The Future of Humankind

medium |  Okay, so we’re not talking about entire brain transplants. There’s a joke that the only organ that’s better to donate than to receive is the brain.

No, no, no, just pieces.

Might people add brain tissue for extra IQ points?

For it to be used in healthy people, it has to be exceptionally safe. But I could imagine that being quite safe.

I think doing experiments on humanlike artificial intelligence would be unethical.

Are there applications of these brain organoids to artificial intelligence?

Oh, that’s the fourth category. The human brain is pretty far ahead of any silicon-based computing system, except for very specialized tasks like information retrieval or math or chess. And we do it at 20 watts of power for the brain, relative to, say, 100,000 watts for a computer doing a very specialized task like chess. So, we’re ahead both in the energy category and in versatility and out-of-the-box thinking. Also, Moore’s law is reaching a plateau, while biotechnology is going through super-exponential growth, where it’s improving by factors of 10 per year in cost/benefit.

Currently, computers have a central processing unit (CPU), often accompanied by specialized chips for particular tasks, like a graphical processing unit (GPU). Might a computer someday have an NPU, or neural processing unit — a bit of brain matter plugged into it?

Yeah, it could. Hybrid systems, such as humans using smartphones, are very valuable, because there are specialized tasks that computers are very good at, like retrieval and math. Although even that could change. For example, now there’s a big effort to store information in DNA. It’s about a million times higher-density than current silicon or other inorganic storage media. That could conceivably in the future be something where biological systems could be better than inorganic or even hybrid systems.

At what size should we think about whether lab brains deserve rights?

All of these things will at some point be capable of all kinds of advanced thinking. I think doing experiments on humanlike artificial intelligence would be unethical as well. There’s this growing tendency of computer scientists to want to make them general purpose. Even if they’re what we would call intellectually challenged, they would have some rights. We may want ways of asking them questions, as in a Turing test, but in this case, to make sure we’re not doing something that would cause pain or anxiety.

Will we ever develop into something that calls itself a new species? And could there be branching of the species tree?

It’s a little hard to predict whether we’ll go toward a monoculture or whether we’ll go toward high diversity. Even if we go toward high diversity, they could still be interbreedable. You look at dogs, for example. Very high diversity, but in principle, any breed of dog can mate with any other dog and produce hybrid puppies. My guess is that we will go toward greater diversity and yet greater interoperability. I think that’s kind of the tendency. We want all of our systems to interoperate. If you look into big cities, you’re getting more and more ability to bridge languages, to bridge cultures. I think that will also be true for species.

Do you think your greatest contribution to humanity will be something you’ve done, or something you’ve yet to do?

Well, I hope it’s something I have yet to do. I think I’m just now getting up to speed after 63 years of education. Aging reversal is something that will buy me and many of my colleagues a lot more time to make many more contributions, so you might consider that a meta-level contribution, if we can pull that off. The sort of things we’re doing with brains and new ways of computing could again be a meta thing. In other words, if we can think in new ways or scale up new forms of intelligence, that would lead to a whole new set of enabling technologies.

Survival of the Richest

Grinnell |  Officially, the eugenics movement ended for the most part by the end of the Baby Boom, as proven by the closure of most official eugenics organizations. Unfortunately, the eugenics movement has been replaced by a slightly modified neo-eugenics movement, which also believes that characteristics or traits such as poverty, criminality, and illegitimacy are signs that a person is unfit to reproduce. The difference is that neo-eugenicists believe that these traits are passed on not genetically, but through culture and environment. This movement recognizes that traits like poverty and illegitimacy are not actually included in the genetic code, but it has many of the same effects as the original eugenics movement.

Neo-eugenics developed during the Civil Rights Movement, a time when white privilege was clearly threatened in the United States.[3] These neo-eugenicists were concerned with preserving the white race, which ironically now included southern and eastern Europeans, who had earlier been considered the greatest threat to the purity of white America. Currently, neo-eugenics rarely targets white women, regardless of their socioeconomic status, but instead focuses its attention on recent immigrants, blacks, and Mexicans, among others.

In the 1970s, the eugenics movement began to focus its attention on other underprivileged groups of people. Physicians employed by the Indian Health Service, who were supposed to be providing medical care for Native American women, forcibly sterilized somewhere between 25 and 42 percent of Native American women of childbearing age. At the same time, women on welfare who had an illegitimate child were often punished by forced sterilizations immediately after giving birth. The eugenicists and physicians who performed this procedure justified it by saying that “those who accepted government assistance should submit to government oversight and conform to mainstream, white middle-class values and gender roles.”[4] Anyone who did not follow the social rules of middle-class white men could be subject to forced sterilization.

Unfortunately, the neo-eugenics movement has not disappeared from the American consciousness. Between 2006 and 2010, 148 women incarcerated in California prisons were illegally and forcibly sterilized through the use of tubal ligations.[5] Only since 1979 have forced sterilizations been forbidden in California, and although these women were clearly wronged, there are still many supporters of these practices for women in prison.[6]

Despite the fact that eugenic ideas still permeate much of American society, statistics show that fertility levels are declining in most of the world. If current trends continue, in the near future half of the human population will be at the replacement level of fertility, or 2.1 children per set of parents.[7] If all humans eventually began to reproduce at exactly the replacement level of fertility, the entire world population would stabilize and we would not see the exponential human population growth that we are currently experiencing. The United States is currently at almost exactly the replacement level of 2.1 children per family, and any increases in the national population are due almost exclusively to immigration and higher life expectancies, not incredibly high birth rates.

Also Sprach Zarathustra

jstor |  Eugenics straddles the line between repellent Nazi ideas of racial purity and real knowledge of genetics. Scientists eventually dismissed it as pseudo-scientific racism, but it has never completely faded away. In 1994, the book The Bell Curve generated great controversy when its authors Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein argued that test scores showed black people to be less intelligent than white people. In early 2017, Murray’s public appearance at Middlebury College elicited protests, showing that eugenic ideas still have power and can evoke strong reactions.

But now, these disreputable ideas could be supported by new methods of manipulating human DNA. The revolutionary CRISPR genome-editing technique, called the scientific breakthrough of 2015, makes it relatively simple to alter the genetic code. And 2016 saw the announcement of the “Human Genome Project–write,” an effort to design and build an entire artificial human genome in the lab.

