the establishment created the cathedral and coercively imposed the logic, language, and values of victims/losers...,

medialens |  On Twitter, George Monbiot succinctly made the point that matters about the Robinson-Salmond 'row':

'Establishment unites to crush popular movements. If movements protest, they're accused of bullying'

Indeed.

Robinson made himself look more ridiculous when he replied to Monbiot:

'protests by a governing party outside a media HQ not a good look'

Robinson was claiming, then, that it was not a public protest outside the BBC headquarters in Glasgow. It was a protest by the ruling Scottish National Party.

Monbiot challenged Robinson to back up his allegation with hard evidence:

'Incidentally, do you have evidence that the protest was organised by the SNP? If so, could you provide it? Thanks.'

As far as we can see, Robinson ignored the challenge to provide evidence for his claim. Instead, he appeared to backtrack when he replied:

'Don't know who organised protest.'

adding, in an attempt to justify his earlier unsubstantiated claim:

'Do know Salmond praised as "joyous", talked of BBC being "scarred" & "gains" for @theSNP'

For many years now, Media Lens has scrutinised Robinson's reporting. Notoriously, he was guilty of repeating false government claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, like so many other journalists. When challenged about this, Robinson wrote in a column for The Times:

'It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking... That is all someone in my sort of job can do.' (' "Remember the last time you shouted like that?" I asked the spin-doctor', Nick Robinson, The Times, July 16, 2004)

As the US journalist Glenn Greenwald remarked:

'That'd make an excellent epitaph on the tombstone of modern establishment journalism'

But Robinson had also made a solemn promise back then:

'Now, more than ever before, I will pause before relaying what those in power say. Now, more than ever, I will try to examine the contradictory case.' (The Times, op. cit.)

To little or no avail, as we have seen in the intervening years. Robinson hates to be reminded of this. Likewise, he bristles whenever he is told that his professed role is more that of a stenographer - an honourable profession in law courts, of course - than a real journalist. Proper analysis and investigation of government claims and propaganda are systematically missing. Reporting of authoritative alternative viewpoints is minimal or non-existent. But then, as Noam Chomsky once noted of corporate journalism:

'The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.' ('Deterring Democracy', Vintage, 1992, p. 79)

kunstler catches mr. miracle...,

kunstler |  Immigration is a practical problem, with visible effects on-the-ground, easy to understand. I’m enjoying the Trump-provoked debate mostly because it is a pushback against the disgusting dishonesty of political correctness that has bogged down the educated classes in a swamp of sentimentality. For instance, Times Sunday Magazine staffer Emily Bazelon wrote a polemic last week inveighing against the use of the word “illegal” applied to people who cross the border without permission on the grounds that it “justifies their mistreatment.” One infers she means that sending them back where they came from equals mistreatment.

It’s refreshing that Trump is able to cut through this kind of tendentious crap. If that were his only role, it would be a good one, because political correctness is an intellectual disease that is making it impossible for even educated people to think — especially people who affect to be political leaders. Trump’s fellow Republicans are entertainingly trapped in their own cowardliness and it’s fun to watch them squirm.

But for me, everything else about Trump is frankly sickening, from his sneering manner of speech, to the worldview he reveals day by day, to the incoherence of his rhetoric, to the wolverine that lives on top of his head. The thought of Trump actually getting elected makes me wonder where Arthur Bremer is when we really need him.

Did any of you actually catch Trump’s performance last week at the so-called “town meeting” event in New Hampshire (really just a trumped-up pep rally)? I don’t think I miscounted that Trump told the audience he was “very smart” 23 times in the course of his remarks. If he really was smart, he would know that such tedious assertions only suggest he is deeply insecure about his own intelligence. After all, this is a man whose lifework has been putting up giant buildings that resemble bowling trophies, some of them in the service of one of the worst activities of our time, legalized gambling, which is based on the socially pernicious idea that it’s possible to get something for nothing.

I daresay that legalized gambling has had a possibly worse effect on American life the past three decades than illegal immigration. Gambling is a marginal activity for marginal people that belongs on the margins — the back rooms and back alleys. It was consigned there for decades because it was understood that it’s not healthy for the public to believe that it’s possible to get something for nothing, that it undermines perhaps the most fundamental principle of human life.

Trump’s verbal incoherence is really something to behold. He’s incapable of expressing a complete thought without venturing down a dendritic maze of digressions, often leading to an assertion of how much he is loved (another sign of insecurity). For example, when he attacked Jeb’s (no last name necessary) statement that we have to show Iraqi leaders that “we have skin in the game,” Trump invoked the “wounded warriors,” saying “I love them. They’re everywhere. They love me.” In the immortal words of Tina Turner, “what’s love got to do with it?”

people speak on their support for mr. miracle

NYTimes |  A review of public polling, extensive interviews with a host of his supporters in two states and a new private survey that tracks voting records all point to the conclusion that Mr. Trump has built a broad, demographically and ideologically diverse coalition, constructed around personality, not substance, that bridges demographic and political divides. In doing so, he has effectively insulated himself from the consequences of startling statements that might instantly doom rival candidates.

In poll after poll of Republicans, Mr. Trump leads among women, despite having used terms like “fat pigs” and “disgusting animals” to denigrate some of them. He leads among evangelical Christians, despite saying he had never had a reason to ask God for forgiveness. He leads among moderates and college-educated voters, despite a populist and anti-immigrant message thought to resonate most with conservatives and less-affluent voters. He leads among the most frequent, likely voters, even though his appeal is greatest among those with little history of voting.

The unusual character of Mr. Trump’s coalition by no means guarantees his campaign will survive until next year’s primaries, let alone beyond. The diversity of his coalition could even be its undoing, if his previous support for liberal policies and donations to Democrats, for example, undermine his support among conservatives. And in the end, the polling suggests, Mr. Trump will run into a wall: Most Republicans do not support his candidacy and seem unlikely ever to do so. Even now, more say they definitely would not vote for him than say they support him.

But the breadth of Mr. Trump’s coalition is surprising at a time of religious, ideological and geographic divisions in the Republican Party. It suggests he has the potential to outdo the flash-in-the-pan candidacies that roiled the last few Republican nominating contests. And it hints at the problem facing his competitors and the growing pressure on them to confront him, as several, like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, are starting to do.

His support is not tethered to a single issue or sentiment: immigration, economic anxiety or an anti-establishment mood. Those factors may have created conditions for his candidacy to thrive, but his personality, celebrity and boldness, not merely his populism and policy stances, have let him take advantage of them.

Tellingly, when asked to explain support for Mr. Trump in their own words, voters of varying backgrounds used much the same language, calling him “ballsy” and saying they admired that he “tells it like it is” and relished how he “isn’t politically correct.”

