News for December 3

New WMD Report Echoes 2001 Panel’s Warnings on Terrorism  |  Crooks and Liars

Even as Barack Obama was introducing his national security team to the nation Monday, Americans learned of a chilling new report detailing the scope of the global threat of weapons of mass destruction. Dramatically titled “World at Risk,” the study led by former Senators Bob Graham (D-FL) and Jim Talent (R-MO) predicted a better than even chance that the world would experience a WMD attack within the next five years. As if President-Elect Obama didn’t already have enough to worry about, the report eerily echoed the dire – and hauntingly accurate – February 2001 warnings by the Hart-Rudman Commission about the growing terrorism threat to the United States.

• Related link: Better-than-even odds of WMD attack?  |  FP Passport

Can the Can: The ‘Broken Windows Theory’ Tested  |  The Economist

A place that is covered in graffiti and festooned with rubbish makes people feel uneasy. And with good reason, according to a group of researchers in the Netherlands. Kees Keizer and his colleagues at the University of Groningen deliberately created such settings as a part of a series of experiments designed to discover if signs of vandalism, litter and low-level lawbreaking could change the way people behave. They found that they could, by a lot: doubling the number who are prepared to litter and steal.

Related link: Does the Broken Windows Theory Hold Online?  |  kottke.org

The Dream Becomes a Nightmare  |  Balloon Juice

I think this is one of the things that will finally be the end of the line for the American middle class: “The rising cost of college — even before the recession — threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the annual report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.”

• Related link: College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.  |  Education and Class
• Related link: U.S. Lags in Providing College Access, Study Finds  |  Washington Post

Obama in Your Heart: The Powerful Human Emotion Called ‘Elevation’  |  Slate

In his forthcoming book, Born To Be Good, Dacher Keltner writes that he believes when we experience transcendence, it stimulates our vagus nerve, causing “a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat.” For the 66 million Americans who voted for Obama, that experience was shared on Election Day, producing a collective case of an emotion that has only recently gotten research attention. It’s called “elevation.”

400 Dead. Does Anybody Care?  |  Windows & Doors

Double the number killed in Nigeria as those murdered in Mumbai, and many more refuges in light of the mayhem, and yet the response to this past week’s events in Nigeria is relatively muted. Why is that? Could it be that we are fascinated by the attacks in Mumbai because we identify more with those victims? Is it because the victims in the attacks in India appear more innocent and therefore make them more appealing to us?