These advances led to calls for a complete moratorium on human genetic experimentation until it has been more fully examined. The moratorium took effect in 2015. In early 2017, however, a report by the National Academies of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine, “Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance,” modified this absolute ban. The report called for further study, but also proposed that clinical trials of embryo editing could be allowed if both parents have a serious disease that could be passed on to the child. Some critics condemned even this first step as vastly premature.

Nevertheless, gene editing potentially provides great benefits in combatting disease and improving human lives and longevity. But could this technology also be pushing us toward a neo-eugenic world?

As ever, science fiction can suggest answers. The year 2017 is the 85th anniversary of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s vision of a eugenics-based society and one of the great twentieth-century novels. Likewise, 2017 will bring the 20th anniversary of the release of the sci-fi film Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol, about a future society based on genetic destiny. NASA has called Gattaca the most plausible science fiction film ever made.

In 1932, Huxley’s novel, written when the eugenics movement still flourished, imagined an advanced biological science. Huxley knew about heredity and eugenics through his own distinguished family: His grandfather Thomas Huxley was the Victorian biologist who defended Darwin’s theory of evolution, and his evolutionary biologist brother Julian was a leading proponent of eugenics.

Brave New World takes place in the year 2540. People are bred to order through artificial fertilization and put into higher or lower classes in order to maintain the dominant World State. The highest castes, the physically and intellectually superior Alphas and Betas, direct and control everything. The lower Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, many of them clones, are limited in mind and body and exist only to perform necessary menial tasks. To maintain this system, the World State chemically processes human embryos and fetuses to create people with either enlarged or diminished capacities. The latter are kept docile by large doses of propaganda and a powerful pleasure drug, soma.

Like George Orwell’s 1984, reviewers continue to find Huxley’s novel deeply unsettling. To Bob Barr, writing in the Michigan Law Review, it is “a chilling vision” and R. S. Deese, in We Are Amphibians, calls its premise “the mass production of human beings.”

Genetic Analysis Of Social Class Mobility

pnas |  Our analysis suggests three take-home messages. The first take-home message is that genetics research should incorporate information about social origins. For genetics, our findings suggest that estimates of genetic associations with socioeconomic achievement reflect direct genetic effects as well as the effects of social inheritance correlated with genetics. Future genetic studies of social attainment can refine inferences about direct genetic effects by including measures of social origins in their study designs. The same is true for genetic studies of other phenotypes, because childhood socioeconomic circumstances are implicated in the etiology of many different traits and health conditions (54⇓–56). Such analysis will help clarify interpretation of studies that analyzed GWAS data and found evidence of genetic overlap between educational attainment and several biomedical phenotypes (57, 58). The advent of national biobanks and other large genetic datasets is increasing the power of GWAS to map genetic risks. Research to investigate how much of the genetic risk measured from GWAS discoveries arises within a single generation and how much accrues from social inheritance correlated with genetics across successive generations is needed.

The second take-home message is that social science research should incorporate information about genetic inheritance. For the social sciences, our findings provide molecular evidence across birth cohorts and countries of genetic influence on social attainment and social mobility. This evidence supports theory in the social sciences that frames genetics as one mechanism among several through which social position is transmitted across generations (9, 20, 21, 59). These theories imply that genetic factors can confound estimates of social environmental effects. However, because genetics have been difficult to measure, studies addressing these theories have had to estimate genetic contributions to attainment indirectly, while other social science research has simply ignored the problem. Now, genetically informed theories of social attainment and mobility can be revisited, tested, and elaborated using molecular genetic data available in an ever-growing array of genetically informed social surveys and longitudinal cohort studies.

Beyond theory, integration of measured genetic inheritance into research on social mobility can add value in at least three ways. First, genetic controls can improve the precision of estimates of environmental effects (11, 14), e.g., of how features of parents’ social circumstances shape children’s development. Second, genetic measurements can provide a starting point for developmental investigations of pathways to social mobility (16, 60), e.g., to identify skills and behaviors that can serve as targets for environmental interventions to lift children out of poverty. Third, genetic measurements can be used to study gene–environment interplay; e.g., how policies and programs may strengthen or weaken genetic and nongenetic mechanisms of intergenerational transmission (61). In our analysis, modeling effects of social origins attenuated genetic-effect sizes by 10–50%, depending on the outcome and cohort. This variation is consistent with evidence that genetic influences on individual differences may vary across cultures and cohorts and across stages of the life course (62, 63). Research is needed to understand how molecular genetic effects on socioeconomic attainment may operate differently across environmental, historical, or economic contexts and the extent to which they may wax or wane across adult development.

The third take-home message is that genetic analysis of social mobility can inform programs and policies that change children’s environments as a way to promote positive development. The genetics we studied are related to socioeconomic attainment and mobility partly through channels that are policy-malleable. Personal characteristics linked with the attainment-related genetics we studied involve early-emerging cognitive and noncognitive skills, including learning to talk and read, act planfully, delay gratification, and get along with others (10, 16). These skills represent intervention targets in their own right, for example by policies and programs that safeguard perinatal development and provide enriching, stable family and educational environments (64). A significant contribution of our study is that the nongenetic social and material resources children inherit from their parents represent a further mechanism linking genetics and attainment over the life course. Policies and programs cannot change children’s genes, but they can help give them more of the resources that children who inherit more education-linked genetics tend to grow up with. Our findings suggest that such interventions could help close the gap. The next step is to find out precisely what those resources are.

Conclusion

A long-term goal of our sociogenomic research is to use genetics to reveal novel environmental intervention approaches to mitigating socioeconomic disadvantage. The analysis reported here takes one step toward enabling a study design to accomplish this. We found that measured genetics related to patterns of social attainment and mobility, partly through direct influences on individuals and partly through predicting the environments in which they grew up. Specifically, parents’ genetics influence the environments that give children their start in life, while children’s own genetics influence their social mobility across adult life. As we learn more about how genetics discovered in GWAS of education influence processes of human development that generate and maintain wealth and poverty, we can identify specific environments that shape those processes. Ultimately, this research approach can suggest interventions that change children’s environments to promote positive development across the life-course.

