nothing short of an urban rebellion against a conspicuously corrupt just-us system?

csm |  Police are concerned about making a fellow officer and his family vulnerable to death threats made on social media and may be concerned that details of the autopsy could spark more civil unrest. But residents have credible claims in demanding to know information that would be available if the shooter weren’t a lawman.

The looting and mayhem in Ferguson, where a nearly all-white police force patrols the largely black St. Louis suburb, suggests deep frustration. Eyewitnesses have said that the officer pursued an injured Brown and shot him after he put his hands up in surrender. Police have done little to counter that narrative except to suggest there was a struggle for the officer's gun and a shot fired inside the cruiser. Amid that vacuum, questions about police transparency have only intensified.

Ferguson police are “are walking a tightrope of how much they should be releasing versus how much information they are releasing,” says Rob Kane, a policing expert at Drexel University in Philadelphia and coauthor of “Jammed Up: Bad Cops, Police Misconduct, and the New York City Police Department.”

“Police departments operate in an environment where they are often tried in the media, and where they have a very real concern about civil litigation, so that’s where it gets tricky,” Professor Kane adds. At the same time, “the police are teetering on the total loss of legitimacy, and it has to do with not releasing information that the public wants.”

As a result, he says, Ferguson is seeing “nothing short of an urban rebellion against the justice system.”

In a statement Tuesday, United States Attorney General Eric Holder warned Ferguson police that the department “should be prepared to complete a thorough and fair investigation in their own right…. Aggressively pursuing investigations such as this is critical for preserving trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.”

it takes perfect timing to see the usually invisible face of systemic corruption

pitch |  Remarks made by Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Bryan Round during a sentencing hearing July 30 have raised the eyebrows of some legal-ethics experts.

Round was sentencing Nicholas Rose on convictions of careless and imprudent driving and disturbing the peace for an incident last year, in which Rose and several dozen stunt-bike riders were creating a traffic hazard on U.S. Highway 40, near Interstate 70.

According to transcripts of the hearing obtained by The Pitch, Round became angry after discovering that Rose was considering filing a civil lawsuit against the Kansas City Police Department. Rose believed that officer Donald Hubbard used excessive force during his arrest.

Round called Rose “a vulture” and said the defendant “played me for a fool,” according to the transcript. Round sentenced him to a two-week jail sentence and two years of probation.

“I can’t tell you how upset that information made me,” said Round, who was the attorney for the Kansas City Police Board for about eight years before becoming a judge. “I am going to impose a two week period of shock incarceration because I don’t think you get it. I just don’t think you get it.”

Several legal experts and local lawyers who reviewed the transcripts say the fact that a defendant is considering a civil lawsuit should never be a factor in a criminal proceeding.

“What the judge did was outrageous,” says Shaun Martin, a law professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. “You can’t sentence someone to prison just because they exercise their right to file a lawsuit. Filing a lawsuit … is expressly protected by the First Amendment.”

Round would not comment for this story. He didn’t say during the hearing how he learned of the potential civil lawsuit.

Rose’s encounter with Hubbard came six months before the officer shot and killed Kansas City firefighter Anthony Bruno during an altercation. The Pitch raised questions about that shooting in last week’s issue (“It Didn’t Need to End This Way,” August 7) and with the release of enhanced video of the fight.

Last week, in a separate case, Bruno’s family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the Marriott Hotel and Hubbard, who was working off-duty at the hotel when he shot Bruno.

Round has been assigned to that case.

timing is everything...,

pitch |  What happened next has been widely reported and, thanks to a bystander's cellphone footage, seen. Two bullets from off-duty police officer Donald Hubbard's .40-caliber Glock ended Anthony Bruno's life a little after 2 a.m. December 1.

Hubbard had been working an overnight security shift at the Marriott Downtown Hotel, at 12th Street and Wyandotte (which shares an owner with the Muehlebach, on the opposite corner), when he was alerted to the taxi scuffle outside. He was on the hotel's 18th floor with another hotel security guard when the radio went off, he later told Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department investigators. He said someone asked him to check on the disturbance.

Following the department's inquiry, a grand jury in February cleared Hubbard of criminal wrongdoing. But scrutiny of his actions leading up to the shooting shows that the policeman broke with procedure in several key ways — ways that might have prevented the firefighter's death.

Experts who have testified in high-profile police-shooting cases nationwide have told The Pitch that videos and documents obtained by this newspaper show that Hubbard should not have found himself one-on-one with Bruno on the street — and that the confrontation did not require lethal force.

The video footage also shows that Bruno, who had been drinking and had struck both Hubbard and the driver in separate encounters, had several opportunities to avoid being shot.

By the time Hubbard arrived outside at the scene of the fare disagreement, Bruno had walked away and turned down that alley. The cab driver told Hubbard that Bruno had punched him. Witnesses indicated to the officer which direction Bruno had gone. Hubbard, against protocol, decided to pursue Bruno.

According to newly enhanced video footage not yet seen by the public, Hubbard caught up with Bruno a block east of the Muehlebach. When Bruno tried to run away, Hubbard grabbed him and forced him down to the ground. Three minutes later, Bruno was dead on the sidewalk, shot twice in the chest.

deep cooperation: the mammalian equivalent of honeybees?

nytimes |  Researchers have known for some time that wild dogs are exceptionally social and civic-minded. Among most group-living carnivores, big adults feed first, gulping down the choicest organs and leaving junior diners to scrounge through gristly leftovers. Among wild dogs, said Patrick R. Thomas, the curator of mammals at the Bronx Zoo, “it’s the exact opposite.”

“The adults let the puppies feed first,” he said. “It’s very peaceful to watch.” 

