vice-chair of the dnc wants to know "what is the policy/what is the mission?"

civilbeat |  Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a frequent critic of the Obama administration’s military policies, was scheduled to appear as the lead guest on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” live on Friday at 4 p.m. (10 p.m. EST). But her recent comments left little doubt as to how she’d react to the deployment: Only days ago, she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer there is “no reason for (U.S. military personnel) to go and to be deployed into these situations” in Syria.

Military actions being taken against the Islamic State now are being pursued under the 2001 and 2002 AUMF, which authorized use of military force against Iraq. Their use in pursuing broader goals in the Middle East goes back to the George W. Bush administration. Obama submitted a proposed new AUMF in February, but under House Speaker John Boehner, Congress failed to take up the authorization.

Up to 50 Special Operations advisers, who will not take part in direct combat, are expected to comprise the new deployment, which the White House described as “an intensification of a strategy that the president announced more than a year ago.”

dyson doesn't believe you're up against it...,

theregister |  Are climate models getting better? You wrote how they have the most awful fudges, and they only really impress people who don't know about them.

I would say the opposite. What has happened in the past 10 years is that the discrepancies between what's observed and what's predicted have become much stronger. It's clear now the models are wrong, but it wasn't so clear 10 years ago. I can't say if they'll always be wrong, but the observations are improving and so the models are becoming more verifiable.

It seems almost medieval to suppose that nature is punishing us, rather than the Enlightenment view, that we can tame nature, and still be good stewards of it.

That's all true.

It's now difficult for scientists to have frank and honest input into public debates. Prof Brian Cox, who is the public face of physics in the UK thanks to the BBC, has said he has no obligation to listen to "deniers," or to any other views other than the orthodoxy.

That's a problem, but still I find that I have things to say and people do listen to me, and people have no particular complaints.

It's very sad that in this country, political opinion parted [people's views on climate change]. I'm 100 per cent Democrat myself, and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on this issue, and the Republicans took the right side.

Because the big growing countries need fossil fuels, the political goal of mitigation, by reducing or redirecting industrial activity and consumer behaviour, now seems quite futile in the West.

China and India rely on coal to keep growing, so they'll clearly be burning coal in huge amounts. They need that to get rich. Whatever the rest of the world agrees to, China and India will continue to burn coal, so the discussion is quite pointless.

At the same time, coal is very unpleasant stuff, and there are problems with coal quite apart from climate. I remember in England when we burned coal, everything was filthy. It was really bad, and that's the way it is now in China, but you can clean that up as we did in England. It takes a certain amount of political willpower, and that takes time. Pollution is quite separate to the climate problem: one can be solved, and the other cannot, and the public doesn't understand that.

Have you heard of the phrase "virtue signalling"? The UK bureaucracy made climate change its foreign policy priority, and we heard a lot of the phrase "leading the world in the fight ..." and by doing so, it seemed to be making a public declaration of its goodness and virtue ...

No [laughs]. Well, India and China aren't buying that. When you go beyond 50 years, everything will change. As far as the next 50 years are concerned, there are two main forces of energy, which are coal and shale gas. Emissions have been going down in the US while they've going up in Europe, and that's because of shale gas. It's only half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal. China may in fact be able to develop shale gas on a big scale and that means they burn a lot less coal.

It seems complete madness to prohibit shale gas. You wondered if climate change is an Anglophone preoccupation. Well, France is even more dogmatic than Britain about shale gas!

what exxon knew about climate change

newyorker |   Wednesday morning, journalists at InsideClimate News, a Web site that has won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on oil spills, published the first installment of a multi-part exposé that will be appearing over the next month. The documents they have compiled and the interviews they have conducted with retired employees and officials show that, as early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed—perhaps fatally—the planet’s response to global warming.

