A Digital Text for Jes Grew....,

Jes Grew is the outbreak of jazz, ragtime, and blues onto the world scene. Jes Grew is a psychic epidemic; it is the spirit of Blackness overtaking America and the world in the 1920's. It is a plague, or rather an anti-plague, which enlivens its victims into dancing, swinging, singing and talking crazy. Jes Grew was a liturgy without a text.

"If it could not find its Text, then it would be mistaken for entertainment."

Continuing from the prior installment on the power of cultural production and barriers to the independent and autonomous exercise of the same - my aim here is to convey what I see as a potential solution path directly through these barriers. The goal is to nucleate independent, autonomous, unstoppable and evolutionary cellular embodiments in which local enclaves of Black cultural genius can Work, get paid, and shape the future.

As I mentioned in my first installment, Jappa's lessons on the comics publishing industry opened my eyes to quite a lot. What's true in the comics industry is true on a larger scale in the music industry. (by extension into the entire realm of cultural production) Unlike comics however - HipHop is a topic at the forefront of popular consciousness. As one of millions of consumer/observers of the rise and fall of HipHop - like many others I have participated in countless discussions with dozens and dozens of folks over the years representing all ends of the spectrum of cultural discourse on this subject.

Everybody has cultural theories and opinions, but very, very few folks had recourse to the facts, insider knowledge, and subject matter expertise to take us out of the theoretical realm and into the specific material issues underscoring what went wrong. Countless articles, books, and even careers have been made off of the dubious business of peddling theories, and a whole useless canon of popular psuedo-scholarly nonsense has been spawned in the wake of this cultural preoccupation.

Thankfully, that's all changed. Norman Kelley summarized the paradoxical political economic context in which Black cultural production occurs and Michael Fisher gave the first person witness - sufficient as far as I'm concerned - for any interested party to fact check, dot connect, and close the case on the material specifics of the rise and fall of HipHop. We now know exactly what went wrong.

Long before Kelley and Fisher broke down this recent tragic subversion - one of our great undersung prophets laid out the entire overarching framework in which this Black boom bust cycle has repeated itself in America. In his autodidactic mashup Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed delineated the exact nature of Black cultural genius and simultaneously pointed out that because our genius has not yet achieved an enduring and institutionalized embodiment under our control;

Jes Grew is a liturgy without a text.

"If it could not find its Text, then

it would be mistaken for entertainment."

The creative and improvisational genius of two turn tables and a microphone proliferated far and wide. But two turntables and a microphone without control of publishing and distribution has;

come and gone,

been mistaken for mere entertainment,

and far far worse this time.

All because somebody else owned and controlled the text...,

Somebody else converted our liturgy into their textual BANK....,

Not only was HipHop appropriated and profited from like never before, but for the first time ever - the spirit of the thing was extracted and its form was corrupted and this corrupted shell was weaponized and turned back upon us with devastating effect.

Now ain't that some shit?

Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge.

Informing and inspiring the open source movement are the African call-and-response traditions, Jazz and the free dance movements which emerged in the 20th Century. Late 20th Century open source strategies include Fluxus, web jams, Wigglism and the international Hip Hop culture. The rise of open-source culture in the 20th century resulted from a growing tension between creative practices that involve appropriation, and therefore require access to content that is often copyrighted, and increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws and policies governing access to copyrighted content.

The open source movement acknowledges its cultural indebtedness to Blackness. The question now is whether folks involved with Black cultural production can expeditiously and systematically close this feedback loop by embracing the tools, ethos, and techniques embodied in the open source movement. And using these begin to produce and control some of the material deliverables that our genius combined with these methods have the capacity to yield.

Let me be clear. I'm not suggesting that folks turn on a dime and attempt to take the tech industry by storm. That's not our current sweet spot and it's not gonna happen. Rather, what I'm saying is that open source tools and techniques comprise low-hanging fruit - a means freely available to us - with which we can leverage our dominant strength in the area of creative cultural production. Cause our community has more young aspiring musicians, singers, dancers, rappers, writers, artists, animators, interviewers, journalists, cinematographers, recording engineers, salesmen, programmers, etc...., than I can shake a stick at.

My esteemed elder and mentor, the founder and chairman of the Dubois Learning Center, Mr. Leon Dixon has written persuasively about the necessity of precisely such a movement.

Notwithstanding his heroic accomplishments locally - embodying, sustaining, and institutionalizing this vision here at the DLC - Dixon's model for giving Jes Grew an enduring digital embodiment has not yet been adopted, endorsed, or implemented by his peers - most of whom are still mired in 1970's era means and themes. This of course doesn't stop us from doing what we do here locally. It does, however, confine the scope of this unique and truly exceptional elders vision to this locality.

Knowing what went wrong, we're now confronted with the necessity of taking matters into our own hands to ensure that that doesn't happen again. Some very fundamental things have changed since the rise and fall of HipHop.

Congo Square Interlude - New technologies give rise to new infrastructures that can be developed and taken advantage of in the acculturation of today’s youth. And like the participants of Congo Square of old used what they had to address their needs, we have a similar challenge confronting us today. The Learning Center’s Telehub Network is an example of using today’s technology, drawing upon cultural patterns and traditions inherent in our urban cores, to develop such an infrastructure.

One way of achieving the goal of making the fixations of cultural work generally available is to maximally utilize technology and digital media. As predicted by Moore's law, the cost of digital media and storage plummeted in the late 20th Century. Consequently, the marginal cost of digitally duplicating anything capable of being transmitted via digital media dropped to near zero.

So we're presented with some challenges and a singularly large opportunity.

1. Engage kids around the collaborative theme of creative cultural production

2. Provide kids with skilled adult guidance and training

3. Provide them with tools they can use at the Learning Center, at home, in the library, at school - wherever computing resources of varying quality, accessibility and capability can be found.

