lives matter when you're hard, skilled, organized, disciplined and motivated enough to make them matter

guardian |  One of Saddam Hussein’s former intelligence officers masterminded Islamic State’s takeover of northern Syria after becoming embittered by the US-led invasion of Iraq, according to a report by the German magazine Der Spiegel

Documents uncovered in Syria reveal meticulous planning for the group’s structure and organisation, the report says, with the 31 pages of handwritten charts, lists and schedules amounting to a blueprint for the establishment of a caliphate in Syria.

The documents were the work of a man identified by the magazine as Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, a former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein’s air defence force, who went by the pseudonym Haji Bakr, Spiegel says.

The files suggest that the takeover of northern Syria was part of a meticulous plan overseen by Haji Bakr using techniques – including surveillance, espionage, murder and kidnapping – honed in the security apparatus of Saddam Hussein.

Bakr was “bitter and unemployed” after the US authorities in Iraq disbanded the army by decree in 2003, the article says. Between 2006 to 2008 he was reportedly in US detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib prison.

The Iraqi national was reportedly killed in a firefight with Syrian rebels in January 2014, but not before he had helped secure swathes of Syria, which in turn strengthened Islamic State’s position in neighbouring Iraq.

“What Bakr put on paper, page by page, with carefully outlined boxes for individual responsibilities, was nothing less than a blueprint for a takeover,” the story by Spiegel reporter Christoph Reuter says.

“It was not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an ‘Islamic Intelligence State’ – a caliphate run by an organisation that resembled East Germany’s notorious Stasi domestic intelligence agency.”

Between 2006 to 2008, Bakr was reportedly in US detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib prison.

In 2010, however, Bakr and a small group of former Iraqi intelligence officers made another former US detainee, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the official leader of Islamic State, with the goal of giving the group a “religious face”, the report says.

Two years later, the magazine says, Bakr travelled to northern Syria to oversee his takeover plan, choosing to launch it with a collection of foreign fighters that included novice militants from Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Europe alongside battle-tested Chechens and Uzbeks.

Iraqi journalist Hisham al-Hashimi, whose cousin served with Bakr, describes the former officer as a nationalist rather than an Islamist. The report argues that the secret to Islamic State’s success lies in its combination of opposites – the fanatical beliefs of one group and the strategic calculations of another, led by Bakr.

Spiegel said it had obtained the papers after lengthy negotiations with rebels in the Syrian city of Aleppo, who had seized them when Islamic State was forced to abandon its headquarters there in early 2014.

the ba'ath modeled on the nazi...,

scotsman |  The movement was based on classless racial unity, hence the strong anti-Marxism, and on national socialism in the scientific sense of the word, such as nationalised industry and an autarkic economy serving the needs of the nation. Hence, the antipathy towards Western capitalism. 

But the rise of German fascism also played a role. Many in the Arab world saw Hitler as an ally. In 1941, the Arab world was electrified by a pro-Axis coup in Baghdad. At that time, Iraq was nominally independent but Britain maintained a strong military presence. An Arab nationalist by the name of Rashid Ali al-Kailani organised an army coup against the pro-British Iraqi monarchy and requested help from Nazi Germany. In Damascus, then a Vichy French colony, the Baath Party founders immediately organised public demonstrations in support of Rashid Ali. 

After the Second World War, the Baathists emerged as the leadership of Arab nationalism for two reasons. First, they were the only force with a coherent ideology. Second, the existing Arab political elites were blamed for the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Nor was Islam a competitor. For the Western-educated founders of Baathism, Islam smacked of backwardness. For the nascent Islamic fundamentalists, the Baathists were substituting Arabism for the much wider historic conquests of Muslim civilisation. But it was that pan-Arab nationalism that appealed to discontented Arab youth in the Fifties and Sixties. 

Baathism had something else to offer these youths: its tight, disciplined internal organisation which - at any rate, before the party became corrupt - stood in sharp contrast to the ramshackle nature of many Arab civil institutions. 

Like the Nazi and Communist parties, the Baath is organised through small cells in a rigid hierarchy. Members are expected to devote their life to the party. In Iraq, would-be members pass through four stages even before becoming a full member: supporter, sympathiser, nominee and trainee. Currently, there are about two million Iraqis in these categories. The system requires passing successfully a series of tests, so full members of Saddam’s Baathist organisation are the most hardened and fanatical of his supporters. 

