the real trouble begins when rising inequality splinters elites

charleshughsmith | History supports two narratives of rising inequality leading to social disintegration and political instability: one is inequality between the top classes and everyone else, and the the other is rising inequality within the top classes.

When the pie starts shrinking and there aren't enough slices to satisfy the rising expectations of the top class, the elites splinter in profound political disunity. In other words, when the offspring of the top 10% earn MBAs from respected universities and can only find internships, their parents become extremely dissatisfied with the status quo.

Josh and Maddie living at home or being subsidized by Mom and Dad was not part of the expected payoff for reaching the top tier of American society. Toss in a stock market crash or two, a medical emergency with co-pays larger than the GDP of small nations and a slump in business/fees/bonuses, and what people who expected to live comfortably on Easy Street are experiencing is downward mobility.

Many in the bottom 90% are also experiencing downward mobility, but their expectations tend to be less elevated than the professional/technocrat class.

Studies have found that our sense of wealth is less a matter of the actual dollar amount and more a matter of how we measure up to our peers. If our entire class is experiencing stagnating income, we're less likely to feel a sense of social inequity.

But if others in our class are still rising while we're stagnating, we sense a great disturbance in the financial and political Force. If our neighbor's kids are landing partnerships (due to superior connections, of course) while Josh and Maddie struggle to escape Intern-Hell, we sense a huge gulf opening that isn't necessarily reflected in income/wealth statistics.

one patient labeled important renders other patients less important by default

NYTimes |  WHEN I saw my first red blanket as a young medical student, I thought little of it.

One morning, as I rushed around a hospital in California on my daily rounds, I spotted an old man who lay in bed beneath a scarlet cover, a sharp contrast to the white linens wrapped around the other patients. He looked unremarkable, and I assumed he brought the blanket from home. So I moved on. He wasn’t my patient, anyway.

That afternoon, I overheard a discussion about the patient between two physicians. Instead of identifying him in the usual manner — age, gender, medical problems — one of the doctors said, “This is a red blanket patient.”

The significance became clear after I took care of my own red blanket patients: It was a marker of status. At that hospital, patient relations gave them to some C.E.O.s, celebrities and trustees’ friends. Although we weren’t instructed on how to treat the V.I.P. patients, the blanket spoke for itself: “This patient is important.”

Today, I work at a hospital in Massachusetts that gives the same white blankets to everyone. Yet I continue to see red blanket patients. Here, they are called “pavilion patients” because they pay extra to stay in private hotel-like rooms on the top floor, which come with gourmet food, plush bath robes and small business centers.

Whether red blankets or luxury suites, elite services exist in various forms at hospitals around the country, and are nearly universal at the most prestigious medical centers. Of the nation’s top 15 hospitals, ranked by U.S. News and World Report, at least 10 offer luxury treatment options.

Some physicians suggest that V.I.P. services are a harmless way to raise money. Wealthy patients can afford to pay over $1,000 a night for deluxe rooms. More important, if V.I.P.s have good experiences, they might make big donations. At some cancer centers, doctors are even trained to solicit donations themselves. It makes sense. With more money, the hospital can improve its overall service. It’s trickle down health care.

But are red blankets really harmless?

rulers know that the most fragile and susceptible personae inevitably succumb to the darkside...,

darpawaitwhat |  Wait, What? is a forum on future technologies … on their potential to radically change how we live and work, and on the opportunities and challenges these technologies will raise within the broadly defined domain of national security. Hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and rooted in what's already happening in today's fastest evolving research fields, Wait, What? is designed to be a crucible for generating ideas that can stretch current conceptual horizons and accelerate the development of novel capabilities in the years and decades ahead.

WHO IS IT FOR? Wait, What? is for forward-thinking scientists, engineers and other innovators interested in thinking interactively about the nature and scope of future technologies, their potential application to tomorrow's technical and societal challenges and the quandaries those applications may themselves engender.

WHY PARTICIPATE? The boundaries between scientific and technological disciplines such as biology, engineering and data science are fast disappearing, and remarkable insights and capabilities are emerging at those turbulent, transitioning intersections. Many innovators today are taking advantage of this rich intellectual and technical environment to pursue extraordinary new opportunities. Wait, What? will consider current and future advances in the physical and information sciences, engineering and mathematics through the lens of current and future national and global security dynamics, to reveal potentially attractive avenues of technological pursuit and to catalyze non-obvious synergies among participants.

WHY DARPA? As the federal R&D agency tasked with preventing and fomenting strategic technological surprise, DARPA is committed to envisioning and ultimately shaping new technological trajectories. It does so in part by fostering discussions among leaders on the forward edge of change—to learn from them about emerging technologies worthy of attention or support, and to inspire them to consider applying their expertise to the important and rewarding worlds of public service and national security.