For puppies too young to leave the den, or for injured pack members unable to hunt, hale-bodied adults go further, provisioning the needy by regurgitating a portion of a recent meal.

Researchers have also known that wild dogs are so-called cooperative breeders. In any given pack of closely related animals, a single male and female will do the bulk of the reproducing, while the other half-dozen or so adults serve as guardians, babysitters, even wet nurses for the alpha pair’s pups. Family is family, after all. 

Yet researchers continue to be impressed by the depths of the dogs’ self-sacrificing behavior. In one recent study, Dr. Creel and his colleagues determined that the bigger a pack grew, the more efficiently it hunted and the greater the number of offspring it raised. However, the researchers were startled to see that not everyone benefited from the swelling ranks. 

“Big packs with lots of offspring turn out to have poor adult survival,” Dr. Creel said. The cost of regurgitating food for a surging number of pups, it seemed, exceeded the advantages of bringing down more prey. As a result, nonbreeding adults in big packs would gradually become malnourished and end up dying at a somewhat younger age than their peers in smaller clans. 

The dogs are “true altruists,” essentially willing to shorten their lives for the sake of the hive, Dr. Creel said, adding, “They’re even further along the line of evolving into the mammalian equivalent of honeybees than we thought.”

cooperative social networking key to helping microbes spread...,

sciencedaily |  Fresh discoveries about how bacteria co-operate with each other when causing infection could help scientists identify animal diseases that might transmit to people.

Bugs that can co-operate best with each other are most likely to be able to jump to new species, including humans, a new study shows.

Bacteria interact by releasing molecules to help them adapt to their environment -- for example, when killing competing infections in their victim. They co-ordinate these actions by releasing tiny amounts of chemicals as signals.

Bacteria that can co-operate to create an environment in which they can thrive are potentially able to infect lots of different species, including humans. Discovering why some diseases are better equipped to infect more species than others -- and therefore could affect humans -- could be valuable in predicting and managing health threats.

Most new human infections arise from diseases that transmit from animals to humans. Many of these cause serious infections and are difficult to control, such as anthrax and the superbug MRSA.

Research led by the University of Edinburgh used a combination of mathematical models and scientific analysis of genetic code in almost 200 types of bacteria. They found that those bugs that carry lots of genes that help them to co-operate are best equipped to adapt to various environments.

Dr Luke McNally of the University of Edinburgh' School of Biological Sciences, who led the study, said: "Humans have been able to colonise almost all of their planet by collectively modifying the environment to suit themselves. Our study shows bugs try to do the same -- co-operation is important for the spread of bacteria to new species."

behavior and the biome: love and early childhood diarrhea

scientificamerican |  It’s not everyday that love and diarrhea come together in theoretical matrimony. Recently, however, a study by an interdisciplinary team of scientists managed to form this near-perfect union. Oh relax. I’m not about to share the sordid details of a revolting new sexual fetish. (That’s for another post.) The research I’m about to tell you about is actually bigger than that. In fact, it’s a pity that the report appeared without much fanfare last year in Evolution and Human Behavior, because when looked at in the right light, there’s a certain quiet beauty to these data in the way that they subtly illuminate gene-environment interactions.

Before we can hope to understand the curious connection between the hellish expunging of our intestinal contents and the type of person that we’re in turn most likely to marry—or simply to screw—it’s necessary to first step back to look at the wider framework in which the study’s main hypothesis was based. Unless you reject evolutionary psychology out of ignorance or spite (or some combination thereof), it’s noncontroversial to say that, all else equal, it’s biologically more adaptive to sexually reproduce with a healthy than with an unhealthy partner. Needless to say, “biologically adaptive” is rarely isomorphic with “nice and kind”, but kind or not, most of us don’t instinctively gravitate to strangers with a death rattle for a cough or get turned on by the sight of someone with random body parts sloughing off. Beyond such truisms, having children with a chronically ill person makes it not only difficult or impossible for that poor individual to “invest” in your mutual offspring, leaving you to shoulder the “costs” of rearing them on your own, the health of your kids (who, let’s not mince words, are the cooing keepers of your eternal genetic promise) may also be compromised if your partner’s disease is heritable.

While it’s all well and good to aim for a healthy baby-mama or baby-daddy, one hitch is that, in the real world, we can’t always count on a conspicuous cue like emaciation or puddles of pus to tip us off about a prospect’s dubious hardiness. Even if that guy giving you eyes looks fit enough now, who’s to say he won’t be the first to drop when the next scourge rolls in? Our ancestors would have faced similar challenges discerning the relative health of viable members of the opposite sex.

The solution to this adaptive problem was mindlessly ingenious. Among other fixes, our brains became aesthetically predisposed to faces that were the best genetic gambles in a world brimming with deleterious pathogens. When looking at aggregate data, these appealing faces tend to belong to folks who are more disease-resistant across the lifespan. Lucky bastards. Now, how to spot these anti-pathogenic lovers. That’s to say, what’s a “pretty face” exactly, and why do we often disagree on others’ attractiveness? Yes, there’s that old facial symmetry giveaway, but debate rages on about the relationship between this variable trait and perceptions of beauty. If you really want to stack the fitness odds in your offspring’s favour, there seems to be a more reliable marker of a person’s health than mere symmetry: having an extremely sex-typical mug. An already impressive, yet still-mounting, body of evidence reveals that the degree of “masculinity” in a man’s face correlates positively with his lifelong health, while the degree of “femininity” in a woman’s face does the same for hers.