There’s a sense, of course, in which one already assumed that this was the case. Everyone who’s been paying attention has known about climate change for decades now. But it turns out Exxon didn’t just “know” about climate change: it conducted some of the original research. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the company employed top scientists who worked side by side with university researchers and the Department of Energy, even outfitting one of the company’s tankers with special sensors and sending it on a cruise to gather CO₂ readings over the ocean. By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black was, according to his own notes, able to tell the company’s management committee that there was “general scientific agreement” that what was then called the greenhouse effect was most likely caused by man-made CO₂; a year later, speaking to an even wider audience inside the company, he said that research indicated that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius. That’s just about where the scientific consensus lies to this day. “Present thinking,” Black wrote in summary, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

architect of the new world order

bibliotecapleyades |  Born as Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Bavaria, Germany in 1923 to a traditional German Jewish family, Henry's father was a schoolteacher, and surely that was a major part of him becoming a bit of an academic.

Kissinger wasn't the family's surname originally, but had been adopted many years before, in 1817 by Henry's great great grandmother. The Kissingers could see and feel the turbulent political weather in Germany during the 1930s, and in 1938 they wisely moved to New York City.

Henry adopted the culture of the USA readily and quickly, but to hear Dr. Kissinger speak is to realize that he never lost his Frankish German accent.

Do you see how clean cut our Dr. Kissinger is in the photo up above? Well, when Henry got out of high school he promptly went to college, and he worked part time in an old fashioned shave brush factory to help pay his bills. Henry excelled academically and enjoyed working part time too.

At the City College Of New York he studied accounting, but his studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the army in 1943.

In the army the future Dr. Kissinger would meet another very talented German immigrant named Fritz Kraemer, and because both of them were very fluent in German, their talents were in great demand.

Henry was no coward, he'd volunteered for hazardous duty and got it during the Battle of The Bulge.

As the allied forces advanced into the German heartland, Henry Kissinger brilliantly arranged and organized German civilians, was promoted quickly to Sergeant, and set to tracking down Gestapo officers and other saboteurs, for his efforts, he was awarded the Bronze Star.

Soon young Henry would take on more and more authority - helping to De Nazify assigned districts of captured Western Germany.

Following his very worthy and appreciated service in the second world war, Henry Kissinger returned to the US and put his mind to books, he studied at Harvard College, and in 1954 was awarded his PhD from Harvard University.

Henry would then remain with Harvard University as a member of the faculty, and his primary manner of influence was in government and international affairs. As an Ivy League staff, one has tremendous sway with government, as universities such as Harvard are practically part of the federal government of the USA.

Henry was on his way to becoming the ultimate globalist philosopher - the kind of man that ultimately is an anti Patriot, a hater of the rights and the culture of the nation that so easily and lovingly adopted his family when they fled the Nazis.

Just like George Soros betrayed the United Kingdom for billions, Henry Kissinger would betray the citizens of the USA in favor of the New World Order.

Eager to influence US Foreign policy in such a manner as to destroy the United States from within, Henry Kissinger would team up with like minded anti American Americans such as Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of New York.

From the influence with the governor of one of the nation's most populace and wealthy states, Kissinger would then leap into the least credible or honest presidential administration in US history, and Richard Nixon must have surely saw a kindred spirit in Henry - he made him National Security Advisor in 1969.

Soon Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State, and after Nixon was humiliated publicly, Henry Kissinger would remain as Secretary of State under Gerald Ford.

why I left the trembling...,

independent |  Moishy*, 27, is a good-looking young man. Dressed in unremarkable jeans and a hoodie, he blends in easily: he’s just another ordinary Londoner. For Moishy, that’s a compliment. Having finally escaped one of the city’s most secretive religious communities, Moishy has achieved a dream he’s held for years: to live an everyday, secular life.

Moishy grew up in the ultra-orthodox (‘charedi’) Jewish community in Stamford Hill, which he describes as “like living in a different world – it’s like the Middle Ages – totally secluded.” There were no jeans there: Moishy adhered to a strict uniform of a black suit, a hat, curls in his hair and a beard trimmed to exactly the right length. Women wear long skirts, long sleeves and wigs once they are married to protect their modesty.