Trumpism, the data and interviews suggest, is an attitude, not an ideology.

peggy hubbard trolls black lives matter

theatlantic |  “You’re hollering this ‘black lives matter’ bullshit,” Hubbard said. “It don’t matter. You’re killing each other.” In fact, the overwhelming majority of people hollering “black lives matter” have never killed and will never kill anyone. The vast majority of Black Lives Matter protestors are not “tearing up the neighborhood” either. These race-based generalizations rob their objects of individual identities. The fact that some young black men carry guns and commit violent crimes doesn’t mean that other young black men and women––totally distinct individuals who happen to share the same skin color––should have their activism discredited, enjoy fewer civil liberties, or be at increased risk of being killed by cops. It is interesting that the various right-wing news sites that picked up this video failed to catch these flaws, despite fancying themselves champions of individualism, color-blindness, and the rights contained in the United States Constitution.

Hubbard was speaking off-the-cuff at a moment of high emotion; it’s possible that she hasn’t fully considered all the implications of her views; but as stated, they are wrongheaded. She might’ve been on solid ground if she’d stopped at arguing that police were justified in shooting Ball-Bey and that Black Lives Matter was wrong to protest that particular killing; instead, she spoke as if the Ball-Bey encounter bears on the righteousness of protesting other deaths, like Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, or any of the other black men that police officers have been indicted for murdering.

​* * *

Despite these significant disagreements, I’m glad Peggy Hubbard spoke out on Facebook. It’s generally a good thing when citizens earnestly express their views in public discourse, and she deserves kudos for trying to improve her community as best she can. She has articulated beliefs that are shared by a lot of people, which is itself an important service: Insofar as those beliefs are inaccurate or wrongheaded, better that they be aired and debated than invisible and unexamined.

This viral video and the comments around it also represent an opportunity for the activists of Black Lives Matter to understand how some critics of their movement perceive the world, to engage in conversation and debate, to refine any weaknesses in their own thinking that emerge, and to persuade their interlocutors to adjust some of their positions. In fact, despite Hubbard’s harsh words, I’d bet that, properly engaged, she could be persuaded to voice support for at least a portion of the policing-reform agenda. If so, what an ambassador she would make to millions of potential converts.

cathedral equates mr. miracle with trolls and bottom-feeders

slate | Watching Donald Trump bluster and bluff his way through a presidential campaign, I wonder if we underestimate the ways in which Internet vitriol has broadened the parameters of political debate. We are “shocked, shocked” by Trump’s language, but all of it is exactly the sort of thing anyone can encounter in the normal course of reading about politics online. John McCain isn’t a war hero? I’ll bet he finds worse insults than that on his Facebook page, and so does everybody who writes about him. All Mexicans are rapists? I open my Twitter account every morning to find similar and worse (my personal favorite, translated from Polish: “Reading what that @anneapplebaum writes I understand anti-semitism. Jews have an incredible gift for pissing you off”).

The language of online political discourse is now so extreme, and often so far divorced from reality, that Trump’s words fit right in, especially when they make no sense. Trump’s defenders—and I know because they tell me so online—say they admire him because he is allegedly “anti-establishment.” They are wrong: He isn’t anti-establishment at all. As a vastly wealthy man—as one who can invite a former president and his then-senator wife to his wedding and expect them to come—he actually lives at the very heart of a certain slice of the establishment. But of course he is different from other politicians in another sense: He is the only presidential candidate who uses, on television, the kind of language normally found in the comment section of a celebrity website or the more aggressive Reddit forums. Vulgar insults, racist slurs, manufactured “anger,” and invented “facts” are all a normal part of debate in those kinds of public spaces. Thanks to Trump, they have now migrated to presidential politics, too.

As others have noted, protest candidates are hardly a uniquely American phenomenon. Silvio Berlusconi brought the language and style of Italian tabloid television into the center of Italian politics; multiple far-right ideologues have brought anger and bombast into European debates. In Britain, the obscurantist far left is having a revival in the form of Jeremy Corbyn, a bearded Marxist—he favors the nationalization of industry and nuclear disarmament—who may well be the next leader of the Labour Party. All of these candidates appeal to electorates who have strong online ties but don’t hear their views reflected in mainstream politics. Trump falls into that category, too. But instead of the far left or the far right, he speaks for the sarcastic hate-tweeters, the anti-everything nihilists, and the conspiracy theorists who write convoluted anonymous comments at the bottom of newspaper articles.

Strengthening Human Adaptive Reasoning and Problem-Solving (SHARP)

iarpa.gov |  Adaptive reasoning and problem-solving are increasingly valuable for information-oriented workplaces, where inferences from sparse, voluminous, or conflicting data must be drawn, validated, and communicated—often under stressful, time-sensitive conditions. In such contexts, one’s ability to accurately update one’s mental models, make valid conclusions, and effectively deploy attention and other cognitive resources is critical. Accordingly, optimizing an analyst’s adaptive reasoning could pay large dividends in the quality of their analytic conclusions and information products. Given adaptive reasoning tests’ high predictive value for performance and productivity, proven methods for strengthening adaptive reasoning and problem-solving could have significant benefits for society in general, as well as for individuals whose work is both analytical and cognitively demanding. Intriguingly, some recent research suggests that these capabilities may be strengthened, even among high-performing adults. Despite some promising results, however, there are methodological and practical shortcomings that currently limit the direct applicability of this research for the Intelligence Community.

Therefore, the Strengthening Human Adaptive Reasoning and Problem-Solving (SHARP) Program is seeking to fund rigorous, high-quality research to address these limitations and advance the science on optimizing human adaptive reasoning and problem-solving. The goal of the program is to test and validate interventions that have the potential to significantly improve these capabilities, leading to improvements in performance for high-performing adults in information-rich environments.

The research funded in this program will use innovative and promising approaches from a variety of fields with an emphasis on collecting data from a set of cognitive, behavioral, and biological outcome measures in order to determine convergent validity of successful approaches. It is anticipated that successful teams will be multidisciplinary, and may include (but not be limited to) research expertise in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience; psychology and psychometrics; human physiology and neurophysiology; structural and functional imaging; molecular biology and genetics; human subjects research design, methodology, and regulations; mathematical statistics and modeling; data visualization and analytics

transcranial direct current stimulation

newyorker |  What does this part of the brain do, again?” I asked, pointing to the electrode on my right temple.

“That’s the right inferior frontal cortex,” said Vince Clark, the director of the University of New Mexico Psychology Clinical Neuroscience Center, in Albuquerque. “It does a lot of things. It evaluates rules. People get thrown in jail when it’s impaired. It might help solve math problems. You can’t really isolate what it does. It has emotional components.”

It was early December, and night was falling, though it was barely five. The shadows were getting longer in the lab. My legs felt unusually calm. Something somewhere was buzzing. Outside the window, a tree stood black against the deepening sky.

