is the 2nd amendment a gun-control amendment?

newyorker |  Stevens’s dissent should be read in full, but his conclusion in particular is clear and ringing:

The right the Court announces [in Heller] was not “enshrined” in the Second Amendment by the Framers; it is the product of today’s law-changing decision. . . . Until today, it has been understood that legislatures may regulate the civilian use and misuse of firearms so long as they do not interfere with the preservation of a well-regulated militia. The Court’s announcement of a new constitutional right to own and use firearms for private purposes upsets that settled understanding . . .

Justice Stevens and his colleagues were not saying, a mere seven years ago, that the gun-control legislation in dispute in Heller alone was constitutional within the confines of the Second Amendment. They were asserting that essentially every kind of legislation concerning guns in the hands of individuals was compatible with the Second Amendment—indeed, that regulating guns in individual hands was one of the purposes for which the amendment was offered.

So there is no need to amend the Constitution, or to alter the historical understanding of what the Second Amendment meant. No new reasoning or tortured rereading is needed to reconcile the Constitution with common sense. All that is necessary for sanity to rule again, on the question of guns, is to restore the amendment to its commonly understood meaning as it was articulated by this wise Republican judge a scant few years ago. And all you need for that is one saner and, in the true sense, conservative Supreme Court vote. One Presidential election could make that happen.

single mothers of delta males are causing these mass shootings...,

csmonitor |  But there’s one topic that’s not getting enough discussion, he and some others say: masculinity. “The elephant in the room with ... mass shootings is that almost all of them are being done by men,” Professor Kilmartin says. Male shooters often “project their difficulties onto other people.... In this case, it sounds like he was blaming Christians for his problems, but the masculinity piece is what is really missing in the discussions about the equation.”

Men are often raised to be stoic, to suppress emotions rather than understand them, and when they struggle, often the only emotion that they see as sufficiently masculine to express is anger, says Jon Davies, director of the McKenzie River Men's Center in Eugene, Ore., and a former psychologist at the University of Oregon. On top of that, he says, “it’s impossible to reach the ideal of what it means to be a man.”

Fortunately, the vast majority of men get enough support in their lives that those societal pressures don’t turn into mass violence.

While mass shooters are often seen as “outliers or oddballs ... we should actually think of them as conformists,” says Tristan Bridges, a sociologist at The College at Brockport, State University of New York, citing research on masculinity by expert Michael Kimmel. “They’re over-conforming to masculinity, because they perceive themselves, in some way or another, as emasculated.... It’s a terrible statement about American masculinity, to say that when you’re emasculated, one way to respond is to open fire.”

is this what america's gun crisis looks like?

What America's Gun Crisis Looks Like

hyparchic folding and reality mechanics at the microcosmic scale

pbs |  Zeno’s paradox is solved, but the question of whether there is a smallest unit of length hasn’t gone away. Today, some physicists think that the existence of an absolute minimum length could help avoid another kind of logical nonsense; the infinities that arise when physicists make attempts at a quantum version of Einstein’s General Relativity, that is, a theory of “quantum gravity.” When physicists attempted to calculate probabilities in the new theory, the integrals just returned infinity, a result that couldn’t be more useless. In this case, the infinities were not mistakes but demonstrably a consequence of applying the rules of quantum theory to gravity. But by positing a smallest unit of length, just like Zeno did, theorists can reduce the infinities to manageable finite numbers. And one way to get a finite length is to chop up space and time into chunks, thereby making it discrete: Zeno would be pleased.

He would also be confused. While almost all approaches to quantum gravity bring in a minimal length one way or the other, not all approaches do so by means of “discretization”—that is, by “chunking” space and time. In some theories of quantum gravity, the minimal length emerges from a “resolution limit,” without the need of discreteness. Think of studying samples with a microscope, for example. Magnify too much, and you encounter a resolution-limit beyond which images remain blurry. And if you zoom into a digital photo, you eventually see single pixels: further zooming will not reveal any more detail. In both cases there is a limit to resolution, but only in the latter case is it due to discretization. 

In these examples the limits could be overcome with better imaging technology; they are not fundamental. But a resolution-limit due to quantum behavior of space-time would be fundamental. It could not be overcome with better technology. 