Contact between Charedim and the rest of the world is mainly non-existent, with children taught to fear the non-Charedi world. Moishy remembers: “As kids we were told that the outside world hated us, so we were suspicious and afraid of them. We were taught that non-Jews had no soul and that our duty in life was not to fall into the trap of going into their world.” That suspicion even extended to non-Charedi Jews like me – Moishy points to me and says: “They wouldn’t regard you as Jewish. We weren’t taught that there are lots of different types of Judaism.”

With Yiddish as their language, most children are not taught to speak English. Jewish studies replace the secular curriculum. Moishy explains: “Children don’t need to learn anything. They grow up controlled and put into arranged marriages. The only thing you aspire to is to become a rabbi. If you’re not academic enough for that you’re found a low-paid job within the community. The Government know about the lack of education in the community, but they don't do anything about it.” Although girls receive a little more education to help them raise children – “they learn enough to go to the doctors” – Moishy says it’s nowhere near enough: “Girls are treated like nothing. They’re not taught anything. If they knew more they’d know that they wouldn’t have to marry these boys who don’t know anything either.”

bibi wants to start shooting stone-throwers...,

RT | Israeli police and the IDF might be given the right to open fire on Palestinians who throw stones and Molotov cocktails. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also announced deployment of additional police to Jerusalem, the West Bank, and on a key highway. 

Netanyahu called an emergency high-level security meeting on Wednesday to discuss the recent spike of “terror incidents” taking place within Jerusalem and on Road 443 connecting the capital Tel Aviv with the city of Modi'in, the Jerusalem Post reports.

The meeting was attended by top security officials, such as Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, Transportation and Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz, General Security Services head Yoram Cohen, and others.

 

PM Netanyahu told the gathering he is not going to tolerate rock and petrol-bomb attacks on a central road, or inside the city of Jerusalem. 

“The policy is zero tolerance for rock throwers and zero tolerance for terror,” Netanyahu said. “Since the legal system is having difficulty dealing with juveniles” engaged in those activities, the Israeli government is going to legislate a minimum punishment for those underage offenders.

trembling children taught that goyim are evil...,

Independent |  Independently translated from Yiddish for The Independent, the worksheet's first question reads: “What have the evil goyim (non-Jews) done with the synagogues and cheders [Jewish primary schools]?” The answer in the completed worksheet reads: “Burned them.”

Another question asks: “What did the goyim want to do with all the Jews?” – to which the answer, according to the worksheet, is: “Kill them.”.

“It doesn’t explicitly refer to the Holocaust,” the source said. “It’s a document that teaches very young children to be very afraid and treat non-Jews very suspiciously because of what they did to us in the past.

"It’s not a history lesson – you can’t say that. It’s a parable that is actively teaching the children extremism, hatred and a fear for the outside world.”

A spokesperson for Beis Rochel said that the worksheets would be amended and apologised for any offence. However they argued the phrase “goyim” was not offensive and accusations that they were indoctrinating children were “without basis”. “The language we used was not in any way intended to cause offence, now this has been brought to our attention, we will endeavour to use more precise language in the future.”

racetards, bibtards, the god of the stupid - useful idiocy in service to hardcore racist elites...,

billmoyers |  Conventional wisdom holds that the rise of the religious right as a political force to be reckoned with during the 1970s and 1980s was driven by conservative Christians’ intense opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. But Dartmouth College’s Randall Balmer writes that “the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny.” He notes that “it wasn’t until 1979 — a full six years after Roe — that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but …. because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”

When Roe was first decided, most of the Southern evangelicals who today make up the backbone of the anti-abortion movement believed that abortion was a deeply personal issue in which government shouldn’t play a role. Some were hesitant to take a position on abortion because they saw it as a “Catholic issue,” and worried about the influence of Catholic teachings on American religious observance.

Shortly after the decision was handed down, The Baptist Press, a wire service run by the Southern Baptist Convention — the biggest Evangelical organization in the US — ran an op-ed praising the ruling. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” read the January 31, 1973, piece by W. Barry Garrett, The Baptist Press’s Washington bureau chief.

necropolitics: the flower of american womanhood revealed (that was quick)

cryptocomb |  South Garland (Texas) High School alumni have been keeping tabs on their classmates for reunion purposes: http://www.dfwretroplex.com/SGHS_1983_master.htm.