4. Maintain a level playing field across the group so that everybody is working from the same tool set.

5. Ensure that the toolset is powerful enough to genuinely serve their creativity

6. Do all of the above without a budget.

Open source and cheap thumbdrives came to the rescue. (for the price of a CD and jewel case and cheap 2 Gig thumb drive, every kid got his own portable bootable toolset and data storage) and I mean that. Boot the operating system of a CD anywhere, load up the applications, do your work, and save your work to the thumbdrive.

but that's just the beginning...,

The opensource CMS we use to power our websites runs on an open source relational database
on an opensource operating system and is presented to the web via an open source webserver....,

and then it got better because one of the younglings came upon this gem,

and so the process fed back on itself with an evolutionary quickness and got even better...,

An evolutionary process involving little more than the effort, attention, and creativity of kids, empowered by freely available tools and technology was now underway in earnest. Very little money required to put it into motion, and a high level of enthusiastic participation, because what kid doesn't like to express him/herself?

Next;

The learning center has 80 volunteer instructors in reading, writing, math, science and technology. Its curricular subject matter expertise is unparalleled. None of those curricular riches have ever really been documented. None have been digitized. This makes it next to impossible to share the hard won knowledge capital that the center has accumulated.

Document, digitize, and web-enable DLC curriculum.

Funny what happens when adult instructors find out that a group of kids can effortlessly do stuff they themselves are struggling to do.

What? Kids should be able to teach their teachers?

Recruit and work with a larger cadre from the community outside the learning center.

Wash, rinse, repeat.....,

(oh yeah, the big hook underscoring this entire process is the goal of producing commercially viable work product - whatever the kids produce and judge to be commercially viable (think showtime at the Apollo) - we put on sale for them at the web-based e-store - so far we haven't quite achieved that goal yet, but the overall tools, methods, and embodying process comprise a still very nascent work-in-progress - something we just kind of figured out after we started teaching kids how to create their own comics.....,)

Why the Paramilitarization?

An Epidemic of "Isolated Incidents"?

"If a widespread pattern of [knock-and-announce] violations were shown . . . there would be reason for grave concern."

—Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, in Hudson v. Michigan, June 15, 2006.

An interactive map of botched SWAT and paramilitary police raids, released in conjunction with the Cato policy paper "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids," by Radley Balko.

Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform.

But Cato has been on about this issue for a minute now, starting in 1999 with Warrior Cops The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police Departments.

Persecution Society

Update: LOST
Blog by Erla Ósk Arnardóttir Lillendahl:

(English Translation: Gunnar Tómasson, Certified translator):

During the last twenty-four hours I have probably experienced the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected. During these last twenty-four hours I have been handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned. Now I am beginning to try to understand all this, rest and review the events which began as innocently as possible.

First the mormon kid in Utah with his pregnant wife, then the icelandic arnar's daughter?

What????

Better act like you know!!!!

Quoth Nana;

And for those who want to talk about the brutality of gangs coming in -"The Stranger returns what was given to them" Folks like to forget the brutal history of Latin America by the USA Military.

Makheru:

Cheikh Anta Diop posed the question, civilization or barbarism? I contend that this world based on the present trajectory of its dominant forces is on a collision course with barbarism. The reestablishment of Ma’at is required to bring this world back to civilization.

Bringing full circle something I posted a while ago about the Lucifer Effect, Person, Situation, or System? It is all of these persons/situations/systems - and the only way to defeat the establishment of full-on re-implementation of this very medieval strategy for harsh governance and centralized social organization is to be fully aware of its methods, history, and creeping re-instantiation. The Guardian carried a great article yesterday about the rising tide of top-down medieval barbarity now well underway;

How did our 12th-century forebears deal with all this insecurity and dramatic change? They invented a persecution society, one that systematically identified whole categories of people and then set about exterminating, subjugating or segregating them. Just as the origins of modern Europe and its global expansion can be tracked back to the momentous political and economic changes of the 12th century, so can its corollary, a state built to persecute minorities, which has intermittently characterised Europe's history ever since.

Medieval barbarity is a governance strategy.

Here's how it works from the bottom-up:

1. If an enemy knows that capture will lead to torture, then that enemy will be strongly motivated to fight to the death, and never surrender. This understanding will be reinforced if an occupying army brutalizes civilians and combatants, and will motivate more "enemies" to join the fight.

2. Torturing prisoners eliminates the humanity of the torturing agent. It makes the torturing agent utterly loyal to the government, and hardens them toward the civilian populace.

3. When the national government tortures, it opens the door to torture by local governance entities such as police and prisons. Local torture binds the local governance entity to the national governance entity, terrorizes the civilian populace and enhances governance in-group solidarity.


The powers that be have never used torture to get at truth.

Ask yourself, why exactly HAVE THEY and ARE THEY now unleashing these methods on a staggeringly large scale?

Anti-Depressants, Suicidality and Youth....,

Antidepressants increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children and adolescents with major depressive disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders. Anyone considering the use of [Drug Name] or any other antidepressant in a child or adolescent must balance this risk with the clinical need. Patients who are started on therapy should be observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, or unusual changes in behavior. Families and caregivers should be advised of the need for close observation and communication with the prescriber. [Drug Name] is not approved for use in pediatric patients except for patients with [Any approved pediatric claims here]. (See warnings and Precautions: Pediatric Use)

Attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case of a teen sentenced to 30 years in prison for killing his grandparents when he was 12, arguing that the sentence is cruel. Christopher Pittman used a shotgun to shoot his grandparents Joe and Joy Pittman, and then set fire to their home in 2001. During his trial four years later, Pittman's attorneys unsuccessfully argued the slayings were influenced by the antidepressant Zoloft — a charge the maker of the drug vigorously denied.