Admit You Don't Like Poor People...,

medium |  In the sociological literature on poverty, there are ample studies and papers about the ways that being poor impacts the brain. Stress, malnutrition, and exposure to the kinds of environmental contaminants that often accompany lower-income neighborhoods (Flint’s lack of clean water or the poor air quality in schools around highways) can have serious neurological impacts on people living on the economic margins.

Less studied, however, is the impact that poverty—seeing it, knowing about it, thinking about it—has on the brains of people who are not poor.

This is also an important area of study, though, particularly as cities and states attempt to maneuver unprecedented wealth inequality and homelessness. Perceptions of poverty (and, as a result, perceptions of scarcity) have substantial impacts on the way we collectively think, act, vote, and legislate.

And often, we don’t bother to examine them.

This is clear in community meetings about new affordable housing or homeless shelters, wherein self-proclaimed “concerned” neighbors begin every testimony with something along the lines of “I care about the homeless! I really do! But…” and then follow their opener with something that expresses an unfounded bias about people living in poverty.

“…I’m worried about increases in crime.”

“…why do we have to pay for their housing?”

“…they’ll just trash it!”

“…how will I explain them to my children?”

These sentiments — which assume that homeless individuals are criminals, that they’re freeloaders, that their very existence is somehow damaging to children — are not based in research, nor do they account for the complexity of socioeconomic status. They are, instead, based on a reaction to poverty and scarcity that is intimately linked to our own survival mechanisms.

Just as humans grapple with implicit biases with regard to race, gender, size, and a host of other differences, it’s clear from the research that does exist, as well as the anecdotal evidence playing out in communities around the country right now, that witnessing poverty and perceiving scarcity creates biases in people who are not poor.

But again, like racial- and gender-based discrimination, cognitive reactions aren’t an excuse for acting on those biases.

Is There Any Point In Talking About What You Don't Have?

slate |  One of the nice things about Occupy Wall Street was that it provided a tidy shorthand to describe the problem of income inequality at a moment when the world didn’t really have one. Today, it’s a cliche: the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent. But at the time, that brief phrase awakened many people to the idea that America’s riches were distributed more unevenly than they thought, and that an increasingly outrageous share was being concentrated at the very top. The winners in this story were corporate executives, business owners, and highly paid professionals—especially bankers. The losers were just about everybody else. Like all shorthand, this tale was a bit oversimplified. But in the wake of a financial crisis brought on by the greed and recklessness of those 1 percenters, it felt apt. 

Back then, the people who took issue with framing America’s economy as a tug of war between the ultrarich and the rest of us generally fell into two camps. They were either inequality skeptics, who insisted unconvincingly that research showing the rise of the 1 percent was flawed, or inequality apologists, who argued that letting some people get exorbitantly wealthy was good for the economy, since it rewarded hustle and entrepreneurship (basically, Paul Ryan during his peak makers-vs.-takers period). 

Lately, though, a few writers have tried to play down the idea of the 1 percent for a different reason: They say it’s making us miss the real story of class and inequality in America. Last year, a Brookings Institution scholar named Richard Reeves published a book titled Dream Hoarders, in which he argues that America’s upper-middle class is rigging the economy in its own favor. Our national focus on the very rich, he suggests, is blinding us to the reality of how well-off soccer moms and dads in places like Arlington, Virginia, are killing the American dream for everyone but their own kids. “Too often, the rhetoric of inequality points to a ‘top 1 percent’ problem, as if the ‘bottom’ 99 percent is in a similarly dire situation,” he writes. “This obsession with the upper class allows the upper middle class to convince ourselves we are in the same boat as the rest of America; but it is not true.”\

Reeves’ book received a brief burst of national attention after David Brooks used it as a launching point for a weird and widely pilloried New York Times column, in which he recounted a story about seeing his friend get flustered by the selection of Italian cold cuts at a sandwich shop. (He assumed this was because she only had a high school education, since you apparently need a philosophy degree to be familiar with soppressata.) But this week, the Atlantic published a long feature more or less rehashing most of Dream Hoarders’ arguments. In “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy,” writer Matthew Stewart argues that aside from a small sliver of true plutocrats who can actually afford to buy an election or two, the top 10 percent of wealthiest Americans are all essentially part of the same highly educated and privileged group—the “meritocratic class”—which has “mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.” 

Reeves and Stewart are both attempting to give us a new shorthand for who is ruining the economy. Instead of the 1 percent, they would like us to talk about the dream hoarders, or the 9.9 percent. But in the end, both authors fail by lumping together large groups of Americans who haven’t really benefited equally from our winner-take-all economy. As a result, their stories about how the country has changed, and who has gained, just don’t track.

Divisive Politics – What Does Neuroscience Tell Us?

weforum | Neuroscience has offered some evidence-based claims that can be uncomfortable because they challenge our notions of morality or debunk the myth about our ‘rational’ brain.

Critically, neuroscience has enlightened us about the physicality of human emotions. Fear, an emotion we have inherited from our ancestors, is not an abstract or intangible sense of imminent danger: it is expressed in neurochemical terms in our amygdala, the almond-shaped structure on the medial temporal lobe, anterior to the hippocampus. The amygdala has been demonstrated to be critical in the acquisition, storage and expression of conditioned fear responses. Certain regions in the amygdala undergo plasticity – changes in response to emotional stimuli – triggering other reactions, including endocrine responses.

Similarly, the way our brains produce moral reasoning and then translate it in the social context can now be studied to some extent in neuroscientific terms. For instance, the role of serotonin in prosocial behaviour and moral judgment is now well documented, with a demonstrably strong correlation between levels of serotonin in the brain and moral social behaviour.

Neuroscientists have also looked at how political ideologies are represented in the brain; preliminary research indicates that an increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex can be correlated with inclinations towards liberalism, while increased gray matter volume in the amygdala (which is part of the limbic system and thus concerned with emotions) appears to be associated with conservative values. These early findings, of course, are not meant to be reductionist, deterministic, or politically pigeonhole one group or the other, nor are they fixed. Rather, they can help explain the deep and persistent divide that we see in party politics across the world. It would very valuable to look into whether these preliminary findings pre-date political affiliation or occur as a result of repeated exposure to politically-inspired partisan and emotional debates.

