Josh Clark | February 1, 2010
If you haven’t seen The Men Who Stare at Goats, I can’t hate you for it. It was largely panned by word of mouth and critics, and its producers opted (I think wisely) to not give anything away in the trailers. It was a good movie, though and I wish so badly that you’d go see it. Please, just go see it. Why won’t you go see it?
So, the premise of the movie (and the book it’s based on) is a military battalion assembled and trained to engage in deadly combat using telekinesis, spy using remote viewing and other types of generally scientifically unfounded techniques of the mind as soldiers. The goats in the title are test subjects used to demonstrate the mental power of the soldiers to kill another being just by concentrating on it. What’s awesome is that not only is it based largely on fact, one of the main characters has come out to correct the author. There was indeed, at least one goat.
Podcast Goodness: Ninja and Undiscovered People
by Charles W. Bryant | January 29, 2010
Goodness gracious, people. It’s almost the end of January, 2010 — THE FUTURE. Can you believe it? Why aren’t we eating five-course meals in the form of a pill or teleporting ourselves from coast to coast? Why don’t we have little robot vacuum cleaners to help us keep tidy? Oh wait, I think we do [...]
Hello there, people. If you’re like me, then you enjoy watching the good old State of the Union Address. They’ve been a dependable source of entertainment for me since I was a kid, even before I got into politics. There was always something about the gravity of it all, the President broadcasting live on every [...]
The Difference Between a Sociopath and a Psychopath
by Josh Clark | January 26, 2010
Chemical Ali was hanged yesterday in Iraq. He was the cousin of Saddam Hussein. Under his cousin’s regime, Ali Hassan al-Majid ordered and orchestrated, among other things, the 1988 chemical weapons drops that killed 5,000 of his own Kurdish countrymen. A year before that, he was the official in charge of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Kurds in Iraq with poison gas. He ordered the survivors be killed. Ali liked the chemical weapons, which is how he got his nickname, and, not coincidentally, why he was hanged.
On PRI’s The World today, Barim Hasali, the Prime Minister of Kurdistan, is introduced as a person who opposes the death penalty. He made a special exception for Ali. “I am against the death penalty,” Hasali said. “But I have to admit: In the case of people like Ali Hassan al-Majid, I cannot be true to my feelings about the death penalty.”
So you may have heard about the Supreme Court’s recent decision to reverse longstanding limitations that banned corporations from directly contributing financially in elections. It’s kind of a big deal.
As reported in the Washington Post, for a few decades now, corporations have been limited to contributing to political action committees, which have set limits of $5,000 per calendar year, and kept corporations away from contributing to a candidate directly. Of course, there are always loopholes: Corporations have a way of strongly suggesting to its rising stars that contributing to a certain campaign would probably be good for the old career. Maybe even those employees’ bonuses later in the year will reflect an additional amount of the same sum they contributed. So you’ve got a few execs writing $5,000 checks to a Political Action Committee. It’s disingenuous, but tolerable. The limits for individual campaigns are even narrower: $2,400 per candidate, per election.
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