geometry for the selfish herd

sciencemag | To escape a hungry wolf, a sheep doesn't have to outrun the wolf, just the other sheep in its flock. Many researchers think that such selfish behavior, not cooperation for the benefit of the whole crowd, shapes the movements of groups of animals. But the decades-old "selfish herd theory" has been hard to back up with data. Now, a detailed analysis of how a flock of sheep moves to avoid a sheepdog has found that the theory holds true. Each sheep heads to safety in the center of the flock, rather than running directly away from the dog.

"It's really difficult to measure 2D spatial information on large animals in the wild," says biologist Theodore Stankowich of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was not involved in the new work. "They've taken advantage of a unique opportunity to work with the sheep to answer these types of questions in a controlled environment."

Studies on seals, crabs, and pigeons have shown that those animals seem to herd for selfish reasons, but the data have often been crude. Biologist Andrew King and colleagues at the Royal Veterinary College of the University of London attached GPS backpacks to 46 sheep and to a trained Australian Kelpie dog. When they released the dog to herd the sheep, they recorded the location of each animal every second. Then, they analyzed the data to determine what factors influenced each sheep's path. The movements of the sheep, the researchers reveal today online in Current Biology, could be best predicted by the center of the flock. Rather than run in a line away from the dog, scatter in all directions, or follow their nearest neighbors, the sheep all hurried toward the flock's center. The sheep began to converge when the dog was 70 meters away. Even as the flock as a whole moved, each sheep continuously competed to be as near the middle as possible.

"The fact that they're running toward the center reduces the chances of their being on the edge and being picked off by a predator," says King. It's a selfish behavior since each sheep puts the animals at the fringes of the flock at risk in order to save itself.

you didn't build that: systemic collapse summarized

businessinsider | The eurozone is on a path into a deep recession. As one of the largest and most advanced economies in the world, its centrality to a system of highly-interconnected global supply chains is taken for granted.

David Korowicz, a physicist and human-systems ecologist, recently authored a lengthy 78-page white paper titled: "Trade-Off: Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion: a study in global systemic collapse."

It explores the increasing systemic risk brewing in the global financial and trade systems. Using complex systems analysis, he explains how within weeks of the next major economic shock, like a major bank failure or a country exiting the eurozone, contagion would quickly spread through global supply chains, causing an "irreversible global economic collapse."

Korowicz warns that in the next crisis, "neither wealth nor geography is a protection. Our evolved co-dependencies mean that we are all in this together."

We read the paper and boiled it down to its key points.

not even a fan, but the Hon.Bro.Preznit obviously meant roads and bridges...,

TheAtlantic | President Obama uttered those four little words Republicans never tire of hearing -- "you didn't build that" -- on July 13, nearly a month ago, and yet if you do a Google News search for "Obama you didn't build that" you will turn up nearly 70,000 hits, the most recent posted within hours. It was a self-inflicted wound from which the president's reelection campaign continues to bleed steadily, if not profusely, despite the Romney campaign's not entirely satisfactory assault on the injured tissue. The election drawing ever closer in the mid-August heat, liberals wonder why the issue will not go away, and conservatives wonder why it did not immediately doom Obama's campaign. Both questions have the same answer: Obama made a shift so profound, but so easily misunderstood, that neither side has been able to end the debate, although Obama thus far is winning.

Here is what Obama said at Fire Station No. 1 in Roanoke, Va., (which Obama won with 61 percent of the vote in 2008, an island of blue in the sea of red that was western Virginia). I include the entire relevant quote so there is no question about the context:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didn't -- look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don't do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That's how we funded the G.I. Bill. That's how we created the middle class. That's how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That's how we invented the Internet. That's how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that's the reason I'm running for President -- because I still believe in that idea. You're not on your own, we're in this together.

Like any classic, it is just as good the hundredth time as it was the first time and the Romney campaign has kept repeating the snippet, "If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." But by "that," did Obama mean the "business" or the "roads and bridges" of the previous sentence? Let's be charitable and take the White House at its word that the president meant to say "those" and not "that." Is the whole controversy then a Machiavellian construction of the "right-wing noise machine?"

much too much fun to watch.....,

here's where you humans are sucking the planet dry...,

what happens if the mighty mississippi runs dry?

thetrumpet | If the world’s largest navigable river system goes dry, the economic consequences will be felt around the world. What is the single greatest reason America is so wealthy? According to the analysts at Stratfor, it is because of a river.

They have to be joking, right?

What about America’s vast gold resources? What about its mountains of coal? America is the world’s third-largest oil producer—surely that is why. Then there is America’s temperate climate and fertile soils that traditionally make it the world’s breadbasket. And don’t forget America’s human capital, Yankee ingenuity, and Protestant work ethic. Surely these factors are cumulatively more important than a river.

Not according to one of America’s premier think tanks. Many countries have large natural resources and hospitable climates, but don’t even come close to having America’s wealth. What sets America apart from the rest of the world is the Mississippi River basin. It is what makes exploiting America’s resources economically possible.

But now, due to the worst drought since the 1950s, the Mississippi may be about to go dry.

In Memphis and Vicksburg, the shrinking river is obvious: slower river, exposed river banks, and more sandbars. The water is down more than 13 and 20 feet in each city respectively. The Mississippi on average is about 13 feet below normal—and a whopping 55 feet below where it was at this time last year. On some stretches, the water level is perilously low. On July 17 it was reported that a 100-mile stretch of the Platte River in Nebraska, had dried up.

For each one-inch loss of water, the standard barge must unload 17 tons of cargo—that is a loss of 204 tons, per barge, for every one-foot loss. A typical tow on the upper Mississippi river may have 15 barges. A one-foot loss of water translates into a loss of 3,000 tons of capacity. Tows on the lower Mississippi River may have up to 45 barges, resulting in a loss of capacity of over 9,000 tons. It would take almost 600 semitrucks to haul the freight unloaded by one large barge grouping under those conditions! There are thousands and thousands of barge strings that ply the Mississippi each year. The shutdown of the Mississippi would be an absolute catastrophe!

history of the world in two minutes

Fist tap Big Don.

is collapse humanity adapting to its own presence?

automaticearth | I think about history ... a lot. It has always been my deepest fascination. When I was little I would construct whole civilizations with my Legos and play out their existence. Monuments would be constructed, kings would die, wars would start, cities would be rebuilt, lineages would rise and fall. I suppose as a child what captivated me was the magnitude of the human epic, the drama of the shifting patterns of human relationship over the course of generations. I simply loved telling their stories, and the sort of melancholic beauty that one feels reflecting on all that has passed, all that has succumbed to time and is irretrievable.

The western historical canon is well known to us in its essential form. The basic narrative runs, "Humans gave up their wandering and settled the fertile crescent, cities emerged, myths and legends were established. Then came the Greeks and all that is noble and virtuous in western culture was born: reason, art, democracy, etc. Next the Romans who brought, law, order and engineering until crushed by the barbarians and the rise of Christianity. The dark ages ensued until Europeans pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and proceeded to make their rightful claim on the world as the descendents of Greece and Rome."