Source: Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults Report

More recently, policy analysis has turned to neuroscience too. For example, in the US 2016 election cycle, some have correlated the appeal of some candidates to the so-called hardwiring in our brains, and to our primordial needs of group belonging, while others have explored the insights from neuroscience on the role of emotions in decision-making. Similarly, the attitudes surrounding “Brexit” have also been analysed with references from neuroscience.

Divisive politics – what does neuroscience tell us?

The short answer is: some useful new insights. To be sure, some findings in neuroscience might be crude at this stage as the discipline and its tools are evolving. The human brain – despite tremendous scientific advances – remains to a large extent unknown. We do have, however, some preliminary findings to draw on. Divisive politics have taken centre stage and neuroscience may be able shed some light on how this is expressed in our brains.

“Us” vs. “them”, cultivating fear and hatred towards out-groups that are deemed different (ethnically, ideologically, religiously, etc.), and vicious and virulent attacks against them, are all part of an unsettling picture of growing ethnic and racial hostility. Philosopher Martin Buber identified two opposed ways of being in relation to others: I-It and I-thou. I-It means perceiving others as objects, whereas I-thou refers to empathic perceptions of others as subjects. Cognitive neuroscientists have studied this distinction with brain imaging techniques and the findings – unsurprisingly – tell us a lot about our increasingly polarised world today and the ways our brains process the distinction between us and “others”.

How Tribalism Overrules Reason

bigthink |  We identify ourselves as members of all sorts of tribes; our families, political parties, race, gender, social organizations. We even identify tribally just based on where we live. Go Celtics, go Red Sox, go U.S. Olympic team! One study asked people whether, if they had a fatal disease, would they prefer a life-saving diagnosis from a computer that was 1,000 miles away, or the exact same diagnosis from a computer in their town, and a large majority preferred the same information if the source…a machine…was local.

     Tribalism is pervasive, and it controls a lot of our behavior, readily overriding reason. Think of the inhuman things we do in the name of tribal unity. Wars are essentially, and often quite specifically, tribalism. Genocides are tribalism - wipe out the other group to keep our group safe – taken to madness. Racism that lets us feel that our tribe is better than theirs, parents who end contact with their own children when they dare marry someone of a different faith or color, denial of evolution or climate change or other basic scientific truths when they challenge tribal beliefs. What stunning evidence of the power of tribalism! (By the way, it wasn’t just geocentrist Catholics in the 16 adn 1700s who denied  evidence that the earth travels around the sun. Some Christian biblical literalists still do. So do a handful of ultra orthodox Jews and Muslims.)

     Yet another example is the polarized way we argue about so many issues, and the incredible irony that as we make these arguments we claim to be intelligent (smart, therefore right) yet we ignorantly close our minds to views that conflict with ours. Dan Kahan, principal researcher into the phenomenon of Cultural Cognition, has found that our views are powerfully shaped so they agree with beliefs of the groups with which we most strongly identify. His research, along with the work of others, has also found that the more challenged our views are, the more we defend them…the more dogmatic and closed-minded we become...an intellectual form of ‘circle-the-wagons, we’re under attack’ tribal unity. Talk about tribalism overruling reason.

"This is a Terrifying Time to be White an American"

NewYorker |  Several distinct cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had in an earlier era. The sexual revolution urged women to seek liberation. The self-esteem movement taught women that they were valuable beyond what convention might dictate. The rise of mainstream feminism gave women certainty and company in these convictions. And the Internet-enabled efficiency of today’s sexual marketplace allowed people to find potential sexual partners with a minimum of barriers and restraints. Most American women now grow up understanding that they can and should choose who they want to have sex with.

In the past few years, a subset of straight men calling themselves “incels” have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy. They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also diabolically misogynistic. “Society has become a place for worship of females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a fucking cum-dumpster,” a typical rant on an incel message board reads. The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with women does not appear to have occurred to them.

The incel ideology has already inspired the murders of at least sixteen people. Elliot Rodger, in 2014, in Isla Vista, California, killed six and injured fourteen in an attempt to instigate a “War on Women” for “depriving me of sex.” (He then killed himself.) Alek Minassian killed ten people and injured sixteen, in Toronto, last month; prior to doing so, he wrote, on Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” You might also include Christopher Harper-Mercer, who killed nine people, in 2015, and left behind a manifesto that praised Rodger and lamented his own virginity.

The label that Minassian and others have adopted has entered the mainstream, and it is now being widely misinterpreted. Incel stands for “involuntarily celibate,” but there are many people who would like to have sex and do not. (The term was coined by a queer Canadian woman, in the nineties.) Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.

If what incels wanted was sex, they might, for instance, value sex workers and wish to legalize sex work. But incels, being violent misogynists, often express extreme disgust at the idea of “whores.” Incels tend to direct hatred at things they think they desire; they are obsessed with female beauty but despise makeup as a form of fraud. Incel culture advises men to “looksmaxx” or “statusmaxx”—to improve their appearance, to make more money—in a way that presumes that women are not potential partners or worthy objects of possible affection but inconveniently sentient bodies that must be claimed through cold strategy. (They assume that men who treat women more respectfully are “white-knighting,” putting on a mockable façade of chivalry.) When these tactics fail, as they are bound to do, the rage intensifies. Incels dream of beheading the sluts who wear short shorts but don’t want to be groped by strangers; they draw up elaborate scenarios in which women are auctioned off at age eighteen to the highest bidder; they call Elliot Rodger their Lord and Savior and feminists the female K.K.K. “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering,” one poster on incels.me wrote recently. “They are the ones who have UNJUSTLY made our lives a living hell… We need to focus more on our hatred of women. Hatred is power.”

A Tedious And Wholly Unselfconscious Current State Assessment Of White Supremacy

theatlantic |  The defining challenge of our time is to renew the promise of American democracy by reversing the calcifying effects of accelerating inequality. As long as inequality rules, reason will be absent from our politics; without reason, none of our other issues can be solved. It’s a world-historical problem. But the solutions that have been put forward so far are, for the most part, shoebox in size.