Zoloft is the most widely prescribed antidepressant in the United States, with 32.7 million prescriptions written in 2003. In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration ordered Zoloft and other antidepressants to carry "black box" warnings — the government's strongest warning short of a ban — about an increased risk of suicidal behavior in children.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) required the makers of all antidepressant medications to update the existing black box warning on their products' labeling to include warnings about increased risks of suicidal thinking and behavior, known as suicidality, in young adults ages 18 to 24 during initial treatment (generally the first one to two months).

Historical Information on Antidepressant Use in Children, Adolescents, and Adults is available here. Sure begs a lot of questions concerning how this information, long in the public domain, is not more widely known, covered, and sounded from the rooftops every.single.time there's another adolescent mass murderer and the underlying psycho-pharmacology of the perpetrating adolescent is known?

as a maestro might compose a musical score

Well, well, well...., seems like the WaPo finally got around to mentioning it. Interestingly, they focused a significant chunk on control and governance. Too bad that genie's out of the bottle, never to be put back into sequestration again.

"Ultimately synthetic biology means cheaper and widely accessible tools to build bioweapons, virulent pathogens and artificial organisms that could pose grave threats to people and the planet," concluded a recent report by the Ottawa-based ETC Group, one of dozens of advocacy groups that want a ban on releasing synthetic organisms pending wider societal debate and regulation.

At the core of synthetic biology's new ascendance are high-speed DNA synthesizers that can produce very long strands of genetic material from basic chemical building blocks: sugars, nitrogen-based compounds and phosphates.

Today a scientist can write a long genetic program on a computer just as a maestro might compose a musical score, then use a synthesizer to convert that digital code into actual DNA.

"The danger is not just bio-terror but bio-error," the report says.

Many scientists say the threat has been overblown. Venter notes that his synthetic genomes are spiked with special genes that make the microbes dependent on a rare nutrient not available in nature. And Pierce, of DuPont, says the company's bugs are too spoiled to survive outdoors.

"They are designed to grow in a cosseted environment with very high food levels," Pierce said. "You throw this guy out on the ground, he just can't compete. He's toast."

"We've heard that before," said Jim Thomas, ETC Group's program manager, noting that genes engineered into crops have often found their way into other plants despite assurances to the contrary. "The fact is, you can build viruses, and soon bacteria, from downloaded instructions on the Internet," Thomas said. "Where's the governance and oversight?"

Colorado Shooter on Anti-Depressants Too

Most information about Murray has become known in recent days through ranting Internet posts that appear to be the shooter’s words. One posting obtained by the AP was to a site called Independent Spirits, a gathering place for those affected by a strict Christian homeschooling curriculum.

The author, going by the handle Chrstnghtmr, described going with his mother to a conference at New Life. The poster said he “got into a debate” with two prayer team staff members, who monitored him, then tracked down his mother and “told her … I ‘wasn’t walking with the lord and could be planning violence.’” The September 2006 post includes biographical information that matches Murray’s background — including details consistent with his involvement in Youth With a Mission, which ran the training center he targeted in last weekend’s rampage.

Chrstnghtmr wrote that at age 17, after an attempt at going “all out for Jesus,” he plunged into a “dark suicidal depression” because he somehow couldn’t live up to the rules. He wrote he felt he was “failing God.” Chrstnghtmr described his parents putting him on two antidepressants after he shared his feelings.

Just half of a hot minute after telling you about the Omaha shooter being on anti-depressant drugs, here we go again. Pretty soon, you too will come to accept that where there's an otherwise inexplicable mass shooting in the U.S. - there too will you find SSRI's and quite likely Ritalin or Adderall.

gurdjieff and peace studies: the dark side in history

From his appearance in Moscow in 1912, the Graeco-Armenian magus George Gurdjieff created a unique contribution to Peace Studies discourse, obscured by second generation interpreters and derivative movements. Gurdjieff drew upon an extensive study of early neuro-physiology, hypnosis and religious traditions to construct a perspective (dubbed "the Work" or "the Fourth Way" by participants) on self-work and cultural recovery. His 'action research' was a precursor to the current interest in the Gaia hypothesis, memetics, ethno-political conflicts and transpersonal psychology. Gurdjieff's legacy offers a re-evaluation of the cultural history of Peace Studies and how contemporary activists can fall prey to group dynamics, technophilia, excessive role-identification and other forms of "consensus trance" (Charles T. Tart). Gurdjieff's techniques, in the tradition of Plato's cave allegory, offer contemporary peace activists an "unmasking psychology" to dis-identify from external events and attitudes, even when these "norms" are part of activist discourses.

I am not interested in who wins war. Not have patriotism or big ideas about peace. Americans with ideals, kill millions of Germans. Germans kill--with own ideals--English, French, Russian, Belgian--all have ideals, all have peaceful purpose, all kill. ~~ George Gurdjieff, Paris, 1944

III - Why No War on Methamphetamine?

So, Prof. Lester Spence stopped in and made a couple quick surgical cuts helping to solve a part of the "why no war on meth" equation. In a nutshell, rural and suburban crime and criminality are not part of the narrative used to sustain support within the American consensus reality for law enforcement and the prison industrial complex.

In 2005 it was reported that 58 percent of law enforcement officials in 500 counties surveyed by the National Association of Counties cite methamphetamine as their biggest drug problem. Half in the sample said that up to 20 percent of their inmates were incarcerated because of meth-related crimes, and some segments representing small counties and areas in the upper Midwest reported as many as 75 to 100 percent of their incarcerations as meth-related.

While that survey drew on a disproportionate number of counties in the West where meth is most widely available, the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) in February 2005, published results from a larger, random sample of 3,400 drug enforcement agencies nationwide. In the NDIC survey, for the first time since they have been taking such surveys, a plurality (40 percent) considered meth their leading drug threat. Cocaine came in second at 36 percent, and marijuana at 12 percent.