Interestingly, her 1981 and 1982 yearbooks have been posted online. Photo attachments above contain visuals of her from 30 years ago.

Bikowsky’s last known address was in Alexandria which I believe sold in 2012. You will see that she is referenced in the alumni list as living in that city, and as holding a second surname, Silverstein.

It appears that Bikowsky, who got her BA from UPenn, may have married a gentleman she met at Tufts University’s Fletcher School for Law and Diplomacy in the late 80′s. His name is David Silverstein.

Both are graduates of the Fletcher School. You will note that in a 1991 article on terrorism for “The Heritage Foundation”, Silvestein references Bikowsky’s unpublished Masters thesis: 

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1991/08/bg847-an-american-strategy-against-terrorism. 

Access to this unpublished thesis would require at least some greater degree of access.

Silverstein has gone on to be deeply involved in formulating foreign, defense, and national security policy. He is currently a director and media talking head with two neo-conservative “think tanks” on, mostly, Middle East matters – “ASMEA” and the “Foundation for Defense of Democracies”. Should his relationship to Bikowsky be confirmed, its hard to imagine how his ideas have not trickled into Bikowsky’s mind, and consequently, the CIA’s business practices.

More about Bikowsky at Cryptome.

recall the burning man of tunisia bouazizi?

These humans have a biological limit on how much social inequality they will tolerate. Which means the centuries old econonarrative project will soon crash in the fire of instinctual moral directives of  fairness. Resource extracting banksters and their bought and paid for politicians and overseers should be on notice regarding what's just beyond that signpost up ahead.

captain trips: the phenomenal power of singular personality...,

archive |  For such a pivotal character in recent history, Al Hubbard is remarkably little known. He is the unsung man who almost single-handedly introduced the world to LSD, as well as (to a lesser degree) mescaline and psilocybin. Albert Hoffman may have invented LSD, but Hubbard is the one who, in the very early years, gave it away like candy to some of the most influential people on the planet.

 

A true cipher, Hubbard was visionary, eccentric, friendly, and mysterious. At various times, he was an intelligence agent, an inventor, a millionaire, a clinical therapist, and more. There appear to be links between Hubbard and MKULTRA, the CIA program that researched behavior modification using LSD and other substances and techniques.

The definitive article on Hubbard is "The Original Captain Trips" by Todd Brendan Fahey, who also wrote a novel (Wisdom's Maw) that prominently features Hubbard. While researching Hubbard, Todd was given access to a cache of primary documents about the "acid messiah." This material has never been seen publicly until now. Todd has scanned these rare, one-of-a-kind documents and graciously sent them to us for posting.

RIP - insatiable curiosity...,

mit | Amar Bose ’51, SM ’52, ScD ’56, a former member of the MIT faculty and the founder of Bose Corporation, has died. He was 83.

Dr. Bose received his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and doctorate from MIT, all in electrical engineering. He was asked to join the faculty in 1956, and he accepted with the intention of teaching for no more than two years. He continued as a member of the MIT faculty until 2001.

During his long tenure at MIT, Dr. Bose made his mark both in research and in teaching. In 1956, he started a research program in physical acoustics and psychoacoustics: This led to his development of many patents in acoustics, electronics, nonlinear systems and communication theory.

Throughout his career, he was cited for excellent teaching. In a 1969 letter to the faculty, then-dean of the School of Engineering R. L. Bisplinghoff wrote, “Dr. Bose is known and respected as one of M.I.T.’s great teachers and for his imaginative and forceful research in the areas of acoustics, loudspeaker design, two-state amplifier-modulators, and nonlinear systems.”