“That’s nice,” you’re probably saying to yourself. “But where does diarrhea come into it?” I thought you’d never ask. The authors of this new study, led by the psychologist Mícheál de Barra of Stockholm University, suspected that our behavioral immune system, which is a hypothetical collection of evolved cognitive biases that spur us on to make adaptive decisions in the domain of disease avoidance, may get a sort of laxative fine-tuning during our early child development.

microbial colonization...,

thescientist |  Infants start out mostly microbe-free but quickly acquire gut bacteria, which take root in three successive groups. First, Bacilli dominate. Then Gammaproteobacteria surge, followed by Clostridia. But the pace at which these bacterial groups colonize the gastrointestinal tract depends on the time since the babies were conceived, not since when they were born. And time since conception appears to have more of an influence on the infant gut microbiome than other factors, such as exposure to antibiotics, whether babies were born vaginally or by cesarean section, and if they were breastfed. These are a few of the findings from a survey of 922 fecal samples collected from 58 premature babies, published today (August 11) in PNAS.

“It is an interesting study that provides useful data regarding temporal changes in microbial composition in the infant gut that can be mined further,” Shyamal Peddada, a biostatistician at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who was not involved in the study, wrote in an e-mail to The Scientist.

“I think the paper does a nice job of showing that premature babies develop differently from full-term babies . . . it is not just a function of colonization after birth,” Rob Knight from the University of Colorado, Boulder, told The Scientist in an e-mail. “Differences in gut physiology or in the infant immune system could explain this pattern.”

Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis embarked on this survey in an effort to better understand the role of the microbiota in the development of gut disorders common in premature infants, such as necrotizing enterocolitis. Without first defining the premature infant gut in the absence of gastrointestinal issues, the researchers struggled to identify potentially pathogenic bacterial patterns.

The researchers collected stool samples each time the babies defecated until they were thirty days old, and sampled every third elimination after that. They then sequenced 16S ribosomal RNA genes to identify the bacterial composition of each sample.

voices from within: gut microbes and the central nervous system

springer |  Recent advances in research have greatly increased our understanding of the importance of the gut microbiota. Bacterial colonization of the intestine is critical to the normal development of many aspects of physiology such as the immune and endocrine systems. It is emerging that the influence of the gut microbiota also extends to modulation of host neural development. Furthermore, the overall balance in composition of the microbiota, together with the influence of pivotal species that induce specific responses, can modulate adult neural function, peripherally and centrally. Effects of commensal gut bacteria in adult animals include protection from the central effects of infection and inflammation as well as modulation of normal behavioral responses. There is now robust evidence that gut bacteria influence the enteric nervous system, an effect that may contribute to afferent signaling to the brain. The vagus nerve has also emerged as an important means of communicating signals from gut bacteria to the CNS. Further understanding of the mechanisms underlying microbiome–gut–brain communication will provide us with new insight into the symbiotic relationship between gut microbiota and their mammalian hosts and help us identify the potential for microbial-based therapeutic strategies to aid in the treatment of mood disorders.

missing microbes: conspicuously obvious once the man points it out...,

martinblaser |   From Missing Microbes by Martin J. Blaser, MD. Blaser, former chair of medicine at NYU and president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, is one of a growing number of medical practitioners and researchers who believe that we are experiencing a growing array of "modern plagues," and that the cause of these plagues is rooted in our "disappearing microbiota":

"Within the past few decades, amid all of [our] medical advances, something has gone terribly wrong. In many different ways we appear to be getting sicker. You can see the headlines every day. We are suffering from a mysterious array of what I call 'modern plagues': obesity, childhood diabetes, asthma, hay fever, food allergies, esophageal reflux and cancer, celiac disease, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, autism, eczema. In all likelihood you or someone in your family or someone you know is afflicted. Unlike most lethal plagues of the past that struck relatively fast and hard, these are chronic conditions that diminish and degrade their victims' quality of life for decades. ...

"The autoimmune form of diabetes that begins in childhood and requires insulin injections (juvenile or Type I diabetes) has been doubling in incidence about every twenty years across the industrialized world. In Finland, where record keeping is meticulous, the incidence has risen 550 percent since 1950. ... But the disease itself has not changed; something in us has changed. Type I diabetes is also striking younger children. The average age of diagnosis used to be about nine. Now it is around six, and some children are becoming diabetic when they are three.

"The recent rise in asthma, a chronic inflammation of the airways, is similarly alarming. One in twelve people (about 25 million or 8 percent of the U.S. population) had asthma in 2009, compared with one in fourteen a decade earlier. Ten percent of American children suffer wheezing, breathlessness, chest tightness, and coughing; black children have it worst: one in six has the disease. Their rate increased by 50 percent from 2001 through 2009. But the rise in asthma has not spared any ethnicity: the rates were initially different in various groups, and all have been rising. ... No economic or social class has been spared.

"Food allergies are everywhere. A generation ago, peanut allergies were extremely rare. ... Ten percent of children suffer from hay fever. Eczema, a chronic skin inflammation, affects more than 15 percent of children and 2 percent of adults in the United States. In industrialized nations, the number of kids with eczema has tripled in the past thirty years. ...

"Why are all of these maladies rapidly rising at the same time across the developed world and spilling over into the developing world as it becomes more Westernized? Can it be a mere coincidenc

e? If there are ten of these modern plagues, are there ten separate causes? That seems unlikely.

"Or could there be one underlying cause fueling all these parallel increases? A single cause is easier to grasp; it is simpler, more parsimonious. But what cause could be grand enough to encompass asthma, obesity, esophageal reflux, juvenile diabetes, and allergies to specific foods, among all of the others? Eating too many calories could explain obesity but not asthma; many of the children who suffer from asthma are slim. Air pollution could explain asthma but not food allergies. ...

"The most popular explanation for the rise in childhood illness is the so-called hygiene hypothesis. The idea is that modern plagues are happening because we have made our world too clean. The result is that our children's immune systems have become quiescent and are therefore prone to false alarms and friendly fire. ...