HOW WILL IT WORK? Wait, What? will be a fast-paced gathering at which world-renowned thinkers and innovators from inside and outside DARPA will offer perspectives on where today's advances are heading. Through a variety of channels, everyone will be encouraged to help extend those ideas further into the future. In addition to plenary sessions focused on topics of broad import and interest, Wait, What? will offer multiple themed breakout sessions, allowing participants to dive more deeply into particular topics. An exhibit area will feature displays describing a selection of DARPA programs that reflect the breadth of the agency's work and range of its performers.

WATCH THE VIDEO

Videos of the general session and breakout session presentations will be made available on this website. Please reference the Schedule and Breakout Session sections below.

who is ahmed mohammed's PR person?

fortune |  The Irving, Texas high school student who freaked out his teachers and was arrested by local police for bringing a home-made clock to school, now has a bunch of new tech swag, including a Surface Pro 3 from his new best friends at Microsoft MSFT 1.45% .

Mohamed’s arrest sparked an outcry among those who felt the reaction was overkill and that he was targeted because he is Muslim. One contention was that, since the bomb squad was never called, there was never any real fear that the clock, a bundle of circuit boards and wiring, was a bomb, as first suggested. Mohamed’s sister documented much of what happened and her photos helped spur the story on. Some of the flailing presidential campaigns might take note of this strategy.

Since the kerfuffle, Mohamed has appeared on MSNBC, gotten invitations to MIT (reportedly his “dream school”) as well as Harvard, received a T-shirt from NASA; a White House invitation from President Barack Obama; and praise from Facebook FB 1.22% CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The general thinking was that Mohamed is the sort of can-do techie this country needs.

clock in a box unleashed fifty megatons of stoopid...,

guardian |  The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins found himself at the centre of controversy on Sunday when he questioned the motives of Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old boy who was arrested and detained in Texas when a teacher thought a clock he had made was a bomb.

Dawkins did not dispute that Mohamed should not have been arrested, but questioned whether the boy had truly “invented” the clock, as has been reported. 

Dawkins, the author of books including the groundbreaking The Selfish Gene, the bestselling The God Delusion and the memoir A Sense of Wonder, is a leading critic of religious belief and an advocate for rational thought. 

On Sunday, the emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford said he was simply looking for the truth of the Texas schoolboy’s story.

In a tweet, the scientist linked to a YouTube video entitled Ahmed Mohammed [sic] Clock is a FRAUD, in which user Thomas Talbot alleges Mohamed’s clock “is in fact not an invention. The ‘clock’ is a commercial bedside alarm clock removed from its casing”.

Dawkins eventually retreated. He devoted tweets to questioning police motives and tweeted a reference to the new leader of Britain’s opposition Labour party: “Sorry if I go a bit over the top in my passion for truth. Not just over a boy’s alleged ‘invention’ but also media lies about J[eremy] Corbyn.”

costumes a dead giveaway that superheroes are insane - elective politics is cosplay....,

newrepublic |  Donald Trump is the Republican frontrunner for president, a fact that has befuddled just about everybody—except perhaps Trump himself—and spawned countless theories: He's leading because Americans are frustrated with politicians and want a straight-talking outsider. Because he shamelessly caters to paranoid conservatives. Because he's famous. He's not politically correct. He never says sorry. He's unfailingly entertaining. And the press can't resist him. But there's another reason that no one has considered yet, a secret weapon that has propelled past charismatic politicians like Bill Clinton and Theodore Roosevelt to the White House: hypomanic temperament. 

To be clear, I’m not using my authority as a professor of psychiatry to call Trump mentally ill. Hypomanic temperament is not an illness. It is genetically linked to bipolar disorder and manifests the same traits as mania—but crucially, does so to a less severe and more functional degree. Historically, hypomanic temperament has received little attention compared to bipolar disorder, but the founders of modern psychiatry—Eugen Bleuler, Emil Kraepelin, Ernst Kretschmer—first described these personalities around a century ago. "Hypomanics," as I describe them in In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography: 

are whirlwinds of activity who are filled with energy and need little sleep, less than 6 hours. They are restless, impatient and easily bored, needing constant stimulation… and tend to dominate conversations. They are driven, ambitious and veritable forces of nature in pursuit of their goals. While these goals may appear grandiose to others, they are supremely confident of success—and no one can tell them otherwise…. They can be exuberant, charming, witty, gregarious but also arrogant…. They are impulsive in ways that show poor judgment, saying things off the top of their head, and acting on ideas and desires quickly, seemingly oblivious to potentially damaging consequences. They are risk takers who seem oblivious to how risky their behavior truly is. They have large libidos and often act out sexually. Indeed all of their appetites are heightened.