Paul Penfield Jr., professor emeritus of electrical engineering, was a colleague of Dr. Bose, and he recalls what made Dr. Bose different. “Amar was personally creative,” he said, “but unlike so many other creative people, he was also introspective. He could understand and explain his own thinking processes and offer them as guides to others. I’ve seen him do this for several engineering and management problems. At some deep level, that is what teaching is really all about.  Perhaps that helps explain why he was such a beloved teacher.”

healthy and safe, whereabouts unknown...,

aljazeera | Edward Snowden has been reported to be "healthy and safe" by Julian Assange but his whereabouts remain a mystery as the US hunted the architect of one of the biggest intelligence leaks in history.

The WikiLeaks founder on Monday said Snowden and a WikiLeaks staff member travelling with him, Sarah Harrison, were "healthy and safe and in contact with their legal team".

However, he added that he could not give information on their whereabouts. Snowden reportedly left Hong Kong for Moscow on Sunday, and was said on Monday to have exited on a flight to Cuba. However, journalists travelling on the same plane said his seat was empty.

Strong objections

The White House later said it believed Snowden was still in Russia, said it expected the Russian government to send him back to the US and lodged "strong objections" to Hong Kong and China for letting him go.

A spokesman said on Monday evening that Snowden's exit from Hong Kong "unquestionably'' damaged US-China relations, and that officials believed he was still in Russia and should be handed over.

Snowden has been charged by the US of espionage and spying after revealing to Western newspapers how the US's National Security Agency spies on the internet and phone activities of millions of people. The programme, named Prism, is authorised by a secret court.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said during a visit to India that it would be "deeply troubling" if Moscow defied the US over Snowden, and said the fugitive "places himself above the law, having betrayed his country".

somebody very sophisticated has scripted Snowden's exit strategy...,

The Motch Brothers

slate | As I explained earlier today, NSA whistle-blower/leaker/source Edward Snowden's decision to flee for Hong Kong doesn't look like the wisest decision given the former British colony's existing extradition treaty with the United States. But the GlobalPost's Benjamin Carlson explains one detail that everyone seems to be overlooking: A potential bureaucratic loophole that could buy Snowden some much-needed time while he figures out where he'll go next.

Simon Young, director of the Centre for Comparative and Public Law at the University of Hong Kong, told GlobalPost that a decision delivered by Hong Kong's High Court in March of this year required the government to create a new procedure for reviewing asylum applications.

Until the government does this, he said, asylum seekers are allowed to stay in Hong Kong indefinitely. "We’re still waiting to hear from government how they are going to implement this decision," said Young. "Until that’s the case, you can’t return anyone until the law’s in place." 

In other words, should Snowden apply for asylum, then even if the US made a valid extradition request and Hong Kong was willing to comply he could not be deported until the government figured out a new way to review asylum cases — a potentially lengthy process.

Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch says that any Snowden extradition must be "a long way off" because of this gap in the law. "If it comes to the point where the US does issue a warrant on Snowden, and then passes it over to the Hong Kong authorities, and he decides to fight it, at this point it would be a court case," he told GlobalPost. "And it can be a long court case, going up to the court of final appeals."

It's unclear if Snowden and his allies planned to exploit this loophole all along, although it would certainly provide the missing rationale for why he chose to head to Hong Kong in the first place, and why he felt comfortable enough to out himself and his (rough) location over the weekend. Regardless, it's unlikely that he'll be resting easy any time soon.

no wonder these bankster beehotches fear and despise bitcoin...,

outpost-of-freedom | I've been following the concepts of digital cash and encryption since I read the article in the August 1992 issue of Scientific American on "encrypted signatures." While I've only followed the Digitaliberty area for a few weeks, I can already see a number of points that do (and should!) strongly concern the average savvy individual:

1. How can we translate the freedom afforded by the Internet to ordinary life?

2. How can we keep the government from banning encryption, digital cash, and other systems that will improve our freedom?

A few months ago, I had a truly and quite literally "revolutionary" idea, and I jokingly called it "Assassination Politics": I speculated on the question of whether an organization could be set up to legally announce that it would be awarding a cash prize to somebody who correctly "predicted" the death of one of a list of violators of rights, usually either government employees, officeholders, or appointees. It could ask for anonymous contributions from the public, and individuals would be able send those contributions using digital cash.