The characters of our narratives have become so familiar to us that we tend to simply view our ancestors as us, separated only by time. I have watched the siege of Troy, the burning of the library of Alexandria and Gladiatorial games all carried out with clipped British accents as though everyone living in the past 10,000 years spoke the queen’s English. What happens in the reshaping of history through our narrative lens is, if you will, a cultural-morphic personification.

We attribute to our ancient cultures our own cosmologies and create a linear relationship between our cultures. Now I am not saying that we are not the descendents of the ancients that preceded us and that they have not had a powerful influence upon us. What I am saying is that we distort our ability to truly empathize and understand the humanity of those who preceded us and in doing so we distort our ability to understand our own position in history and relationship to those that will follow us.

The truth is that the ancients were radically different cultures than ours. The stories they told about themselves are not the same as the ones we tell about them. Though we can only reconstruct their worlds now using what facts we know, it is important that we work to empathize with their reality as best we can so that we might understand our own more fully. We must work to imagine the condition of the ancients. I often think of what it would have felt like to go into battle.

Can you imagine standing on the field, heat bearing down on you as you stare out at the mass of humanity on the opposing side, light glinting off of metal? You would have that deep anxiousness in the pit of your stomach. Drums beating as you and the columns start to move, first walking, jogging, then running, everything moving faster and faster.

Leather and metal strapped to your body chafing against your skin, the scent of other humans and dust from thousands of sandals hitting the earth surrounds you. Blood and adrenaline pumping through your body to match the pounding of the war drums. Closer and closer the inevitability of the clash descending upon you, the roar of thousands of voices screaming in unison fill the air and... impact.

What was the psychology of these humans? What ordered their world, what was the visceral intensity of their experience? What makes them "us", what gives them their own unique truths? The people that we call the "Greeks", were an Iron age people in the Mediterranean, already with their own vast history filled with legends and fallen civilizations as distant from their times as we are from them.

Certainly the Hellenes form part of the DNA of our culture, their ideas and actions have been transmitted through the shifting dynamics of human society and played a large role in the shape and expression of our cultures. Yet they were not "Westerners" or "Europeans". They were a people trying to make sense of the process in which they were embedded, trying to create a coherent narrative out of all that they had inherited and did not even remotely imagine of us.

Yet why is this idea of reframing the narrative so important? I would argue that if we do not demythologize our history we will be incapable of demythologizing ourselves, and if our understanding of our lineage is mythic then our relationship to our own times is equally so. That when we respond to our condition with pre-scripted narratives we are attempting to conform reality to our own thoughts, assumptions and biases. This reduces our adaptability because it reduces our ability to see possibilities and to embrace a diversity of perception and response. Think of all the humans burned at stakes, all the texts that have been obliterated simply because they challenged the dominant narratives.

conservation by other means: the world crisis in 1000 words or less

economic-undertow | Our crisis is the unraveling of modernity and associated industrialization due to resource/capital depletion (Hall,Kümmel). This is the consequence of a ‘culture of excess’ that refuses to accept limits: there is human over-population, too many machines along with extractive industrial agriculture. Failures in credit- political- and production sector marketplaces are the manifestation of resource/capital depletion. What is underway is ‘conservation by other means’.

Modernity is a long-running process (400 years). It has been too successful too long for it to continue. Modernity cannibalizes its capital, as such our crisis is irreversible. Conventional marketplace remedies such as debt jubilees/write-offs, re-distribution, bailouts, stimulus, austerity policies, monetary easing, etc. have no effect on outcome other than to worsen conditions. These are efforts to reclaim capital that no longer exists. Consequently, remedies accelerate unraveling process by increasing gross debt (claims against capital) while exposing remaining capital to consumption at higher rates. The capital ‘pie’ cannot be redistributed, only a new and much smaller pie is to be had and carefully tended. Our smaller pie of non-renewable resources is what we have to make use of, to last us and the rest of the world’s creatures until the end of humanity.

Economists insist that the crisis is one of debt and out-of-control finance. Rather, the crisis is a non-productive physical economy which monetizes resource waste. Pop culture promotes the process, management policy defends the process’ beneficiaries from any undesirable consequences.

Economists insist that capital is symbolic (money) rather than material. Capital = resources (Daly), all industrial money is debt. Abstract money is infinitely reproducible, material inputs are not. Existence of debt-money is incentive to waste even as input constraints unravel input-dependent enterprises (petroleum fuel, also topsoil, water and waste-carrying capacity).

Waste-based economy depletes the capital it requires. Adjusting the waste-based economy to operate at greater efficiency depletes capital more thoroughly at a higher rate (Jevons).

global food security index sponsored by dupont...,

the hunger wars in our future

tomdispatch | Wherever you look, the heat, the drought, and the fires stagger the imagination. Now, it’s Oklahoma at the heart of the American firestorm, with “18 straight days of 100-plus degree temperatures and persistent drought” and so many fires in neighboring states that extra help is unavailable. It’s the summer of heat across the U.S., where the first six months of the year have been the hottest on record (and the bugs are turning out in droves in response). Heat records are continually being broken. More than 52% of the country is now experiencing some level of drought, and drought conditions are actually intensifying in the Midwest; 66% of the Illinois corn crop is in “poor” or “very poor” shape, with similarly devastating percentages across the rest of the Midwest. The average is 48% across the corn belt, and for soybeans 37% -- and it looks as if next year’s corn crop may be endangered as well. More than half of U.S. counties are officially in drought conditions and, according to the Department of Agriculture, “three-quarters of the nation's cattle acreage is now inside a drought-stricken area, as is about two-thirds of the country's hay acreage.” Worse yet, there’s no help in sight -- not from the heavens, not even from Congress, which adjourned for the summer without passing a relief package for farmers suffering through some of the worst months since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

In sum, it’s swelteringly, unnerving bad right now in a way that most of us can’t remember. And that’s the present moment. The question of what lies ahead is the territory occupied by TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author most recently of The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources. From the time he published his book Resource Wars back in 2001, he’s been ahead of the curve on such questions and he suggests that we’re going to have an uncomfortably hot time in all sorts of unexpected ways on this increasingly hot planet of ours.

that old martial spirit...,

kunstler | A great orgasm shuddered through the money world last week when Mario Draghi paused between scamorza con arugula tidbits to remark that the European Central Bank (ECB) would stop at nothing to keep the financial blood of Europe circulating. Of course you wonder how many pony glasses of Campari he knocked back before that whopper came out. The markets squirmed with glee. I suppose it feels good to have quantities of smoke blown up your ass.

This is the last month of the Great Pretending over on that lovely continent of exquisitely preserved towns and the corniche winding down to the crashing green sea, and the lunch table under the grape arbor... I mean, compared to, say, the universal slum vista of tilt-up, strip-mall America along the deafening highways, with the wig shops, tattoo dens, pawn shacks, dollar stores, parking lot swap-meets, and supersized citizens waddling through the greasy 100-degree heat of a new climate regime. When things blow, as you may be sure they will, at least the Europeans will sink amid all that loveliness while the American experience will be more like getting flushed down a toilet.