Well-meaning meritocrats have proposed new and better tests for admitting people into their jewel-encrusted classrooms. Fine—but we aren’t going to beat back the Gatsby Curve by tweaking the formulas for excluding people from fancy universities. Policy wonks have taken aim at the more-egregious tax-code handouts, such as the mortgage-interest deduction and college-savings plans. Good—and then what? Conservatives continue to recycle the characterological solutions, like celebrating traditional marriage or bringing back that old-time religion. Sure—reforging familial and community bonds is a worthy goal. But talking up those virtues won’t save any families from the withering pressures of a rigged economy. Meanwhile, coffee-shop radicals say they want a revolution. They don’t seem to appreciate that the only simple solutions are the incredibly violent and destructive ones.

The American idea has always been a guide star, not a policy program, much less a reality. The rights of human beings never have been and never could be permanently established in a handful of phrases or old declarations. They are always rushing to catch up to the world that we inhabit. In our world, now, we need to understand that access to the means of sustaining good health, the opportunity to learn from the wisdom accumulated in our culture, and the expectation that one may do so in a decent home and neighborhood are not privileges to be reserved for the few who have learned to game the system. They are rights that follow from the same source as those that an earlier generation called life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Yes, the kind of change that really matters is going to require action from the federal government. That which creates monopoly power can also destroy it; that which allows money into politics can also take it out; that which has transferred power from labor to capital can transfer it back. Change also needs to happen at the state and local levels. How else are we going to open up our neighborhoods and restore the public character of education?

It’s going to take something from each of us, too, and perhaps especially from those who happen to be the momentary winners of this cycle in the game. We need to peel our eyes away from the mirror of our own success and think about what we can do in our everyday lives for the people who aren’t our neighbors. We should be fighting for opportunities for other people’s children as if the future of our own children depended on it. It probably does.  Fist tap Dorcas Dad.

Normotic Illness Culture: Programming the Social Validation Feedback Loop

CounterPunch |  Sitting alone in my room watching videos on Youtube, hearing sounds from across the hall of my roommate watching Netflix, the obvious point occurs to me that a key element of the demonic genius of late capitalism is to enforce a crushing passiveness on the populace. With social atomization comes collective passiveness—and with collective passiveness comes social atomization. The product (and cause) of this vicious circle is the dying society of the present, in which despair can seem to be the prevailing condition. With an opioid epidemic raging and, more generally, mental illness affecting 50 percent of Americans at some point in their lifetime, it’s clear that the late-capitalist evisceration of civil society has also eviscerated, on a broad scale, the individual’s sense of self-worth. We have become atoms, windowless monads buffeted by bureaucracies, desperately seeking entertainment as a tonic for our angst and ennui.

The old formula of the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott is as relevant as it always will be: “It is creative apperception more than anything that makes the individual feel that life is worth living.” If so many have come to feel alienated from life itself, that is largely because they don’t feel creative, free, or active.......

 

Noam Chomsky, in the tradition of Marx, is fond of saying that technology is “neutral,”neither beneficent nor baleful in itself but only in the context of particular social relations, but I’m inclined to think television is a partial exception to that dictum. I recall the Calvin and Hobbes strip in which, while sitting in front of a TV, Calvin says, “I try to make television-watching a complete forfeiture of experience. Notice how I keep my jaw slack, so my mouth hangs open. I try not to swallow either, so I drool, and I keep my eyes half-focused, so I don’t use any muscles at all. I take a passive entertainment and extend the passivity to my entire being. I wallow in my lack of participation and response. I’m utterly inert.” Where before one might have socialized outside, gone to a play, or discussed grievances with fellow workers and strategized over how to resolve them, now one could stay at home and watch a passively entertaining sitcom that imbued one with the proper values of consumerism, wealth accumulation, status-consciousness, objectification of women, subordination to authority, lack of interest in politics, and other “bourgeois virtues.” The more one cultivated a relationship with the television, the less one cultivated relationships with people—or with one’s creative capacities, which “more than anything else make the individual feel that life is worth living.”

Television is the perfect technology for a mature capitalist society, and has surely been of inestimable value in keeping the population relatively passive and obedient—distracted, idle, incurious, separated yet conformist. Doubtless in a different kind of society it could have a somewhat more elevated potential—programming could be more edifying, devoted to issues of history, philosophy, art, culture, science—but in our own society, in which institutions monomaniacally fixated on accumulating profit and discouraging critical thought (because it’s dangerous) have control of it, the outcome is predictable. The average American watches about five hours of TV a day, while 60 percent of Americans have subscription services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. Sixty-five percent of homes have three or more TV sets.

Movie-watching, too, is an inherently passive pastime. Theodor Adorno remarked, “Every visit to the cinema, despite the utmost watchfulness, leaves me dumber and worse than before.” To sit in a movie theater (or at home) with the lights out, watching electronic images flit by, hearing blaring noises from huge surround-sound speakers, is to experience a kind of sensory overload while being almost totally inactive. And then the experience is over and you rub your eyes and try to become active and whole again. It’s different from watching a play, where the performers are present in front of you, the art is enacted right there organically and on a proper human scale, there is no sensory overload, no artificial splicing together of fleeting images, no glamorous cinematic alienation from your own mundane life.

Since the 1990s, of course, electronic media have exploded to the point of utterly dominating our lives. For example, 65 percent of U.S. households include someone who plays video games regularly. Over three-quarters of Americans own a smartphone, which, from anecdotal observation, we know tends to occupy an immense portion of their time. The same proportion has broadband internet service at home, and 70 percent of Americans use social media. As an arch-traditionalist, I look askance at all this newfangled electronic technology (even as I use it constantly). It seems to me that electronic mediation of human relationships, and of life itself, is inherently alienating and destructive, insofar as it atomizes or isolates. There’s something anti-humanistic about having one’s life be determined by algorithms (algorithms invented and deployed, in many cases, by private corporations). And the effects on mental functioning are by no means benign: studies have confirmed the obvious, that “the internet may give you an addict’s brain,” “you may feel more lonely and jealous,” and “memory problems may be more likely” (apparently because of information overload). Such problems manifest a passive and isolated mode of experience.

