Well, good old NPR has explained it all, clearly and simply. Take an hour to listen to this episode of This American Life and you’ll understand it, too: The Giant Pool of Money. It’s not only educational, it’s entertaining, too, as they have interviewed the people who actually made the loans and bundled the  mortgages into securities. They’ve asked the questions we all want to ask, such as “What were you thinking?!”

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities.

Here’s a glimpse of how this aberrant community thinks:

clipped from www.nytimes.com “Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity. The author interviews and stays with several prominent trolls, showing what they are like in person as opposed to the way they act online. While that is interesting on one level, I liked more the exploration of what the prevalence of trolls says about human beings and society. For example: clipped from www.nytimes.com Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?

Two new papers illustrate the continuing power of Stanley Milgram’s shock experiments — and the diverse interpretations they still inspire.

I’ll never forget the powerful impact that learning about Milgram’s experiments had on me as a young man. Surely it was part of my strong belief in questioning authority. If you’re not familiar with these ground-breaking experiments in which subjects were encouraged to inflict terrible pain on another person, I urge you to read this article.

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A moral hypocrite convinces himself that he is acting virtuously even when he does something he would condemn in others.

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As new reports make it clear, the efficiency of industrial animal production is an illusion, made possible by prisonlike confinement systems.

Not only is the efficiency an illusion, it’s actually a disaster all around.

In short, animal husbandry has been turned into animal abuse. Manure — traditionally a source of fertilizer — has been turned into toxic waste that fouls the air and adjacent water bodies. Crowding creates health problems, resulting in the chronic overuse of antibiotics. And, because the modest profits in confinement operations require the lowest possible labor costs, including automated feeding, watering and manure-handling systems, these operations have helped empty and impoverish rural America.

What is it going to take to change this heavily-entrenched, politically-supported and publicly-financed system?
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There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule.

(Photo: Thomas Hannich)
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So, 26% of Americans are anti-Semitic, and that’s nothing to be proud of, but I’d guess that’s a lot better than past percentages in our history. What struck me in the statistics is that we’ve replaced bias against one religion for bias against another. Muslims are the new Jews in America, the country where freedom of religion is enshrined in our constitution. You can practice whatever religion you wish, but many of us will assume you’re up to no good if you do.

I’m not even going to waste any time on the specious argument that the 9/11 attackers were Muslim, etc. Prejudice is prejudice, period. It’s the refuge of the ignorant and lazy. Rather than learn about people who look and behave and worship differently, prejudiced people jump illogically to the conclusion that they need to suspect and fear an entire group. That’s easier for them to process, as it requires less thinking and reasoning.

Even better, it makes them feel better about themselves, because it gives them an entire group of people to look down upon and feel superior to, while bonding them to their ignorant neighbors in a false feeling of fellowship. It’s us against them, and the boundary lines are painted in bold red, white and blue — all the better to obscure the subtle shades of reality that they choose to ignore.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo will speak Thursday afternoon at the TED conference about parallels between his infamous 1971 “prison experiment” at Stanford and prisoner abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq more than 30 years later. Wired.com has an exclusive video from Zimbardo’s talk, featuring Abu Ghraib photos he says are previously unseen.

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With 1.6 million people in prison, the incarceration rate is now the highest in American history, a new report says.

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One of the most fascinating talks at the TED conference so far was given by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, who gave a riveting account of a stroke she experienced in 1996.

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