The more you reflect on the Draghi remark, the more you wonder whether absolutely anyone out there is paying attention to the fact that there is no money backing up these pledges of continued bailouts. All the major banks of Europe are functionally insolvent and all of the nations that charter the banks are structurally insolvent, and the economies that depend on the circulation of funds around this Euro organism really cannot escape some sort of cascading collapse. The big unknown element of the story is how angry and batshit crazy the citizens of all these countries will get when summer ends. I don't believe they will fight each other just now, but it is very likely that the lampposts of all these lovely towns and cities will be decorated with swinging corpses of bankers, ministers, and a choice selection of politicians while a fight over the table scraps of a 30-year-long debt banquet occupies the folks in the streets.

greece rounds up thousands of immigrants in weekend sweep

LATimes | Greek police arrested more than 1,000 immigrants and detained thousands more in a massive weekend sweep that comes as the strapped nation has increasingly soured on hosting foreigners.

The vast roundup in Athens was jarringly named Xenios Zeus -- after the Greek god known as the patron of hospitality. Police stopped and detained 6,000 immigrants, out of whom 1,600 were arrested for illegally entering Greece and sent to holding centers, according to the Associated Press. Greek media reported that similar sweeps are in the works for other cities.

Leftist political parties slammed the crackdown as an assault on human rights that had fostered fear and racism, while the extreme right Golden Dawn party accused the government of not actually sending anyone back to a home country, merely holding a “badly organized PR stunt,” Athens News reported.

Public Order and Citizens' Protection Minister Nikos Dendias defended the roundups as necessary to keep Greece from unraveling, arguing that the country faced the biggest “invasion” since the influx of the ancient Dorians thousands of years ago. Dendias had earlier claimed that "unbelievably high" numbers of immigrants were involved in crime, according to Greek news reports.

As for naming a roundup after the god of hospitality, Dendias reportedly told Greek media that the name was fitting because immigrants were living in miserable conditions, crammed into decrepit apartments after being conned by smugglers into thinking that they would be able to get jobs.

“Now they will return to their home countries. ... It's the best thing that could happen to them,” Dendias was quoted by the Kathimerini newspaper.

record heat killing midwest fish...,

NPR | This summer, extreme heat and drought have brought on larger than normal "fish kills" throughout the Midwest. Fish are dying by the tens of thousands. All Things Considered host Audie Cornish speaks with Aaron Woldt, Fisheries Program Supervisor for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Midwestern Region, about what's happening in these waters.

failing even before the greatest depression, yet another killer-ape goes turner diary

Boston | The gunman who killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin before he was shot to death by police was identified Monday as a 40-year-old Army veteran and former leader of a white supremacist metal band.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Haanstad in Milwaukee identified the shooter as Wade Michael Page. Page joined the Army in 1992 and was discharged in 1998, according to a defense official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release information yet about the suspect.

Officials and witnesses said the gunman walked into the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in suburban Milwaukee and opened fire as several dozen people prepared for Sunday services. When the shooting ended, seven people lay dead, including Page. Three others were critically wounded in what police called an act of domestic terrorism.

Page was a "frustrated neo-Nazi" who led a racist white supremacist band, the Southern Poverty Law Center said Monday. Page told a white supremacist website in an interview in 2010 that he had been part of the white-power music scene since 2000 when he left his native Colorado and started the band, End Apathy, in 2005, the nonprofit civil rights organization said.

He told the website his "inspiration was based on frustration that we have the potential to accomplish so much more as individuals and a society in whole," according to the SPLC. He did not mention violence in the website interview.

End Apathy's biography on the band's MySpace page said it began in 2005 and was based in Nashville, N.C. It said their music "is a sad commentary on our sick society and the problems that prevent true progress."

Joseph Rackley of Nashville, N.C., told the AP on Monday that Page lived with his son for about six months last year in a house on Rackley's three acres of property. Wade was bald and had tattoos all over his arms, Rackley said, but he doesn't remember what they depicted. He said he wasn't aware of any ties Page may have had to white supremacists.

too much magic: wishful thinking, technology, and the fate of the nation

kazibookreview | In his latest non-fiction work, James Howard Kunstler delivers a sobering message about what a post-oil society might look like and how we got ourselves into this situation.

Too Much Magic is both a history lesson and a warning. The warning concerns how we as a society will have to deal with a world where cheap, plentiful oil is a thing of the past. The history lesson is all about how we came to live in such an oil-dependent society bent on expanding its suburbs to infinity.

Kunstler is also the author of 2005 book The Long Emergency which dealt with similar topics: the passing of peak oil production, climate change, and the reorganization of society in a lower-energy environment. He argues that advances in technology cannot replace dwindling fossil fuels in our economy, and we are unwilling as a people to prepare or plan for this eventuality.

One of Kunstler’s major beliefs is that the result of a lack of oil will be a necessary restructuring of our society on a more local basis. Geographical areas will have to be responsible for producing their own food and water. Waterways will become important again as a means of transportation, and people will have to adjust their living situations to be close to such waterways. He also advocates a more robust national rail system, as that may be the only way to reliably travel long distances quickly once our oil supply is gone.

Another main argument is that alternative energies such as wind and solar cannot produce enough energy to replace what we burn in oil right now. Also, the equipment needed to harvest these energies requires some form of fossil fuels to be used in the first place. Kunstler is not against trying what we can, but he feels that any of that will be a “transitory phase of history” before we settle into a “low-energy,” more local society. Another effect is that major parts of the country (such as the southwest) may become uninhabitable as we won’t have the electricity to pump water and run air conditioning in these areas.

religious conservatism: an evolutionarily evoked disease-avoidance strategy

tandfonline | Issues of purity and symbolic cleansing (e.g., baptism) play an important role in most religions, especially Christianity. The purpose of the current research was to provide an evolutionary framework for understanding the role of disgust in religiosity, which may help elucidate the relationship between religious conservatism and non-proscribed prejudice (e.g., prejudice toward sexual minorities). The behavioral immune system (BIS) is a cluster of psychological mechanisms (e.g., disgust) that encourage disease-avoidance (Schaller, 2006). Out-group members have historically been a source of contamination. Consequently, evidence suggests that the BIS predicts negative attitudes toward out-groups (Faulkner, Schaller, Park, & Duncan, 2004). The purpose of the current research is to investigate whether religious conservatism mediates the relationship between the BIS and prejudice toward sexual minorities. Study 1 demonstrated that the disease-avoidant components of disgust (e.g., sexual and pathogen disgust), but not moral disgust, were positively correlated with religious conservatism. Additionally, the data supported a model in which religious conservatism mediated the relationship between disgust and prejudice toward homosexuals. In Study 2, the correlations and mediation model were replicated with a more diverse sample and different measures. The current research suggests that religious conservatism may be in part an evolutionarily evoked disease-avoidance strategy.

ethnic nepotism: its proponents don't just study it, they practice it

wikipedia | In sociology, the term ethnic nepotism describes a human tendency for in-group bias or in-group favouritism applied by nepotism for people with the same ethnicity within a multi-ethnic society.

