NYTimes | It used to be believed that people had a level of general intelligence with which they were born that was unaffected by environment and stayed the same, more or less, throughout life. But now it’s known that environmental influences are large enough to have considerable effects on intelligence, perhaps even during your own lifetime.
Reality Sandwich | Recently, I have taken as my personal mantra the not very transcendent phrase, "I don't know." The list of things I feel unsure about seems to be steadily increasing. For instance, I don't know if our solipsistic species will survive much longer, and sometimes I am not even sure how much I care. I don't know if Barack Obama is a warm-hearted leader who will unite people at a time of adversity, or the most brilliant puppet ever put forth by the New World Order conspirators (who, as radio journalist and documentary filmmaker Alex Jones suggests, may be plotting a program of rapid depopulation). I don't know if the increase in UFO sightings means we are approaching a benevolent contact experience or a horrific predatory ambush. I don't know if global warming is mainly caused by human action, or if it is part of a phase transition of the entire solar system, as the Russian scientist Dmitriev proposes.
Global Research | Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor and early supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, has warned that civil unrest on American soil is a possibility that should not be dismissed. Brzezinski explains that "[the United States is] going to have millions and millions of unemployed, people really facing dire straits. And we’re going to be having that for some period of time before things hopefully improve. And at the same time there is public awareness of this extraordinary wealth that was transferred to a few individuals at levels without historical precedent in America..." Brzezinski concludes with this noteworthy remark "...hell, there could be even riots".
Palestine Chronicle | Although George W. Bush is universally recognized for his right-wing leaning, he is not so well-known, at least publicly, for upholding some of the most fundamentalist apocalyptic thoughts underpinning the spiritual beliefs of some of his ideological brethren.
“Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East” and then added that “the biblical prophecies are being fulfilled”. Bewildered, Jacque Chirac did not react immediately. He knew that Bush was somehow religious but could never have thought that the president of the world only superpower was as mysteriously warmhearted to the complex intricacies of the Scriptures as he seemed to be. When a day later George W. Bush pronounced the mysterious words in a conference about the “axis of evil” (the word “evil” was inserted by the evangelical speechwriter Michael Gerson, the original term coined by another staff writer, the Canadian Jew David Frum, was “axis of hatred”), the Elysée decided secretly to consult an expert or biblical scholar about the issue.
NYTimes | Secretary of State Hillary Clinton grabbed headlines with an invitation to Iran to attend a conference on Afghanistan, but the significant Middle Eastern news last week came from Britain. It has “reconsidered” its position on Hezbollah and will open a direct channel to the militant group in Lebanon.
Since TARP version 1.0 was signed into law on October 3rd, 2008 the S&P 500 is down approximately 38%. Think about this for a bit. We are talking about 5 months ago and the market has shed nearly 40% of its value. From the 2007 peak, we are now off by a mind boggling 56.4% putting us back to levels not seen since 1996.
National Academies Press | The intelligence community (IC) faces the challenging task of analyzing extremely large amounts of information on cognitive neuroscience and neurotechnology, deciding which of that information has national security implications, and then assigning priorities for decision makers. It is also challenged to keep pace with rapid scientific advances that can only be understood through close and continuing collaboration with experts from the scientific community, from the corporate world, and from academia. The situation will become more complex as the volume of information continues to grow. The Committee on Military and Intelligence Methodology for Emergent Neurophysiological and Cognitive/Neural Science Research in the Next Two Decades was tasked by the Technology Warning Division of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA’s) Defense Warning Office to identify areas of cognitive neuroscience and related technologies that will develop over the next two decades and that could have military applications that might also be of interest to the IC. Specifically, the DIA asked the National Research Council (NRC) to perform the following tasks:
• Amplify the technology warning methodology to illustrate the ways in which neurophysiological and cognitive/neural research conducted in selected countries may affect committee assessments.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | For nostalgia purposes, I recommend reading President Jimmy Carter's 1977 speech on energy policy. It's spot-on, and Carter's subsequent energy policies managed--among other things--to decrease U.S. oil imports by 50 percent between 1977 and 1982.