So, a resolution-limit seems necessary to avoid the problem with infinities in the development of quantum gravity. But does space-time remain smooth and continuous even on the shortest distance scales, or does it become coarse and grainy? Researchers cannot agree.

something outside the computational laws of physics, what could it be?

homo evolutis

ted |  the future is looking back 200 years, because next week is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. And it's the 150th anniversary of the publication of "The Origin of Species." And Darwin, of course, argued that evolution is a natural state. It is a natural state in everything that is alive, including hominids. There have actually been 22 species of hominids that have been around, have evolved, have wandered in different places, have gone extinct. It is common for hominids to evolve. And that's the reason why, as you look at the hominid fossil record, erectus, and heidelbergensis, and floresiensis, and Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens, all overlap. The common state of affairs is to have overlapping versions of hominids, not one.

 

17:08 And as you think of the implications of that, here's a brief history of the universe. The universe was created 13.7 billion years ago, and then you created all the stars, and all the planets, and all the galaxies, and all the Milky Ways. And then you created Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, and then you got life about four billion years ago, and then you got hominids about 0.006 billion years ago, and then you got our version of hominids about 0.0015 billion years ago. Ta-dah! Maybe the reason for thr creation of the universe, and all the galaxies, and all the planets, and all the energy, and all the dark energy, and all the rest of stuff is to create what's in this room. Maybe not. That would be a mildly arrogant viewpoint. (Laughter) So, if that's not the purpose of the universe, then what's next?

18:07 I think what we're going to see is we're going to see a different species of hominid. I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis. And I think this isn't 1,000 years out. I think most of us are going to glance at it, and our grandchildren are going to begin to live it. And a Homo evolutis brings together these three trends into a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species. And that, of course, would be the ultimate reboot.

why the negro/black digest had to go, and why black media is no mo....,

paecon |  Almost everyone recognizes that the media plays a crucial role in real democracies. One must examine the media to understand its role in how democracies work, including how it both enhances and detracts from how well any democratic society works. Amartya Sen recognizes this basic truth in the realms of capabilities, functionings, economics, and freedom. However, there is a tension between this recognition and the fact that Sen does not deeply develop the structural and institutional aspects of the role of the media and of democratic society.

In many of his works, Amartya Sen has correctly pointed out the links that exist between many kinds of freedom. One of the most important is the connection between democratic participation, political freedom, and the structure of the media. This is important because Sen argues that direct or representative democracy prevents catastrophic famine. (Sen 1999, 2009) He has also forcefully argued that political participation is important in its own right.

In order to reap the full benefits of democracy, Sen has argued that it is crucial have a free press that allows for the free flow of ideas. The free press helps a society decide which policies to pursue, since these discussions lead to the direct consideration of the goals that society thinks are worthwhile. These discussions also shape a society, because they inform citizens how it might be best to pursue goals that are already settled on. On this point, I agree with Sen.

However, there is a problem. Authors like Robert McChesney have argued that the ownership structure of media companies limits debate over economic and political policy. In the U.S., the primary concern seems to be the potential for corporate censorship, while in other parts of the world the main problem appears to be government censorship.

For the U.S., the argument goes like this. Media companies such as Disney, Fox, and Turner have direct economic interests. Large media companies are large corporations, and they sell advertising to other large corporations. Management of these large corporations has the responsibility to run the firms as profitably as they can. This is both a competitive requirement, and in some ways a legal one. One could argue that these firms have to please two masters, their shareholders and their audience. Management is often legally bound to serve shareholders first in case of a conflict between shareholder interests and other competing interests, such as those of employees or the audience. The corporate structure of these firms gives them an economic incentive to consider the financial consequences to the corporation of any particular story, regardless of its truth or potential social importance even if they maintain a strict separation between the news division and other divisions. Important aspects of any debate over social, political, and economic policy may be sidestepped because of corporate organization and the accompanying incentives. For example, Stromberg (2004) developed a model that describes the links between the mass media, political competition, and the resulting public policy. The emergence of the mass media “may introduce a bias in favor of groups that are valuable to advertisers, which might introduce a bias against the poor and the old.” (Stromberg 2004, 281)