No systemic incentives are proffered to the county sheriffs responsible for enforcing laws in the rural precincts of America. Though the meth epidemic has taken a horrific toll on both rural and suburban denizens, and caused an epidemic spike in crime and criminality, it just doesn't matter as much to TPTB as open-air, urban crack dealers. It's not part of the dominant narrative depended upon to manage and sustain public support for the contemporary version of the thin blue line. (which quite obviously has a mission somewhat different from traditional "protect and serve" crime prevention, detection, deterrence and maintenance of law and order for the welfare of the general citizenry);

A NEW report on drug abuse has turned an old stereotype on its head: young teenagers in rural parts of the United States are more likely to use illegal drugs than those in big cities. Data gathered by the National Centre on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) say that eighth-graders (mainly 12-to-14-year-olds) living in the country are twice as likely as their urban counterparts to have used amphetamines, including methamphetamine, in the past month.

The same bucolic adolescents are also 34% more likely to have smoked marijuana in the past month, 50% likelier to have snorted cocaine and 83% more likely to have abused crack cocaine. “It’s time for all Americans to recognise that drugs are not only an urban problem,” says Joseph Califano, CASA’s president. …

Hat tip to Submariner



Freeing America from its addiction to methamphetamine is clearly not an elite management priority. Building and maintaining an increasingly militarized urban police capability along with the most massive detention and incarceration infrastructure in the world IS an elite management priority.

Ephedrine, pseudoephedrine and methamphetamine are close molecular cousins; meth, in fact, is ephedrine minus a single oxygen atom. As a result, their effects on the body are similar. All three shrink blood vessels in the nose and dilate airways in lungs, while unleashing adrenaline that stimulates the heart. With meth, the latter effect is most pronounced. Removing the oxygen atom, it turns out, makes the molecule fit receptor cells in the human brain "like a key in the lock," said Paul Doering, a professor of pharmacy at the University of Florida.

The Oregonian published an article three years ago called Shelved Solutions giving the pharmaceutical industry angle on the story - and while it's a certainly a necessary part of the puzzle as it relates to home cooking methamphetamine, it sheds almost no light on the domestic meta-economic traffic and the vast toll which increasing demand, crime, and criminality is taking on rural and suburban population groupings. Thinking and dot-connecting sufficient to encompass all of what is transpiring in the U.S. on this front would fall much more along these lines. I just raise the questions evident out the corner of your eye. I leave it to you to connect the liminal dots and bring the fuzzy picture more clearly into focus.

II - Why No War on Methamphetamine?

Richard Dawkins studies an American infected by an extreme case of methamphetamine addiction and sundry related syndromes:


Dawkins "was almost reminded of the Neuremburg rally. Dr. Goebbels would have been proud"! Doubtless....,

One of the earliest uses of methamphetamine was during World War II when the German military dispensed it under the trade name Pervitin. It was widely distributed across rank and division, from elite forces to tank crews and aircraft personnel. Chocolates dosed with methamphetamine were known as Fliegerschokolade ("flyer's chocolate") when given to pilots, or Panzerschokolade ("tanker's chocolate") when given to tank crews. From 1942 until his death in 1945, Adolf Hitler was given daily intravenous injections of methamphetamine by his personal physician, Theodor Morell as a treatment for depression and fatigue. It is possible that it was used to treat Hitler's speculated Parkinson's disease, or that his Parkinson-like symptoms which developed from 1940 onwards were related to abuse of methamphetamine.

Epidemiology of methamphetamine abuse - In the US methamphetamine use is the highest in Native Hawaiians and Pasific islanders (2.2%) and Native Americans (1.7%), lower among whites (0.7%) and Hispanics (0.5%), and much lower in Asians (0.2%) and blacks (0.1%). According to one study in large cities, 13% of men having sex with men used methamphetamine in the previous 6 months.

The faces of meth:

Just nine factories worldwide manufacture ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in bulk: one each in Germany and the Czech Republic, two in China, and five in India. Because drug traffickers' super labs require large amounts of ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, cartels are reliant on these international sources for their supply. The spread of meth can only be halted if the chemicals ephedrine and psuedoephedrine can be regulated at their international sources and if countries are required to only import enough of the chemicals to satisfy legitimate national demand for pseudoephedrine-containing cold and cough remedies.

So why no successful interdiction of the wholesale supply and curtailment of this obviously very serious blight on American consensus reality?

I - Why No War on Methamphetamine?

Why was the methamphetamine epidemic allowed to happen?

Methamphetamine abuse effects law enforcement, health, substance abuse providers, social services, jails and prisons and environmental and housing agencies at all levels of government. According to the National Association of County Officials, meth is the number one drug problem and crime source in the U.S..

Serious health and appearance problems are caused by unsterilized needles, lack of hygiene, the chemistry of methamphetamine (particularly when smoked), and especially pollutants in street-grade methamphetamine. The use of methamphetamine may lead to hypertension, damage to heart valves, vastly deteriorated dental health, and increased risk of strokes. Obsessive skin-picking by chronic methamphetamine users may lead to abscesses.

The Combat Methamphetamine Act went into effect last year and the first arrest under the act was made early this year. But minimal effort has been levied at the federal level to control Meth at the source - and this is all the more puzzling because the precursor chemicals, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine come from only 9 factories in the world. The DEA was aware of the dangers of this type of drug as early as 1980 when federal controls were put on phenyl-2-propanone, the key chemical needed to make amphetamine. In the mid-80s Gene Haislip, the DEA's number three man at the time, decided to go after the chemicals needed to make methamphetamine -- ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. But Haislip's solution was never fully tried because of opposition from the pharmaceutical companies who made cough and cold remedies containing the chemicals and didn't want regulation.