But this is the mode of experience of neoliberalism, i.e., hyper-capitalism. After the upsurge of protest in the 1960s and early ’70s against the corporatist regime of centrist liberalism, the most reactionary sectors of big business launched a massive counterattack to destroy organized labor and the whole New Deal system, which was eating into their profits and encouraging popular unrest. The counterattack continues in 2018, and, as we know, has been wildly successful. The union membership rate in the private sector is a mere 6.5 percent, a little less than it was on the eve of the Great Depression, and the U.S. spends much less on social welfare than comparable OECD countries. Such facts have had predictable effects on the cohesiveness of the social fabric.

What Does Responsibility Have To Do With Reproduction?

nursingclio |  Genetic counseling, as the previous two posts in this series suggested, has a lot to offer for navigating the tricky decisions things like prenatal testing and preimplantation genetic diagnosis raise. Well, in this post I’d like to make things a little more complicated. Enter the sheer messiness of history. I still believe genetic counseling is the best approach we have right now for helping prospective parents with hard choices, but it has a complicated — and not so distant — past that continues to shape counselors’ ways of interacting with clients and their decisions.

A LITTLE REVIEW

In the first post I shared a little bit of the history of genetic counseling in the United States and gave some examples of how, today, it can help prospective parents understand why they’re being tested and what those tests might mean. The second post discussed the history of blame and disability more broadly and introduced the fact that ideas about what disability means have changed over time — often significantly.

I’ve argued that genetic counseling has the potential to address feelings of blame, guilt, and confusion in the face of genetic testing results. Further, it can help answer questions like: What will life actually be like for parents and their children? What do genetic tests say and what don’t they say? What are the options after having a test?

My optimism about genetic counseling, evident in these two posts, is tempered by the fact that it has a complex and challenging past with origins in eugenics ideology that have influenced the way counseling is provided today. In a sense what I’m suggesting is that genetic counseling still has a lot of issues that need to be talked about and worked on, but that it’s way better than nothing.

Lets take a look at what I mean about how eugenic ideas shaped genetic counseling.

EUGENIC BEGINNINGS

Most of the first genetic counselors in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were human geneticists, but the origins of human genetics lay in eugenics. Early genetic counselors identified self-proclaimed eugenicists like Charles Davenport, founder of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor — one of the nation’s leading eugenics institutions between 1910 and the 1930s — as some of the first human geneticists in the United States. And four of the first five presidents of the American Society of Human Genetics, founded in 1948, were also board members of the American Eugenics Society.[1] Human geneticists tried to distance themselves from aspects of the traditional eugenics movement, particularly its racial prejudices and some of its scientific methods, but were still concerned about the eugenic effects of their work. They worried about what effect their counseling might have on the population as a whole.

Try? Been Doing It For A Minute, Consequences Be Damned...,

gizmodo |  Imagine a scenario, perhaps a few years from now, in which Canada decides to release thousands of mosquitoes genetically modified to fight the spread of a devastating mosquito-borne illness. While Canada has deemed these lab-made mosquitoes ethical, legal and safe for both humans and the environment, the US has not. Months later, by accident and circumstance, the engineered skeeters show up across the border. The laws of one land, suddenly, have become the rule of another.

If modern science can can defy the boundaries of borders, who exactly should be charged with deciding what science to unleash upon the world?

A version of this hypothetical scenario is already unfolding in the UK. Last year, the British government gave scientists the green light to genetically engineer human embryos. But in the US and most other nations, this possibility is still both illegal and morally fraught. Opponents to the practice argue that it risks opening up a Pandora’s Box of designer babies and genetically engineered super-humans. Even many more neutral voices argue that the technology demands further scrutiny.

And yet, the UK, at the vanguard of genetic engineering human beings, has already opened that box. In 2015, the British government approved the use of a controversial gene-editing technology to stop devastating mitochondrial diseases from being passed on from mothers to their future children. And last February, the UK granted the first license in the world to edit healthy human embryos for research. Recently, a Newsweek headline asked whether the scientists of this small island nation are in fact deciding the fate of all of humanity. It is a pretty good question.

This alarming ethical conundrum has not escaped the notice of global governments. A National Intelligence Council report released this month concluded that “genome editing and human enhancement” are “likely to pose some of the most contentious values questions in the coming decades.” Advancements in these arenas, the report said, “will affect relations between states.”

Dueterostems Already In The DIE Phase Of Their Nightmare...,

bigthink |  There are nearly 7.5 billion people on the planet right now. The question of how to feed, clothe, educate, employ, and hydrate everyone is a problem that is widely acknowledged. The question of overpopulation, and whether or not it is a major problem, often asks how our limited resources can be used in a growing world.

However, while most discussion of overpopulation is focused on the material aspects of it, some have asked about the psychological ramifications. Chief among these thinkers was Dr. John B. Calhoun who worked extensively with mice and rats to study the effects of overpopulation on behavior.

Dr. Calhoun was a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In his most famous experiment, four breeding pairs of mice were moved into a mouse utopia. There were unlimited supplies of food, water and bedding. The area was disease free, the temperature perfectly controlled, and the researchers even cleaned the place monthly. As close to heaven as a mouse could get. All that they lacked was infinite space. There was, however, room for 3,000 mice.

Mice, for those who are unaware, are actually quite social creatures in the right conditions. They take on group roles, mark out territories, and develop hierarchies if their environment allows. It is this behavior that Calhoun wished to affect, and study. He described the experiment in terms of four “eras”, summarized here.

Days 0-100: The era called “Strive”. During which the mice were getting used to the new world, territories were established.

Days 100-315: The “Exploit” period. The population doubled every 60 or so days. Normal social behavior was noted here, and the population took full advantage of its unlimited resources.

Days  315-600: The “Equilibrium” period. It was here that the social roles of mice began to break down. Mice born during this period found they lacked space to mark out territories in, and random acts of violence among the mice began to occur. Many males simply gave up on trying to find females. These males retreated into their bedding and rarely ventured out. Simply eating, sleeping, and grooming. Calhoun dubbed these narcissistic loners “The Beautiful Ones”. They also tended to be rather stupid.

