This looks perfectly moral to late risers.
At Ars Technica, Cathleen O'Grady writes
Are mornings for morality? Night owls might disagree:
The question of why good people do bad things has fascinated psychologists for decades. Stanley Milgram famously identified deference to authority as a factor pushing people toward unethical behavior, but it seems that something even simpler could be in the mix: fatigue.
A recent study published in Psychological Science found that people are more inclined to cheat on a task at different times of the day, depending on their individual body clocks, or “chronotypes.” Chronotypes affect people’s natural peaks and troughs of physical and cognitive functions throughout the day, making “larks” more alert first thing in the morning and “owls” more wakeful late at night. The new evidence suggests that morning people are more likely to cheat at night, while evening people are more likely to cheat in the morning.
Building on research suggesting that people are more dishonest when they are tired, Brian Gunia, Christopher Barnes, and Sunita Sah assessed the chronotypes of participants, classifying them as either morning, intermediate, or evening people. Participants attended morning test sessions that required completing a puzzle task and were paid $0.50 for each puzzle they claimed to have solved correctly. If a participant failed to solve a puzzle but reported having done so, this was counted as a cheat.
The results showed that evening people cheated more often than intermediate people, who in turn cheated more often than morning people. The number of people who cheated within each group was also affected: a lower percentage of morning people cheated than intermediate people, and fewer intermediate people cheated than evening people.
However, it could be that evening people are more inclined to cheat at any time of day, not just in the morning. To establish whether this could have affected the results, the researchers performed similar tests in the evenings. They found that evening people were indeed inclined to cheat less in the evening than in the morning, showing the opposite pattern to morning people.
The study appears to contradict previous research, also published in Psychological Science, showing a “morning morality effect” that saw people cheating more on a task in the evening than in the morning. Maryam Kouchaki and Isaac Smith, the authors of the paper on morning morality, suggested that the simple drain of living through the day, such as making decisions and expending physical energy, can deplete resources needed for self-control. [...]
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos near this date in 2003—A Little Sanity on Cuba:
President Bush has a chance to break with America’s outdated policy of isolating Americans from Cuba and sign a bill that would ease travel restrictions to the island. A veto seems assured. Maintaining his tenuous hold on Florida may depend on it. […]
For more than four decades, Castro’s unique blend of what Spanish speakers call caudillismo and a fierce nationalist form of communism has done more than any other factor to shape contradictory U.S. foreign policy throughout Latin America. Since the time of the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary, the Caribbean has been seen as a U.S. “lake,” Latin America as “our backyard.” Out of this mindset grew an interventionism that brooked no meddlers from Europe and no objections from the peoples of the countries the U.S. chose to bring under its “protection.” While the U.S. did not create the dictators of Latin America, it nurtured many of them.
The coming of Castro, who soon linked himself to America’s No. 1 foe, exacerbated the older policy of backing thugs like Somoza in Nicaragua, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Batista in Cuba, men who were said by FDR’s men to be sons of bitches, but “our” sons of bitches. That expression of pre-World War II realpolitik summarized quite well what would become, 50 years later, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine—in essence, a policy of support for “our” bad guys as less evil than letting “their” bad guys gain power.
Since the fiasco at the 1961 Bay of Pigs and the nuclear close-call of 1962, Castro has overshadowed all of U.S. policy in Latin America. From the hemispheric Alliance for Progress to the counter-insurgent “low-intensity conflicts” in Bolivia and Colombia, from support for the generals of Brazil, Argentina and Chile to the trumped-up invasions of the Dominican Republic and Grenada, from the one-sided slaughters in Guatemala to the full-scale civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, U.S. policy throughout the region has been mostly about Fidel.
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