Methamphetamine is a powerful, addictive synthetic stimulant that causes the brain to release a surge of dopamine, creating a high that lasts from six to 24 hours. Like cocaine, meth comes in two forms: powder or rock. The powder form is usually white, odorless and bitter-tasting and can be snorted, smoked, eaten, dissolved in a drink and ingested, or heated and injected. The purer form of the drug, called "crystal," "glass" and "ice," appears as clear, chunky crystals that are usually smoked or injected. Meth can also come in small, colored tablets, but they are less common.

Methamphetamine causes the body to release large amounts of dopamine, a neurotransmitter, resulting in a prolonged sense of pleasure or euphoria for the user; however, over time, this causes severe side effects. With repeated use, meth depletes the brain's stores of dopamine and actually destroys the wiring of the dopamine receptors. This is a major reason why users become so addicted to the drug; without it they are no longer able to experience pleasure (a condition known as anhedonia), and they usually slip into a deep depression. Although dopamine receptors can grow back over time, studies have suggested that chronic meth use can cause other permanent brain damage, such as declines in reasoning, judgment and motor skills.

I Told You IT WAS THE DRUGS!

Put on Ritalin and Prozac starting at the age of 5?????

I told you it was the drugs!!!

Where was the Supernanny or some parentally involved adult with even the most rudimentary parenting skills? Talk about parental licensure???

Sorry, but with that degree of parentally and institutionally imposed pharmaceutical child abuse - Robert Hawkins never even had a chance.

Click the image or the post title to hear this inexcusable tale of woe.....,

Human Essentialist Cognitive Activism

Since the subject of human essentialism was questioned here rather recently, I thought I might point you in the direction of a good on-topic point of entry into a treatment of the subject that I hold in the highest regard. The ongoing debates in which I've gotten embroiled increasingly demand that I stipulate some or another political stance. Unfortunately, interpersonal communion and emergence are difficult stances to articulate. Still fuzzier and less accessible when articulated in terms of Gurdjieffian group work. Suffice it to say that I sincerely take at face value that the word ‘conscious’ means ‘knowing together’ and that the realization to whatever degree of the potential of people ‘thinking together’ is revolutionary. I recommend visiting, visiting, and revisiting this entire site. It is a truly exceptional ergodic text.

We can together reMember a game of unity and mutual uplift our anscestors were adept with, and games of this nature will entirely change what we believe about what it means to be human — because what we believe is grossly misfounded, and our intelligence has potentials we’ve never seen examples of.

There is a garden of stories we can share...which rapidly unlock learning potentials barely dreamt of in our religions and most imaginative fictions... by changing how we interact with a feature of representational experience.

For thousands of years our ancestors were attempting to piece together a way to speak about a living riddle which they had constant and direct experience of. This riddle had to do with the source of Knowledge. and the meaning of Light, Darkness, Life and Death.

Each of our cultures and their children of science, philosophy or religion express a different version as well as a modernized token of their essential experience and understanding — but there are ways of integrating the toys they left us that lead to a startling experience:

Direct contact with what they were making stories about.

If we can merely agree, we can play an ancient riddle-solving game together...

that transforms into game of impossible rescue...

...and that’s only the beginning...

More BioArt - Kittens

On monday I put up a blurb about bioart and the GFP bunny rabbit.

Today I spied with my little eye these truly kewl looking little OFP (orange flourescent protein) kittens.

Manufactured in Seoul Korea. photo released in Seoul by the Ministry of Science and Technology shows a combo of cloned cats that have a fluorescence protein gene and glowing under ultraviolet beams. The technology could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases, the developers said.

I'm thinking psychedelic birthday present myself....,

So you brade-runnah?

Laws Requiring Parental Licensure?

and it all sounds so reasonable, sweet, and perfectly innocent;

I believe that, during my grandchildren's lifetimes, the U.S. Supreme Court will find a way to approve laws requiring parental licensure.

Traditional societies in which children are socialized collectively, the method to which our species is evolutionarily adapted, have very little crime. In the modern U.S., the proportion of fatherless children, living with unmarried mothers, currently some 10 million in all, has increased more than 400% since 1960 while the violent crime rate rose 500% by 1994, before dipping slightly due to a delayed but equal increase in the number of prison inmates (from 240,000 to 1.4 million.) In 1990, across the 50 States, the correlation between the violent crime rate and the proportion of illegitimate births was 0.70.

About 70% of incarcerated delinquents, of teen-age pregnancies, of adolescent runaways, involve (I think result from) fatherless rearing. Because these frightening curves continue to accelerate, I believe we must eventually confront the need for parental licensure — you can't keep that newborn unless you are 21, married and self-supporting — not just for society's safety but so those babies will have a chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

DAVID LYKKEN
Behavioral geneticist and Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Minnesota; Author, Happiness

Political Dot Connecting at Foreign Dispatches

A cautionary note to gung ho Black conservatives; ignorance of history is no excuse!

The world wide web serves as a nearly miraculous lens of bicameral information interchange. While it is certainly the case that the TEP has ready access to highly granular detail about each and every individual accessing the net - the vice is surely versa. As a democratizing force, the web has afforded the masses with the means to observe, correlate, and communicate otherwise disparate strands of governance activity. While it watches us - those of us who are interested - are empowered as at no other time in history to watch and understand it.

In a pair of posts this week, Abiola Lapite has begun to reduce to its essence two of the key ingredients in the fascistic governance stew. These posts nicely summarize much of why I believe the resurgence of eugenic pot boiling in the public sphere should be a cause for serious public concern. From where I sit, he points out why it is a jarringly and stunningly discordant thing to read fascistic political pronouncements coming from even nominally Black-identified folk. Please make a point of reading them both.

The Genetic Seduction:

Although I didn't mention it in my recent post on a certain A. Hitler, one of the reasons why I've been investigating the man's career is because it's long been clear to me that there is a direct line connecting the pseudoscience "justifying" Hitler's brutality and the pseudoscience being flogged in our day under the rubric of "genetics": not only can one trace the continuity of certain ideas over the decades, but often one finds that the actual institutions pushing these ideas, and even the very individuals who man them, are directly connected on an intimate level. To put it plainly, a lot of the hype being generated about genes "for" homosexuality, IQ or this, that and the other today is the handiwork of people who have been mentored or sponsored by actual honest-to-goodness Nazis, war criminals many of whom escaped justice only because they were shrewd enough to burn the evidence of their crimes when they saw the writing on the wall. The one time practitioners of "eugenics" and "racial hygiene" are the forefathers of today's "race realists" and self-styled advocates of "human biodiversity."

Making Sense of a Madman:

That a long-oppressed minority should be attracted to an ideology which promises to radically break with the past and usher in an age of total equality is no more surprising when the oppressed are European Jews than it is when they are black American or African intellectuals, very many of whom have been drawn to communism from Paul Robeson and W.E. DuBois through far too many 1960s African leaders to name right down to the ANC leadership today; nor would a rational and unprejudiced mind leap from the finding that Jews were overrepresented in the leadership of communist revolutions to the conclusion that all or even most Jews look favorably on communism, just as it is only the bigots who seize upon the fact that black Americans are convicted of more crimes than their white fellow citizens as "proof" that "blacks" as a whole are criminals by nature. Seizing upon some group or other's "disproportionate" participation in some unfavorable activity or other as "evidence" of an innate malevolence is deeply irrational unless one can establish that this evil activity is driven by the core beliefs of said group

That there are common denominators in the background of conservative politicking in America should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention. Sadly, a lot of gung ho Black conservatives don't or won't......,

Deep Cover Brother Weighs in on the IQ Debate....,

Malcolm Gladwell writing in the New Yorker about the Flynn Effect.

None of the Above - What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race.

“The mind is much more like a muscle than we’ve ever realized,” Flynn said. “It needs to get cognitive exercise. It’s not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark.” The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences was the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in.

Streaming Realvideo of James Flynn debating Charles Murray two weeks ago at the Manhattan Institute. Flynn is on first. He was recently named scientist of the year by the International Society of Intelligence Research.

CNu vs UCBM - Grueling Dueling II

In the prior installment, I asked the following kwestins;

I know from our blackprof.com exchanges that you have a racially tinged interest in crime and criminality. Have you included in your crime category, kidnapping people, murdering them, raping them, and making them labor for you without compensation - a pretty good description of the American economic system for 300 years? Any chance that this crime and criminality could have had an adverse effect on Black folks heritable position and status within the American social hierarchy?

Having laid to rest the genetic and psychometric pseudo-science, which are crushingly persuasive on their own, I reread Stephen Metcalf's devastating disavowal of William Saletan with my own endgame as against Mill's anti-egalitarian position in mind. From where I sit, all that's left that's worth knowing is the relevant history, sociology, morality and personal experiences framing our respective world views. Why do you believe and profess as you do David? Here's the logical nougat of my own political arguments against American-style eugenic polemicization a la Metcalf;

the APA (American Psychological Association) task force lays out—finally!—the real heart of the conflict. To understand what is really being fought over when we fight over the IQ gap between blacks and whites, its authors explain, you must think through an analogy. Imagine two wheat fields. Now imagine two genetically identical sets of seeds. (The analogy was first made famous by the Harvard evolutionary biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin.) Now imagine each field is planted with these two identical seed stocks. Field No. 1 is given the best possible inputs: sunshine intensity, rain, soil nitrates, etc. Field No. 2 is given much less of all of the above. Within each field, inputs are kept uniform. Inevitably, the first field grows a healthier supply of grain than the second. But here is the rub: Within each field, the variation in outcomes is entirely hereditary. Between the two fields, the variation in outcomes in entirely environmental.

The APA task force reduces the question of the IQ test score gap to a single set of questions. As they list them:

Are the environmental and cultural situations of American Blacks and Whites also substantially and consistently different—different enough to make this a good analogy? If so, the within-group heritability of IQ scores is irrelevant to the issue. Or are those situations similar enough to suggest that the analogy is inappropriate, and that one can plausibly generalize from within-group heritabilities? Thus the issue ultimately comes down to personal judgment: How different are the relevant life experiences of Whites and Blacks in the United States today?

To the APA's superb list, I would add some related queries. Does it feel as though researchers like Jensen and Rushton, the so-called "race realists," have spent their careers examining a range of competing hypotheses for the black-white IQ gap, and carefully scrutinizing the quality of the research at their disposal? Or have they been attempting, at all costs, to prove a single hypothesis—that blacks are congenitally dumber than whites? Shouldn't researchers on any highly charged subject be required to show a minimum of clean hands? Why is it that every researcher I can find who supports the heredity-only thesis takes money from the Pioneer Fund? Would you ever take money from the Pioneer Fund? Under any circumstances?

In the absence of some startling new evidence, the crux of the issue turns out to be this: Do you believe the legacy of American racism, in all its complexity, can explain depressed black IQ scores, even when controlling for all other factors, including socioeconomic status? Is the black experience, in other words, so unique as to constitute, for nearly all black Americans, a separate wheat field? If you say yes, then good news: You believe (along with the most prominent environmentalists) that the black-white IQ gap will close in the next 50 or so years. If you think no, then bad news: You believe, with the most prominent hereditarians, that blacks as a group must resign themselves to higher rates of poverty, unemployment, divorce, and violent criminality purely as a matter of genetic fate.