This description doesn't just match Clinton; it also sounds an awful lot like Trump. He reports, for example, “I usually sleep only four hours a night,” which by itself is usually a pretty reliable indicator of hypomania, and something he boasts about: “How can you compete against people like me if I sleep only four hours?” He claims to work seven days a week, and in a typical 18-hour day makes “over a hundred" phone calls and have “at least a dozen meetings.” “Without passion you don't have energy, without energy you have nothing!” Trump has tweeted. Hence his taunt of Jeb Bush as “a low energy person,” by contrast. Like most hypomanics, he is distractible. “Most successful people have very short attention spans. It has a lot to do with imagination,” he once wrote. He is correct. The same rapidity of thought that helps engender creativity makes it difficult to stay on one linear track of ideas without skipping to the next. Like most hypomanics, he follows his “vision, no matter how crazy or idiotic other people think it is.” Trump sees himself as a person of destiny and no one is going to talk him out of it. Trump's inflated self-esteem is illustrated by the fact that his net worth is reported by Forbes to be $4 billion, a fraction of the $10 billion he claims. It’s not just hyperbole: Hypomanics' wild optimism systematically distorts their perceptions.

Dripping with arrogance, Trump is an uber-aggressive alpha male who gleefully dominates, bullies, and colorfully disparages his competitors and critics. His hypomanic energy gives him that elusive charisma: Whether you love him or hate him (and charismatic figures produce such polarized responses) he makes himself the center of attention, the most exciting figure on the stage, who consumes all the oxygen in the room.

conspicuous consumption

wikipedia |  Conspicuous consumption is the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power—either the buyer's income or the buyer's accumulated wealth. Sociologically, to the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means either of attaining or of maintaining a given social status. Consumption is regarded to foster economic benefits, by some accounts.

Moreover, invidious consumption, a more specialized sociologic term, denotes the deliberate conspicuous consumption of goods and services intended to provoke the envy of other people, as a means of displaying the buyer’s superior socio-economic status.

In the 19th century, the term conspicuous consumption was introduced by the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), in the book The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (1899), to describe the behavioural characteristics of the nouveau riche (new rich) social class who emerged as a result of the accumulation of capital wealth during the Second Industrial Revolution (ca. 1860–1914).^[1] In that social and historical context, the term “conspicuous consumption” was narrowly applied to describe the men, women, and families of the upper class who applied their great wealth as a means of publicly manifesting their social power and prestige, be it real or perceived.

In the 20th century, the significant improvement of the material standard of living of a society, and the consequent emergence of the middle class, broadly applied the term “conspicuous consumption” to the men, women, and households who possessed the discretionary income that allowed them to practice the patterns of economic consumption—of goods and services—which were motivated by the desire for prestige, the public display of social status, rather than by the intrinsic, practical utility of the goods and the services proper. In the 1920s, economists, such as Paul Nystrom (1878–1969), proposed that changes in the style of life, made feasible by the economics of the industrial age, had induced to the mass of society a “philosophy of futility” that would increase the consumption of goods and services as a social fashion; an activity done for its own sake. In that context, “conspicuous consumption” is discussed either as a behavioural addiction or as a narcissistic behaviour, or both, which are psychologic conditions induced by consumerism — the desire for the immediate gratification of hedonic expectations.

costs of slipshod research in the $billions...,

npr |  Laboratory research seeking new medical treatments and cures is fraught with pitfalls: Researchers can inadvertently use bad ingredients, design the experiment poorly, or conduct inadequate data analysis. Scientists working on ways to reduce these sorts of problems have put a staggering price tag on research that isn't easy to reproduce: $28 billion a year.

"Better training for students, postdoctoral fellows, even principal investigators is in order here."

Leonard Freedman, molecular geneticist and president of Global Biological Standards Institute

That figure, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology, represents about half of all the preclinical medical research that's conducted in labs (in contrast to research on human volunteers). And the finding comes with some important caveats.

The $28 billion doesn't just represent out-and-out waste, the team that did the research cautions. It also includes some studies that produced valid results — but that couldn't be repeated by others because of the confusing way the methods were described, or because of other shortcomings.

Leonard Freedman, who heads a nonprofit called the Global Biological Standards Institute, decided to undertake the study with two Boston University economists, Iain Cockburn and Timothy Simcoe. Their goal was to identify ways to make research more efficient.

"We initially were asking a very simple question," Freeman says. "We simply wanted to know how much money is being spent each year on basic preclinical research that is not reproducible."

That turned out to be a very difficult question; only a few studies have addressed the issue head-on, and they aren't directly comparable. The economists eventually homed in on a best estimate: $28 billion per year.

status-seeking within prestige hierarchies the antithesis of competence culture...,

physicstoday |  “The case against science,” wrote Richard Horton, editor of the medical journal the Lancet, “is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” Horton’s April commentary appeared weeks before news broke about Science magazine’s now widely analyzed retraction of a psychology paper about attitudes towards gay marriage. Much in the current media analysis, whether or not citing Horton specifically, aligns with his judgment—sometimes without much of the hopefulness he framed within this harshness.