USA Today | More than half of the nation's foreclosures last year took place in 35 counties, a sign that the financial crisis devastating the national economy may have begun with collapsing home loans in only a few corners of the country.
In other parts of the country, the foreclosure wave was barely a ripple — at least until it started swamping major banks that had invested heavily in mortgages. Banking giant Wachovia Corp., for example, was hammered after California and Florida customers of one mortgage firm it bought began defaulting at high rates. The risks of such lending were spread so broadly among financial institutions that, when the loans went bad, it drove the national credit crisis, says Christopher Mayer, who studies real estate at Columbia Business School.
Humans are the most adventitious of creatures—a result of blind evolutionary drift. Yet, with the power of genetic engineering we need no longer be ruled by chance. Humankind—so we are told—can shape its own future. According to E.O. Wilson, conscious control of human evolution is not only possible but inevitable:
Humanity did not descend as angelic beings into this world. Nor are we aliens who colonized Earth. We evolved here, one among many species, across millions of years, and exist as one organic miracle linked to others. The natural environment we treat with such unnecessary ignorance and recklessness was our cradle and nursery, our school, and remains our one and only home. To its special conditions we are intimately adapted in every one of the bodily fibers and biochemical transactions that gives us life.
fda.gov | What is it? A totally implanted brain stimulator intended to suppress symptoms associated with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) that are not adequately controlled with medications and/or other therapies.
Noologie | The current progress in neurological research gives rise to the expectation that within the next generation, there will be an understanding of the neuronal loci and functions that form the infrastructure of sign processes and of language. Of the many works pointing into this direction, William Calvin's: "The Cerebral Code", and Spitzer's: "Geist im Netz" are quoted as examples. The present contribution aims at sketching a (so far hypothetical) working model based on Calvin's neuronal resonance fields for a heterodox interpretation of the ancient Greek Aoide language used in the Epics of Homer and other Aoidoi. While this is orthodoxically treated in the linguistic framework of the Saussurean "Signe Arbitraire" doctrine (e.g. Parry, Lord, and followers), it is proposed here that at least part of that material (perhaps of Pelasgian origin), was formed on another principle, to which Platon hints at in Kratylos: "That the sounds must be similar to the thing also". If this thing is interpreted not as the objective outer world (Popper-World 1) thing, but as neuronal subfunction of the "Weltbildapparat" (Riedl, Lorenz), then it is easy to see that the sign cannot be totally arbitrary, and that the sounds must correspond to an extremely fine-tuned neuronal and muscular resonance circuit that can produce and perceive them. As we can see in all spoken languages, only a very small subset of all the possible phonemic combinatorics is utilized in each language, and that combination is by no means arbitrary. The hypothesis presented will advance arguments that the ancient Aoide language can be interpreted, obviously not as prosa communication system (and no adaptation thereof), but as a (specially designed) fine-tuned neuronal-sound-imagination device designed for evoking neuronal resonance states of a kind that we presently associate with trance. Platon's description of Homer as "daemiourgon onomaton" (craftsman of words) is taken as hint in this direction. Selected examples will be presented of a morphemic combinatoric system underlying the Aoide language.
Washington Post | IMAGINE A PLACE where soldiers are entitled to burst through doors without warrants and citizens can be locked away without trial. Imagine that the leader of this place has the power to silence dissenters and the press and has the right to keep duly elected legislators from having a voice in these matters. Imagine further that he can unilaterally rip up and disregard any treaty he dislikes and that he has been told he is on solid legal ground by a hand-picked circle of advisers.
Some of the ideas in these memos, authored by lawyers in the Justice Department's elite Office of Legal Counsel, have been known for some time, and later iterations of the Bush Justice Department repudiated many of the principles the memos espouse. What their public disclosure this week makes clear is how intellectually dishonest Bush-era lawyers were in coming to these preposterous conclusions.