The theory views ethnocentrism and racism as nepotism toward extended kin and an extension of kin selection. In other words, ethnic nepotism points toward a biological basis for the phenomenon of people preferring others of the same ethnicity or race; it explains the tendency of humans to favor members of their own racial group by postulating that all animals evolve toward being more altruistic toward kin in order to propagate more copies of their common genes.

"The myth of common descent", proposed by many social scientists as a prominent ethnic marker, is in his view often not a myth at all.[clarification needed] "Ethnicity is defined by common descent and maintained by endogamy".[2]

To guard one's genetic interests, Frank Salter notes altruism toward one's co-ethnics:

Hamilton's 1975 model of a genetic basis for tribal altruism shows that it is theoretically possible to defend ethnic genetic interests in an adaptive manner, even when the altruism entails self sacrifice. He argued mathematically that an act of altruism directed towards the tribe was adaptive if it protected the aggregate of distant relatives in the tribe. In sexually-reproducing species a population's genetic isolation leads to rising levels of interrelatedness of its members and thus makes greater altruism adaptive. Low levels of immigration between tribes allow growing relatedness of tribal members, which in turn permits selection of altruistic acts directed at tribal members, but only if these acts "actually aid in group fitness in some way...." Closely related individuals are less likely to free ride and more likely to invest in and thus strengthen the group as a whole, improving the fitness of its members.[3]

Regarding how this translates into politics and why homogeneous societies are more altruistic, Frank Salter writes:

Relatively homogeneous societies invest more in public goods, indicating a higher level of public altruism. For example, the degree of ethnic homogeneity correlates with the government's share of gross domestic product as well as the average wealth of citizens. Case studies of the United States, Africa and South-East Asia find that multi-ethnic societies are less charitable and less able to cooperate to develop public infrastructure. Moscow beggars receive more gifts from fellow ethnics than from other ethnics. A recent multi-city study of municipal spending on public goods in the United States found that ethnically or racially diverse cities spend a smaller portion of their budgets and less per capita on public services than do the more homogenous cities.

whooped sharipova like she stole something then crip-walked...,

trouble in the "happiest place on earth"?

NYTimes | Visitors to Disneyland pull off the freeway here and drive along dense rows of palm trees on pristine streets, past dozens of hotels beckoning them to stay. It is, the park’s marketing material says, “the Happiest Place on Earth.”

A few blocks away, though, a deep fury has boiled over. There have been days of protests, at times violent, with the police responding in combat gear and placing sharpshooters to guard their headquarters. The mayor says he has never seen such mistrust and anger in two decades in the city.

The latest frustrations began last month when the police killed an unarmed man and then another man a day later. An Anaheim neighborhood, just five miles north of Disneyland, quickly erupted. Protests continued. A community meeting is scheduled for next Wednesday. It is expected to draw about 1,000 residents.

There have always been divides in this city south of Los Angeles, where Disneyland and professional hockey and baseball teams bring in millions of visitors each year. The money generated by the resort area makes up roughly a third of the city’s annual income. But few visitors ever see the poor neighborhoods just beyond Disneyland Drive. As the protests exploded last week, the park’s nightly fireworks continued just a few miles away.

While most of the city’s population of nearly 350,000 lives on the west side of the bowtie-shaped city, in recent decades a wealthy enclave known as Anaheim Hills has flourished to the east. The hills are about 15 miles away from downtown, more like a separate town than a part of this mostly working-class and largely Latino city. There, household income is roughly twice as much as in the flatlands, as the rest of the city is known.

Like most of the City Council, Mayor Tom Tait lives in Anaheim Hills. Last week, he asked federal investigators to look into the Police Department’s practices. This week, trying to grapple with how the city could move on, he called a meeting with executives from Disney, as well as the Los Angeles Angels and the Anaheim Ducks, asking them to help come up with programs to help the most struggling neighborhoods in the city.

In those neighborhoods, the mostly Latino residents have grappled with unemployment, poverty, crime and gangs for years. Now, suddenly, those longstanding problems are being thrust into wider view.

“The problem is in that in some of these neighborhoods, there’s really a lack of hope from people, and they turn to gangs and crime,” said Mr. Tait, who has lived in the city since 1988. “We need people to go into the areas that lack hope and find ways to help.”

Spokesmen for Disney and the sports teams declined to comment about the meeting.

street stops in nyc fall as unease over the tactic increases...,

NYTimes | The number of times police officers stopped, questioned and frisked people on the streets of New York City has dropped significantly, by more than 34 percent, in recent months, and a key contributing factor appears to be that police commanders have grown wary of pushing for such stops at daily roll calls, police supervisors said.

At the same time, a general feeling of unease about the tactic by officers on the street — who have seen widespread criticism of so-called stop-and-frisks in the news media and by the courts — has also contributed to the drop, some say, with officers simply choosing not to question people they might have stopped before.

The decline suggests that officers are unsure whether the political support remains for street stops, long a focal point of Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly’s crime-fighting strategy. In recent months, three court rulings have raised questions about the New York Police Department’s use of the tactic, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly have put in place new measures aimed at ensuring lawful stops.

“Cops are nervous, and supervisors are nervous” about the stop-and-frisk practice, said a police supervisor, explaining the drop. The supervisor, like other officers interviewed, spoke on the condition that he not be named for fear of angering his bosses.

Another said that officers who were not pursuing as many stops were thinking to themselves, “I don’t want to be on the receiving end of any kind of allegation.”

The Police Department conducted 203,500 stops in January, February and March this year, according to the department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne — a record number. But in the second quarter — April, May and June — the police stopped 133,934 people, he said. During this period, the issue received considerable attention in the news media. The second-quarter stops were about 25 percent lower compared with the number of street stops in the second quarter of 2011, police officials said.

Generally, about half of the street stops resulted in the police’s frisking the person, police officials said.

spores...,

"I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections that the number in a human brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal, only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyperlight communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider's web but the collective hypermind and memory is a vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across the aeons of time and space drift many spore-forming life-forms in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment. Few such species are minded, only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hyper-communication mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members in the community of galactic intelligence. How the hypercommunication mode operates is a secret which will not be lightly given to man. But the means should be obvious: it is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my symbiots the vision screens to many worlds. You as an individual and man as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic relationship with my genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and earth into the galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations.

Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But beyond the cohesion of the members of a species into a single social organism there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary possibilities. Symbiosis is one of these. Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the species involved. Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my development. These relationships have been mutually useful; within my memory is the knowledge of hyperlight drive ships and how to build them. I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns younger and more stable than your own. To secure an eternal existence down the long river of cosmic time I again and again offer this agreement to higher beings and thereby have spread throughout the galaxy over the long millennia. A mycelial network has no organs to move the world, no hands; but higher animals with manipulative abilities can become partners with the star knowledge within me and if they act in good faith, return both themselves and their humble mushroom teacher to the million worlds all citizens of our starswarm are heir to." From Psilocybin - Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide

the wisdom of not being too rational...,

sciencemag | Many children (and adults) have heard Aesop's fable about the crow and the pitcher. A thirsty crow comes across a pitcher partly filled with water but can't reach the water with his beak. So he keeps dropping pebbles into the pitcher until the water level rises high enough. A new study finds that both young children and members of the crow family are good at solving this problem, but children appear to learn it in a very different ways from birds.

Recent studies, particularly ones conducted by Nicola Clayton's experimental psychology group at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom have shown that members of the crow family are no birdbrains when it comes to cognitive abilities. They can make and use tools, plan for the future, and possibly even figure out what other birds are thinking, although that last claim is currently being debated. A few years ago, two members of Clayton's group showed that rooks can learn to drop stones into a water-filled tube to get at a worm floating on the surface. And last year, a team led by Clayton's graduate student Lucy Cheke reported similar experiments with Eurasian jays: Using three different experimental setups, Cheke and her colleagues found that the jays could solve the puzzle as long as the basic mechanism responsible for raising the water level was clear to the birds.

To explore how learning in children might differ from rooks, jays, and other members of the highly intelligent crow family, Cheke teamed up with a fellow Clayton lab member, psychologist Elsa Loissel, to try the same three experiments on local schoolchildren aged 4 to 10 years. Eighty children were recruited for the experiments, which took place at their school with the permission of their parents.

about the special relationship...,

archeologynewsnetwork | The genetic changes underlying the evolution of new species are still poorly understood. For instance, we know little about critical changes that have happened during human evolution. Genetic studies in domestic animals can shed light on this process due to the rapid evolution they have undergone over the last 10,000 years. A new study published today describes how a complex genomic rearrangement causes a fascinating phenotype in chickens.

In the study published in PLoS Genetics researchers at Uppsala University, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, North Carolina State University and National Chung-Hsing University have investigated the genetic basis of fibromelanosis, a breed characteristic of the Chinese Silkie chicken. This trait involves a massive expansion of pigment cells that not only makes the skin and comb black but also causes black internal organs. Chickens similar in appearance to the Silkie were described by Marco Polo when he visited China in the 13th century and Silkie chickens have a long history in Chinese cuisine and traditional Chinese medicine.

archeologynewsnetwork | The domestication of chickens has given rise to rapid and extensive changes in genome function. A research team at Linköping University in Sweden has established that the changes are heritable, although they do not affect the DNA structure.

Humans kept Red Junglefowl as livestock about 8000 years ago. Evolutionarily speaking, the sudden emergence of an enormous variety of domestic fowl of different colours, shapes and sizes has occurred in record time. The traditional Darwinian explanation is that over thousands of years, people have bred properties that have arisen through random, spontaneous mutations in the chickens' genes.

Linköping zoologists, with Daniel Nätt and Per Jensen at the forefront, demonstrate in their study that so-called epigenetic factors play a greater role than previously thought. The study was published in the high-ranking journal BMC Genomics.

archeologynewsnetwork | Dr Alice Storey, an archaeologist at the University of New England, is tracing the global migration routes of domestic chickens back through thousands of years towards their origins in the jungles of South-east Asia.

In doing so, Dr Storey is pioneering the use of DNA from ancient chicken bones recovered from well-dated archaeological sites around the world. This is enabling her to add a fourth dimension – that of time – to an emerging “map” of chicken dispersal. One of the ultimate goals of such research is identifying the original Asian centres of jungle fowl domestication.

“All of our domestic chickens are descended from a few hens that I like to think of as the ‘great, great grandmothers’ of the chicken world,” Dr Storey said.

Biological, linguistic, historical and archaeological data have all contributed to an understanding that chickens accompanied human movements from their Asian homeland west through the Middle East to Europe and Africa, and east through the islands of South-east Asia and the Pacific.

Dr Storey’s analysis of ancient DNA is disentangling complications in this broad picture caused by interactions later than the original dispersal. “Only ancient DNA provides a unit of analysis with the chronological control necessary to reconstruct and disentangle the signals of initial dispersals from those of later interactions,” she said. Hers are the first published reports on the use of ancient DNA in this context.

A paper by Dr Storey and her colleagues, titled “Global dispersal of chickens in prehistory using ancient mitochondrial DNA signatures”, is published today in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE.

wikileaks and the war on drugs

the nation | In September 2006, just days before Felipe Calderón was declared president of Mexico in a disputed election fraught with fraud and corruption, the US Embassy sent a secret report to Washington titled “Strengthening Calderon’s weak hand.” Mexico’s new president would have “virtually no ‘honeymoon,’” the cable stated, so “we will begin vigorous transition planning across the board with the Calderón team.” Without aggressive involvement, US diplomats warned that “we risk stagnation on our highest-profile issues unless we can send a strong signal of support, prompt the Calderón team into a vigorous transition, and reinforce Calderón’s agenda and leadership.”

Now, as he leaves office after yet another disputed election, Calderón will go down in history as one of Mexico’s most discredited and unpopular presidents—in part because of the revelations in the WikiLeaks cables that exposed his “unprecedented cooperation” with Washington. Indeed, as Mexicans know from the documents published in my newspaper, La Jornada, Calderón’s failed agenda and leadership—particularly his top priority of winning the war against the drug cartels and protecting Mexican citizens from the gruesome, intolerable narco-generated violence that has taken the lives of thousands—is a failure he shares with the United States.

The cables struck Mexico like a windstorm, blowing back the curtains of diplomacy and exposing what had not been intended for public view. Through the 3,000 leaked records—some secret, a few ultrasecret, but the majority simply indiscreet, harsh and rude—readers of Mexican newspapers learned the hidden details of our political, military and economic relations with the United States. For the first time, Mexicans could read the US Embassy’s critical judgments of the proud Mexican generals who never open themselves up to public scrutiny, as well as Washington’s candid assessment of its erstwhile ally, President Calderón, who is depicted as weak and condescending, lacking in legitimacy from the start of his tenure.

Beyond the undiplomatic opinions, however, the WikiLeaks cables revealed the astonishing degree to which the United States exercised its power and influence at the highest levels of the Mexican government. In some cases it appears that an essential part of the decision-making process on matters of internal security is actually designed not in Mexico City but in Washington. For Mexicans, the cables have reinforced once again that famous adage “Pobre Mexico: tan lejos de Dios, y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos.” Poor Mexico: so far from God and so close to the United States.

the elite perversion of scholarship

truthdig | Fraternities, sororities and football, along with other outsized athletic programs, have decimated most major American universities. Scholarship, inquiry, self-criticism, moral autonomy and a search for artistic and esoteric forms of expression—in short, the world of ethics, creativity and ideas—are shouted down by the drunken chants of fans in huge stadiums, the pathetic demands of rich alumni for national championships, and the elitism, racism and rigid definition of gender roles of Greek organizations. These hypermasculine systems perpetuate a culture of conformity and intolerance. They have inverted the traditional values of scholarship to turn four years of college into a mindless quest for collective euphoria and athletic dominance.

There is probably no more inhospitable place to be an intellectual, or a person of color or a member of the LGBT community, than on the campuses of the Big Ten Conference colleges, although the poison of this bizarre American obsession has infected innumerable schools. These environments are distinctly corporate. To get ahead one must get along. The student is implicitly told his or her self-worth and fulfillment are found in crowds, in mass emotions, rather than individual transcendence. Those who do not pay deference to the celebration of force, wealth and power become freaks. It is a war on knowledge in the name of knowledge.

“Knowledge,” as C. Wright Mills wrote in “The Power Elite,” “is no longer widely felt as an ideal; it is seen as an instrument. In a society of power and wealth, knowledge is valued as an instrument of power and wealth, and also, of course, as an ornament in conversation.”

There are few university presidents or faculty members willing to fight back. Most presidents are overcompensated fundraisers licking the boots of every millionaire who arrives on campus. They are like court eunuchs. They cater to the demands of the hedge fund managers and financial speculators on their trustee boards, half of whom should be in jail, and most of whom revel in this collective self-worship. And they do not cross the football coach, who not only earns more than they do but has much more power on the campus.

DHS Presents: Surviving a Crazy Baldhead Eruption

charles murray deeply worried about his people and their ways...,

WSJ | Mitt Romney's résumé at Bain should be a slam dunk. He has been a successful capitalist, and capitalism is the best thing that has ever happened to the material condition of the human race. From the dawn of history until the 18th century, every society in the world was impoverished, with only the thinnest film of wealth on top. Then came capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Everywhere that capitalism subsequently took hold, national wealth began to increase and poverty began to fall. Everywhere that capitalism didn't take hold, people remained impoverished. Everywhere that capitalism has been rejected since then, poverty has increased.

Capitalism has lifted the world out of poverty because it gives people a chance to get rich by creating value and reaping the rewards. Who better to be president of the greatest of all capitalist nations than a man who got rich by being a brilliant capitalist?

Yet it hasn't worked out that way for Mr. Romney. "Capitalist" has become an accusation. The creative destruction that is at the heart of a growing economy is now seen as evil. Americans increasingly appear to accept the mind-set that kept the world in poverty for millennia: If you've gotten rich, it is because you made someone else poorer.

What happened to turn the mood of the country so far from our historic celebration of economic success?

Two important changes in objective conditions have contributed to this change in mood. One is the rise of collusive capitalism. Part of that phenomenon involves crony capitalism, whereby the people on top take care of each other at shareholder expense (search on "golden parachutes").

Another change in objective conditions has been the emergence of great fortunes made quickly in the financial markets. It has always been easy for Americans to applaud people who get rich by creating products and services that people want to buy. That is why Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were American heroes a century ago, and Steve Jobs was one when he died last year.

When great wealth is generated instead by making smart buy and sell decisions in the markets, it smacks of inside knowledge, arcane financial instruments, opportunities that aren't accessible to ordinary people, and hocus-pocus. The good that these rich people have done in the process of getting rich is obscure. The benefits of more efficient allocation of capital are huge, but they are really, really hard to explain simply and persuasively. It looks to a large proportion of the public as if we've got some fabulously wealthy people who haven't done anything to deserve their wealth.

The objective changes in capitalism as it is practiced plausibly account for much of the hostility toward capitalism.

cia manages the drug trade...,

aljazeera | The US Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces "don't fight drug traffickers", a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead "they try to manage the drug trade".

Allegations about official complicity in the drug business are nothing new when they come from activists, professors, campaigners or even former officials. However, an official spokesman for the authorities in one of Mexico's most violent states - one which directly borders Texas - going on the record with such accusations is unique.

"It's like pest control companies, they only control," Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, the Chihuahua spokesman, told Al Jazeera last month at his office in Juarez. "If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs."

Villanueva is not a high ranking official and his views do not represent Mexico's foreign policy establishment. Other more senior officials in Chihuahua State, including the mayor of Juarez, dismissed the claims as "baloney".

"I think the CIA and DEA [US Drug Enforcement Agency] are on the same side as us in fighting drug gangs," Hector Murguia, the mayor of Juarez, told Al Jazeera during an interview inside his SUV. "We have excellent collaboration with the US."

Under the Merida Initiative, the US Congress has approved more than $1.4bn in drug war aid for Mexico, providing attack helicopters, weapons and training for police and judges.

More than 55,000 people have died in drug related violence in Mexico since December 2006. Privately, residents and officials across Mexico's political spectrum often blame the lethal cocktail of US drug consumption and the flow of high-powered weapons smuggled south of the border for causing much of the carnage. Fist tap Arnach.

forget LIBORgate - oil market manipulation is much worse...,

zerohedge | Since the Global Community all the sudden seems to be preoccupied with Market manipulation even though the authorities knew it was a problem for over 5 years with Libor Rate Fixing. It is high time authorities look at the Crude Oil market which has been manipulated for the last decade and all the sophisticated participants know it is rigged or artificially higher than the fundamentals of the economy dictate. Consumers are paying an easy $35 dollars per barrel over what they would otherwise dole out for a barrel of oil if fund managers didn`t use the benchmark futures contracts as their own personal ATMs.

Just a month ago Crude Oil WTI was $78 a barrel and today it is $93. Do you think the fundamentals changed one bit to merit this price swing? Nope! Supply levels are all at record highs around the world. Is it Iran? Please!! It is all about the money flows, nobody takes delivery anymore. Assets have become one big correlated risk trade. Risk On, Risk Off. If the Dow is up a hundred, you can bet crude is up at least a dollar! It has nothing to do with fundamentals, inventory levels, supply disruptions, etc. It is all about fund flows.

So how this affects the average Joe is that if Wall Street is having a good day, i.e., fund flows are going in, then Average Joe is having a bad day and paying more for Gas. Yes, it is that simple. A good day for Wall Street is a bad day for consumers at the pump these days as Capital flows into one big Asset Trade: Risk On!

It should be separate in that equities respond to stock valuations, and energy responds to the market conditions of supply and demand. But that isn`t the case in the investing world today, it is all about Capital Flows in and out of Assets. The economy could be doing really poorly, Oil inventories can be extremely high, the economic data very bleak but Oil will go up and consumers will pay more at the pump just because some Fund Manager pours capital into a futures contract.The Fund Managers goals are in direct opposition to the consumers who actually uses the product. Funds flows and not supply and demand ultimately carry the day in the energy markets, and that needs to change!

The key is equities, crude oil (both Brent and WTI) are essentially equities for Fund Managers to trade in and out of and they make a fortune in these instruments. When I refer to Fund Managers this includes Hedge Funds, Oil Majors, Pension Funds, Investment Banks etc. This is part of the reason that the price of oil can be so varied in value within a 3 month span. WTI can literally be $110 one month and $80 the next because of pure funds going in or coming out of the futures contracts.

The volatility really is where they make their money, they have deep pockets and they make a fortune moving crude oil around like a puppet on a string. If you think in terms of each dollar price move in the commodity being equal to $1,000 and the size that these players employ on a monthly and quarterly basis you start to see the value of buying thousands and thousands of futures contracts and capitalizing on these huge moves in the commodity.

does the insula help elite athletes better anticipate their body's upcoming feelings, improving their physical reactions?

scientificamerican | All elite athletes train hard, possess great skills and stay mentally sharp during competition. But what separates a gold medalist from an equally dedicated athlete who comes in 10th place? A small structure deep in the brain may give winners an extra edge.

Recent studies indicate that the brain's insular cortex may help a sprinter drive his body forward just a little more efficiently than his competitors. This region may prepare a boxer to better fend off a punch his opponent is beginning to throw as well as assist a diver as she calculates her spinning body's position so she hits the water with barely a splash. The insula, as it is commonly called, may help a marksman retain a sharp focus on the bull's-eye as his finger pulls back on the trigger and help a basketball player at the free-throw line block out the distracting screams and arm-waving of fans seated behind the backboard.

The insula does all this by anticipating an athlete's future feelings, according to a new theory. Researchers at the OptiBrain Center, a consortium based at the University of California, San Diego, and the Naval Health Research Center, suggest that an athlete possesses a hyper-attuned insula that can generate strikingly accurate predictions of how the body will feel in the next moment. That model of the body's future condition instructs other brain areas to initiate actions that are more tailored to coming demands than those of also-rans and couch potatoes.

This heightened awareness could allow Olympians to activate their muscles more resourcefully to swim faster, run farther and leap higher than mere mortals. In experiments published in 2012, brain scans of elite athletes appeared to differ most dramatically from ordinary subjects in the functioning of their insulas. Emerging evidence now also suggests that this brain area can be trained using a meditation technique called mindfulness—good news for Olympians and weekend warriors alike.

genomic study of african hunter-gatherers elucidates human variation and ancient interbreeding

sciencedaily | Human diversity in Africa is greater than any place else on Earth. Differing food sources, geographies, diseases and climates offered many targets for natural selection to exert powerful forces on Africans to change and adapt to their local environments. The individuals who adapted best were the most likely to reproduce and pass on their genomes to the generations who followed.

That history of inheritance is written in the DNA of modern Africans, but it takes some investigative work to interpret. In a report to be featured on the cover of the Aug. 3 issue of the journal Cell, University of Pennsylvania geneticists and their colleagues analyze the fully sequenced genomes of 15 Africans belonging to three different hunter-gatherer groups and decipher some of what these genetic codes have to say about human diversity and evolution.

The study, led by Sarah Tishkoff, a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with appointments in the School of Arts and Sciences' biology department and the Perelman School of Medicine's genetics department, tells several stories.

It identifies several million previously unknown genetic mutations in humans. It finds evidence that the direct ancestors of modern humans may have interbred with members of an unknown ancestral group of hominins. It suggests that different groups evolved distinctly in order to reap nutrition from local foods and defend against infectious disease. And it identifies new candidate genes that likely play a major role in making Pygmies short in stature.

"Our analysis sheds light on human evolution, because the individuals we sampled are descended from groups that may have been ancestral to all other modern humans," Tishkoff said. "A message we're seeing is that even though all the individuals we sampled are hunter-gatherers, natural selection has acted differently in these different groups."

Joining Tishkoff in the work from Penn was first author Joseph Lachance as well as Clara Elbers, Bart Ferwerda and Timothy Rebbeck. Their collaborators include Benjamin Vernot, Wenqing Fu and Joshua Akey of the University of Washington; Alain Froment of France's Musée de L'Homme; Jean-Marie Bodo of Cameroon's Ministère de la Recherche Scientifique et de l'Innovation; Godfrey Lema and Thomas B. Nyambo of Tanzania's Muhimbili University College of Health Sciences; and Kun Zhang of the University of California at San Diego.

The researchers sequenced the genomes of five men from each of three hunter-gatherer groups: the Hadza and the Sandawe of Tanzania and the Western Pygmies of Cameroon. The three differ greatly from one another in appearance, in language, in the environments they occupy and in cultural practices, though the Hadza and the Sandawe live just 200 kilometers apart.

"We purposefully picked three of the most diverse hunter-gatherer groups," Tishkoff said, "because they have not been very well represented in other genome sequencing projects, which tend to focus on majority populations in Africa. This is a unique and important dataset."

since the last famine, have as many girls been butchered in ethiopia as jewish women who died in the holocaust?

independent | Last Thursday week, with famine approaching yet again, I wondered about the wisdom of forking out yet more aid to Ethiopia. Since the great famine of the mid-1980s, Ethiopia's population has soared from 33.5 million to 78 million.

Now, I do not write civil service reports for the United Nations: I write a newspaper column, and I was deliberately strong in my use of language -- as indeed I had been when writing reports from Ethiopia at the height of that terrible Famine.

I was sure that my column would arouse some hostility: my concerns were intensified when I saw the headline: "Africa has given the world nothing but AIDS." Which was not quite what I said -- the missing "almost" goes a long way; and anyway, my article was about aid, not AIDS.

Since dear old Ireland can often enough resemble Lynch Mob Central on PC issues, I braced myself for the worst: and sure enough, in poured the emails. Three hundred on the first day, soon reaching over 800: but, amazingly, 90pc+ were in my support, and mostly from baffled, decent and worried people. The minority who attacked me were risibly predictable, expressing themselves with a vindictive and uninquiring moral superiority. (Why do so many of those who purport to love mankind actually hate people so?)

We did more in Ethiopia a quarter of a century ago than just rescue children from terrible death through starvation: we also saved an evil, misogynistic and dysfunctional social system. Presuming that half the existing population (say, 17 million) of the mid 1980s is now dead through non-famine causes, the total added population from that time is some 60 million, around half of them female.

That is, Ethiopia has effectively gained the entire population of the United Kingdom since the famine. But at least 80pc of Ethiopian girls are circumcised, meaning that no less than 24 million girls suffered this fate, usually without anaesthetics or antiseptic. The UN estimates that 12pc of girls die through septicaemia, spinal convulsions, trauma and blood-loss after circumcision which probably means that around three million little Ethiopian girls have been butchered since the famine -- roughly the same as the number of Jewish women who died in the Holocaust.

2 UC Davis neurosurgeons accused of experimental surgery are banned from human research

sacbee | A prominent UC Davis neurosurgeon was banned from performing medical research on humans after he and an underling were accused of experimenting on dying brain cancer patients without university permission, The Bee has learned.

Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar, who earns more than $800,000 a year as chairman of the department of neurological surgery, was ordered last fall to "immediately cease and desist" from any research involving human subjects, according to documents obtained by The Bee.

Also banned was the colleague, Dr. Rudolph J. Schrot, an assistant professor and neurosurgeon who has worked under Muizelaar the past 13 years.