And that ladies and gentlemen, from my humble perspective, is what this is all about. So David Mills, I'ma axe you one more time again - but this time echoing the sentiments of your commenter Bay Radical;

what on earth would ever make even an undercover Black man say that there are racial inequalities in our society because the beneficiaries of these inequalities (white people) are, in general "smarter" than those who get the short end of things (for the most part people of color, but also women, and poor people of all ethnicities and genders)?

and my brother Submariner;

What Mills hasn't explained to my (and Bay Radical's) satisfaction is other than a constitutional right to 'free speech' why is this subject worth his serious consideration? What is his endpoint? To use a spades analogy, I'm willing to let his little joker walk. What's next?

we're all still waiting with baited breath to hear you out.....,

CNu vs UCBM - Grueling Dueling I

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. Albert Einstein

We shouldn’t ignore our simple, real-world understanding of what “intelligence” is – and what it means – as we navigate this politically and scientifically complex subject. David Mills



My forensic opponent has leveled the following charges against yours truly;

I will leave it to any interested reader to decide which of us spoke plainly and which one argued poorly... which one is ideology-driven and deliberately oblique.

So I'm going to break it down to really simple terms and see if we can bring the Millsian soft shoe to dialectical closure. According to Mills;

1. Intelligence is a faculty

2. One person is strictly smarter than another.

3. The faculty is inherited

4. There's little that society or the individual can or should do to alter where an individual is in the hierarchy.

5. Richer and higher status individuals (and families, since this characteristic is heritable) are richer and have a higher status, because they are smarter.

I believe that in a nutshell, these propositions capture the essence of David Mill's political position on IQ. (David, please correct me if I've over or understated your simple, real-world understanding of what intelligence is and the outcomes which it naturally engenders?)

David, do you understand what a social construct is? Here are a few examples:

academic performance
job performance
crime

I know from our blackprof.com exchanges that you have a racially tinged interest in crime and criminality. Have you included in your crime category, kidnapping people, murdering them, raping them, and making them labor for you without compensation - a pretty good description of the American economic system for 300 years? Any chance that this crime and criminality could have had an adverse effect on Black folks heritable position and status within the American social hierarchy? The fact is, there is no scientific category that is more than tangentially connected to "race", and there is no known genetic marker that is more than tangentially connected to "IQ." Both of those, in the context you are using, are social constructions, not scientific ones.

There's more;

Speaking of politically and scientifically complex...

While Craig Nulan marches up and down the sidewalk wearing a sandwich board that says “IQ is meaningless!” on the front and “Psychometrics is racist!” on the back... guess what? A subset of the high-IQ population is doing things like mapping the human genome, putting machines on the surface of Mars (and communicating with them), and pondering the nature of subatomic particles.

Hell, it takes a high IQ to even comprehend that stuff, let alone do the actual science.

This in itself renders silly any black-partisan blustering about the unknowability of “intelligence,” or the relativism of different kinds of intelligences. Whitey done sent a spaceship past Saturn, got-dammit! How you sound, talkin’ ’bout “IQ ain’t shit”?

Here David has stepped up his argument from individuals to groups and enlarges on his argument that IQ correlates to various outcomes and has value for that reason. Race applies to groups. Given that race also correlates to outcomes, why not simply skip the middle man and claim that race is linked to group intelligence because it is linked to group outcomes? IQ tests, which are products of 19th and early 20th century acculturation - long before the advent of either neurology or genetics, and, at the height of the American racist imperialist ethos - is about group acculturation and its effect on group curricular assimilation. The fatal flaw in whatever the IQ test measures is that it isn't measuring anything beyond the same old environmental factors that it presumes to render irrelevant.

For discussions sake, let's play along with David and see what we have to believe in order to hold his group stratification scheme together, shall we?

1. We pretend that the IQ test developed in the late 19th century corresponds to natural human intelligence, instead of ways of getting ahead in a particular society.

2. A subpopulation of humans, (the Germanics) distinguished only by their skin color, suddenly spread a genetic feature that allowed them to be smarter - as defined by the symbol manipulations of the IQ test - but that the phylogenetic effect of that change lagged behind by, 5,000 years if we compare the Germanics with the poor benighted black folks who did their thing back in Egypt.

3. In fact, for 4,000 years, the symbol manipulation of, say, writing, was far advanced on the Nile, while our Germanics were making do with painting themselves blue and living in caves.

4. Unbeknownst to the rest of humanity though, the Germanics were secretly passing on an absolutely useless genetic mutation across all those millenia, because as Hitler pointed out, Gott im Himmel had a plan for them.

5. When they finally learned to manipulate symbols to the extent that they learned a writing system around 400 AD - they were poised for group explosion.

6. Then came the dark ages....,

7. Until around 500 years ago, across those long dark ages - these hardy Germanics were dwarfed, in terms of their technological and symbol manipulation knowledge by the Chinese, Japanese, North African, African, Mesoamerican, and other civilizations.

8. Thank altertumswissenschaft - all of a sudden - the secret genetic inheritance of the Germanics kicked in and propelled them to a position of group supremacy over all the benighted others.

9. Having arrived at their long-occulted genetic inheritance the lofty Germanics are now doing things like mapping the human genome, putting machines on the surface of Mars (and communicating with them), and pondering the nature of subatomic particles....., amen.

Taking my pop cultural cue from David, until the next installment - a musical outro;

Bio Art

GFP -"Green Fluorescent Protein" - Alba is undoubtedly a very special animal, but I want to be clear that her formal and genetic uniqueness are but one component of the "GFP Bunny" artwork. The "GFP Bunny" project is a complex social event that starts with the creation of a chimerical animal that does not exist in nature (i.e., "chimerical" in the sense of a cultural tradition of imaginary animals, not in the scientific connotation of an organism in which there is a mixture of cells in the body) and that also includes at its core: 1) ongoing dialogue between professionals of several disciplines (art, science, philosophy, law, communications, literature, social sciences) and the public on cultural and ethical implications of genetic engineering; 2) contestation of the alleged supremacy of DNA in life creation in favor of a more complex understanding of the intertwined relationship between genetics, organism, and environment; 3) extension of the concepts of biodiversity and evolution to incorporate precise work at the genomic level; 4) interspecies communication between humans and a transgenic mammal; 5) integration and presentation of "GFP Bunny" in a social and interactive context; 6) examination of the notions of normalcy, heterogeneity, purity, hybridity, and otherness; 7) consideration of a non-semiotic notion of communication as the sharing of genetic material across traditional species barriers; 8) public respect and appreciation for the emotional and cognitive life of transgenic animals; 9) expansion of the present practical and conceptual boundaries of artmaking to incorporate life invention.