Days 600-800: The “Die” phase. The population, which maxed-out at 2,200, began to decline. No surviving births took place after day 600, and the colony ultimately died out. Individuals removed from the colony and placed in similar units continued to demonstrate erratic behavior and also failed to reproduce. The mice were remarkably violent at this time, for little reason.

A formula was written to explain what happened to the mice, how the population continued to crash even after conditions began to improve again. Calhoun felt there were truly two deaths for the mice: the first death was a spiritual one, leading to the decline into chaos and madness. After that event, no recovery was possible for the mice. The second was physical, and inevitable after the first.

We Already Know Civilizational Sleep Ends In Nightmares...,

Counterpunch |  It feels as if world events are in overdrive, and sometimes it’s hard to escape the thought that that there is no longer much point in trying to analyse, or make sense of, a trajectory increasingly out of control.

I see little evidence that those of us in the segment of the world political spectrum likely to read these words need much persuasion — nor that those who consider us dupes of the Evil Vladimir, or apologists for what was once called the “Yellow Peril”, could ever have any inclination to even glance at the arguments and sentiments of those they consider so utterly deluded.

In fact, the plethora of information (both truth and lies), and the amazing communicative possibilities most of us now have at our disposal, have brought with them a world in which no one is very often persuaded of anything: for every fact we present, they have access to an official or cleverly crafted lie with convincing-looking documentation that demonstrates our ostensible mendacity and subversion.

What pre-internet thinker – is it possible that bygone age ended only 20 years ago for most of us? — would have ever thought that a technological world in which every voice can be heard worldwide would solidify, rather than threaten, the role of propaganda in public life? or that near-universal access to technology enabling impressively thorough research, at incredible speed, would be one of the major factors in eliminating political consensus and rendering nearly obsolete the recognition of facts as such?

Well, perhaps there are brilliant minds out there who foresaw it all. But consider me dumbfounded. While there is a range of similarities between our world today and those described by Orwell and Huxley in their famous novels of future horror, there are other aspects that render this a different universe altogether, and one that continues to shock me.

Assuming that it WERE in fact possible to persuade people who accept their governments’ colossal lies and distortions that those same lies are in fact exactly that – lies — one would be required to acquaint most of them with the most basic facts of recent history. For remarkably, almost unbelievably, in a world where all of us have limitless information and history at our fingertips, most people know nothing about recent history – and the vast majority is not even curious about it.

‘Most White Americans, as a general statement, think they are better than the rest of the world. And most Americans have scant knowledge about the rest of the world. So the belief in cultural (and moral) superiority is based on what? The answer is not simple, but as a general sort of response, this trust in “our” superiority is built on violence. On an ability to be effectively violent. Most British, too, think they are superior to those “wogs” south of their emerald isle. But since the setting of the sun on Empire, “officially”, the British hold to both a sense of superiority and a deep panic-inducing sense of inferiority — at least to their American cousins. They are still better than those fucking cheese eating frogs or the krauts or whoever, but they accept that the U.S. is the sort of heavyweight champ of the moment. Meanwhile, the tragic and criminal fire at Grenfell Towers in London elicited a public discourse that perfectly reflected the class inequality of the UK, but also reflected, again, the colonialist mentality of the ruling party and their constituency … But that is exactly it. The colonial template is one etched in acid in the collective imagination of the West. At least the English-speaking West. Expendable natives…which is what Jim Mattis sees everywhere that he dumps depleted uranium and Willy Pete. It is what Madeleine Albright saw in Iraq or Hillary Clinton in Libya or Barack Obama in Sudan, Yemen, and…well… four or five other countries. It is what most U.S. police departments see in neighborhoods ravaged by poverty. As in those old Tarzan films, when the sound of drums is heard, the pith helmeted white man notes…”the natives are restless tonight”. When one discusses Syria, the most acute topic this week, remember that for Mad Dog and Boss Trump, or for the loopy John Bolton, these are just natives in need of pacification. Giving money to ISIS or Daesh, or whoever, as a cynical expression of colonial realpolitik, is nothing out of the ordinary. It is what the UK and US have done for a long while. It’s Ramar of the Jungle handing out beads to the *natives*.’ (John Steppling, “The Sleep of Civilization”) 

Overpopulation Leads to Catastrophe

medicalnewstoday |  The potentially catastrophic consequences of an exponentially growing global population is a favorite subject for writers of dystopian fiction. 

The most recent example, Utopia - a forthcoming David Fincher-directed series for HBO - won critical acclaim in its original incarnation on UK television for its depiction of a conspiracy-laden modern world where the real threat to public health is not Ebola or other headline-friendly communicable viruses, but overpopulation. 

Fears over the ever-expanding number of human bodies on our planet are not new and have been debated by researchers and policy makers for decades, if not centuries. However, recent research by University of Washington demographer Prof. Adrian Raftery - using modern statistical modeling and the latest data on population, fertility and mortality - has found that previous projections on population growth may have been conservative. 

"Our new projections are probabilistic, and we find that there will probably be between 9.6 and 12.3 billion people in 2100," Prof. Raftery told Medical News Today. "This projection is based on a statistical model that uses all available past data on fertility and mortality from all countries in a systematic way, unlike previous projections that were based on expert assumptions." 

Prof. Raftery's figure places up to an additional 5 billion people more on the Earth by 2100 than have been previously calculated. 

 

A key finding of the study is that the fertility rate in Africa is declining much more slowly than has been previously estimated, which Prof. Raftery tells us "has major long-term implications for population."

Merry Christmas Fetishists: Was Teddy the Jay-Z to Harold's Dame Dash?

Cause we all already KNOW y'all ain't know a DAYYUM THANG about this..., but anyway

Harold Melvin an'em Blue Notes really wasn't ALL THAT without the late, great, Mr. Teddy Pendergrass. 

See, and better still, listen for yourself to this epic case of aural domination....,

then in HQ Audio

The Rape of RAP - Don't Say ISHT To Me About Harvey Weinstein...,

yournewswire |  John Homeston, a retired CIA agent, has admitted this week on National Russian Television (NTV) that the CIA was behind the creation of the 1980s hip hop scene and financed major hip hop acts including NWA, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five.