I also speculated that using modern methods of public-key encryption and anonymous "digital cash," it would be possible to make such awards in such a way so that nobody knows who is getting awarded the money, only that the award is being given. Even the organization itself would have no information that could help the authorities find the person responsible for the prediction, let alone the one who caused the death.

It was not my intention to provide such a "tough nut to crack" by arguing the general case, claiming that a person who hires a hit man is not guilty of murder under libertarian principles. Obviously, the problem with the general case is that the victim may be totally innocent under libertarian principles, which would make the killing a crime, leading to the question of whether the person offering the money was himself guilty.

On the contrary; my speculation assumed that the "victim" is a government employee, presumably one who is not merely taking a paycheck of stolen tax dollars, but also is guilty of extra violations of rights beyond this. (Government agents responsible for the Ruby Ridge incident and Waco come to mind.) In receiving such money and in his various acts, he violates the "Non-aggression Principle" (NAP) and thus, presumably, any acts against him are not the initiation of force under libertarian principles.

The organization set up to manage such a system could, presumably, make up a list of people who had seriously violated the NAP, but who would not see justice in our courts due to the fact that their actions were done at the behest of the government. Associated with each name would be a dollar figure, the total amount of money the organization has received as a contribution, which is the amount they would give for correctly "predicting" the person's death, presumably naming the exact date. "Guessers" would formulate their "guess" into a file, encrypt it with the organization's public key, then transmit it to the organization, possibly using methods as untraceable as putting a floppy disk in an envelope and tossing it into a mailbox, but more likely either a cascade of encrypted anonymous remailers, or possibly public-access Internet locations, such as terminals at a local library, etc.

In order to prevent such a system from becoming simply a random unpaid lottery, in which people can randomly guess a name and date (hoping that lightning would strike, as it occasionally does), it would be necessary to deter such random guessing by requiring the "guessers" to include with their "guess" encrypted and untraceable "digital cash," in an amount sufficiently high to make random guessing impractical.

For example, if the target was, say, 50 years old and had a life expectancy of 30 years, or about 10,000 days, the amount of money required to register a guess must be at least 1/10,000th of the amount of the award. In practice, the amount required should be far higher, perhaps as much as 1/1000 of the amount, since you can assume that anybody making a guess would feel sufficiently confident of that guess to risk 1/1000th of his potential reward.

The digital cash would be placed inside the outer "encryption envelope," and could be decrypted using the organization's public key. The prediction itself (including name and date) would be itself in another encryption envelope inside the first one, but it would be encrypted using a key that is only known to the predictor himself. In this way, the organization could decrypt the outer envelope and find the digital cash, but they would have no idea what is being predicted in the innermost envelope, either the name or the date.

If, later, the "prediction" came true, the predictor would presumably send yet another encrypted "envelope" to the organization, containing the decryption key for the previous "prediction" envelope, plus a public key (despite its name, to be used only once!) to be used for encryption of digital cash used as payment for the award. The organization would apply the decryption key to the prediction envelope, discover that it works, then notice that the prediction included was fulfilled on the date stated. The predictor would be, therefore, entitled to the award. Nevertheless, even then nobody would actually know WHO he is!

It doesn't even know if the predictor had anything to do with the outcome of the prediction. If it received these files in the mail, in physical envelopes, which had no return address, it would have burned the envelopes before it studied their contents. The result is that even the active cooperation of the organization could not possibly help anyone, including the police, to locate the predictor.

Also included within this "prediction-fulfilled" encryption envelope would be unsigned (not-yet-valid) "digital cash," which would then be blindly signed by the organization's bank and subsequently encrypted using the public key included. (The public key could also be publicized, to allow members of the public to securely send their comments and, possibly, further grateful remuneration to the predictor, securely.) The resulting encrypted file could be published openly on the Internet, and it could then be decrypted by only one entity: The person who had made that original, accurate prediction. The result is that the recipient would be absolutely untraceable.