"We need to look closely at the microorganisms that make a living in and on our bodies, massive assemblages of competing and cooperating microbes known collectively as the microbiome. ... Each of us hosts a ... diverse ecology of microbes that has coevolved with our species over millennia. They thrive in the mouth, gut, nasal passages, ear canal, and on the skin. In women, they coat the vagina. The microbes that constitute your microbiome are generally acquired early in life; surprisingly, by the age of three, the populations within children resemble those of adults. Together, they play a critical role in your immunity as well as your ability to combat disease. In short, it is your microbiome that keeps you healthy. And parts of it are disappearing.

"The reasons for this disaster are all around you, including overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals, Cesarean sections, and the widespread use of sanitizers and antiseptics, to name just a few. ...

"The loss of diversity within our microbiome is far more pernicious [than the overuse of antibiotics and resulting antibiotic resistance]. Its loss changes development itself, affecting our metabolism, immunity, and cognition.

"I have called this process the 'disappearing microbiota.' It's a funny term that does not immediately roll off your tongue, but I believe it is correct. For a number of reasons, we are losing our ancient microbes. This quandary is the central theme of this book. The loss of microbial diversity on and within our bodies is exacting a terrible price. I predict it will be worse in the future. Just as the internal combustion engine, the splitting of the atom, and pesticides all have had unanticipated effects, so too does the abuse of antibiotics and other medical or quasi-medical practices (e.g., sanitizer use).

"An even worse scenario is headed our way if we don't change our behavior. It is one so bleak, like a blizzard roaring over a frozen landscape, that I call it 'antibiotic winter.'"

the quantified microbiome visualization looks strangely like an appflow visualization...,

nationalgeographic |  Some of my friends are sporting wristbands these days that keep track of their bodies. Little computers nestled in these device inside record the steps they take each day, the beats of their heart, the length of their slumbers. At the end of each day, they can sit down at a computer and look at their data arrayed across a screen like a seismogram of flesh.

I got one of these devices as a gift recently. But as much as I enjoy wasting time with technology, I just didn’t care enough to put it on my wrist. I already know that I should run more, walk more, stand more, and avoid sitting in front of monitors more. I don’t need granular data to remind me of that.

But as I read the journal Genome Biology today, I decided that someday I might surrender to the Quantified Self movement. I’ll just have to wait till I can track my trillions of microbes from one day to the next.

Thanks to the falling cost of sequencing DNA, it’s now possible for us to survey the thousands of species that live in our bodies. A couple years ago, for example, I found out that I have 58 species in my bellybutton. But all I knew was that there were 58 species in my bellybutton at one point in time–that moment I swiped a Q-tip around my navel. But everything we know about bacteria tells us that our inner ecosystems can change swiftly. My bellybutton may be remarkably different today than it was when I put a Q-tip in it.

Eric Alm, a biologist at MIT, and a graduate student of his named Lawrence David decided to plumb this change by tracking a year in the life of their microbiomes. Each day, they saved some of their stool, and later, they extracted DNA from it to figure out which species of bacteria were living in their guts. David also spat some of his saliva into a tube each day so that he could compare how his microbiome changed in his gut compared to his mouth.

Even though their study only involved two people, it was still very much a Big Data project. And one of the major challenges of any Big Data project is to visualize the results in a useful way. A number on a wrist watch won’t cut it. Between Alm and David, they and their colleagues identified thousands of species of microbes. Most were rare, while a few hundred made up the majority of bugs in their bodies. Some species showed up briefly and vanished; others lingered all year.

Here’s one way to look at their microbiomes. It shows David’s saliva. Each band represents one of the dominant species (or operational taxonomic units). Species belonging to the same lineage (a phylum) have different shades of the same color.  Fist tap Dale.

genetic information transfer promotes cooperation in bacteria

pnas |  Many bacterial species are social, producing costly secreted “public good” molecules that enhance the growth of neighboring cells. The genes coding for these cooperative traits are often propagated via mobile genetic elements and can be virulence factors from a biomedical perspective. Here, we present an experimental framework that links genetic information exchange and the selection of cooperative traits. Using simulations and experiments based on a synthetic bacterial system to control public good secretion and plasmid conjugation, we demonstrate that horizontal gene transfer can favor cooperation. In a well-mixed environment, horizontal transfer brings a direct infectious advantage to any gene, regardless of its cooperation properties. However, in a structured population transfer selects specifically for cooperation by increasing the assortment among cooperative alleles. Conjugation allows cooperative alleles to overcome rarity thresholds and invade bacterial populations structured purely by stochastic dilution effects. Our results provide an explanation for the prevalence of cooperative genes on mobile elements, and suggest a previously unidentified benefit of horizontal gene transfer for bacteria. 

Bacteria often cooperate through the production of public goods that change their environment. These processes can affect human health by increasing virulence or antibiotic resistance. Public good production is costly, making cooperation susceptible to invasion by nonproducing “cheater” individuals. Bacteria also readily share genes, even among distinct species. Our experiments and models converge to show that when both cheating and cooperative genes are transferred, cooperators win against cheaters because transfer increases assortment among alleles, favoring cooperation. This can explain why genes for cooperation are often mobile, and suggests that, in addition to reducing antibiotic resistance spread, preventing gene mobility could reduce cooperative virulence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

california experiencing most severe drought ever recorded and californians still can't change their habits...,

resilience |   One of the worst North American droughts in history could be getting a whole lot worse. According to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor Map released on Tuesday, more than 58 percent of California is in an “exceptional drought” stage. That’s up a staggering 22 percent from last week’s report. And, in its latest drought report released earlier today, the National Drought Mitigation Center warned that “bone-dry” conditions are overtaking much of the Golden State, and noted that, overall, California is “short more than one year’s worth of reservoir water, or 11.6 million acre-feet, for this time of year.”

All across California, streams are drying up, crops are dying off and local communities are struggling to maintain access to water, thanks to 3 years of persistent drought conditions. The situation is so dire that on Tuesday, California implemented state-wide emergency water-conservation measures, in an effort preserved what remaining water there is. Under the new measures, Californians can face fines of up to $500 per day for using hoses to clean sidewalks, run decorative fountains, and other water-guzzling activities.

Unfortunately, while the situation in California is already pretty bleak, it looks like things are only going to get worse. In fact, it’s possible that all of the American southwest could soon be seeing the devastating drought conditions that Californians are facing. That’s because the largest surge of heat ever recorded moving west to east in the Pacific Ocean, often referred to as a Kelvin Wave, which was supposed to start an El Nino and bring tropical-like rains to the West Coast and southwest, just dissipated, after it was absorbed by abnormally warm ocean waters.

An El Nino is marked by the prolonged warming of Pacific Ocean surface temperatures, when compared to the average temperature. El Ninos usually happen every two to seven years, and can last anywhere between nine months and two years. As warm water spreads from the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean to the eastern Pacific, it brings rain and moisture with it, bringing rain to California and the American Southwest.

So, during an El Nino period, winters are often a lot wetter than usual in the southwest U.S., including in central and southern California, where drought conditions are currently the worst. That’s why Californians were hoping for a strong El Nino period, to bring the rains and moisture that’s needed to help ease the drought.

Unfortunately, while some weather models are still predicting that an El Nino is possible, the chances of an El Nino strong enough to break the devastating drought that California is seeing are now very, very slim. As a result, there’s probably no end in sight to the current drought conditions in California. And, since warm ocean waters that bring rain are moving farther north up the Pacific, while Oregon and Washington and Alaska will get rain, the jet stream is set to extend drought-like conditions to much of the southwest.

normotic consumption vs. environmental adaptation...,

Average water use per person per day

inhabit | One week ago, 36% of California was in a state of exceptional drought. Just seven days later, that number has jumped to 58%. Lynn Wilson, academic chair at Kaplan University, warns that the situation is reaching a point where we may have to put migration out of California on the table. He says that it wouldn’t be the first time in history that people have left an area because of drought, and if current water-saving measures don’t work, it may be the best option to help alleviate water shortages.

Related: The Latest Drilling Boom in California is All About Water

The drought has cost the state billions of dollars and at least 17,000 jobs and with some scientists expecting the drought to last 100 years, it could be just the tip of the melting iceberg. Obviously other options like importing water and desalinization should be exhausted before moving some people out of the area, but as surface water quickly vanishes from the state, sometimes the best option is to just admit that some places aren’t meant to hold a lot of people.

ebolas of our own...,

dailyimpact |  The world is transfixed right now by the awful spectacle of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. It’s like a horror movie — it has inspired several — this monster that lurks for years in some remote African cave, then lashes out to condemn with its touch hundreds of people to a quick and ghastly death. Like a horror movie, the revulsion it inspires in us Americans is short-lived, a quick thrill of faux fear (it is, after all, in West Africa) somewhat like a child’s anxiety about a monster under the bed. But in our real-life movie, the Americans who hyperventilate briefly about the Ebola under the bed are ignorant of the fact that there are chain-saw mass murderers at the door and window.

Infectious diseases fully as horrible as Ebola are spreading across America like wildfires, ignited in many cases by industrial agriculture (whose overuse of antibiotics for profit maximization has created a raft of infections that antibiotics can no longer treat) and industrial medicine (ditto). Among the worst:

Brain Eating Amoeba. Naegleria Fowleri thrive in warm fresh water, and used to be found everywhere in the South. Now they are found just about everywhere (they reached Minnesota in 2010). When ingested, gastric juices destroy them and they give us no problem.  But if they get into a nose, they drill their way into the brain, attack it and kill it — the fatality rate is 99 percent. Mercifully, cases are few. So far this year a 12-year old boy in Florida and a nine-year-old girl in Kansas have died from it. But pollution — the kind that causes the climate to heat up and the kind that loads rivers and lakes with nutrients — is helping the spread of this deadly critter, who may soon create a horror movie of its own. Last fall it showed up in the public water supply of St. Bernard’s Parish, Louisiana.

Flesh Eating Bacteria.Vibrio vulnificus bacteria thrive in warm salt water (are hosted by shellfish) and when they get into a human body (via a wound, or being ingested) cause an aggressive infection that often requires amputation of a limb and is frequently fatal. According to the Centers for Disease Control there are about 95 cases and 35 deaths every summer, most occurring in Florida, Texas and Maryland. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation this week warned that vibrio infections in its environs are increasing. Maryland alone had 57 cases last year.

Nightmare Bacteria. (As if the others aren’t.) Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae  (CRE) live in our gut, just doing their job, until they get out, usually in a hospital situation, and then they go on a rampage. What sets them apart, even from other drug-resistant superbugs, is that they are resistant to the antibiotic that is the treatment of last resort when the others fail.  CREs were found in one hospital in the United States in 2001. By 2013 they were in 46 states. A new study has found that CRE cases increased fivefold in community hospitals in the southeastern United States between 2008 and 2012. Now, 9,300 people are infected in America every year, and 600 of them die. (Ebola in West Africa so far — 900 fatalities.)

And then there’s MRSA, or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, also used to refer to staph bacteria resistant to other drugs, which was setting the doctors’ hair on fire five years ago. MRSA infection rates and mortality are down significantly in the past five years, but other superbugs have arisen in that time (see CRE, above) and in all, the CDC estimates that drug-resistant bacteria infect 2 million people a year and kill 23,000 of them.