Consider, for example, Charles Seife’s Los Angeles Times op-ed. The science journalist and New York University journalism professor discerns “a weakness at the heart of the scientific establishment,” which a “steady drip-drip-drip of falsification, exaggeration and outright fabrication [is] eroding.”

Science itself eroding? Horton leveled general accusations:

Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.… The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours.

But in some ways—not always matched in the popular media—Horton placed hopefulness alongside the harshness. “The good news is that science is beginning to take some of its worst failings very seriously,” he wrote, though the “bad news is that nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system.” He described possible hopeful steps, including one inspired by physicists:

One of the most convincing proposals came from outside the biomedical community. Tony Weidberg is a Professor of Particle Physics at Oxford. Following several high-profile errors, the particle physics community now invests great effort into intensive checking and rechecking of data prior to publication. By filtering results through independent working groups, physicists are encouraged to criticise. Good criticism is rewarded. The goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists are aligned around this goal. Weidberg worried we set the bar for results in biomedicine far too low. In particle physics, significance is set at 5 sigma—a p value of 3 × 10^–7 or 1 in 3.5 million (if the result is not true, this is the probability that the data would have been as extreme as they are).

Other scientists have also given the popular media cues for generalizing harshly about science overall from specific failings like the retracted Science paper. At Nature, Richard Van Noorden borrowed phrasing from Seife in reporting that delegates to the recent World Conference on Research Integrity in Rio de Janeiro saw in the retracted study only more of the “steady drip-drip of research misconduct.” In December 2013, the American Journal of Neuroradiology published a paper with a powerfully loaded title: “The fraud and retraction epidemic.” Last month at The Conversation, Laureate Professor of Mathematics Jonathan Borwein of the University of Newcastle published a piece called “The ‘train wreck’ continues: Another social science retraction.” The train-wreck analogy comes from 2012, when Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman called on psychologists to tighten up replicability in “social priming” research, as reported in Nature. Two years ago, Borwein coauthored a Huffington Post essay arguing that the “scientific world is suffering through a rash of examples of the sad consequences of the ‘hype now, hide later’ approach to scientific news.”

pope francis must be depressed or sum'n, steady on that radical late-MLK type isht...,

Time | "Responsibility for the poor and the marginalized must therefore be an essential element of any political decision" Pope Francis warned heads of states attending the annual G20 meeting in Australia about the effects of “unbridled consumerism” and called on them to take concrete steps to alleviate unemployment.

In a letter addressed to Australia Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who is chairing this year’s G20 Leaders’ Summit which begins Sunday, the Pontiff called for its participants to consider that “many lives are at stake.”

“It would indeed be regrettable if such discussions were to remain purely on the level of declarations of principle,” Pope Francis wrote in the letter.

Pope Francis, who has made a habit of addressing the leaders of the G20 meetings, has often raised his concerns with the global economy. Last year, in lengthy report airing the views of the Vatican, he criticized the “idolatry of money” and denounced the unfettered free market as the “new tyranny.”

In the letter published Tuesday, he said that, like attacks on human rights in the Middle East, abuses in the financial system are among the “forms of aggression that are less evident but equally real and serious.”

“Responsibility for the poor and the marginalized must therefore be an essential element of any political decision, whether on the national or the international level,” he wrote.

knowing what the system is helps you know who your allies are...,

HuffPo |  It was, after all, the Catholic bishops who created the "right-to-life" movement in the first place, back when most American weren't even paying attention to the abortion issue, as I detail in my book Good Catholics: The Battle over Abortion in the Catholic Church. In the mid-1960s, abortion wasn't a major political issue. It was regulated by the states, most of which banned it except to save a woman's life. But public health officials, doctors and some legislators began pushing to make abortion more widely available because some 1 million illegal procedures were being performed every year. The gynecological wards of many city's hospitals were filled with women suffering from botched procedures -- some 10,000 in New York City alone in 1967 -- and only women who were rich or well-connected could get legal abortions, even in cases of rape or fetal deformity.

But the Catholic bishops, who considered sexual morality their special purview, decided to make preventing any liberalization of abortion law the main cause of their newly formed National Conference of Catholic Bishops. When California considered a bill to liberalize abortion access, the Dioceses of Los Angeles hired the same political consulting firm that got Ronald Reagan elected governor of California to beat back the bill. The bishops' consulting firm created the first grassroots "right-to-life" group to lobby against the bill. 

After that, the NCCB hired a political consultant to create right-to-life groups around the country. The bishops provided the financial and administrative support to get some of the earliest and most influential anti-abortion groups, including those in New York, Pennsylvania and Michigan, off the ground to obscure their involvement in the campaign against abortion, which they feared would reawaken old fears of the Vatican trying to impose its doctrine on American society. They created and funded the National Right to Life Committee, which would go on to be the most influential anti-abortion organization for 30 years, to coordinate the activities of the local anti-abortion groups.