Washington Post | At least four tons of fertilizer was stolen over the weekend in Frederick, city police said. No motive had been determined.A boxcar full of it was stolen in Kansas City on monday but the thief crashed it into a field and I believe was apprehended. This is a collapse crime that folks need to be on the lookout for...,
A ton of urea and three tons of other fertilizer were taken from the Southern States store on South Street between Saturday night and Sunday morning, police said.
According to police, the fertilizer was contained for the most part in white 50-pound bags with a company logo.
Fertilizer thefts have attracted increased attention from law enforcement officials in recent years because some types of fertilizer can be used in making explosives. It was not immediately clear whether the materials taken could be used for such a purpose.
Lt. Clark Pennington said police have notified the FBI. As a matter of routine, a report of the theft was sent to a state coordinating center, which is to notify all interested federal agencies. He said detectives would work closely with those agencies in the inquiry, which was in its early stages.
Comes now Big Don with a particularly nasty data point unlikely to break the radar of mainstream media.
That company, Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, then disseminated the supposed H3N2 virus product to subcontractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany. Authorities in the four European countries are looking into the incident, and their efforts are being closely watched by the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Control.
Washington Post | Clinton "said she is doubtful that Iran will respond to any kind of engagement and opening the hand out and reaching out to them," said a senior State Department official, who requested anonymity because he was describing a closed-door conversation.
The National | A week is a long time in Washington, especially for the influential Israel lobby. Last Monday it had cause to celebrate the appointment of one of its favourite sons, Dennis Ross, as the State Department’s point-man on Iran. But on Friday came the announcement that Charles Freeman is to be President Obama’s National Intelligence Council chairman – the superspook who distils the gleanings of America’s 16 different intelligence agencies into the authoritative National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) that guide US policy.
NYTimes | So a Jerusalem Post article says that I’m “hardly the first American to be misled by the existence of synagogues in totalitarian countries.”
Anthony Campbell | Jaynes's central idea is that our modern type of consciousness is a recent development; indeed, that it began no more than 3,000 years ago. In earlier times human mentality was characterized by auditory and sometimes visual hallucinations, in which people heard the voices of the gods speaking to them and telling them what to do. Only when this process became internalized and recognized as coming from within the percipients' own minds did truly modern consciousness begin.
NYTimes | The hypocrisy grows all too gruesome: The Justice Department pronounced the Mexican drug cartels “a national security threat” this week, even as American gun dealers along the border were busily arming the cartels’ murderous gangs. Mexico complains that American dealers supplied most of the 20,000 weapons seized last year in drug wars in which 6,000 Mexicans died.
NYTimes | On a fall afternoon in 2002, the New York City police broke up a protest in front of Gov. George E. Pataki’s office in Midtown Manhattan and hauled a dozen demonstrators away.
SFGate | U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is sending strong signals that President Obama - who as a candidate said states should be allowed to make their own rules on medical marijuana - will end raids on pot dispensaries in California.
SFWeekly | Assemblyman Tom Ammiano's press conference this morning announcing his marijuana-legalization bill started punctually and stayed relentlessly on-point -- thereby denying a barb to every journalist present. Ammiano and the assembled speakers at San Francisco's State Building also spoke calmly and methodically, at one point being drowned out by a floor-waxer. The famously funny lawmaker reined himself in, presenting "The Marijuana Control, regulation and education act (AB 390)" as a simple matter of fiscal common sense. If you believe Ammiano and his straitlaced panel, it is. In a nutshell, here's what the bill would do: "Remove all penalties under California law for the cultivation, transportation, sale, purchase, possession, and use of marijuana, natural THC and paraphernalia by persons over the age of 21," "prohibit local and state law enforcement officials from enforcing federal marijuana laws (more on that later)" and establish a fee of $50 an ounce on marijuana on top of whatever pot will cost in a legal future -- which legalization advocates say is about half what it costs now. This tax rate figures at about a buck a joint.politico | The Washington Post on Friday announced it will no longer endorse presidential candidates, breaking decades of tradition in a...