With war looming, Saddam has extended this principle with the establishment of Fedayeen Saddam, many of whom have been in action against allied troops. The Fedayeen consists of teenage level members or novices eager to move up in the Baath hierarchy ladder. In this respect, they are very reminiscent of the Hitler Youth. 

It is estimated that there are about 40,000 full members of the Baath Party in Iraq. Each is assigned to an autonomous cell. A cell consists of three to five members, only one of whom would have a link to the next level of operation. This limits the ability to penetrate the organisation from without. This structure was born of the original clandestine and illegal life of the Baathists before they came to power.  Fist tap Woodensplinter.

Heinz Alfred Kissinger: The Godfather of the Modern National Security State

democracynow |  Four decades after Henry Kissinger left office, his influence on the national security state can still be widely felt, as the United States engages in declared and undeclared wars across the globe. Kissinger served as national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations and helped revive a militarized version of American exceptionalism. We speak with Greg Grandin, author of the new book, "Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman.  Fist tap Bro. Makheru

these apes plan well in advance using the global extraction system put in place by Kissinger

RT | WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has opened up about his new book, 'The WikiLeaks Files,' speaking about the 'US empire' and telling RT's 'Going Underground' program that Washington had plans to overthrow Syria's government long before the 2011 uprising began. 

Speaking to 'Going Underground' host Afshin Rattansi, Assange referred to the chapter on Syria, which goes back to 2006. In that chapter is a cable from US Ambassador William Roebuck, who was stationed in Damascus, which apparently discusses a plan for the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria.

“...That plan was to use a number of different factors to create paranoia within the Syrian government; to push it to overreact, to make it fear there's a coup...so in theory it says 'We have a problem with Islamic extremists crossing over the border with Iraq, and we're taking actions against them to take this information and make the Syrian government look weak, the fact that it is dealing with Islamic extremists at all.'”

He added that the most serious part of the plan was to “foster tensions between Shiites and Sunnis. In particular, to take rumors that are known to be false...or exaggerations and promote them – that Iran is trying to convert poor Sunnis, and to work with Saudi and Egypt to foster that perception in order to make it harder for Iran to have influence, and also harder for the government to have influence in the population.”

like ww-II, ww-III will be a killer-ape struggle for autarky

oilprice |  The characteristic feeling of the post-2008 world has been one of anxiety. Occasionally, that anxiety breaks out into fear as it did in the last two weeks when stock markets around the world swooned and middle class and wealthy investors had a sudden visitation from Pan, the god from whose name we get the word "panic." Pan's appearance is yet another reminder that the relative stability of the globe from the end of World War II right up until 2008 is over. We are in uncharted waters.

Here is the crux of the matter as expressed in a piece which I wrote last year:

The relentless, if zigzag, rise in financial markets for the past 150 years has been sustained by cheap fossil fuels and a benign climate. We cannot count on either from here on out....

Another thing we cannot necessarily count on is the remarkable geopolitical stability that the world experienced for two long stretches during the fossil fuel age. The first one lasted from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the beginning of World War I in 1914 (interrupted only by the brief Franco-Prussian War). The second lasted from the end of World War II in 1945 until now.

Following the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq, the Middle East has experienced increasing chaos devolving into a civil war in Syria; the rapid success of forces calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria which are busily reshaping the borders of those two countries; and now the renewed chaos in Libya. We must add to this the Russian-Ukranian conflict. It is no accident that all of these conflicts are related to oil and natural gas.

the human cost of botched u.s. regime change and resource theft

globalresearch |  At a meeting of the Foreign Ministers in Cairo in September 2002 the then Secretary General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa warned US President George W. Bush that the proposed invasion of Iraq would: “open the gates of Hell … in the region.” Iraq and Syria would be the first to be engulfed in the fire.

German’s Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said it would be a “big mistake” for the United States to launch its own war on Iraq: “ … and European foreign policy chief Javier Solana insisted that weapon inspections issues were a matter for the UN”, not an invasion (1.)

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was isolated as: “the sole European leader in Bush’s camp.” Even:  “Australian Prime Minister John Howard, long one of Bush’s staunchest allies, said he favored a diplomatic solution to the crisis and would not blindly follow the United States into war.”