works progress administration 2.0

paecon |  As the global crisis deepens and most industrialized and developing countries continue facing the risk of a prolonged labour market recession, it is leading to a catastrophic rise in unemployment and decline in real wages. Several countries have used neoclassical tools to mitigate this, primarily by moving legislation to have more flexible labour markets. The oft-repeated neoclassical logic has been that rigidities in labour markets are the barriers to recovery. The economic mechanism being that of lowering interest and wage rate to incentivize private investment; but the plans have not succeeded so far due to a lack of effective demand. On the other hand, public investment driven public work projects, by encouraging social participation, can be the way to stimulate economic recovery and expansion in employment. Along similar lines, the International Labor Organization (2009) reiterates that it is crucial to implement a coherent, job-oriented recovery strategy to address the basic needs of millions workers and their families, and emphasizes that employment and social protection must be at the centre of fiscal stimulus measures to protect the vulnerable groups and to reactivate investment for raising aggregate demand in the economy.

Public works become closely interlinked to social programs in contemporary democracies under the tension of various kinds of identity politics of exclusion and inclusion. It has the potential to alleviate these tensions and contrariwise, if badly conceived such programs can also heighten such tensions. This paper explores new frontiers of public works program from this viewpoint; and investigates how public work programs can be effective in combating labour market problems in economically and socially meaningful ways. The paper consists of six parts. The second part, after this introduction, reviews briefly the theoretical debate of market mechanism and unemployment related to classical and Keynesian paradigms regarding voluntary and involuntary unemployment and their policy implications. Section three draws a clear distinction between Keynesian demand management and new public works programs with emphasis on the distinction between demand side and supply side of the problem. Section four focuses on two issues which could be the basis for demarcating new employment policies, i.e. public works programs with and without skill components relating it to questions of benefits, externality and labour productivity. Section five discusses the principle of finance sharing of public works programs and its possible effects on inflation and private investment. In the last section, we conclude with a discussion of possible inclusion benefits of newly designed public works programs.

much inequality has been caused by politically-induced decisions

paecon |  This article analyses causes of high and persistent income inequality in the U.S.2 The analysis provides an explanation of the interconnected factors behind rising income inequality and the upward redistribution of national income from labour to capital. Followed by a series of reports about rising inequalities from various International Organisations (IO) (ILO 2011; UNCTAD 2012; OECD 2011b), the interest peaked after the publication of the English translation of Piketty’s (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The publication triggered a heated debate and brought widespread attention to the issue also from non-academic circles ever since. Not surprisingly, there is as much empirical evidence supporting as broad a variety of arguments as scholars working on the subject.

The interaction between exogenous and endogenous drivers of inequality is of particular interest. At first sight the global trend towards increasing inequality across developed and developing economies suggests that exogenous forces are the main driver of inequality. However, the impact of exogenous drivers can be counteracted or reinforced by national policies and are thus highly country-specific. For example the experience of most countries in Latin America which successfully reduced inequality while being subject to the same exogenous drivers as other countries, suggests that countries do have the means to reduce inequality. One major influence on inequality are the policies adopted (or not adopted) by the respective governments. Those vary considerably across regions and countries and alter the distribution of income significantly. It is argued that the political dimension as an endogenous driver of inequality has been neglected to the benefit of economic-based explanations. Some political scientists and sociologists have explored possible political explanations of increasing inequality (DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux 1995; Bartels 2010; DiPrete 2007; Rosenthal 2004), while economists have mostly neglected the role of the political.

How and to what extent the political dimension has contributed to increasing inequality has been under-researched. In order to analyse the political causes of increasing inequality the U.S. has been chosen as a case study. The research question reads as follows: Which factors are the main drivers of income inequality in the U.S.? The U.S. is of particular interest because the country has experienced a sharp increase of inequality relative to other countries. In addition to that the U.S. is one of the few countries where continuous and reliable data is available. This enables the analysis and comparison of the changing patterns of income inequality from the early 1950s onwards.

Partly, as it is argued, inequality has been caused by politically induced decisions. Certain policies, such as the decreased support for unions and tax cuts favouring the relatively well-off and corporations, have benefitted a small minority of the population at the expense of the majority and have thus contributed to widening income inequality. It is argued that this particular type of income inequality leads to representational inequality. High and persisting inequality in the U.S. has contributed to the strengthening of an economic elite who have a vested interest and the means to influence policies accordingly which increases and perpetuates inequality. This in turn reduces the purchasing power of the majority of the U.S. population (and hence aggregate demand). Thus, growth stalls also due to decreasing means of purchasing goods and services for the majority, or, contributes to economic and financial instability because the stagnating real wages are compensated by increasing accumulation of debts (Onaran and Galanis 2013, 88).

give it a minute pedro, believe me, you ain't seen NOTHIN yet...,

cnn |  Puerto Ricans feel like second class citizens in the United States. 