NPR Story today on Bioart:

Low Self-Esteem the Root of Material Desire

Contemporary American tweens and teens have emerged as the most ;

brand-oriented
consumer-involved
materialistic generation

in history. And they top the list globally. . . .More children here than anywhere else believe that their clothes and brands describe who they are and define their social status.

Growing up in a Material World: Age Differences in Materialism in Children and Adolescents

Changing Images of Man

You already know that I'm a big fan of information absorption from the Rand archives. Well let me introduce you to another one of my favorite watering holes of elite thought exteriorization. Always mindful of what that Northern Cali bunch have been up to, I must say that these folks have had an amazing history and they have a very large footprint indeed.

Changing Images of Man predicts an American economic collapse and a "garrison" (police) state," if the overwhelming inequities of our economic system are not corrected by powerful multinationals making more humane decisions. Alternatives to this doomsday scenario are discussed, all of which point to the need to devote all available resources towards transforming the image of man, changing man's nature, instead of altering the corrupted economic system which has brought America to this dire state. In this government study it was inappropriate to denounce the evil culprits behind all our troubles (who pull the strings on government itself), even though the task was to document and remedy the damage that they have done. Instead, they are cited as the hopeful "saviors," that we should look to for help and leadership. The hypocrisy of the hegemons! The authors admit that it is "utopian in 1974 to think of the multinational corporations as potentially among our most effective mechanisms for husbanding the earth's resources and optimizing their use for human benefit -- the current popular image of the corporation tends to be more that of the spoiler and the exploiter."

Instead of charging the people who are responsible for our situation, for manipulating our economy and our democracy to maximize their profits, the multi-national corporations and their owners were exalted as the potential saviors of mankind. The elite have consistently taken steps to dominate the world by controlling people through "humanitarian" projects which, in the end, turn out to be profit mechanisms. The "green revolution" to spread corporate farming to the Third World has been the key to globalization's destabilizing of world labor markets, in order to create populations of "refugee workers," who are willing to go anywhere to find work for slave wages. This is the cause of the wave of illegal immigration into the US from Mexico. This is part of the proof that there are powerful individuals who are using their economic power to undermine nations in a long-term scheme to gain control of nations and multiply their profits.

Neuroscience and Fundamentalism - Social Policy Implications

Having banged heavily on conservative and racist just-so stories about genetic determinism, IQ, and eugenics for the past month or so - here now is a heavily value-laden perspective from the other side of the political fence. What types of socio-political policies are warranted and appropriate on the basis of the neurological data and hypothesis set forth in this article? Murray and Herrnstein didn't hesitate to propose policies in their polemical "The Bell Curve" - so surely there are evaluative, psychological, educational, and security policy implications resulting from the fact that there may well be a neurological basis for inflexible, dogmatic people who are stuck on stupid?

Do extremism and an unconditional adherence to religious dogma result from a failure of a portion of the frontal lobe to fully develop or, if fully developed, to activate? Studies suggest that faithful adherence to a single reasoning strategy on tests such as the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test means that parts of the frontal lobes are inactive, have failed to fully develop, or have even been damaged. Thus, unqualified disdain for divergent beliefs,for personal interpretation, and for creative theories like Darwin’s theory of evolution, may indeed have, at least a partial, biological explanation: a reduced utilization of that section of the brain which has played such a vital role in humanity’s creative advances—the frontal lobes. By unconditionally obeying religious tenets—or any dogma—some people may be relying on the phylo-genetically older, more posterior portions of the brain that store knowledge and enable consistent or stable behaviors and, unknowingly, circumventing the portion which has been gifted to humans alone through evolution.

Doesn't the natural implication of congenitally "stuck-on-stupid" folks gobbling up the lion's share of welfare state benefits clearly compromise the aim of resource optimization in an increasingly resource scarce world? This is a condition for which one can easily screen and objectively document.

Is the Brain Really Necessary?

This was the question asked by British neurologist John Lorber when he addressed a conference of pædiatricians in 1980. Such a frivolous sounding question was sparked by case studies Lorber had been involved in since the mid-60s. The case studies involve victims of an ailment known as hydrocephalus, more commonly known as water on the brain. The condition results from an abnormal build up of cerebrospinal fluid and can cause severe retardation and death if not treated.

Two young children with hydrocephalus referred to Lorber presented with normal mental development for their age. In both children, there was no evidence of a cerebral cortex. One of the children died at age 3 months, the second at 12 months. He was still following a normal development profile with the exception of the apparent lack of cerebral tissue shown by repeated medical testing. An account of the children was published in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology.

Later, a colleague at Sheffield University became aware of a young man with a larger than normal head. He was referred to Lorber even though it had not caused him any difficulty. Although the boy had an IQ of 126 and had a first class honours degree in mathematics, he had "virtually no brain". A noninvasive measurement of radio density known as CAT scan showed the boy's skull was lined with a thin layer of brain cells to a millimeter in thickness. The rest of his skull was filled with cerebrospinal fluid. The young man continues a normal life with the exception of his knowledge that he has no brain.

Although anecdotal accounts may be found in medical literature, Lorber is the first to provide a systematic study of such cases. He has documented over 600 scans of people with hydrocephalus and has broken them into four groups:

• those with nearly normal brains
• those with 50-70% of the cranium filled with cerebrospinal fluid
• those with 70-90% of the cranium filled with cerebrospinal fluid
• and the most severe group with 95% of the cranial cavity filled with cerebrospinal fluid.