There was of course no “crisis”, just a pack of lies to justify the illegal invasion for oil and to rid a government who had committed another unpardonable sin – switching oil trading from $US to Euros – and were a staunch supporter of Palestine. We are currently witnessing a similar murderous stitch up of another supporter of Palestine, Syria.

Syria is also believed to have considerable untapped reserves of oil and gas in her territorial waters in the Levantine Basin, exploration and finance of which is being undertaken in cooperation with Russia (2.)

Given the planning the United States has invested in destabilization of the country, aptly phrased by Syrian Military Intelligence in 2006 their: “efforts to provide military training and equipment to Syria’s Kurds” (3) and to “highlight Kurdish complaints” in order to implement another illegal “regime change” and resources theft there must be a fair amount of angst in Washington and Whitehall at resilience and government survival, though at huge human cost, approaching a decade later.

The “highlighting of Kurdish complaints” though, clearly had time devoted to its complexities, being needed: “to be handled carefully, since giving the wrong kind of prominence to Kurdish issue in Syria could be a liability for our efforts … given Syrian civil society’s skepticism of Kurdish objectives.”  Nevertheless, another plan for illegally overthrowing a sovereign government was underway, lessons from the Iraq nightmare ignored.

The human cost of US meddling has, as ever, been staggering. According the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) Syria’s 2013 population was 22,85 million. By May 2015  12.2 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance, 7.6 million displaced internally due to violence and 4 million had fled the country (4.) Incidentally for those who notice the discrepancy between the population and the UNOCHA figures, in crisis people return home to those they love: “If we die, at least we will die together” is a phrase that haunts.

that early childhood vocabulary is IQ determinative...,

theatlantic |  Re­search sug­gests that poor chil­dren hear about 600 words per hour, while af­flu­ent chil­dren hear 2,000. By age 4, a poor child has a listen­ing vocab­u­lary of about 3,000 words, while a wealth­i­er child wields a 20,000-word listen­ing vocab­u­lary. So it’s no sur­prise that poor chil­dren tend to enter kinder­garten already be­hind their wealth­i­er peers. But it’s not just the poverty that holds them back—it’s the lack of words. In fact, the single-best pre­dict­or of a child’s aca­dem­ic suc­cess is not par­ent­al edu­ca­tion or so­cioeco­nom­ic status, but rather the qual­ity and quantity of the words that a baby hears dur­ing his or her first three years.

Those early years are crit­ic­al. By age three, 85 per­cent of neur­al con­nec­tions are formed, mean­ing it’s dif­fi­cult for a child who has heard few words to catch up to his peers once he enters the school sys­tem.

While the word gap might sound like an edu­ca­tion prob­lem, the health consequences can be dire—and the be­ne­fits of elim­in­at­ing it can be im­mense. Pub­lic-health of­fi­cials in Geor­gia re­cog­nize this.

“This is pure bio­logy,” Brenda Fitzger­ald, Geor­gia’s Health Com­mis­sion­er and the wo­man in charge of state pub­lic-health pro­grams, said dur­ing an in­ter­view at her At­lanta of­fice. “Which is why it’s a pub­lic-health ini­ti­at­ive.”

Chil­dren with more words do bet­ter in school. Adults who were good stu­dents and earned a col­lege de­gree have longer life ex­pect­an­cies. They are at a lower risk for hy­per­ten­sion, de­pres­sion, and sleep prob­lems. They are less likely to be smokers and to be obese.

“There is no way we can sep­ar­ate health and edu­ca­tion,” said Jen­nifer Stapel-Wax, dir­ect­or of in­fant and tod­dler clin­ic­al re­search op­er­a­tions at the Mar­cus Aut­ism Cen­ter in At­lanta, and the self-de­scribed “chief cheer­lead­er” for the effort.

* * *

So in Geor­gia, from the gov­ernor’s of­fice on down to nurses and WIC (Wo­men, In­fants, and Chil­dren) clin­ics like the one the Pate boys vis­ited in Ma­con, the solu­tion and the mes­sage are clear: Talk with your baby (and help im­prove the state’s well-be­ing).

That second part is not touted much, but doc­tors and nurses be­hind the cam­paign hope that by en­ga­ging par­ents in the first part early and of­ten, the second part will fol­low—and they can al­le­vi­ate the need for costly in­ter­ven­tions down the line.

society depends upon competent parents

pbs |  Even though appearing to decrease somewhat recently, violence and crime have reduced public safety in the United States to an unacceptable level. The rising rates of juvenile violence and crime portend greater social problems in the future. 