That's the message Puerto Rico's lone Congressman, Rep. Pedro Pierluisi, had for his colleagues Tuesday in a harsh rebuke of Congress' treatment of Puerto Rico.

"If you treat us like second class citizens, don't expect us to have a first class economy," Pierluisi said to the Senate Finance Committee in a hearing. "Congress treats Puerto Rico in a discriminatory fashion under numerous programs."

Pierluisi has a point. The island is in the midst of a massive a debt crisis after having defaulted in August, and Congress isn't helping out much.

Puerto Rico owes $72 billion to its creditors and the island's governor, Alejandro Garcia Padilla, says the debts can't be paid. High-skilled Puerto Ricans are leaving the island for mainland U.S. for better-paying jobs.

The commonwealth's government offered an extensive plan to pay back its debt in early September, but even that falls short by $14 billion of what's needed. The governor is demanding that Puerto Rico have chapter 9 bankruptcy rights and that its creditors take a steep discount.

"We cannot allow them to force us to choose between paying for our police, our teachers, our nurses, and paying our debt," Padilla said in a televised announcement on June 29.

illinois politricians dumber than yeast...,

illinoispolicy |  Illinois is the only state in the Midwest to have added more people to food-stamp rolls than to employment rolls during the recovery from the Great Recession. Job losses from the Great Recession occurred from January 2008 to January 2010, and since then, states have had five-and-a-half years of recovery.

During the recovery from the Great Recession, the Land of Lincoln, alone in the Midwest, had more people enter the food-stamps program than start jobs. Food-stamps growth in Illinois has outpaced jobs creation by a 5-4 margin.

In every other Midwestern state, jobs growth has dramatically outpaced food-stamps growth during the recovery. In fact, in every other state in the region, jobs growth dwarfs food-stamps growth. But during the recovery, Illinois put more people on food stamps than every other Midwestern state combined.

Manufacturing has borne the brunt of Illinois’ policy failures. From the state’s broken workers’ compensation system, to the highest property taxes in the region, to the lack of a Right-to-Work law while surrounding states enact Right to Work, Illinois has the worst policy environment in the Midwest for manufacturers.

The result for Illinois factory workers? The Land of Lincoln has put 25 people on food stamps for every manufacturing job created during the recession recovery.

chiraq 311 callers will get used to new delhi english with a hindi accent...,

theatlantic |  Cash-strapped cities have long looked at privatizing services or selling off assets as a way to save money, but Chicago in particular has a spotty record with the practice. In a move orchestrated by Emanuel’s predecessor, Richard Daley, the city sold off its parking meters to a private firm, allowing the company to reap the revenues in exchange for a one-time, upfront payment. But the deal has been widely criticized as a loser for the Windy City. The firm has already made well over half as much revenue as the $1.2 billion lump sum it paid to Chicago, and it will continue to  earn 100 percent of the revenue for nearly seven more decades under the agreement. Selling off the parking meters and privatizing services is  like “burning your furniture to heat your house,” said Anders Lindall, a spokesman for the AFSCME Council 31, the union that represents city employees.

Emanuel, a Democrat, ran for office criticizing the parking-meter deal, and in his budget speech last week he specifically pledged not to sell off city assets. That sale, and the political blowback it generated, is now cited as a cautionary tale for mayors nationwide and has slowed the move to privatization that began more than a decade ago.

“I think since then the enthusiasm for privatization has tempered somewhat,” said Ron Littlefield, the former mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Littlefield, who left office two years ago, told me that when they looked at privatizing services, they focused on those “that don’t touch citizens directly.”