So by all means shudder at the stories about Ebola, but don’t wait for it to get here before you buy that hazmat suit.

gurdjieff and hypnosis: a hermeneutic study

gurdjieffandhypnosis |  Gurdjieff ’s ontological universe is sacred and monotheistic. The mythological panorama in the First Series—where Beelzebub the “devil,” despite his youthful sins and archangelic powers still seeks, and is overjoyed by, his eventual pardon by our “COMMON FATHER OMNI-BEING ENDLESSNESS,” “MAKER CREATOR”—leaves no doubt that in Gurdjieff ’s universe only one god rules. Gurdjieff ’s “devil” is subordinate to God. But the “devil” of Gurdjieff is not what humans have portrayed him to be—at least no longer. It is true that Beelzebub, like other members of his “tribe” has hoofs and a tail, and regains (eventually upon his pardon) his horns; however, he is a passionate, kind, and benevolent angel, telling fairy tales to his grandson Hassein, and is deeply concerned about the affairs of his God’s universe and the fate of those poor creatures on that remote planet, the Earth.1 Perhaps it was out of “revolutionary” concerns, in fact, that he had rebelled in his youth against what he considered to be “illogical” in the government of the universe (B:52), and because of this had been banished with his “comrades” by His “All-lovingness and All-forgiveness … to one of the remote corners of the Universe, namely to the solar system ‘Ors’ whose inhabitants call it simply the ‘Solar System’” (B:52; capitals here and hereafter in quotes are in the original). But now, having earned pardon and reconciliation and already received them from God, Beelzebub is on a journey back to his home planet.

The most significant conclusion to draw from the cosmic picture painted by Gurdjieff in the First Series commonly titled Beelzebub’s Tales his Grandson is that the dualism of “good” and “evil” does not exist as an objective fact in his universe. This is a shock Gurdjieff imparts to his reader’s mind from the very outset. Evil does not objectively exist, and what evil may exist, it is a human construct. This dualism (as in the case of heaven and hell, as we shall see later) is simply a product of human mind and behavior, made up once by a certain learned human being whom, for the purpose of historical tangibility, Gurdjieff imaginatively calls “a certain Makary Kronbernkzoin” (B:1127). Although Kronbernkzoin’s “evil” human act of making up this dualism is later discovered and condemned in the planet Purgatory where his higher-being-body resides, his invention has already infected humans across generations as a belief system: 

“… after long and complicated researches, it became clear to them that the fundamental cause of the whole abnormality of the psyche of the threebrained beings arising on this planet was that a very definite notion arose and began to exist, that outside the essence of beings, as it were, there are two diametrically opposite factors—the sources of ‘Good’ and the sources of ‘Evil’—which are just the instigators for all their good and bad manifestations.

“It was then established by them that this universally disseminated maleficent idea, the data for which gradually became crystallized in each of them during their formation into preparatory age, already dominates their common psyche at their responsible existence and becomes on the one hand a tranquillizer and justifier of all their manifestations and on the other hand the fundamental impeding factor for the possibility which arises in certain of them for the self-perfecting of their higher being-parts.” (B:1125–26)

Gurdjieff ’s God, thus, represents all goodness. “Everything, without exception, all sound logic as well as historical data, reveal and affirm that God represents absolute goodness; He is all-loving and all-forgiving” (L:24: italics in the original). If there was a so-called “Devil” (i.e., Beelzebub)—with a power somewhat equal to God at one time—who in his youth rebelled against God “by way of pride” proper to any “young and still incompletely formed individual” (L:24), the act itself of relegating such a force to a “beloved son” was still an act of an absolutely all-powerful God. This interpretation can be derived from the following passage in the Third Series where Gurdjieff, in search of a technique for uninterrupted remembering of his higher self or “I,” arrives at the universal analogy of God and the Devil:

At the same time why should He, being as He is, send away from Himself one of His nearest, by Him animated, beloved sons, only for the “way of pride” proper to any young and still incomplete individual, and bestow upon him a force equal but opposite to His own? … I refer to the “Devil.” (L:24:italics in the original)

For Gurdjieff, therefore, the universe has one Creator and a unitary source of origin, while Beelzebub, or the so-called “Devil,” who is a beloved son of God and who in youth became rebellious but later repented and was forgiven, is not an objective source of evil in this world. The association, by humans, of their own evil acts to Beelzebub as an angel and “beloved son of God” is thereby not justified. The human evil is really of their own making. The question still remains, however: Why is there (human) evil in a universe created by a God of all-goodness?
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1. According to J. Walter Driscoll, “Gurdjieff claimed that his ideas are rooted in tradition now lost or largely unavailable in modern societies. The figure of a pardoned Beelzebub provides a striking example of an authentic but little known mythopoetic tradition that Gurdjieff exploits. His Beelzebub is alien to conventional Judeo-Christian traditions where ‘fallen angels’ are condemned for eternity—never pardoned, let alone elevated to a quasi-redemptive status. A unique scriptual and mythological tradition that was familiar to Gurdjieff and which contains a clear echo of the pardoned fallen angel, can be found among the Yezidi (pronounced Ya-she-dees and sometimes spelled Yazidis), a unique Kurdish tribe” (2004a:6–8). As cited by Driscoll from The Encyclopedia of the Orient, “The Yezidi creed has elements from Zoroastrianism, Manicheism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” (Ibid.:7; also found at http://www.i-cias.com/e.o/index.htm). Driscoll also draws on the work of Giuseppe Furlani (1940) to substantiate his observation that for Yezidis indeed Malek Ta’us, or Angel Peacock, corresponding to the Devil in Christianity and Islam, “is supreme among the angels, who, after his fall and repentance, has been re-installed by God in his original and pre-eminent position” (Driscoll, 2004a:6–8). Of significance for Gurdjieff was the strange ritual he observed among Yezidis when he was a child (M:65–66), when he saw a Yezidi child could not get out of a circle drawn around him. Echoing this theme, Driscoll cites the following from Philip Kreyenbroek (1995) in Yezidism: Its Background: “… oaths are administered by drawing a circle on the ground. The inside of the circle is declared to be ‘the property of Melek Tawus,’ an observance which is paralleled in Zoroastrianism” (161). For another authoritative study of the Yezidis see John S. Guest’s Survival Among the Kurds: A History of the Yezidis (1993).