“Verbal people tend to get really quiet,” Clark said softly. “That’s one effect we noticed. And it can do funny things with your perception of time.”

The device administering the current started to beep, and I saw that twenty minutes had passed. As the current returned to zero, I felt a slight burning under the electrodes—both the one on my right temple and another, on my left arm. Clark pressed some buttons, trying to get the beeping to stop. Finally, he popped out the battery, the nine-volt rectangular kind.

This was my first experience of transcranial direct-current stimulation, or tDCS—a portable, cheap, low-tech procedure that involves sending a low electric current (up to two milliamps) to the brain. Research into tDCS is in its early stages. A number of studies suggest that it may improve learning, vigilance, intelligence, and working memory, as well as relieve chronic pain and the symptoms of depression, fibromyalgia, Parkinson’s, and schizophrenia. However, the studies have been so small and heterogeneous that meta-analyses have failed to prove any conclusive effects, and long-term risks have not been established. The treatment has yet to receive F.D.A. approval, although a few hospitals, including Beth Israel, in New York, and Beth Israel Deaconess, in Boston, have used it to treat chronic pain and depression.

“What’s the plan now?” Clark asked, unhooking the electrodes. I could see he was ready to answer more questions. But, as warned, I felt almost completely unable to speak. It wasn’t like grasping for words; it was like no longer knowing what words were good for.

Clark offered to drive me back to my hotel. Everything was mesmerizing: a dumpster in the rear-view camera, the wide roads, the Route 66 signs, the Land of Enchantment license plates.

After some effort, I managed to ask about a paper I’d read regarding the use of tDCS to treat tinnitus. My father has tinnitus; the ringing in his ears is so loud it wakes him up at night. I had heard that some people with tinnitus were helped by earplugs, but my father wasn’t, so where in the head was tinnitus, and were there different kinds?

“There are different kinds,” Clark said. “Sometimes, there’s a real noise. It’s rare, but it happens with dogs.” He told me a story about a dog with this rare affliction. When a microphone was placed in its ear, everyone could hear a ringing tone—the result, it turned out, of an oversensitive tympanic membrane. “The poor dog,” he said.

We drove the rest of the way in silence.

unleashing the power of neuroscience

royalsociety |  In addition to causing distress and disability to the individual, neuropsychiatric disorders are also extremely expensive to society and governments. These disorders are both common and debilitating and impact on cognition, functionality and wellbeing. Cognitive enhancing drugs, such as cholinesterase inhibitors and methylphenidate, are used to treat cognitive dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, respectively. Other cognitive enhancers include specific computerized cognitive training and devices. An example of a novel form of cognitive enhancement using the technological advancement of a game on an iPad that also acts to increase motivation is presented. Cognitive enhancing drugs, such as methylphenidate and modafinil, which were developed as treatments, are increasingly being used by healthy people. Modafinil not only affects ‘cold’ cognition, but also improves ‘hot’ cognition, such as emotion recognition and task-related motivation. The lifestyle use of ‘smart drugs' raises both safety concerns as well as ethical issues, including coercion and increasing disparity in society. As a society, we need to consider which forms of cognitive enhancement (e.g. pharmacological, exercise, lifelong learning) are acceptable and for which groups (e.g. military, doctors) under what conditions (e.g. war, shift work) and by what methods we would wish to improve and flourish.

smart drug modafinil safe for widespread use

reason |  Good news, overachieving students, ADHD-havers, Limitless fans, and pillheads everywhere: A meta-analysis of the data on "smart drug" modafinil has found that yes, it's safe, and yes, it's effective as a cognitve enhancer.

Published in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology, the review covers 24 placebo-controlled studies of modafinil—also known by the brand name Provigil—that were conducted between 1990 and 2014 on healthy, non-sleep deprived individuals. "Such an analysis overcomes some of the limitations of each of the smaller studies, such as narrow demographics or conflicting results, and draws an overarching conclusion," notes Quartz writer Akshat Rathi. 

Officially sanctioned in the U.S. to treat sleep disorders such as narcolepsy, modafinil is sometimes prescribed off-label to treat conditions like depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, and Parkinson's disease. It's also become popular as a cognitive enhancer, or nootropic. A 2008 poll from science journal Nature found that 44 percent of its readers had tried modafinil. And while less popular than Adderall, it's also a hit among college students as a study aid. 

Without a prescription, modafinal is still pretty easy for Americans to purchase online from foreign pharmacies (where it's sold under names such as Modalert, Modvigil, and Alertec), albeit also pretty illegal. Some countries, such as India and Mexico, neither classify modafinil as a controlled substance nor require buyers to have a medical prescription; in others, such as Canada, Australia, Germany, and the U.K., it's not a controlled substance but a prescription is required. In the U.S., however, it's both a Schedule IV controlled drug and prescription-only. 

Could that change? In the new review, researchers found that "modafinil appears to consistently engender enhancement of attention, executive functions, and learning," all without "any preponderances for side effects or mood changes." Modafinil "appears safe for widespread use," concluded researchers, calling it "one of the most promising and highly-investigated neuroenhancers to date."

freight train of happiness...

Bloomberg | On the seventh floor of a building overlooking the Federal Reserve Bank in lower Manhattan, two medical clinics share an office. One is run by a podiatrist who’s outfitted the waiting room with educational materials on foot problems such as hammer toes and bunions. The other clinic doesn’t have pamphlets on display and offers a much less conventional service: For the advertised price of $525, severely depressed and suicidal patients can get a 45-minute intravenous infusion of ketamine—better known as the illicit party drug Special K.

Glen Brooks, a 67-year-old anesthesiologist, opened NY Ketamine Infusions in 2012. “At least eight or nine of my patients have ended up making appointments with the podiatrist,” he says. “But I haven’t gotten any patients through him—I don’t know why.” Not that Brooks is lacking for business. He typically treats 65 patients a week. Most come in for an initial six infusions within a span of two weeks, then return every six to eight weeks for maintenance sessions. To keep up with demand, he often borrows rooms from the podiatrist on weekends so he can treat eight patients at once. His only help is a secretary at the front desk.

Patients don’t need a prescription, but not just anyone can get an appointment. “You have to have the right story,” Brooks says. “For ketamine to work, there needs to be some preexisting brain damage caused by post-traumatic stress. I’m looking for some indication of childhood trauma. If not overt pain, then fear, anxiety, loneliness, low self-esteem—or bullying, real or perceived.” Patients receive a low dose of the drug: about one-tenth of what recreational abusers of ketamine take or about one-fifth of what might be used as a general anesthetic.

During the infusions, which are gradual rather than all at once, patients often experience strange sensations, such as seeing colors and patterns when they close their eyes. “The first time, I had a sense that the chair was rocketing upwards, just on and on and on … a kind of weightlessness,” a patient from a different clinic explains. The 51-year-old environmental engineer and university lecturer, who asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons, credits ketamine with reviving him from a near-catatonic depression. “During the treatment, I got this profound feeling of optimism,” he says. “I told my family it’s like getting hit by the freight train of happiness—they tease me about that now.”

the first and most essential step in the transformation of any society is delegitimization of the existing order...,

thearchdruidreport | The science fiction author Isaac Asimov used to say that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. That’s a half-truth at best, for there are situations in which effective violence is the only tool that will do what needs to be done—we’ll get to that in a moment. It so happens, though, that a particular kind of incompetence does indeed tend to turn to violence when every other option has fallen flat, and goes down in a final outburst of pointless bloodshed. It’s unpleasantly likely at this point that the climate change movement, or some parts of it, may end up taking that route into history’s dumpster; here again, we’ll get to that a little further on in this post.

It’s probably necessary to say at the outset that the arguments I propose to make here have nothing to do with the ethics of violence, and everything to do with its pragmatics as a means of bringing about social change. Ethics in general are a complete quagmire in today’s society.  Nietzsche’s sly description of moral philosophy as the art of propping up inherited prejudices with bad logic has lost none of its force since he wrote it, and since his time we’ve also witnessed the rise of professional ethicists, whose jobs consist of coming up with plausible excuses for whatever their corporate masters want to do this week. The ethical issues surrounding violence are at least as confused as those around any of the other messy realities of human life, and in some ways, more so than most.

Myself, I consider violence enitrely appropriate in some situations. Many of my readers may have heard, for example, of an event that took place a little while back in Kentucky, where a sex worker was attacked by a serial killer.  While he was strangling her, she managed to get hold of his handgun, and proceeded to shoot him dead. To my mind, her action was morally justified. Once he attacked her, no matter what she did, somebody was going to die, and killing him not only turned the violence back on its originator, it also saved the lives of however many other women the guy might have killed before the police got to him—if they ever did; crimes against sex workers, and for that matter crimes against women, are tacitly ignored by a fairly large number of US police departments these days.

Along the same lines, a case can be made that revolutionary violence against a political and economic system is morally justified if the harm being done by that system is extreme enough. That’s not a debate I’m interested in exploring here, though.  Again, it’s not ethics but pragmatics that I want to discuss, because whether or not revolutionary violence is justified in some abstract moral sense is far less important right now than whether it’s an effective response to the situation we’re in. That’s not a question being asked, much less answered, by the people who are encouraging environmental and climate change activists to consider violence against the system. ....

.....The first and most essential step in the transformation of any society is the delegitimization of the existing order. That doesn’t involve violence, and in fact violence at this first stage of the process is catastrophically counterproductive—a lesson, by the way, that the US military has never been able to learn, which is why its attempts to delegitimize its enemies (usually phrased in such language as “winning minds and hearts”) have always been so embarrassingly inept and ineffective. The struggle to delegitimize the existing order has to be fought on cultural, intellectual, and ideological battlefields, not physical ones, and its targets are not people or institutions but the aura of legitimacy and inevitability that surrounds any established political and economic order.

Those of my readers who want to know how that’s done might want to read up on the cultural and intellectual life of France in the decades before the Revolution. It’s a useful example, not least because the people who wanted to bring down the French monarchy came from almost exactly the same social background as today’s green radicals: disaffected middle-class intellectuals with few resources other than raw wit and erudition. That turned out to be enough, as they subjected the monarchy—and even more critically, the institutions and values that supported it—to sustained and precise attack from constantly shifting positions, engaging in savage mockery one day and earnest pleas for reform the next, exploiting every weakness and scandal for maximum effect. By the time the crisis finally arrived in 1789, the monarchy had been so completely defeated on the battlefield of public opinion that next to nobody rallied to its defense until after the Revolution was a fait accompli.

private prison lobbyists bundle big bucks for granny...,

firstlook |  Hillary Clinton has a complicated history with incarceration. As first lady, she championed efforts to get tough on crime. “We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders,” Clinton said in 1994. “The ‘three strikes and you’re out’ for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets,” she added.

In recent months, Clinton has tacked left in some ways, and now calls for alternatives to incarceration and for greater police accountability. And while Clinton has backed a path to citizenship for undocumented people in America, she recently signaled a willingness to crack down on so-called “sanctuary cities,” a move that could lead to more immigrant detentions.

The future of both criminal justice reform and immigration are critical for private prison firms. The Geo Group, in a disclosure statement for its investors, notes that its business could be “adversely affected by changes in existing criminal or immigration laws, crime rates in jurisdictions in which we operate, the relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, and the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws or the loosening of immigration laws.”

footnote from the comments:  The majority owners of CCA were Vanguard Group and BlackRock, and the majority owners of Geo were Vanguard Group and Fidelity.

Now, what are the top four major investment firms which together have the controlling shares in the majority of major corporations in America (and also Europe, I believe)?

BlackRock, Vanguard Group, State Street (owned by BlackRock, but still retains the name) and Fidelity or FMR LLC.

Interesting, huh?

The historical monies in BlackRock would lead one to believe it is controlled by either the Rockefeller family, or else the Rockefeller and Cabot families.

Vanguard controls the Wellington Fund (advisor to the Wellington Fund is the Wellington Management Company, therefore financially interlocked with Vanguard), and since Vanguard is owned by their investors, the original majority investor in the firm which then changed its name to the Wellington Fund was (is?) the British branch of the Rothschild family. (While every random person always claims the Rothschilds own everything, this isn’t the case, but in this instance, it appears a probable.)

Fidelity is controlled by the Johnson family.

Three or four families, mainly Old Money, appear to be running the show?

watch as rachel discrimination blows blm into itty bitty pieces...,

dailymail |  'He’s no Rachel Dolezal': Shaun King's wife defends her husband over claims he lied about his race as family member CONFIRMS both his parents are white

•     Rai King, the wife of Shaun King, is defending her husband over claims that he is white
•     She said he husband is 'no Rachel Dolezal' and that the story behind his race is 'beautifully difficult'
•     Rai also said despite her pleas to get him to share his story, Shaun will not comment out of respect to his family
•     On Wednesday night, a family member said in an interview that both of King's parents are white
•     That family member also claimed that the vicious attack King suffered in high school was not in fact a hate crime, which eyewitnesses dispute
•     Rai and Shaun have five children, and have taken in other children in the past Fist tap Rohan

mr. miracle's not an uberman, slaves are just terrified of free speech in public...,

thedailycaller |  A recent Newsweek piece asked “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” Another column at The Week (where I’m a contributing editor) is titled: “How Nietzsche explains the rise of Donald Trump.” These are just two examples of the many “think” pieces examining the dangerous roots behind Trump’s style and ideology (to the degree he has an ideology). To put it mildly, the criticism transcends concerns about populism that might have been found in William Jennings Bryan, or even Ross Perot.