The government at the time spent “big money, serious money” on this covert operation destined to “further division” and “corrupt the American youth to nihilist, anti-establishment and anti-American ideologies”, he explained in a half hour interview broadcast on national television.

Famous hip hop songs of the legendary hip hop outfit NWA were even scripted by a team of psychologists and war propagandists of the CIA. “F#ck the police,” and “When I’m called off, I got a sawed off / Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off,” and other nihilist and anti-establishment lyrics were intended to unleash a wave of cynicism towards authorities, promote the use of heavy drugs, and entice the youth with revolutionary, counter-establishment ideas.

The retired CIA agent claims the social engineering maneuver was “extremely successful.“

“We understood at the time that music was a powerful means of propaganda to reach the youth,” explained the 77-year-old man.

“Our mission was to use teenage angst to our advantage and turn Generation X into a decadent, pro-drug and anti-establishment culture that would create uprisings and further division within society. We even infiltrated mainstream radio to promote their music and reach millions of people everyday,” he admitted, visibly proud of the accomplishment.

“For many of us in the CIA, infiltrating the 1980s hip hop scene was one of the CIA’s most successful experiments of propaganda to date,” he acknowledged during the interview.

“You could say Frankenstein’s monster got up off the table and started goose-stepping.”

Is Hip-Hop Good For Anyone? (REDUX Originally Posted 6/29/17)

theoccidentalobserver |   It is unfortunate, to say the least, that Black hip-hop scholarship never mentions the elephant in the room: Jewish control of the music industry. If hip-hop is, indeed, ethno-politics set to music, if hip-hop has taken the place of the civil rights movement in the hearts and minds of Black youth, it is impossible to ignore the historic Black-Jewish alliance against WASPs. For much of the twentieth century, that alliance was a constituent element in what Black nationalist Harold Cruse called the “fateful triangular tension among national groups…coming to the fore” in the 60s.[28] It is a truism of American political history that, from the Leo Frank trial and the founding of the NAACP in the early twentieth century down to the Black Lives Matter movement, Jewish intellectual-activists have worked tirelessly to imbue disaffected American Negroes with their own revolutionary spirit.[29]

Cruse was himself a Negro member of the American Communist Party. By that time, Jews had displaced Anglo-Saxons as the vanguard of American Communism. Unlike WASP Communists, the Jews shaped radical politics in accordance with “their own national group social ambitions or individual self-elevation.” Negroes were relegated to the status of a national minority in the party while Jews were free to pick up or drop their Jewish identity as it suited them.[30] This arrangement enabled Jews to become experts on “the Negro problem.” Not surprisingly, Jewish artists, musicians, and radicals then became highly visible players in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. “As a result,” Cruse observes, “the great brainwashing of Negro radical intellectuals was not achieved by capitalism, or the capitalistic bourgeoisie, but by Jewish intellectuals in the American Communist Party.”[31]

In the contemporary hip-hop community, Jewish leadership has been hidden behind the corporate veil. Tricia Rose vehemently denounces the corrupting influence of corporate control on the hip-hop community but her treatment of the subject obscures the identity of the corporate high command.[32] The music industry is absorbed into a vast impersonal system of “White power,” a matrix whose denizens all routinely swallow the blue pill. The closest we come to identifying those in charge is when Dyson criticizes the “White corporate interests” exploiting Black talent.[33]

Jews are never mentioned in Dyson’s work on hip-hop. Not surprisingly, Dyson has unimpeachable philo-Semitic credentials. Blacks and Jews, he believes, are united in common struggles against oppression in White America. Far be it from him ever to cast Jews as an enemy of Black folk. On his account, Blacks love Jews and Jews love Blacks.[34] Professor Rose also tip-toes around the issue of Jewish influence in the hip-hop community; The Hip Hop Wars has no index entry for Jews. Only in passing does Rose name names. But, when she does identify a few of the corporate heavyweights involved in the hip-hop community, the elephant moves onto center stage.

In a chapter on hip-hop’s responsibility for sexist and misogynist lyrics and imagery, Rose mentions a rare public appearance by leading figures in the corporate record industry. In their statements “corporate executives such as Universal chairman Doug Morris, Warner chairman and chief executive Edgar Bronfman, Sony chairman Andrew Lack, and Viacom president and CEO Phillipe P. Dauman have defended their role as distributors of intensely sexist content by subsuming sexism under artists’ rights to express themselves freely.” Interestingly, in the same paragraph, Rose urges us to “pull back the veil on the corporate media’s manipulation of Black male and female artists and the impact this has on fans and the direction of Black cultural expression.”[35] Why does she not see fit to mention that the four corporate kingpins she names are all Jews? The ethno-political fact is that Rose leaves the corporate veil intact by ascribing blame for the corruption of the hip-hop community to an abstraction called corporate greed. Rose heads the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.[36] How can she not be aware of the stunning success Jews have had in mixing business with ethno-politics?

After all, a simple Google search on “Jews run hip hop” turns up a wealth of investigative leads for a researcher eager to see how the “triangular tension” between Jews, Negroes, and Anglo-Saxons” has accommodated itself to the new players in American ethno-politics. Black scholars typically ignore the criticisms of Jewish control commonly made by rappers and fans.[37] Traditional Catholics such as E. Michael Jones are also critical of rap music as “one more manifestation of the behavior which goes along with the Jewish revolutionary spirit that took over the Black mind during the course of the 20^thcentury.”[38] The Jewish revolutionary spirit has pioneered the techniques of using sex as an instrument of political control.[39] The hip-hop brand of sexuality is no exception.

Bearing that in mind, it comes as no surprise to learn that hip-hop is deeply involved “with the multibillion dollar pornographic industry. The strip club has long been an integral part of both the music video and business end, but since the start of the new century, there has been a complete cross-over into pornography.” Orlando Patterson describes scenes from these productions as “the most degrading and abusive depictions of women imaginable.”[40] Small wonder, then, that a Google search for “Jews run pornography” yields another treasure trove of investigative leads sure to be left unexplored (for fear of the Jews?) by both Black and White scholars.