Êzidî

wikipedia |  The Yazidi (also Yezidi, Êzidî, Yazdani, ایزدیان, Եզդիներ, Езиды) are a Kurdish- and Arabic-speaking ethno-religious community who practice an ancient syncretic religion linked to Zoroastrianism and early Mesopotamian religions.^[12][13][14] They live primarily in the Nineveh Province of northern Iraq, a region once part of ancient Assyria. Additional communities in Armenia, Georgia and Syria have been in decline since the 1990s, their members having migrated to Europe, especially to Germany.^[15] The Yazidi believe in God as creator of the world, which he has placed under the care of seven "holy beings" or angels, the "chief" (archangel) of whom is Melek Taus, the "Peacock Angel." In Zoroastrian-like tradition, the Peacock Angel embodied humanity's potential for both good (light) and bad (dark) acts, and due to pride temporarily fell from God's favor, before his remorseful tears extinguished the fires of his hellish prison and he reconciled with God. Some followers of other monotheistic religion jokingly or mistakenly re-cast the Peacock Angel as the unredeemed evil deity Satan^[16][17], which has incited centuries of persecution of the Yazidi as "devil worshippers" by some followers of these religions. Persecution of Yazidis has continued in their home communities within the borders of modern Iraq, under both Saddam Hussein and fundamentalist Sunni Muslim revolutionaries.^[18]

Tawûsê Melek

What is the Peacock Angel?

wikipedia |  The Yazidi consider Tawûsê Melek an emanation of God and a benevolent angel who has redeemed himself from his fall and has become a demiurge who created the cosmos from the Cosmic egg. After he repented, he wept for 7,000 years, his tears filling seven jars, which then quenched the fires of hell.

Tawûsê Melek is sometimes transliterated Malak Ta'us, Malak Tawus, Malak Tawwus or Malik Taws. Melek was borrowed from the Arabic term "king" or "angel". Tawûs is uncontroversially translated "peacock"; in art and sculpture, Tawûsê Melek is depicted as peacock. However, peacocks are not native to the lands where Tawûsê Melek is worshipped. Among early Christians, the peacock represented immortality on account of the folk belief that its flesh does not decay after death, and this symbolism has passed into Yazidi beliefs.^[6] Consequently, peacock imagery adorns Yazidi shrines, gateways, graves, and houses of worship.

The Kitêba Cilwe "Book of Illumination", which claims to be the words of Tawûsê Melek, and which presumably represents Yazidi belief, states that he allocates responsibilities, blessings and misfortunes as he sees fit and that it is not for the race of Adam to question him. Sheikh Adî believed that the spirit of Tawûsê Melek is the same as his own, perhaps as a reincarnation. He is believed to have said:

I was present when Adam was living in Paradise, and also when Nemrud threw Abraham in fire. I was present when God said to me: 'You are the ruler and Lord on the Earth'. God, the compassionate, gave me seven earths and throne of the heaven.

Yazidi accounts of creation differ from that of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They believe that God first created Tawûsê Melek from his own illumination (Ronahî) and the other six archangels were created later. God ordered Tawûsê Melek not to bow to other beings. Then God created the other archangels and ordered them to bring him dust (Ax) from the Earth (Erd) and build the body of Adam. Then God gave life to Adam from his own breath and instructed all archangels to bow to Adam. The archangels obeyed except for Tawûsê Melek. In answer to God, Tawûsê Melek replied, "How can I submit to another being! I am from your illumination while Adam is made of dust." Then God praised him and made him the leader of all angels and his deputy on the Earth. (This likely furthers what some see as a connection to the Islamic Shaytan, as according to the Quran he too refused to bow to Adam at God's command, though in this case it is seen as being a sign of Shaytan's sinful pride.) Hence the Yazidis believe that Tawûsê Melek is the representative of God on the face of the Earth, and comes down to the Earth on the first Wednesday of Nisan (April). Yazidis hold that God created Tawûsê Melek on this day, and celebrate it as New Year's Day. Yazidis argue that the order to bow to Adam was only a test for Tawûsê Melek, since if God commands anything then it must happen. (Bibe, dibe). In other words, God could have made him submit to Adam, but gave Tawûsê Melek the choice as a test. They believe that their respect and praise for Tawûsê Melek is a way to acknowledge his majestic and sublime nature. This idea is called "Knowledge of the Sublime" 

(Zanista Ciwaniyê). Sheikh Adî has observed the story of Tawûsê Melek and believed in him.^[7]

Yazidis believe that good and evil both exist in the mind and spirit of human beings. It depends on the humans, themselves, as to which they choose. In this process, their devotion to Tawûsê Melek is essential, since it was he who was given the same choice between good and evil by God, and chose the good.

The Yazidi believe that the founder of their religion, Sheikh Adi Ibn Musafir, was an incarnation of Tawûsê Melek.

a mere forty five years ago, we didn't need an infectious diseases cover story for our holocausts....,

oocities |  Western anthropology pretty much equates animism with spirit belief. I think this is mistaken. Spirit belief is not necessary to, and, when present, is only a superficial expression of, animism, which is more accurately viewed, I believe, as an expression of “identity transparency”. I prefer this term to “participation mystique” which has a connotation of primitivism not at all justified -- given that subject-subject and subject-object empathic fusion requires access to elaborate simultaneous awareness states of consciousness not easily experienced by the uncultivated awareness.