Most of these early groups were heavily Catholic. But as more Evangelical Christians became interested in the issue, they became concerned that the bishops' control of the NRLC would dilute the effectiveness of the pro-life movement because it would be seen as tool of the Catholic Church. At a heated board meeting just before the Roe v. Wade decision, they wrested control of the organization from the bishops' conference, obscuring the Catholic roots of the organization and the anti-abortion movement.

Having lost their grassroots lobby just when they needed it most, the bishops tried another tack. In 1975, they released the Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities, which said abortion was the number one issue for Catholics, and laid out a plan to organize Catholics politically to support candidates who backed a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. The move politicized the issue in a presidential election cycle in which both Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford thought they needed the Catholic vote to win. Both candidates went to the bishops seeking their blessing as the press watched breathlessly. Not surprisingly, the bishops gave what was widely viewed as their endorsement to Ford because of his support of an anti-abortion amendment.

So by the mid-1970s, the bishops had created the anti-abortion movement out of whole cloth and become the first to politicize the issue in a presidential election (even though they failed to throw the election to their preferred candidate). Four years later, when Republican strategist Paul Weyrich was looking for an issue to unite socially conservative voters into a new Republican electoral coalition to replace the fading New Deal coalition, he decided abortion was the perfect wedge issue, both because it tapped into conservative dissatisfaction with the new, socially liberal culture and because it could potentially separate Catholic voters from the Democratic Party. Weyrich rebranded the bishops' right-to-life movement the "pro-family" movement, teamed up with direct mail wizard Richard Viguerie and televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to form the Moral Majority, and the culture wars were officially born.

can it be that it was all so simple?

exceptionally obnoxious wattles out of pocket an ackin a fool...,

freethinker |  The problem began when a group of Haredi men bound for Israel last Wednesday to celebrate the Jewish New Year refused to sit next to female passengers on the plane. Why they were on the plane to begin with is a bit of a mystery, because Orthodox Jews were specifically told in 2009 to boycott El Al. Rabbi Yitzhak Goldknopf said they should fly with airlines that only screen:

Movies showing water and scenery, and not dirty movies.

But back to last week’s flight, described by one passenger as:

An 11-hour nightmare.

First the flight was delayed because The Men in Black refused to be seated next to females. Regular passengers claimed that hundreds of the ultra-Orthodox men demanded that they trade places with them before takeoff, saying they could not possibly sit next to women.

Their behaviour not only delayed the flight, but caused actual chaos. Said one passenger, Amit Ben-Natan, who snapped the picture (inset) above:

People stood in the aisles and refused to go forward. Although everyone had tickets with seat numbers that they purchased in advance, they asked us to trade seats with them, and even offered to pay money, since they cannot sit next to a woman. It was obvious that the plane wouldn’t take off as long as they kept standing in the aisles.

Passengers claimed that though the El Al flight crew informed them they did not have to agree to a switch, the flight’s captain said over the PA system that the flight would not take off as long as people were standing.

does atheism make believers uncomfortable?

salon |  Why do so many religious believers want atheists to lie about our atheism?

It seems backward. Believers are always telling atheists that we need religion for morality; that we have to believe because without religion, people would have no reason not to murder and steal and lie. And yet, all too often, they ask us to lie. When atheists come out of the closet and tell the people in our lives that we don’t believe in God, all too often the reaction is to try to shove us back in.

In some cases, they simply want us to keep our mouths shut: when the topic of religion comes up, they want us to tell the lie of omission. But much of the time, they actually ask us to lie outright. They ask us to lie to other family members. They ask us to attend church or other religious services. They sometimes even ask us to perform important religious rituals, like funerals or confirmations, where we’re not just lying to the people around us, but to the god they supposedly believe in.

Why would they do this?

When I was doing research for my new guidebook, “ Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why,” I was shocked at how often this happens. I read over 400 “coming out atheist” stories to write this book, and in the stories I read, this theme came up again and again and again.

You see it a lot with parents and children. When kids and teenagers tell their parents that they’re atheists, parents often respond by insisting that their kids keep up a religious charade. Alexander came out as atheist to his family in fourth grade, and was met with hostility and confusion — and quickly went back into the closet. “True to form,” he says on his Scribbles and Rants blog, “my parents dropped the matter as long as I went through the motions and didn’t bring it up myself.”

humanzee essentials: what it do...,

*Abbot:* I’m neither irritated nor upset. I’m simply surprised and a little disappointed. Somewhere along the way, you have learned or were taught that a discussion must involve anger, ranting, suspicion, and dirty tricks. You treat dialogue and discussion like some kind of sword fight or some sort of violent contest, where directness and bluntness and the disparaging of the other person are weapons to be used to win something. Don’t you find cynicism tiresome? I was taught that dialogue and discussion is the coming together of people to gain understanding, insight, sympathy, and an education or experience of a new or different perspective. It’s not a sword fight or some other violent contest. There’s no need for strategies. And, the idea of winning something is a non sequitur. It comes from a place of genuine interest in the other person or group. And, the goal isn’t division but the forming of a better understanding and hopefully, a closer bond.