But I’m less alarmed by Trump than I am by the fact that he has tapped into something.Trump’s gonna Trump—that’s just how it is. But the scary part is that a pretty good slice of the public is falling for what could (if one finds the term “fascist” to be overwrought) fairly be described as demagoguery.

Of course, the fascist label has been bandied about as a catch-all slur against “people we don’t like.” But it actually means something fairly specific. And Newsweek made the case for why it’s not an inappropriate designation for Trumpism:

In the 19th century, this penchant for industrial protectionism and mercantilism became guild socialism, which mutated later into fascism and then into Nazism. You can read Mises to find out more on how this works.

This is how strongmen take over countries. They say some true things, boldly, and conjure up visions of national greatness under their leadership. They’ve got the flags, the music, the hype, the hysteria, the resources, and they work to extract that thing in many people that seeks heroes and momentous struggles in which they can prove their greatness.

Over at The Week, Damon Linker sees a parallel to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche understood himself to be reviving what he called the morality of the strong against the morality of the weak — the outlook that has prevailed in the West ever since Jesus Christ inspired a “slave revolt in morality.” Before then, the strong preyed on the weak at will, and both parties took for granted that this was the natural order of things. But Christ taught a different lesson, one rooted in the resentment of history’s victims: the cruelty of the strong is a sin, God loves the powerless most of all, the winners deserve to lose, and the meek deserve to win. And they will.

Linker doesn’t go there, but it’s worth noting that fascists like Hitler and Mussolini, channeling Nietzsche, believed in a sort of  “übermensch.”

This worldview is at odds with a Christian philosophy that involves caring for “even the least among us” and believes in compassion and human dignity for everyone — even immigrants, “losers,” the weak, and … the unborn. Trump’s own words betray this sort of Nietzschean weltanschauung.

BD - neither your original sins or continuing status as the most evil and crimogenic entity in the universe are in dispute...,

HuffPo |  Take a moment and think about that. If we're not the "most evil" country in the world -- i.e., the country with the greatest number of evil people in it -- then we Americans are doing something terribly wrong, because we have the greatest number of people incarcerated in our prisons. 

If these people deserve to be locked up, then so be it. If they deserve it, then yes, one can make the case that America is home to the most rotten people in the world. While that label is not something to be proud of, we're stuck with it. But if these people don't deserve to be imprisoned, then shame on us, because all we're doing is messing with them.

Are we honestly afraid of all these people? Are we afraid of them or are we just mad at them? Is it retribution or punishment? Or is it a whole other deal, one having more to do with economics than "justice"? Are we running these people through the system in order to provide jobs for judges, police, bailiffs, counselors, court recorders, lawyers, probation officers, prison guards and bail bondsmen?

Another element is the rise of private ("for-profit") prisons, one of the more hideous features of that now ubiquitous phenomenon known as "outsourcing." Under this arrangement, when local, state or federal authorities can't (or choose not to) handle the influx of prisoners, they turn over all or part of the operation to private firms.

Even if we give these for-profit prisons the benefit of the doubt and willingly say they do a better job than government-run prisons (an assertion that has been repeatedly challenged), there's a disturbing component of self-interest involved here. In fact, it's not only disturbing, it's downright frightening.

In order to survive, these private facilities require a constant supply of prisoners. They need prisoners the same way sausage-makers need pigs. Indeed, just as a severe pig epidemic would ravage the sausage industry, a precipitous and sustained drop in the crime rate would ravage the for-profit prison industry.

Bizarre as it sounds, what we now have in the U.S. is a thriving industry that goes home at night and prays for more crime. It's true. Unlike the average citizen who clings to the belief that our society is gradually improving itself, these for-profit prisons (and the shareholders who invest in them) hope that our families and schools and churches will produce more criminals.

Ironically, violent crime (which the FBI classifies as murder, rape, and aggravated assault) has decreased dramatically over the last 15-20 years. For whatever reason (and there are numerous theories), we have become a demonstrably less violent society. Annual homicides now number roughly 16,000. By contrast, there are roughly 32,000 suicides per year.

With violent crime dropping, and Americans generally becoming more law-abiding, our for-profit prisons have been forced to look elsewhere. Accordingly, what they now focus on is exploiting illegal immigrants and drug users, which is why the private prison lobby opposes any meaningful attempt to reform our immigration and drug laws.

Putting people in prison for drug use has always been strange. Yes, drugs are illegal, and yes, they can't be ignored; but insisting that some poor schmuck be locked inside a cage because he wanted to get high seems harsh. And referring to these sorry-assed stoners as "criminals" isn't fair. We should call them what they are: "sausage."

blm cathedral acolytes painfully naive to imagine they could faze granny goodness....,

NYTimes |  (Good magazine pointed out: “Hillary Clinton lobbied lawmakers to back the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Bill Clinton signed the act into law in 1994. The largest crime bill in history, it provided $9.7 billion in prison funding. From 1992 to 2000, the amount of prisoners in the U.S. increased almost 60 percent.”)

Clinton pointed to her record on civil rights work, but she never apologized for, or even acknowledged, her and her husband’s role in giving America the dubious distinction of having the world’s highest incarceration rate.

To me, the diversion was stunning, and telling.

Maggie Haberman noted in The New York Times that the exchange “showed Mrs. Clinton as even her admirers lament that she is seldom seen: spontaneous, impassioned and seemingly unconcerned about potential repercussions.”

Politically, that may be true. She was agile and evasive, for sure. She bobbed and weaved like Floyd Mayweather. But there was a moral issue, an accountability issue, that still hung rotting in the ring: What in her has changed, now that she has seen the devastation a policy she advocated has wrought?

(Last month, at the annual convention of the N.A.A.C.P., Bill Clinton did apologize, saying, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse.” He continued, “And I want to admit it.” His contrition makes Hillary’s nonapology all the more vexing.)

This is the part of the Black Lives Matter political protests that I love so much: The idea that you must test the fealty of your supposed friends in addition to battling the fury of your avowed foes.

The truth of America is that both liberals and conservatives alike have things for which they must answer, sins for which they must atone, when it comes to how the criminal justice system has been aimed at and unleashed upon black people in this country.

And it’s not just the Clintons who have things they must answer for on criminal justice and black people. As I have written about before, toward the end of his tenure, President George W. Bush drastically reduced funding for the Byrne Formula Grant Program, which had been established by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act to supercharge the war on drugs — a disastrous boondoggle that would come to be a war waged primarily against marijuana use by black men.

As the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out in 2011, “The racial disparities are staggering: despite the fact that whites engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that of whites.’”

A group of senators, mostly Democrats, wrote a letter demanding that the funding be restored. Barack Obama ran on a promise to restore that funding, and once elected, he did just that. As I wrote in 2010:

“The 2009 stimulus package presented these Democrats with the opportunity, and they seized it. The legislation, designed by Democrats and signed by President Obama, included $2 billion for Byrne Grants to be awarded by the end of September 2010. That was nearly a 12-fold increase in financing. Whatever the merits of these programs, they are outweighed by the damage being done. Financing prevention is fine. Financing a race-based arrest epidemic is not.”

And these sins exist not only at the federal level, but also at the local level.

Many of the recent cases have been in some of our most liberal cities — cities that, as Isabel Wilkerson brilliantly pointed out in January, were the very ones to which black Americans flocked during the Great Migration.

puerto rico tied up by cephalopod mollusc with its tentacles in the hon.bro.preznit's pants...,

thenation |  Marc Lasry is perhaps the kind of benefactor—someone who raised $500,000 for Obama’s last campaign—the president and the Democrats think they should keep happy. After all, Lasry was Obama’s choice for ambassador to France in 2013, but unfortunately “had to remove his name from consideration after a close friend was named in a federal indictment for playing in a poker ring with alleged ties to the Russian mafia.” Just last May, Lasry threw a $2,700-a-head fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, while assuring MSN viewers that she is “moving a little bit to the left.” 

Lasry’s ties to big Democratic politics go back many years. A March 2010 feature in The Wall Street Journal (titled “Avenue Capital’s Investor in Chief—He’s Prescient. He’s Well-Connected. Just Don’t Call Marc Lasry a ‘Vulture.’”) describes him lunching with then–White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, in part to advise Emanuel on whether banks would resume lending again in the wake of the 2008 crisis. A 2012 New York Times article said “About 50 people paid $40,000 each to crowd into an art-filled room” in Lasry’s apartment to hear Obama and Bill Clinton speak. Last decade, Lasry’s Avenue Capital even famously employed Chelsea Clinton, whose husband has more recently flopped in making bad investments in Greece while heading his own hedge fund. 

Lasry, who was once a humble UPS driver whose parents convinced him to go to law school, seems to be at heart a gambler capable of rolling the dice with anyone in the global Wall Street hedge-fund casino dice game—as well as actual casino owners, like Republican candidate and anti-Mexican bigot/misogynist Donald Trump. This partnership, which stretches back to Trump’s Atlantic City casino bankruptcy in 2009, eventually resulted in Lasry buying him out and becoming the chairman of Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2011, a post Lasry eventually resigned. 

The stories about Lasry in the business press describe him as the “don’t call him that” vulture-fund investor; the optimistic gambler who “bets” on economies like those of Spain or Greece to “recover,” and then profits from that. This 2012 Bloomberg story describes a regular poker game he has with other hedge-fund managers; one colleague assesses him as “good at figuring out what the odds are. He’s willing to take moderate risk.” 

Yet it’s pretty hard to believe that someone who is worth $1.87 billion, according to Forbes—presumably an indication of good business sense—would believe that economies that are in a “death spiral” would miraculously recover. It’s more likely that rather than believing in a Puerto Rican economy that had shown no signs of growth for so long, and whose economy was largely driven by government employment, Lasry bet that its inability to declare bankruptcy would yield a higher return once it defaulted. Avenue Capital was one of many vultures that began hovering over Puerto Rico in late 2013, when its junk-leaning bonds caused credit analyst Richard Larkin to say of the vultures, “They can smell the blood and the fear.”

mr. miracle exposed the fake political system from its snotty rooter to its stinking tooter...,

counterpunch |  Last night’s FOX News GOP Presidential Debate Extravaganza featured the most riveting two minute political exchange ever heard on national television. During a brief colloquy between Republican frontrunner  Donald Trump and Fox moderator Brett Baier, the pugnacious casino magnate revealed the appalling truth about the American political system, that the big money guys like Trump own the whole crooked contraption lock, stock, and barrel, and that, the nation’s fake political leaders do whatever they’re told to do.  Without question, it was most illuminating commentary to ever cross the airwaves. Here’s the entire exchange direct from the transcript:

FOX News Brett Baier (talking to Trump): Now, 15 years ago, you called yourself a liberal on health care. You were for a single-payer system, a Canadian-style system. Why were you for that then and why aren’t you for it now?

TRUMP: As far as single payer, it works in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland. It could have worked in a different age, which is the age you’re talking about here.

What I’d like to see is a private system without the artificial lines around every state. I have a big company with thousands and thousands of employees. And if I’m negotiating in New York or in New Jersey or in California, I have like one bidder. Nobody can bid.

You know why?

Because the insurance companies are making a fortune because they have control of the politicians, of course, with the exception of the politicians on this stage. (uneasy laughter) But they have total control of the politicians. They’re making a fortune.

Get rid of the artificial lines and you will have…yourself great plans…

BAIER: Mr. Trump, it’s not just your past support for single-payer health care. You’ve also supported a host of other liberal policies….You’ve also donated to several Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton included, and Nancy Pelosi. You explained away those donations saying you did that to get business-related favors. And you said recently, quote, “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.”

TRUMP: You’d better believe it.

BAIER: — they do?

TRUMP: If I ask them, if I need them, you know, most of the people on this stage I’ve given to, just so you understand, a lot of money.

TRUMP:  I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people, before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.

mr. miracle should call for a mandatory national service corps (WPA) to build the wall

WaPo |  Trump has committed to a plan that is detailed and ambitious, with none of that trust-me ambiguity. For now it is the only formal plank in his campaign platform; on his Web site, it is the only position listed under the category “Positions.”

“What you have to give to Trump is, whatever way he’s done it, he has pushed this front and center,” said Roy Beck of Numbers­USA, which wants to lower overall U.S. immigration, legal and illegal. The elites of the Republican Party, Beck said, “absolutely did not want this discussed in this debate. And instead it’s front and center. It’s strange, but it is the triumph of the working class of the Republican Party.”

Still, on Monday, even some who supported the ideals of Trump’s plan said they weren’t sure it would actually work. It would require a massive extension of federal authority into maternity wards and Western Union offices, tracing the parentage of children and money to deny illegal immigrants a comfortable spot in U.S. society.

“If we could get 12 million people to leave, why don’t we just do that now? This idea that we’re going to get ’em all to leave, and we’re going to get the good ones back, it’s a fairy tale,” said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks to reduce illegal immigration. “It’s just not the way that government could function. It’s dopey. It’s a gimmick.”

u.s. hasn't had a strategic grain reserve since 2008...,

LATimes |  Grain silos sport quaint silhouettes on country roads, but these stores of corn, soybeans and wheat have played an essential role in the history of drought, flood and frost, and they suggest a solution to the specter of inflation. No one questions why the United States maintains a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The very threat of bringing reserves to the market can moderate the spiking price of crude oil. But when it comes to food prices, our country cannot even threaten to bolster the national supply because the United States does not possess a national grain reserve.