The university has admitted to the federal government that the surgeons' actions amounted to "serious and continuing noncompliance" with federal regulations.

Documents show the surgeons got the consent of three terminally ill patients with malignant brain tumors to introduce bacteria into their open head wounds, under the theory that postoperative infections might prolong their lives. Two of the patients developed sepsis and died, the university later determined.

The actions – described by two prominent bioethicists as "astonishing," and a "major penalty" for the school – threaten both the doctors' professional careers and the university's reputation and federal-funding status.

"This is really distressing" said Patricia Backlar, an Oregon bioethicist who served on former President Bill Clinton's national bioethics advisory commission.

"UC Davis is a very respectable school, but even the best places have trouble," Backlar said. " … These men have put that school in jeopardy."

Research on both humans and animals is tightly controlled in the United States and, according to federal regulations and university policy, must undergo a rigorous approval process to ensure that subjects are protected.

did a female burro commit suicide?

psychologytoday | Every now and again someone asks me if nonhuman animals (animals) commit suicide. This past weekend I gave two lectures as part of the Collegiate Peaks Forum Series in Buena Vista, Colorado and after I talked about grief and mourning in a wide variety of species (see also) someone in the audience asked me this question. My answer was that there are some good observations of animals seemingly taking their own lives in situations when one might expect a human to take his or her own life. For example, it's been suggested that whales intentionally beach themselves to end their lives, highly stressed elephants step on their trunks or jump over a cliff to end prolonged pain (see also), and cats stressed out by earthquakes kill themselves.

Opinions vary from "yes they do" to "perhaps they do" to "no they don't" (see also). Some say animals don't have the same concept of death that we have and don't know that their lives will end when they do something to stop breathing.

Burro suicide?

After one of my talks in Buena Vista one of the women in the audience, Cathy Manning, told me a very simple but compelling story about a burro who seemed to kill herself. Cathy knew a female burro who gave birth to a baby with a harelip. The infant couldn't be revived and Cathy watched the mother walk into a lake and drown. It's known that various equines including horses and donkeys grieve the loss of others (see and and) so I didn't find this story to be inconsistent with what is known about these highly emotional beings.

I think it's too early to make any definite statements about whether animals commit suicide but this does not mean they don't grieve and mourn the loss of family and friends. What they're thinking when they're deeply sadded when another animal dies isn't clear but it's obvious that a wide variety of animals suffer the loss of family and friends. Cathy's story made me rethink the question if animals commit suicide and I hope this brief story opens the door for some good discussion about thie intriguing possibility. As some of my colleagues and I have stressed, we must pay attention to stories and hope they will stimulate more research in a given area.

supernatural: meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind

grahamhancock | My intention at the outset was to write a book exploring the mystery of human origins. There are many gaps in the fossil record between about 7 million years ago (the date of our supposed last common ancestor with chimpanzees) and the emergence of the first civilisations recognised by historians around 5000 years ago. My thought was that if I probed these gaps diligently enough something might emerge – some insight, some scrap of previously neglected information – that might shed light on the great puzzles of the human predicament. Why, alone amongst animal species, have we developed culture and religion, beliefs in life after death, beliefs in non-physical beings such as spirits, demons and angels, elaborate mythologies, the ability to create and to appreciate art, the ability to use and manipulate symbols, consciousness of ourselves and of our place in the scheme of things? Did these abstract, even “spiritual”, qualities develop slowly, over millions of years, or were they switched on suddenly, like lights in a darkened room?

To cut a long story short, what I discovered is that during most of the first 7 million years of human evolution there is no evidence at all for the existence of symbolic abilities amongst our ancestors. No matter how intensively we probe what is known about the fossil record, or speculate about what is not yet known about it, all that we see evidence for throughout this period is a dull and stultifying copying and recopying of essentially the same patterns of behaviour and essentially the same “kits” of crude stone tools, without change or innovation, for periods of hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. When a change is introduced (in tool shape for example) it then sets a new standard to be copied and recopied without innovation for a further immense period until the next change is finally adopted. In the process, glacially slow, we also see the gradual development of human anatomy in the direction of the modern form: the brain-pan enlarges, brow ridges reduce in size, overall anatomy becomes more gracile – and so on and so forth.

By 196,000 years ago, and on some accounts considerably earlier, humans had achieved “full anatomical modernity”. This means that they were in every way physically indistinguishable from the people of today and, crucially, that they possessed the same large, complex brains as we do. The most striking mystery, however, is that their behaviour continued to lag behind their acquisition of modern neurology and appearance. They showed no sign of possessing a culture, or supernatural beliefs, or self-consciousness, or any interest in symbols. Indeed there was nothing about them that we could instantly identify with “us”. Dr Frank Brown, whose discovery of 196,000-year-old anatomically-modern human skeletons in Ethiopia was published in Nature on 17 February 2005, points out that they are 35,000 years older than the previous “oldest” modern human remains known to archaeologists:

“This is significant because the cultural aspects of humanity in most cases appear much later in the record, which would mean 150,000 years of Homo sapiens without cultural stuff…”

Brown’s colleague, John Fleagle of Stony Brook University in New York State, also comments on the same problem:

“There is a huge debate regarding the first appearance of modern aspects of behaviour… As modern human anatomy is documented at earlier and earlier sites, it becomes evident that there was a great time gap between the appearance of the modern skeleton and ‘modern behaviour’.”

For Ian Tattershall of the American Museum of Natural History the problem posed by this gap – and what happened to our ancestors during it – is “the question of questions in palaeoanthropology”. His colleague Professor David Lewis-Williams of the Rock Art Research Institute at South Africa’s Witwatersrand University describes the same problem as “the greatest riddle of archaeology – how we became human and in the process began to make art and to practice what we call religion.”

I quickly realized that this was the mystery, and the period, I wanted to investigate. Not that endless, unimaginative cultural desert from 7 million years ago down to just 40,000 years ago when our ancestors hobbled slowly through their long and boring apprenticeship, but the period of brilliant and burning symbolic light that followed soon afterwards when the first of the great cave art of southwest Europe appeared – already perfect and fully formed – between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago.

A most remarkable theory exists to explain the special characteristics of these amazing and haunting early works of art, and to explain why identical characteristics are also found in prehistoric art from many other parts of the world and in art produced by the shamans of surviving tribal cultures today. The theory was originally elaborated by Professor David Lewis-Williams, and is now supported by a majority of archaeologists and anthropologists. In brief, it proposes that the reason for the similarities linking all these different systems of art, produced by different, unrelated cultures at different and widely-separated periods of history, is that in every case the shaman-artists responsible for them had previously experienced altered states of consciousness in which they had seen vivid hallucinations, and in every case their endeavour in making the art was to memorialise on the walls of rock shelters and caves the ephemeral images that they had seen in their visions. According to this theory the different bodies of art have so many similarities because we all share the same neurology, and thus share many of the same experiences and visions in altered states of consciousness.