The past focus on socioeconomic, racial, educational, and biological factors that contribute to violence and crime has obscured the most important element - parenting. The main source of these social problems is the cycle of child abuse and neglect that results when parenting fails. Incompetent (defined in legal terms as unfit) parenting is the most important factor in those adult outcomes. Competent parenting protects even biologically vulnerable and socioeconomically disadvantaged children from those outcomes. 

Because of the high financial and social costs of dealing with adult and juvenile violence and crime, in 1991 the National Commission on Children, appointed by Congress and by the president, urged a change in focus to preventive interventions during early life. 

By far most children who live in poverty, who come from broken homes, who receive welfare, who have been abused, or who have criminal relatives do not become habitual criminals or welfare dependent. When any of these factors converge with parental abuse and neglect, however, one of two or three of these children is destined for criminality or welfare dependency. Some are handicapped by brain damage resulting from maternal drug abuse and alcoholism and inadequate prenatal care. All do not learn from their parents the values and personal skills necessary for effective education and for productive employment. These dangerous and dependent persons are increasing in numbers to further drain public funds and to erode the productivity of our workforce.

any purchase from the infowars store revokes your procreative license for three generations....,

wired |  The transhumanist age -- where radical science and technology will revolutionise the human being and experience -- will eventually bring us indefinite lifespans, cyborgization, cloning, and even ectogenesis, where people use artificial wombs outside of their bodies to raise foetuses.

Breeding controls and measures make more sense when you consider that some leading life extensionist scientists believe we will conquer human mortality in the next 20 years. Already, in 2010, scientists had some success with stopping and  reversing ageing in mice. The obvious question is: In this transhumanist future, should everyone still be allowed to have unlimited children whenever they want?

In an attempt to solve this problem and give hundreds of millions of future kids a better life, I cautiously endorse the idea of licensing parents, a process that would be little different than getting a driver's licence.

The philosophical conundrum of controlling human procreation rests mostly on whether all human beings are actually responsible enough to be good parents and can provide properly for their offspring. Clearly, untold numbers of children -- for example, those millions that are slaves in the illegal human trafficking industry -- are born to unfit parents.

In an attempt to solve this problem and give hundreds of millions of future kids a better life, I cautiously endorse the idea of licensing parents, a process that would be little different than getting a driver's licence. Parents who pass a series of basic tests qualify and get the green light to get pregnant and raise children. Those applicants who are deemed unworthy -- perhaps because they are homeless, or have drug problems, or are violent criminals, or have no resources to raise a child properly and keep it from going hungry -- would not be allowed until they could demonstrate they were suitable parents.

procreation is not a right

starbuckseverywhere |  Society's ills will never be corrected by attacking the symptoms, which is the path taken by many, from politicians to charitable organizations. To solve the world's problems, we need to attack the root causes. Religion is one such cause, as is overpopulation. Related to overpopulation is the idea that people should have the right to procreate according to their desires. Besides overpopulation, this right creates other problems, the primary of which is an inability to tackle the number one root cause of humanity's troubles--human nature itself. Below are examples of how society has been harmed by allowing people to procreate at will.

what tards cannot control, they will seek to destroy

WaPo |  This month, Francis makes his first trip to the United States at a time when his progressive allies are hailing him as a revolutionary, a man who only last week broadened the power of priests to forgive women who commit what Catholic teachings call the “mortal sin” of abortion during his newly declared “year of mercy” starting in December. On Sunday, he called for “every” Catholic parish in Europe to offer shelter to one refugee family from the thousands of asylum seekers risking all to escape war-torn Syria and other pockets of conflict and poverty.

Yet as he upends church convention, Francis also is grappling with a conservative backlash to the liberal momentum building inside the church. In more than a dozen interviews, including with seven senior church officials, insiders say the change has left the hierarchy more polarized over the direction of the church than at any point since the great papal reformers of the 1960s.

The conservative rebellion is taking on many guises — in public comments, yes, but also in the rising popularity of conservative Catholic Web sites promoting Francis dissenters; books and promotional materials backed by conservative clerics seeking to counter the liberal trend; and leaks to the news media, aimed at Vatican reformers.

In his recent comments, Burke was also merely stating fact. Despite the vast powers of the pope, church doctrine serves as a kind of constitution. And for liberal reformers, the bruising theological pushback by conservatives is complicating efforts to translate the pope’s transformative style into tangible changes.

“At least we aren’t poisoning each other’s chalices anymore,” said the Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, a liberal British priest and Francis ally appointed to an influential Vatican post in May. Radcliffe said he welcomed open debate, even critical dissent within the church. But he professed himself as being “afraid” of “some of what we’re seeing”

importance of mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation

royalsociety |  Studies aimed at explaining the evolution of phenotypic traits have often solely focused on fitness considerations, ignoring underlying mechanisms. In recent years, there has been an increasing call for integrating mechanistic perspectives in evolutionary considerations, but it is not clear whether and how mechanisms affect the course and outcome of evolution. To study this, we compare four mechanistic implementations of two well-studied models for the evolution of cooperation, the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) game and the Iterated Snowdrift (ISD) game. Behavioural strategies are either implemented by a 1 : 1 genotype–phenotype mapping or by a simple neural network. Moreover, we consider two different scenarios for the effect of mutations. The same set of strategies is feasible in all four implementations, but the probability that a given strategy arises owing to mutation is largely dependent on the behavioural and genetic architecture. Our individual-based simulations show that this has major implications for the evolutionary outcome. In the ISD, different evolutionarily stable strategies are predominant in the four implementations, while in the IPD each implementation creates a characteristic dynamical pattern. As a consequence, the evolved average level of cooperation is also strongly dependent on the underlying mechanism. We argue that our findings are of general relevance for the evolution of social behaviour, pleading for the integration of a mechanistic perspective in models of social evolution.

psychopaths less susceptible to contagious yawning...,

medicalexpress |  People with psychopathic characteristics are less likely to be affected by "contagious yawning" than those who are empathetic, according to a Baylor University psychology study. 

Yawning after spotting someone else yawn is associated with empathy and bonding, and "catching" yawns happens with many social mammals, among them humans, chimpanzees and dogs, researchers say.

The study—"Contagious yawning and psychopathy"—involved 135 college student respondents and was published online in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

"You may yawn, even if you don't have to," said lead researcher Brian Rundle, a doctoral student in psychology and neuroscience in Baylor's College of Arts and Sciences. "We all know it and always wonder why. I thought, 'If it's true that yawning is related to empathy, I'll bet that psychopaths yawn a lot less.' So I put it to the test."

Psychopathy is characterized by an antisocial lifestyle, including being selfish, manipulative, impulsive, fearless, domineering and, in particular, lacking in empathy, previous research has shown.

Students in the Baylor study first took a standard psychological test—the 156-question Psychopathic Personality Inventory, with questions aimed at determining their degree of cold-heartedness, fearless dominance and self-centered impulsivity. "It's not an 'on/off' of whether you're a psychopath," Rundle said. "It's a spectrum."

Next, students were seated in a dim room in front of computers. They wore noise-canceling headphones, with electrodes placed below their eyelids, next to the outer corners of their eyes, on their foreheads and to index and middle fingers.

They were shown 10-second video clips of different facial movements—a yawn, a laugh or a neutral face—with 10 seconds of blank screen separating 20 video snippets of those expressions.

Based on the psychological test results, the frequency of yawns and the amount of physiological response of muscle, nerve and skin, the study showed that the less empathy a person had, the less likely he or she was to "catch" a yawn.

is warfare part of human nature?

LATimes |  It's been argued that warfare is as old as humanity itself -- that the affairs of primitive society were marked by chronic raiding and feuding between groups.

Now, a new study published in Science argues just the opposite.

After reviewing a database of present-day ethnographies for 21 hunter-gatherer societies -- groups that most closely resemble our evolutionary past -- researchers at Abo Akademi University in Finland concluded that early man had little need or cause for war.

Though these so-called mobile forager band societies -- referred to in the report as MFBS -- were not free of violence, researchers said the mayhem was very unorganized and seldom involved rival groups.

In fact, the violence practiced by these wandering societies was overwhelmingly murder, plain and simple, according to Douglas Fry, an anthropology professor, and Patrik Soderberg, a developmental psychology graduate student. 

"Many lethal disputes involved two men competing over a particular woman (sometimes the wife of one of them), revenge homicide exacted by family members of a victim (often aimed at the specific person responsible for the previous killing), and interpersonal quarrels of various kinds; for instance, stealing of honey, insults or taunting, incest, self-defense or protection of a loved-one," authors wrote.

The researchers examined 148 killings and their reported cause. For the most part, the 21 groups were peaceful, but one group in particular stood out for its violence, the Tiwi of Australia. They generated nearly half of the lethal events.

"The findings suggest that MFBS are not particularly warlike if the actual circumstances of lethal aggression are examined. Fifty-five percent of the lethal events involved a sole perpetrator killing only one individual (64% if the atypical Tiwi are removed). One-person-killing-one-person reflects homicide or manslaughter, not coalitional killing or war," the authors wrote.

Only 15% of the lethal events occurred across societal lines, however.

panksepp

helian |  So who is Jaak Panksepp?  Have a look at his YouTube talk on emotions at the bottom of this post, for starters.  A commenter recommended him, and I discovered the advice was well worth taking.  Panksepp’s The Archaeology of Mind, which he co-authored with Lucy Biven, was a revelation to me.  The book describes a set of basic emotional systems that exist in all, or virtually all, mammals, including humans.  In the words of the authors:

…the ancient subcortical regions of mammalian brains contain at least seven emotional, or affective, systems:  SEEKING (expectancy), FEAR (anxiety), RAGE (anger), LUST (sexual excitement), CARE (nurturance), PANIC/GRIEF (sadness), and PLAY (social joy).  Each of these systems controls distinct but specific types of behaviors associated with many overlapping physiological changes.

This is not just another laundry list of “instincts” of the type often proposed by psychologists at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.  Panksepp is a neuroscientist, and has verified experimentally the unique signatures of these emotional systems in the ancient regions of the brain shared by humans and other mammals.  Again quoting from the book,

As far as we know right now, primal emotional systems are made up of neuroanatomies and neurochemistries that are remarkably similar across all mammalian species.  This suggests that these systems evolved a very long time ago and that at a basic emotional and motivational level, all mammals are more similar than they are different.  Deep in the ancient affective recesses of our brains, we remain evolutionarily kin.

If you are an astute student of the Blank Slate phenomenon, dear reader, no doubt you are already aware of the heretical nature of this passage.  That’s right!  The Blank Slaters were prone to instantly condemn any suggestion that there were similarities between humans and other animals as “anthropomorphism.”  In fact, if you read the book you will find that their reaction to Panksepp and others doing similar research has been every bit as allergic as their reaction to anyone suggesting the existence of human nature.  However, in the field of animal behavior, they are anything but a quaint artifact of the past.  Diehard disciples of the behaviorist John B. Watson and his latter day follower B. F. Skinner, Blank Slaters of the first water, still haunt the halls of academia in significant numbers, and still control the message in any number of “scientific” journals.  There they have been following their usual “scholarly” pursuit of ignoring and/or vilifying anyone who dares to disagree with them ever since the heyday of Ashley Montagu and Richard Lewontin.  In the process they have managed to suppress or distort a great deal of valuable research bearing directly on the wellsprings of human behavior.

ants have group-level personality

sciencemag |  If you stuck to Aesop’s fables, you might think of all ants as the ancient storyteller described them—industrious, hard-working, and always preparing for a rainy day. But not every ant has the same personality, according to a new study. Some colonies are full of adventurous risk-takers, whereas others are less aggressive about foraging for food and exploring the great outdoors. 

Researchers say that these group “personality types” are linked to food-collecting strategies, and they could alter our understanding of how social insects behave.

Personality—consistent patterns of individual behavior—was once considered a uniquely human trait. But studies since the 1990s have shown that animals from great tits to octopuses exhibit “personality.” Even insects have personalities. Groups of cockroaches have consistently shy and bold members, whereas damselflies have shown differences in risk tolerance that stay the same from grubhood to adulthood.

To determine how group behavior might vary between ant colonies, a team of researchers led by Raphaël Boulay, an entomologist at the University of Tours in France, tested the insects in a controlled laboratory environment. They collected 27 colonies of the funnel ant (Aphaenogaster senilis) and had queens rear new workers in the lab. This meant that all ants in the experiment were young and inexperienced—a clean slate to test for personality.

The researchers then observed how each colony foraged for food and explored new environments. They counted the number of ants foraging, exploring, or hiding during set periods of time, and then compared the numbers to measure the boldness, adventurousness, and foraging efforts of each group. They also measured risk tolerance by gradually increasing the temperature of the ants’ foraging area from 26°C to 60°C. Ants that stayed out at temperatures higher than 46°C, widely considered to be the upper limit of their tolerance, were considered risk-takers.

When they reviewed their data, the scientists found strong personality differences between colonies, they reported online this month in Behavioral Ecology. Some were bold, adventurous risk-takers with highly active foragers. Others were shy, risk-averse, and fearful of new environments. Their foragers were less active, and they were less inclined to search for food at very high temperatures. When the team performed the same tests 11 weeks later, they saw that these differences persisted over time. More than half of all variation between colonies fell into distinct categories known as “behavioral syndromes.” These syndromes—similar to personality types among humans—are present across the animal kingdom and include categories like “proactive” (animals are bold, aggressive, and risk-prone) and “reactive” (animals are shy, calm, and risk-averse).

immigrant crises + pan-troglodytic ethology = accelerated musical chairs

pri |  When two groups of chimps bump into each other in the forest, it always leads to conflict. Males threaten each other with loud calls and aggressive gestures. And, occasionally, things escalate to physical violence and warfare.

"If they can grab a member of the other community, they may beat on them, bite them, and continue doing so until they're very severely injured or killed," says Wilson.

(See this video for an example of inter-group conflict among chimps. It was recorded by Wilson's colleague in Tanzania, in 1998.)

He says it makes sense chimps defend their territories. Several studies have shown that a bigger territory means more food for the group, and a better chance of survival.

But if chimps say anything about our own evolutionary past, so do bonobos. They're a smaller species of apes, also closely related to us.

Primatologist Frans de Waal of Emory University has studied what happens when two groups of bonobos encounter each other.

"They have initial hostility, but then they have sex, and they groom, and very soon it looks more like a picnic than like warfare between them," says de Waal.

No one really knows why bonobos are friendlier than chimps. It could be because bonobos live in forests with more food and therefore don't need to protect their resources from neighbors, de Waal speculates.

So what do we make of our primate ancestry, when two of our closest evolutionary cousins are so different?

this past week - blazing and amazing - can't say enough about the GOAT!!!

doing nothing is governance's way of dividing and conquering ramping up control

WaPo |  We have a choice to make.

We can look at violence and racism as scourges that all of us must join together to fight. Or we can turn the issues of crime and policing into fodder for racial and political division. 

In principle, it shouldn’t be hard to recognize two truths. 

Too many young African Americans have been killed in confrontations with police when lethal force should not have been used. We should mourn their deaths and demand justice. Black Lives Matter turned into a social movement because there is legitimate anger over the reality that — to be very personal about it — I do not have to worry about my son being shot by the police in the way an African American parent does. 

At the same time, too many of our police officers are killed while doing their jobs. According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, 1,466 men and women in law enforcement died in the line of duty over the past decade. We should mourn their deaths, appreciate the dangers they face and honor their courage.

Now I’ll admit: It’s easy for me to type these words on a computer screen. Circumstances are more complicated for those on either side of confrontations over the obligations of our police officers. Things get said (or, often, shouted) that call forth a reaction from the other side. A few demonstrators can scream vile slogans that can be used to taint a whole movement. Rage escalates.

peasants vs. utterly desperate peasants...,

RT |  Clashes have broken out between refugees and football hooligans as the latter pelted smoke bombs and fireworks at the asylum seekers at the Keleti train station in Budapest. At least one person was injured before riot police intervened.

The refugees responded with plastic bottles and shoes, RT’s correspondent Daniel Hawkins reported from the scene on Friday. 

Refugees formed human chain between riot police and their comrades to stop the violence, he added. Police arrested a number of football hooligans.

Syrian refugees were shouting “Freedom, freedom, we want peace” as well as “Fascists!” at the radical football fans.

At least one person, a refugee, was injured in the clashes.

On Friday, the so-called Visegrád Four – Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland –met at an emergency summit in Prague to discuss the influx of refugees to the EU. As a result the four released a statement rejecting plans for quotas for refugees seeking asylum in the EU.