Such was not always the case.

The modern concept of a strategic grain reserve was first proposed in the 1930s by Wall Street legend Benjamin Graham. Graham's idea hinged on the clever management of buffer stocks of grain to tame our daily bread's tendencies toward boom and bust. When grain prices rose above a threshold, supplies could be increased by bringing reserves to the market — which, in turn, would dampen prices. And when the price of grain went into free-fall and farmers edged toward bankruptcy, the need to fill the depleted reserve would increase the demand for corn and wheat, which would prop up the price of grain.

Following Graham's theory, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created a grain reserve that helped rally the price of wheat and saved American farms during the Depression. In the inflationary 1970s, the USDA revamped FDR's program into the Farmer-Owned Grain Reserve, which encouraged farmers to store grain in government facilities by offering low-cost and even no-interest loans and reimbursement to cover the storage costs. But over the next quarter of a century the dogma of deregulated global markets came to dominate American politics, and the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act abolished our national system of holding grain in reserve.

As for all that wheat held in storage, it became part of the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust, a food bank and global charity under the authority of the secretary of Agriculture. The stores were gradually depleted until 2008, when the USDA decided to convert all of what was left into its dollar equivalent. And so the grain that once stabilized prices for farmers, bakers and American consumers ended up as a number on a spreadsheet in the Department of Agriculture.

Now, as the United States must confront climate change, commodity markets riddled by speculation, increased import costs, hosts of regional conflicts and the return of international grain tariffs and export bans, we have put our faith entirely in transnational agribusiness and the global grain market.

Buzz - give it a try

GitHub | Buzz is a novel programming language for heterogeneous robots swarms.

Buzz advocates a compositional approach, by offering primitives to define swarm behaviors both in a bottom-up and in a top-down fashion.

Bottom-up primitives include robot-wise commands and manipulation of neighborhood data through mapping/reducing/filtering operations.

Top-down primitives allow for the dynamic management of robot teams, and for sharing information globally across the swarm.

Self-organization results from the fact that the Buzz run-time platform is purely distributed.

The language can be extended to add new primitives (thus supporting heterogeneous robot swarms) and can be laid on top of other frameworks, such as ROS.

More information is available at http://the.swarming.buzz/wiki/doku.php?id=start.

Buzz - a programming language for self-organizing heterogenous robot swarms

arXiv | We present Buzz, a novel programming language for heterogeneous robot swarms. Buzz advocates a compositional approach, offering primitives to define swarm behaviors both from the perspective of the single robot and of the overall swarm. Single-robot primitives include robot-specific instructions and manipulation of neighborhood data. Swarm-based primitives allow for the dynamic management of robot teams, and for sharing information globally across the swarm. Self-organization stems from the completely decentralized mechanisms upon which the Buzz run-time platform is based. The language can be extended to add new primitives (thus supporting heterogeneous robot swarms), and its run-time platform is designed to be laid on top of other frameworks, such as Robot Operating System. We showcase the capabilities of Buzz by providing code examples, and analyze scalability and robustness of the run-time platform through realistic simulated experiments with representative swarm algorithms.

Evolution of Self-Organized Task Specialization in Robot Swarms

plos |  Division of labor is ubiquitous in biological systems, as evidenced by various forms of complex task specialization observed in both animal societies and multicellular organisms. Although clearly adaptive, the way in which division of labor first evolved remains enigmatic, as it requires the simultaneous co-occurrence of several complex traits to achieve the required degree of coordination. Recently, evolutionary swarm robotics has emerged as an excellent test bed to study the evolution of coordinated group-level behavior. Here we use this framework for the first time to study the evolutionary origin of behavioral task specialization among groups of identical robots. The scenario we study involves an advanced form of division of labor, common in insect societies and known as “task partitioning”, whereby two sets of tasks have to be carried out in sequence by different individuals. Our results show that task partitioning is favored whenever the environment has features that, when exploited, reduce switching costs and increase the net efficiency of the group, and that an optimal mix of task specialists is achieved most readily when the behavioral repertoires aimed at carrying out the different subtasks are available as pre-adapted building blocks. Nevertheless, we also show for the first time that self-organized task specialization could be evolved entirely from scratch, starting only from basic, low-level behavioral primitives, using a nature-inspired evolutionary method known as Grammatical Evolution. Remarkably, division of labor was achieved merely by selecting on overall group performance, and without providing any prior information on how the global object retrieval task was best divided into smaller subtasks. We discuss the potential of our method for engineering adaptively behaving robot swarms and interpret our results in relation to the likely path that nature took to evolve complex sociality and task specialization.

Author Summary
Many biological systems execute tasks by dividing them into finer sub-tasks first. This is seen for example in the advanced division of labor of social insects like ants, bees or termites. One of the unsolved mysteries in biology is how a blind process of Darwinian selection could have led to such highly complex forms of sociality. To answer this question, we used simulated teams of robots and artificially evolved them to achieve maximum performance in a foraging task. We find that, as in social insects, this favored controllers that caused the robots to display a self-organized division of labor in which the different robots automatically specialized into carrying out different subtasks in the group. Remarkably, such a division of labor could be achieved even if the robots were not told beforehand how the global task of retrieving items back to their base could best be divided into smaller subtasks. This is the first time that a self-organized division of labor mechanism could be evolved entirely de-novo. In addition, these findings shed significant new light on the question of how natural systems managed to evolve complex sociality and division of labor.

u.s. mcdonald's fitna get industrial robots...,

WaPo |  Crowded. That’s how Ed Rensi remembers what life was like working at McDonald’s in 1966. There were about double the number of people working in the store — 70 or 80, as opposed to the 30 or 40 there today — because preparing the food just took a lot more doing.

“When I first started at McDonald’s making 85 cents an hour, everything we made was by hand,” Rensi said — from cutting the shortcakes to stirring syrups into the milk for shakes. Over the years, though, ingredients started to arrive packaged and pre-mixed, ready to be heated up, bagged and handed out the window.

“More and more of the labor was pushed back up the chain,” said Rensi, who went on to become chief executive of the company in the 1990s. The company kept employing more grill cooks and cashiers as it expanded, but each one of them accounted for more of each store’s revenue as more sophisticated cooking techniques allowed each to become more productive.

The industry could be ready for another jolt as a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour nears in the District and as other campaigns to boost wages gain traction around the country. About 30 percent of the restaurant industry’s costs come from salaries, so burger-flipping robots — or at least super-fast ovens that expedite the process — become that much more cost-competitive if the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is doubled.

“The problem with the ­minimum-wage offensive is that it throws the accounting of the restaurant industry totally upside down,” said Harold Miller, vice president of franchise development for Persona Pizzeria, who also consults for other chains. “My position is: Pay your people properly, keep them longer, treat them right, and robots are going to be helpful in doing that, because it will help the restaurateur survive.”

taiwan mcdonald's magical pretty soldier sailor moon..,

dailymail |  McDonald's is not always considered the most glamorous place to work, however one server in Taiwan is bringing a little added allure to the counter. 

Hsu Wei-han, whose age was not given, has been attracting plenty of customers to her branch of the fast-food chain in the city of Kaohsiung after she was discovered by a blogger. 

RainDog spotted the doll-like beauty and noted that Wei-han, who is also known as 'Weiwei' or 'Haitun' ('dolphin' in Chinese), was cute and wore a pink shirt and heels. 

She has been called the 'cutest McDonald's goddess in Taiwanese history' after fans pointed out that the country's branches are famous for dressing up their female employees in cute themed outfits, such as sailors or maids.

Playing God?

counterbalance |  QUESTION: Could you tell us where does the idea come from that fiddling with our DNA is somehow sacred?

DR. PETERS: Well, if you go back to the 1950s, people were talking about the secret of life: will scientists discover the secret of life? And then the double helix was discovered. And eventually DNA was described to be what, the secret of life, or sometimes the blueprint of life. And when the Human Genome Project was beginning in 1987-1988, it was described as the holy grail. Boy, if scientists could get into that DNA and find all those genes, they would have the essence, so to speak, of what makes a human being a human being. And I think it's that sort of special status that has drawn our attention towards DNA as being different than other molecules.

QUESTION: You've disagreed with this position that DNA is sacred.

DR. PETERS: Yes. I think what happened is that people began to treat DNA as sacred. By sacred I mean putting up no trespassing signs, saying you can't muck around with it, you can't get in with your wrenches and screwdrivers and mess around because DNA was put there by God. Well, I disagree with that.

QUESTION: Why do you disagree?

DR. PETERS: Well, I think that the DNA that is in your and my bodies right now is sort of an accident of evolution. By accident I don't mean to trivialize it - it's the product of many millions of years of development, but it's not designed in any kind of holy or sacred way. It's full of defects. We may have four or five thousand genes that precipitate diseases, and cause suffering. Now, if God were to design DNA, I think God probably could have done a better job. So, I hesitate to think of it as sacred, holy, special.

QUESTION: Opponents of genetic engineering have often argued that messing with our genes, genetic engineering, is a kind of hubristic "playing God". But you also disagree with that. Why?

DR. PETERS: Well, the phrase "playing God" usually means that we overshoot ourselves, that we're proud, that we're smug, that we think that with our scientific tools we can do more than we actually can. And if we get into the DNA, and if we mess around with it, maybe we'll screw something up. If the genes work in a kind of system with one another, and we modify this gene here, we modify that gene there, maybe the whole system will go out of kilter, and I think people who want to say, don't play God, they want to prevent those big mistakes from happening. And so, by making DNA look sacred, they can say, hands off.

Now, I disagree with that because one aspect of the Human Genome Project that's currently going on that is extremely important is the search for genes that cause disease. And if we can find a gene that causes disease, if we can find the switch that turns it on or turns it off, we can come up with a therapy. And with a therapy, we can help make human life better, right, more healthy in that fashion or another. And I would hate to see a doctrine of the sacrality of DNA that would say, stop that kind f research, stop that kind of improvement of human health.

QUESTION: You've put forward the position that, in fact, by fiddling with our genes we can somehow be "co-creators" with God. Could you explain this concept of co-creation?

DR. PETERS: Well, the first observation I have is that things are always changing. They're not fixed. They don't stand still. Now, the question is, if we're going to influence the direction of change, should we do it for better or for worse? The human DNA is going to change if we do nothing, just out of natural selection, mutation, et cetera. Now, if we have the capacity, if we have the power to alter it in such a way as to make human health better, to relieve human suffering, I think we have a moral responsibility to do that.

Does that mean I'm advocating that we should change the human being entirely, you know, put arms coming out of our heads, perhaps, or eyes on the end of your finger? No, I'm not advocating that kind of thing. But I do think a sensible, careful, step-by-step attempt to improve human health, that's something we are responsible to God for doing.

are humans obsolete?

rpi |  Predictions that humanity will soon yield to successor species are especially popular among those who spend a good amount of time in corporate and university research laboratories where movement on the cutting edge is the key to success. While most scientists and technologists at work in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics, man/machine symbiosis, and similar fields are content with modest descriptions of their work, each of these fields has recently spawned self-proclaimed futurist visionaries touting far more exotic accounts of what is at stake-vast, world-altering changes that loom just ahead. Colorful enough to be attractive to the mass media, champions of post-humanism have emerged as leading publicists for their scientific fields, appearing on best seller lists, as well as television and radio talk shows, to herald an era of astonishing transformations. 

While the claims of post-humanist futurism are always pitched as unprecedented, sensational forecasts, the rhetorical form of such messages has assumed a highly predictable pattern. The writer enthusiastically proclaims that the growth of knowledge in a cutting-edge research field is proceeding at a dizzying pace. He/she presents a barrage of colorful illustrations that highlight recent breakthroughs, hinting at even more impressive ones in the works. Although news from the laboratory may seem scattered and difficult to fathom, there are, the writer explains, discernible long-term trends emerging. The trajectory of development points to revolutionary outcomes, foremost of which will be substantial modifications of human beings as we know them, culminating in the fabrication of one or more new creatures superior to humans in important respects. The proponent insists that developments depicted are inevitable, foreshadowed in close connections between technology and human biology that have already made us "hybrid" or "composite" beings; any thought of returning to an original or "natural" condition is, therefore, simply unrealistic, for the crucial boundaries have already been crossed. Those who try to resist these earth-shaking developments are simply out of touch or, worse, benighted Luddites who resist technological change of any sort. Nevertheless, the post-humanist assures us, there is still need for ethical reflection upon the events unfolding. For although these transformations will necessarily occur, we should think carefully about what it all means and how we can gracefully adapt to these changes in the years to come. 

Typical of this way of arguing is Gregory Stock's Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines Into a Global Superorganism. With a PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins and an MBA from Harvard, Stock is prepared to map both scientific and commercial possibilities at stake in re-engineering the species: 

Both society and the natural environment have previously undergone tumultuous changes, but the essence of being human has remained the same. Metaman, however, is on the verge of significantly altering human form and capacity….

As the nature of human beings begins to change, so too will concepts of what it means to be human. One day humans will be composite beings: part biological, part mechanical, part electronic….

By applying biological techniques to embryos and then to the reproductive process itself, Metaman will take control of human evolution….

No one can know what humans will become, but whether it is a matter of fifty years or five hundred years, humans will eventually undergo radical biological change.