In some ways, the 311 hotlines have become a victim of their own success. The more calls come in, the more people you need to answer the phone. The system had grown so popular in Chattanooga, a city of 170,000, that the call center frequently ran behind, Littlefield said, “because you just cant get people to keep up with the calls.” But rather than outsource its operations, the former mayor said that, like other cities, Chattanooga focused on encouraging residents to contact 311 through its mobile app when possible. Reporting a pot hole, for example, is now as easy as sending a photo with embedded GPS coordinates—no phone call and no operator needed.

BURN THE WITCH!!! she consorteth with the devil and slaughtereth the innocent....,

WaPo |  Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards on Tuesday for the first time directly addressed members of Congress about undercover videos purporting to show that the women’s health organization illegally sells fetal tissue for profit, telling members of the House Oversight committee that the allegations are “offensive and categorically untrue.”

At a hearing centering on whether federal funding should continue for the group, Richards forcefully defended her organization, calling it a critical source for cancer screenings, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, contraception care and other services for millions of women, particularly those who are low-income.

“For many American women, Planned Parenthood is the only health-care provider they will see this year,” she said during her opening testimony. “It is impossible for our patients to understand why Congress is once again threatening their ability to go to the health-care provider of their choice.”

But the hearing quickly turned into a grilling, with Republican lawmakers aggressively questioning Richards on everything from her annual salary to the support of Democratic candidates provided by the group’s political action committee; often delivering rapid-fire questions that left little time for her to respond.

watching the necropolitical manueverings of so-called western democracies...,

guardian |  Jeremy Corbyn used his Labour conference speech to call for the Ministry of Justice to drop its bid for a Saudi prisons contract, citing the case of pro-democracy protester, Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who has been sentenced to crucifixion.

Nimr is facing a death sentence, handed down when he was 17, which is largely based on a “confession” he was forced to sign following what he says were days of torture while in custody.

The sentence will be carried out in jail by the Saudi prison service. Corbyn called on the British government to protest against this sentence by dropping its bid for a £5.9m contract to provide prison expertise to the Saudis.

The bid was put in by Justice Solutions International, the commercial arm of the MoJ that was set up by the last justice secretary, Chris Grayling, to sell its expertise in prisons and probation – including in offender management, payment by results, tagging and privatisation – around the world.

Last month the new justice secretary, Michael Gove announced that he was closing down JSI, telling MPs it was because “of the need to focus departmental resources on domestic priorities”.

the neverending necropolitical fruits of bitter lake...,

guardian |  Riyadh has sanctioned more than a hundred beheadings so far this year – more, it is claimed, than Islamic State.

The Saudi foreign ministry files, passed to Wikileaks in June, refer to talks with British diplomats ahead of the November 2013 vote in New York. The documents have now been been translated by the organisation UN Watch – a Geneva-based non-governmental human rights organisation that scrutinises the world body – and newspaper the Australian.

The classified exchanges, the paper said, suggest that the UK initiated the secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support. Both countries were eventually elected to the UNHRC, which has 47 member states.

The Saudi cables, dated January and February 2013, were translated separately by the Australian and UN Watch. One read: “The delegation is honoured to send to the ministry the enclosed memorandum, which the delegation has received from the permanent mission of the United Kingdom asking it for the support and backing of the candidacy of their country to the membership of the human rights council (HRC) for the period 2014-2016, in the elections that will take place in 2013 in the city of New York.

Bitter Lake

when the music's over....,

metro |  A Mexican councillor has got into a spot of bother after suggesting homeless people should be culled by lethal injection.

Olga Guiterrez Machorro’s suggestion for the town of Tecamachalco, Puebla, was met with anger.

She said: ‘Yes they’re a little crazy, but they’re harmless. Which is why I think to myself wouldn’t it be kinder to just give them a lethal injection?’

She’s since apologised, adding that she didn’t think the idea would create such outrage.

In a twist of irony, Machorro is actually the chairman of the Commission for Vulnerable Groups for the council.

Her comments were recorded and published by a local newspaper. She also claimed that some homeless people were being taken to a psychiatric hospital before being left in the middle of a motorway to be run over.

neuroscience and technology have far outpaced the training and practice of psychiatry...,

behaviorismandmentalhealth |  Joel Yager, MD, is a Professor of Psychiatry, University of Colorado at Denver School of Medicine.  He started his career as a US Army psychiatrist in 1969, and has held a wide range of clinical and teaching positions in the intervening years.  He has received numerous awards, including lifetime achievement awards from the National Eating Disorders Association (2008) and from the Association for Academic Psychiatry (2009).  He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, many of which are concerned with the training of psychiatrists.