The digital cash is then processed by the recipient by "unbinding" it, a principle which is explained in far greater detail by the article in the August 1992 issue of Scientific American. The resulting digital cash is absolutely untraceable to its source. Fist tap Dale.

finally, an interesting correlation....,

medicalexpress | As a person's IQ increases, so too does his or her ability to filter out distracting background motion. This surprisingly strong relationship may help scientists better understand what makes a brain more efficient, and, as a result, more intelligent.

A brief visual task can predict IQ, according to a new study. This surprisingly simple exercise measures the brain's unconscious ability to filter out visual movement. The study shows that individuals whose brains are better at automatically suppressing background motion perform better on standard measures of intelligence.

The test is the first purely sensory assessment to be strongly correlated with IQ and may provide a non-verbal and culturally unbiased tool for scientists seeking to understand neural processes associated with general intelligence. "Because intelligence is such a broad construct, you can't really track it back to one part of the brain," says Duje Tadin, a senior author on the study and an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. "But since this task is so simple and so closely linked to IQ, it may give us clues about what makes a brain more efficient, and, consequently, more intelligent." The unexpected link between IQ and motion filtering was reported online in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 23 by a research team lead by Tadin and Michael Melnick, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. In the study, individuals watched brief video clips of black and white bars moving across a computer screen. Their sole task was to identify which direction the bars drifted: to the right or to the left. The bars were presented in three sizes, with the smallest version restricted to the central circle where human motion perception is known to be optimal, an area roughly the width of the thumb when the hand is extended. Participants also took a standardized intelligence test.

As a person's IQ increases, so too does his or her ability to filter out distracting background motion. This surprisingly strong relationship may help scientists better understand what makes a brain more efficient, and, as a result, more intelligent.

Read more at: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-motion-quotient-iq-ability-filter.html#jCp

that neural default mode network again...,

wired | The default mode network has been a hot topic in neuroscience in recent years. Scientists don’t really know what it does, but they love to speculate. One interpretation is that activity in this network may represent what we experience as our internal monologue and may help generate our sense of self.

Last year, British scientists reported that psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, like ayahuasca,  reduces activity in the brain’s default mode network.

The researchers proposed that interfering with the default network could be how psychedelic drugs cause what users often describe as a disintegration of the self, or even a sense of oneness with the universe.

Robin Carhart-Harris, the neuroscientist who led the psilocybin study, reported new findings at the conference from a study that used a method called magnetoencephalography, which tracks brain activity with better time resolution than fMRI does. The results suggest psilocybin affects not only the default mode network, but also disrupts a certain type of rhythmic brain activity.

Individual subjects who experienced more of this desychronization while on the drug tended to report a greater subjective sense of disintegration. ”For me this is the most interesting observation of the lot,” Carhart-Harris said. “Our sense of self, the sense of being someone, really is a kind of an illusion. All we are is a product of our brain activation.”

Eroding the sense of self may be one way hallucinogens produce what many users experience as profound spiritual insights. In 2008 Griffiths and his team at Johns Hopkins reported that the majority of 36 ordinary people who took psilocybin for the first time in an 8-hour session in his lab still regarded the experience as one of the five most personally meaningful events of their lives more than a year later. Two-thirds of them rated it among their top five spiritual experiences.

“It seemed so improbable to me when we started that they’d compare this to birth of a child or death of a parent,” he said at the conference. Fist tap Arnach.

when do babies become conscious?

sciencemag | For everyone who's looked into an infant's sparkling eyes and wondered what goes on in its little fuzzy head, there's now an answer. New research shows that babies display glimmers of consciousness and memory as early as 5 months old.

For decades, neuroscientists have been searching for an unmistakable signal of consciousness in electrical brain activity. Such a sign could determine whether minimally conscious or anesthetized adults are aware—and when consciousness begins in babies.

Studies on adults show a particular pattern of brain activity: When your senses detect something, such as a moving object, the vision center of your brain activates, even if the object goes by too fast for you to notice. But if the object remains in your visual field for long enough, the signal travels from the back of the brain to the prefrontal cortex, which holds the image in your mind long enough for you to notice. Scientists see a spike in brain activity when the senses pick something up, and another signal, the "late slow wave," when the prefrontal cortex gets the message. The whole process takes less than one-third of a second.