*Ethologist:* Hello Abbot. I enjoy reading your posts to the group. Thank you for your vocation. There are certain advantages for a Roman Catholic religious male to be celibate. You have just demonstrated one of them: a peacemaker among other reproductive-age males. Among reproductive age non-celibate males, interactions with other reproductive age males also have a component related to one's social status in a sex-specific, male dominance hierarchy.

When two non-celibate heterosexual males interact there are always two agendas: (1) an exchange of information and (2) a sizing up of the other male's social status. Once (2) is obtained and it the status differences between the two interacting males appear to be close enough to be challenged, the agenda for each male becomes increasing the relative social status of self above the social status of the other male with whom you are interacting.

This increasing one's relative social status is done in two ways: (a) displaying linguistic symbols of one's resources, including intellectual resources, or (b) saying things that attempt to lower the status of the male with whom you are interacting. You are commenting about (b). The reason why one's rank in a male social hierarchy is important for a heterosexual male is because higher rank gives a male preferential access to high value females both as marriage partners and as extra-pair-bonded opportunistic "matings." High value human females are sexually attracted to high social status males like ducks are attracted to water. They are wired that way.

One would think that after a certain age heterosexual males would stop acting this way. However, natural selection has wired us such that this propensity lasts as long as we breath. High status older males are still "attractive" from a reproductive perspective to reproductive age women. Henry Kissinger, the now 90 some year old former Secretary of State in the Nixon administration in the USA, once captured this phenomenon well several decades ago when he said "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." When asked, he said that this statement referred to how women found him attractive when he was Secretary of State and appeared to be "running the world."

in the herd but above the herd...,

Washington Or Alabama - Who Is More Pro Science?

science2.0 |  Not all students returning to school this month will be up to date on their vaccinations and a new paper in Gender&Society by Jennifer Reich, a professor of Sociology from the University of Colorado Denver, correlates it to the class privilege of their mothers.

It's no secret that anti-vaccination hotbeds correlate to income and other lifestyle choices. Put a pin in a Whole Foods store in California and you can find a hotbed of anti-vaccine sentiment in the parking lot and surrounding neighborhood. In America, red states have overwhelming vaccine acceptance while blue states are where the problems are occurring.  

The national averages barely tell the tale. The National Network for Immunization Information says that 3 children per 1000 in the U.S. have never received any vaccines - that used to be just religious fundamentalists but now it is common on America's wealthy coasts, with one school in California having only about 25 percent of children vaccinated. The number of un-vaccinated children has led to several recent vaccine-preventable outbreaks in the U.S., including measles and whooping cough. 

Reich's paper affirms that children from higher income backgrounds and better educations have parents who intentionally choose to refuse or delay vaccinations out of a belief that they are protecting their children.  Basically, they think vaccines are risky and want poor kids to provide herd immunity.

There are some poor kids who don't get vaccines, but that is due to lack of access to health care, not an anti-science mentality of poor parents.

Reich says that "vaccine-refusers" are mothers who have the resources, education, and time to make decisions regarding vaccinations. These middle and upper class mothers instead rely on other intensive practices they see as rendering vaccines less necessary, such as breastfeeding, nutrition and monitoring social interactions and travel.

in a consumer society, there are two kinds of slaves:the prisoners of addiction, and the prisoners of envy...,

monbiot |  To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an honourable aspiration. This column is for those who feel at odds with life. It calls on you not to be ashamed.

I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, just published in English, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe(1). What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is one of those books that, by making connections between apparently distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening to us and why.

We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identity is shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Every society defines and shapes its own normality – and its own abnormality – according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply or to exclude them if they don’t.

Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in Europe as neoliberalism. The story it tells is that the market can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. The less the state regulates and taxes us, the better off we will be. Public services should be privatised, public spending should be cut and business should be freed from social control. In countries such as the UK and the US, this story has shaped our norms and values for around 35 years: since Thatcher and Reagan came to power(2). It’s rapidly colonising the rest of the world.

Verhaeghe points out that neoliberalism draws on the ancient Greek idea that our ethics are innate (and governed by a state of nature it calls the market) and on the Christian idea that humankind is inherently selfish and acquisitive. Rather than seeking to suppress these characteristics, neoliberalism celebrates them: it claims that unrestricted competition, driven by self-interest, leads to innovation and economic growth, enhancing the welfare of all.

At the heart of this story is the notion of merit. Untrammelled competition rewards people who have talent, who work hard and who innovate. It breaks down hierarchies and creates a world of opportunity and mobility. The reality is rather different. Even at the beginning of the process, when markets are first deregulated, we do not start with equal opportunities. Some people are a long way down the track before the starting gun is fired. This is how the Russian oligarchs managed to acquire such wealth when the Soviet Union broke up. They weren’t, on the whole, the most talented, hard-working or innovative people, but those with the fewest scruples, the most thugs and the best contacts, often in the KGB.

Even when outcomes are based on talent and hard work, they don’t stay that way for long. Once the first generation of liberated entrepreneurs has made its money, the initial meritocracy is replaced by a new elite, which insulates its children from competition by inheritance and the best education money can buy. Where market fundamentalism has been most fiercely applied – in countries like the US and UK – social mobility has greatly declined(3).

If neoliberalism were anything other than a self-serving con, whose gurus and think tanks were financed from the beginning by some of the richest people on earth (the American tycoons Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others)(4), its apostles would have demanded, as a precondition for a society based on merit, that no one should start life with the unfair advantage of inherited wealth or economically-determined education. But they never believed in their own doctrine. Enterprise, as a result, quickly gave way to rent.

All this is ignored, and success or failure in the market economy are ascribed solely to the efforts of the individual. The rich are the new righteous, the poor are the new deviants, who have failed both economically and morally, and are now classified as social parasites.

the message of a $549,000 watch...,

bloomberg |  Don’t worry, this isn't going to be a class-warfare rant or a treatise on living the simpler, less materialistic life. Rather, it is a suggestion to some folks that perhaps they might want to make some of their conspicuous consumption a little less conspicuous. 

For example, I learned last week that Tiffany & Co. had a secret room for the big spenders. That's because when you're dropping $20 million on a necklace that, according to Tiffany's vice president, is being bought with literally a wheelbarrow full of cash, you want some, you know, privacy.

Or how about those folks who want to learn how to drive a $500,000 car very, very fast and they need to take a specific class? It's tough luck if you don’t have a Lamborghini Aventador Roadster yet, because they are sold out. So is the new $1.4 million Ferrari LaFerrari. You can still buy a Bentley GT or a Ferrari California T -- assuming you don’t mind hearing the derisive snickers of the parking valets behind your back.

The condo in the peak of the Woolworth building is going for $110 million. That isn't the building, just one apartment. That’s a relative bargain, compared with the Hamptons estate that just was purchased for $147 million dollars.

But it wasn’t a car or a diamond necklace or a house that made me realize that perhaps the ultra rich have become a bit tone deaf; it was a watch -- or a “timepiece,” as the brochure describes them. In an advertisement in last week’s New York Times, I saw a picture of the Greubel Forsey GF05. As the picture showed, it’s a busy little number in platinum and black. A quick Google search revealed a selling price of $549,000. 

I half expected to see a tagline that read “For when you need to tell the time, but you just can't do it without spending the equivalent of 36 years of minimum wage salary.” A timepiece that costs almost triple the U.S.'s median existing-home price ($201,700) does seem a tad pricey to us peasants.

rodgers rorschachian: what do you see?

forbes |  Rodger also authored a 141-page autobiography titled “My Twisted World,” which was sent to a local news station. He describes the events of his life since birth, blaming an obsession with World of Warcraft for lack of social development in middle and early high school; blaming his father for not teaching him how to woo women; blaming his mother for not re-marrying into the rich, upper class after his parents separated; and blaming his own social awkwardness for getting in the way of his making friends and meeting women. Despite his seemingly-affluent lifestyle, he felt less rich than and inferior to others in the circles in which he traveled, lamenting that his father was not a more successful director. In college, he starts playing the Megamillions Lottery obsessively, spending hundreds of dollars at a time in the hopes of becoming a multi-millionaire, which he thinks will allow him to finally “get a woman.” He visited a shooting range for the first time at age 21 after he failed to win the lottery when there was a $120 million jackpot.

He expresses jealousy of people in sexual relationships; he seems more hateful of and angry at specific men — friends and social acquaintances — than at particular women. Women are vaguer to him, objects of desire; he sees them as both superior to him and inferior at the same time. The jealousy gets more and more deranged as the manifesto goes on. As he becomes a fan of Game of Thrones, he expresses a desire to a friend to “flay” a couple he sees in a mall food court; he seems especially enraged when men of other races are dating white women. (This despite his being of a mixed background; his father is British and his mother is Malaysian).

He feels the jealousy and sadness that all of us feel at some point when we are alone, without a romantic partner, except his loneliness manifests as a desire to cause violence for people who are happy. He starts acting out by spilling beverages on people he dislikes: coffee on a couple making out in a Starbucks, ice tea on a couple he saw in a mall whom he followed with his car. When he was 20, after two women at a bus stop didn’t smile back at him when he drove by, he turned his car around and splashed them with his Starbucks latte, taking pleasure in it staining their jeans, driving away quickly before they could get his license plate. And months later, when he spotted a happy group of “popular college kids” — “typical fraternity jocks, tall and muscular” and “beautiful blonde girls” — playing kickball in a park, he went to a K-mart and bought a Supersoaker, which he filled with orange juice and sprayed them, driving away when they chased him, an ominous foreshadowing of the devastation he would wreak later with a real gun.

At 21, he called his parents ranting about his loneliness and virginity. They insisted he see a psychiatrist. The next month, he bought his first gun.

clown fest

theoildrum | We evolved to favor the ‘in group’ over the ‘out group’, for resource, defensive, and ultimately reproductive advantages. The internet has spawned millions of ‘in-groups’ – peak oilers, tea-party evangelizers, deflationistas, gold-bugs, Austrian economics followers, anti-abortion activists, and myriad less controversial groups such as ‘Claremount High School Boosters", "Kerr Jar Enthusiasts", “Earthworm Snack Creators” and the like. People gravitate towards groups they identify with. And they usually stay there. (After all, a room full of clowns feels a lot less clown-like).

Achieving status is a primary driver in the biological kingdom and remains a key driver in our human social groups. But today, for the first time in our species history, the same ‘feelings’ we get from moving up in a real life social hierarchy can be attained cheaply and easily online. Being the most vocal, most persuasive or most interesting in a small group of dedicated/interested followers engenders the same neural reward as being the head of a small business, or a Mayor, or a high school basketball star. Our brains don’t really know that being the head of the “Morel Foraging Society” or “Nudists for Nader 2012” with several hundred members online is different than being County Treasurer in real life – we receive respect, positive feedback, deference etc. from the people in our ‘in-group’ (the fact they might be just anonymous mushroom pickers or passionate nude people is not relevant to our brains).

Human ethologists liken this phenomenon to 'dispersal phenotype' prevalent in nature:

Dispersal is important in biology. Often a species will produce two forms:
1) a maintenance phenotype (the outcome of genes and the structures they produce interacting with a specific environment) that is adapted to the environment in which it is born, and (2) a dispersal phenotype that is programmed to move to a new area and that often has the capacity to adapt to a new environment.

According to the present theory, humans have developed two dispersal phenotypes in the forms of the prophet and the follower. The coordinated action of these two phenotypes would serve to disperse us over the available habitat. This dispersal must have been aided by the major climatic changes over the past few million years in which vast areas of potential human habitat have repeatedly become available because of melting of ice sheets.

The dispersal phenotypes might have evolved through selection at the individual level, since the reproductive advantage of colonizing a new habitat would have been enormous. They would also promote selection between groups. Factors that promote selection at the group level are rapid splitting of groups, small size of daughter groups, heterogeneity (differences) of culture between groups, and reduction in gene flow between groups. These factors are all promoted by the breaking away of prophet-led groups with new belief systems.

Cult followers have been studied and found to be high on schizotypal traits, such as abnormal experiences and beliefs. They have not yet been tested for the sort of selfish attitudes and behavior that characterize free-riders. If a large cohort of people were tested for some measure of selfishness, it is predicted that those who subsequently joined cults would be low on such a measure. Predictions could also be made about future cult leaders. They would be likely to be ambitious males who were not at the top of the social hierarchy of their original group. If part of why human groups split in general is to give more reproductive opportunities to males in the new group, it can also be predicted that leaders of new religious movements would be males of reproductive age. Female cult leaders are not likely to be more fertile as a result of having many sexual partners, but their sons might be in an advantageous position for increased reproduction.

From THE BIOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BEHAVIOR, Edited by Jay R. Feierman (bold added my me)
[pp. 184-186] DISPERSAL

Most people are both reasonable, and passive. Some people are either unreasonable or assertive (or both). In a free form forum one unreasonable or assertive person will drown out 10 or more who are either reasonable or passive. Especially for those whose assertion or unreasonableness in real life leads to fewer social opportunities, the internet has been a godsend. Either anonymous or in their own name, they can easily accumulate a following by articulating what people already believe or like to hear. Given the self-selected audience, there doesn’t exist the normal social checks and balances. As such, due to the myriad different categories, those assertive and/or social acceptance seeking souls who find their niches online dig in hard and ‘feel’ as if they are true celebrities. Combine that with the iterations and scale that come from long time periods, little or no barriers to entry and an apathy/lack of interest from those not spending time on the internet and these folks have become ensconced at all sorts of cyber guideposts on topics that cover the map. Dispersal phenotypes.

Basically, since people believe in authority figures, and nominate their own authority figures based on their own belief systems, it is no wonder that time and numbers has by circa 2010 amassed an internet army of 'clowns'. We see increasingly hysterical caricatures emerge on the internet/media that undergo some perceived status/ego boost that they wouldn't/couldn't have gotten in normal situations. The feedback from the true believers (of whatever tribe they communicate to), then locks these personalities into an utterly confident belief in their own position as an expert, and their actions become considerably (and understandably) clownlike over time to people not in their sub-group, especially magnified in those cases of borderline mental illness (which I suspect are not few). I notice this dynamic in numerous areas of discourse but its particularly prevalent in the the peak oil, finance and climate change circles where I have spent alot of time.