In January 2011, Dr. Yager published The Practice of Psychiatry in the 21^st Century: Challenges for Psychiatric Education, in the journal Academic Psychiatry.  This paper received favorable comment from Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, President of the APA, in the article Training the Psychiatrists of the Future, in the November 26, 2013 issue of Psychiatric News.  As my regular readers will know, I am an avid fan of Dr. Lieberman’s, and it is my belief that anything he recommends warrants close scrutiny.

The stated purpose of Dr. Yager’s article is:

“To consider how shifting scientific, technological, social and financial pressures are likely to significantly alter psychiatric practice, careers, and education in the 21^st century…”

and to review

“…trends and innovations likely to have an effect on tomorrow’s psychiatrists and their educators.”

It’s a wide-ranging and optimistic article.  Here are some quotes, interspersed with my thoughts and observations.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“Measurement-based disease-management care will progress as even chronically ill psychiatric patients increasingly use computer-based tools in waiting rooms to rate their clinical status before office appointments.”

From his use of the terms “disease” and “ill,” it is clear that Dr. Yager is immersed in the medical model.  There is nothing in the article to suggest even an awareness of the fact that this model is under considerable criticism at the present time, nor that this reality may have some relevance for psychiatrist training.

Is there a hint of condescension in the phrase “even chronically ill psychiatric patients”?  And is having the client fill in boxes on a computer screen in the waiting room an improvement over talking to him in the office?  Will the 15-minute med check be reduced to 10 minutes?

'wiring diagrams' link lifestyle to brain function

nature |  The brain’s wiring patterns can shed light on a person’s positive and negative traits, researchers report in Nature Neuroscience¹. The finding, published on 28 September, is the first from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), an international effort to map active connections between neurons in different parts of the brain.

The HCP, which launched in 2010 at a cost of US$40 million, seeks to scan the brain networks, or connectomes, of 1,200 adults. Among its goals is to chart the networks that are active when the brain is idle; these are thought to keep the different parts of the brain connected in case they need to perform a task.

In April, a branch of the project led by one of the HCP's co-chairs, biomedical engineer Stephen Smith at the University of Oxford, UK, released a database of resting-state connectomes from about 460 people between 22 and 35 years old. Each brain scan is supplemented by information on approximately 280 traits, such as the person's age, whether they have a history of drug use, their socioeconomic status and personality traits, and their performance on various intelligence tests.

eigenvalues: influence of hyparchic folding via the backward arrow of time...,

parabola |  For thousands of years people have wondered about creative power. All this world around us was believed to have been made and did not just happen. Yet humans themselves make things. Are we then creators within a meta-Creation or mere “apes of god”? A primary realm of experience in which these and far more profound questions played out was in the making of words, or poetry. The authenticity of our poetry had to be granted us. This was the origin of the idea of the muse. The word itself has origins associated with mind, deriving from the proto-Indo-European root men “to think.” 

Mousika, from which we get our word “music,” was performed metrical speech. The speaking of verse was once the recognized form of intelligence and Plato had to argue it should be superseded by philosophical discourse (prose one might say) to open up to sceptical enquiry. This had vast implications since the very meters of verse were considered gods. (The secularization of language was completed only about five hundred years ago with the emergence of the form we call “sentence.”) Practically, for example in Norse poetry, there were different meters for different purposes, such as Fornyrðislag or “meter of ancient words” and Malahattr or “meter of speeches”.  By following and excelling in the forms, the bards were in tune, we could say, with the gods. The idea of intelligence and even “sacredness” residing in language itself rather than in people (capable only of temporary ableness) came down through the ages to Giambattista Vico and James Joyce and continues in modern commentators such as R. Calasso and George Steiner.

The making of verse and other manifestations of the Muses were expressions of making as such, including the making of the world and even evolution (in its various senses over the ages) once identified by the idea of the demiurge as in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. The demiurge became the arch-villain in Gnostic writings because he was seen as tied to the material world and creating a “prison-reality” such as depicted in the film The Matrix.