Researchers in France wondered if such a two-step pattern might be present in infants. The team monitored infants' brain activity through caps fitted with electrodes. More than 240 babies participated, but two-thirds were too squirmy for the movement-sensitive caps. The remaining 80 (ages 5 months, 12 months, or 15 months) were shown a picture of a face on a screen for a fraction of a second.

Cognitive neuroscientist Sid Kouider of CNRS, the French national research agency, in Paris watched for swings in electrical activity, called event-related potentials (ERPs), in the babies' brains. In babies who were at least 1 year old, Kouider saw an ERP pattern similar to an adult's, but it was about three times slower. The team was surprised to see that the 5-month-olds also showed a late slow wave, although it was weaker and more drawn out than in the older babies. Kouider speculates that the late slow wave may be present in babies as young as 2 months.

This late slow wave may indicate conscious thought, Kouider and colleagues report online today in Science. The wave, feedback from the prefrontal cortex, suggests that the image is stored briefly in the baby's temporary "working memory." And consciousness, Kouider says, is composed of working memory. 

measuring consciousness?

thescientist | General anesthesia has transformed surgery from a ghastly ordeal to a procedure in which the patient feels no pain. Despite its widespread use, however, little is known about how anesthesia produces loss of consciousness—a blind spot brought into sharp focus by the fact that patients still occasionally wake up during surgery. But over the past 5 years, researchers have made significant progress in understanding what happens in the brain as consciousness departs and returns.

Peering into the anesthetized brain with neuroimaging and electroencephalograph (EEG) recordings, scientists have found evidence to support the “integrated-information theory,” which holds that consciousness relies on communication between different brain areas, and fades as that communication breaks down. EEG studies have also revealed distinctive brain wave patterns that signal when consciousness is lost and regained, offering easily identifiable markers for this impairment of communication.

Though many questions remain, advances in brain activity monitoring promise to shed light the neural basis of consciousness, and to eradicate the nightmare of mid-surgery awakenings. What’s more, by combining EEGs with magnetic brain stimulation, researchers may be able to measure consciousness and track recovery in unresponsive patients diagnosed as “vegetative,” who in recent years have been shown to sometimes have higher levels of consciousness than previously realized.

political divides begin in the brain

NewScientist | JOHN HIBBING used to be a traditional political scientist. He studied elections, ran opinion polls and researched why some politicians opt to retire rather than wait around to be defeated by challengers. "About as traditional as it gets," he says.

Roughly a decade ago, though, Hibbing shifted to a new approach that is starting to revolutionise how we think about politics. He began to explore whether political preferences might be partly based in biology. The idea initially met with great scepticism from his peers. But Hibbing and his collaborators at the Political Physiology Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln now have a stack of scientific publications backing the idea.

For example, when they measure the physical reactions of liberals and conservatives to aversive stimuli, they find major differences. Tough-on-crime, pro-military conservatives have a more pronounced startle reflex after hearing a sudden loud noise. They also show stronger skin responses when shown threatening images and look at them more rapidly and for longer.

It is conventional to think about political ideology as a set of ideas people consciously hold about the way society should be ordered. A tacit assumption is that we come to these beliefs rationally, by reading and thinking about the issues. If we differ, it is because we reason to different conclusions.

Hibbing's results suggest otherwise. "One of the things we're trying to get people to realise is that those who disagree with them politically really do experience the world in a different fashion," he says.

Many other seemingly apolitical differences between liberals and conservatives have also been discovered. For example, they tend to organise their living spaces differently, with conservatives favouring tidiness and conventionality, and liberals more tolerant of clutter. They also seem to have different art preferences and even senses of humour.

Most recently, and controversially, focus has shifted to differences in brain structures and functions. In one experiment, conservatives on average had a larger right amygdala, a region of the brain that processes responses to fear and threat. Liberals, in contrast, had more grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, an error-detecting region that is thought to be involved in causing us to stop repeated patterns of behaviour and change course.