Urban versus rural may not be the real issue. Explicit animism in Japan has probably fallen into abeyance due mostly to the fact that the traditional arts, crafts, and inner disciplines are no longer being practiced as widely or as authentically as they were only one or two generations ago. The relative absence of analogical and metaphorical reference in contemporary Japanese architecture (compared to the traditional) may well be another factor promoting conscious abeyance of animism (which abeyance, I believe, has unconsciously been psychologically compensated for by the flood of highly fetishized pornography which came on the scene beginning in the early-1970s).

Regarding the second question you raise: I think Schrödinger must certainly have had quite elaborate experience of “identity transparency” (and thus of animism) and that this played a significant role in the production of his famous wave equation. I also think it played a role in his refusal to embrace the probability interpretation of his equation. Indeed, I view much of the problematics associated with quantum theory as being the result of an absence of animistic experience on the part of those doing the interpreting.

At the beginning of this 21st century, the monoculture use to which the evolving techno-base is being put is imposing a uniformization and subjective-intersubjective cognitive and neurologic deficit omniculturally on such an unprecedented scale, that, given the history of holocausts associated with this millennia-long cognitive implosion, one would have to be oblivious to human history to believe THE NEW WORLD ORDER will be imposed absent holocausts of unprecedented scale. It's a ridiculous notion entertained only by those with huge neurologic lacunae.

Being uninformed is not only a mark of distinction in America, it is a matter of national pride.

Cell phones will be to the present generation what cigarettes were to the WWII generation.

It has been a long time since there were students in American universities; now, there are only trainees.

Intergenerational memory of inner states is far poorer than the famed limitations of institutional memory: collective amnesia is endemic to the human species.

Anyone with a voice at this juncture is not doing any good. If the person were doing good, knee-jerk nesting instinct protecting the current institutionalization would not allow him or her a voice.

When U.S. officials responsible for causing the Cambodian holocaust were not held legally culpable for their acts -- indeed, one even received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts -- who could possibly imagine U.S. officials being held responsible for their acts in the Waco deaths? They were not held responsible for the Hansford irradiation; the production of Agent Orange at a location on the waterfront in Alexandria, Virginia, at the time surrounded by a densely populated ghetto community, which, when gentrified to upper-middle class, the City Public Works Department required 12 feet of dirt removed, a plastic shield placed, 12 feet of new dirt installed before building could proceed; the testing of electromagnetic pulse weapons for well over a decade in upper-middle class suburban Virginia and Maryland, which, in all likelihood, was involved in triggering or inducing fulminations of SLE and other radiation-sensitive degenerative autoimmune and demyelinating diseases; and so on; and so on.

Nothing significant will be done until the wave moving from the periphery to the power centers begins to break. All sorts of interest will arise at that point, but only the most meager of undertakings will then be possible.

ebola and applied cultural "evolution"...,

socialevolutionforum |  A colleague of mine named Beate Ebert started a Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) called Commit and Act in Sierra Leone. They run a psychosocial center in Bo, a city in the south of Sierra Leone, led by a local counselor, Hannah Bockarie. Bo is a high risk area of the Ebola epidemic, where some of the first cases showed up. One reason that the disease is so deadly is that it creates a perfect storm of cultural confusion. Here is how Beate described it to me in a recent email message.

Ebola mostly spreads because of local habits like washing and kissing dead bodies. People don’t get the information needed. They avoid hospitals as most people with Ebola die there. Doctors and nurses look like monsters in their prevention suits when they come to villages. The inhabitants are scared and think the health workers bring the disease. People circulate text messages that stimulate fear and also lead to avoiding treatment, like not contacting strangers.

The public health practices that can limit the spread of the Ebola virus are known, but getting people to adopt new practices—even when it is a matter of life and death—is not easy. Can evolutionary science help? Beate thinks that it can and her local team is bravely working to use a method of cultural change being developed at the Evolution Institute to help stem the Ebola epidemic where previous efforts have failed.

The method is called PROSOCIAL and is designed to improve the efficacy of any group whose members must work together to achieve common goals. It helps to create a strong sense of group identity and clarifies both core values and obstacles that prevent a group from moving in its valued direction. It also helps to create a social environment that is maximally favorable for cooperation and guards against behaviors that undermine the goals of the group.

PROSOCIAL is a new method, still under development, and the Commit and Act team in Sierra Leone is starting to use it in their regular work, which is to bring psychotherapeutic support to traumatized people in areas of conflict. This means that they have a network of facilitators working in communities already in place that can be used to address the Ebola epidemic. Here is a progress report from Commit and Act’s facebook page:

We can hardly post as quickly as Hannah is training people how to prevent Ebola. She went through the PROSOCIAL process … again today, with another 300 people in Bo, close to our center. Our wonderful, courageous Commit and Act women’s group and the families of the desert flower project we are supporting to prevent female gender circumcision of the girls were present too. Due to Hannah´s successful efforts, Commit and Act has been identified as the leading agency in the district by the District Health Management Team to give psychosocial support to the families affected by Ebola and to support medical teams etc. As there is hardly any additional funding available for this, please donate every amount possible to Commit and Act and mark it with the purpose “Ebola”, then we will use it for that. Thank you so much!

I have donated and urge everyone who reads this post to contribute what they can. Here is the link to Commit and Act’s donation page. It would be hard to imagine a more noble and worthy cause to support, especially by those who are trying to develop a science of intentional change.