In many cultures the role of the demiurge was symbolized by the potter. Pottery and its art were deeply revered and appear to go back at least to Palaeolithic times. The abstract idea of it is that the demiurge has to use already existing material to fashion a world in contrast to the higher creation of ex nihilo, “out of nothing.”

On a personal level, the early Greeks had the idea of the daimon. It is mentioned in the Symposium that Socrates had problems with his daimon because it would indicate dangers but never tell him what to do–which is rather as we picture the unconscious these days.

R.B. Onians, who comments extensively on the terminology of early Greek thought, avers that the daimon had a personal physical location in the head and was associated with sex. It was only later, around the time of Plato, that the idea of thought originating in the brain was entertained. It is possible then to see the daimon in the head as a placement of creativity beyond the conscious mind. Onians traces the image into later times and links it with the appearance of energy around the head that became the “halo” of sacred individuals. The daimon as sexual and creative was also considered “irrational” and then became the “evil” demon. There are a myriad of evolutes of the idea including its translation in Roman times into the term “genius.” This very multiplicity of meaning is essential to its meaning. Just consider that special people (such as Lamia the queen of Libya) could become a daimon. Philip Pullman turned daimons into animals in his novels.

The people we imagined around their camp fire look to their artificial blaze and cannot see the deeper light in the “black” that surrounds them. Creativity has to be beyond consciousness. Yet, only in the world of consciousness can we seem to have choice and will. In the practical world–such as in industry or in psychotherapy–we strive to find ways of co-operation between the conscious and trans-conscious realms.  Nobody knows what happens at the critical moment which makes a process creative; consciousness is always somewhat downstream from reality. When Christ said while on the Cross, “Forgive them for they know not what they do,” it was the declaration of the central human predicament.

Commonly, people have located higher intelligences in the atmosphere or inside the sun. A more interesting “location” is the future, or at least in some order of greater time than our own moment. Until quite recently these intelligences were located in the “far-past” as in the days of creation. Bennett places them in a special time he called the hyparchic future, a phrase which means what is ahead of us capable of altering present time. Such a quasi-scientific view carries a sense of dealing with the higher intelligence and ourselves as a system. 

There is an aspect of all this that is mathematical and technical with no particular stake in spirituality. This is to look into process or action when they are self-reflective. An action that feeds into itself is infinite and requires no entity to “do” it but will exhibit what are called eigenvalues that appear as entities (that can be named). Speculatively, then, higher order operations or actions will incur higher beings. One of the most intriguing speculations in modern physics is that the very existence of the universe requires a multitude of what are called “Boltzmann observers.” And, as far as the reality of “I” is concerned there is a parallel in the singularity at the heart of a black hole in that it remains uncertain whether it can ever be observed.

CRISPieR

MIT News | A team including the scientist who first harnessed the CRISPR-Cas9 system for mammalian genome editing has now identified a different CRISPR system with the potential for even simpler and more precise genome engineering.

In a study published today in Cell, Feng Zhang and his colleagues at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, with co-authors Eugene Koonin at the National Institutes of Health, Aviv Regev of the Broad Institute and the MIT Department of Biology, and John van der Oost at Wageningen University, describe the unexpected biological features of this new system and demonstrate that it can be engineered to edit the genomes of human cells.

“This has dramatic potential to advance genetic engineering,” says Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute. “The paper not only reveals the function of a previously uncharacterized CRISPR system, but also shows that Cpf1 can be harnessed for human genome editing and has remarkable and powerful features. The Cpf1 system represents a new generation of genome editing technology.”

CRISPR sequences were first described in 1987, and their natural biological function was initially described in 2010 and 2011. The application of the CRISPR-Cas9 system for mammalian genome editing was first reported in 2013, by Zhang and separately by George Church at Harvard University.

In the new study, Zhang and his collaborators searched through hundreds of CRISPR systems in different types of bacteria, searching for enzymes with useful properties that could be engineered for use in human cells. Two promising candidates were the Cpf1 enzymes from bacterial species Acidaminococcus and Lachnospiraceae, which Zhang and his colleagues then showed can target genomic loci in human cells.

“We were thrilled to discover completely different CRISPR enzymes that can be harnessed for advancing research and human health,” says Zhang, the W.M. Keck Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

The newly described Cpf1 system differs in several important ways from the previously described Cas9, with significant implications for research and therapeutics, as well as for business and intellectual property: