quantum biology

BBCNews | Until recently, the delicate states of matter predicted by quantum mechanics have only been accessed with the most careful experiments: isolated particles at blisteringly low temperatures or pressures approaching that of deep space.

The idea that biology - impossibly warm, wet and messy to your average physicist - should play host to these states was almost heretical.

But a few strands of evidence were bringing the idea into the mainstream, said Luca Turin of the Fleming Institute in Greece.

"There are definitely three areas that have turned out to be manifestly quantum," Dr Turin told the BBC. "These three things... have dispelled the idea that quantum mechanics had nothing to say about biology."

The most established of the three is photosynthesis - the staggeringly efficient process by which plants and some bacteria build the molecules they need, using energy from sunlight. It seems to use what is called "superposition" - being seemingly in more than one place at one time.

Watch the process closely enough and it appears there are little packets of energy simultaneously "trying" all of the possible paths to get where they need to go, and then settling on the most efficient.

"Biology seems to have been able to use these subtle effects in a warm, wet environment and still maintain the [superposition]. How it does that we don't understand," Richard Cogdell of the University of Glasgow told the BBC.

But the surprise may not stop at plants - there are good hints that the trickery is present in animals, too: the navigational feats of birds that cross countries, continents or even fly pole to pole present a compelling behavioural case.

Experiments show that European robins only oriented themselves for migration under certain colours of light, and that very weak radio waves could completely mix up their sense of direction. Neither should affect the standard compass that biologists once believed birds had within their cells.

What makes more sense is the quantum effect of entanglement. Under quantum rules, no matter how far apart an "entangled" pair of particles gets, each seems to "know" what the other is up to - they can even seem to pass information to one another faster than the speed of light.

Experiments suggest this is going on within single molecules in birds' eyes, and John Morton of University College London explained that the way birds sense it could be stranger still.

"You could think about that as... a kind of 'heads-up display' like what pilots have: an image of the magnetic field... imprinted on top of the image that they see around them," he said.

The idea continues to be somewhat controversial - as is the one that your nose might be doing a bit of quantum biology.

Most smell researchers think the way that we smell has to do only with the shapes of odour molecules matching those of receptors in our noses.

But Dr Turin believes that the way smell molecules wiggle and vibrate is responsible - thanks to the quantum effect called tunnelling.

The idea holds that electrons in the receptors in our noses disappear on one side of a smell molecule and reappear on the other, leaving a little bit of energy behind in the process.

studying the extended phenotype...,

NYTimes | The investigation of the genetics of behavior is a huge scientific enterprise, with great progress being made in a variety of species — roundworms, fruit flies, lab mice, sticklebacks. Dr. Hoekstra’s work is unusual in that it deals with a naturally occurring, complicated behavior in mammals that is important for survival. And it is significant that she has been able to separate that behavior into two modules controlled by separate and independent DNA regions — burrow length, and escape tunnels.

Dr. Bargmann said she was impressed at Dr. Hoekstra’s success in unpacking the behavior into modules, a result that adds to the likelihood of one day finding simple genetic controls underlying the mystifying diversity of natural behavior patterns. The extraordinary variety of animal body shapes, after all, has been found to grow out of a relatively few master control genes.

“I really believe that there are rules for behavior that go all the way back,” Dr. Bargmann said.

One component of Dr. Hoekstra’s success has been oddly low-tech: the kind of fast-hardening foam that can be purchased in a hardware store for home repair. It quickly produces an easily measured mold — behavior solidified.

Another important factor is as high-tech as tech gets. Decades ago the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggested that one could study the evolution and genetics of behavior just the way one studies the evolution of body shape: concentrate on what animals build — birds’s nests, beaver dams, termite mounds — and treat them like beak length or coat color. Writing before the development of enormously powerful technology for analyzing DNA, he regretted that his proposals were hypothetical.

They are hypothetical no longer.
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You always have to watch the NYTimes like a hawk. Its reporting of topics in "evolutionary biology" always dangerously skirts Big Don-ism. Any time you mix molecular biology with a nonsensical theory in a disturbing mess of facts and factoids, you run the risk of creating a narrative that will be opportunistically co-opted for knuckledragging political ends. If you're going to talk about molecular biology as evolutionary biology, it is important first and foremost, to establish the clear understanding that molecular biologists will be studying differences in burrowing behavior which are nutrient-dependent and pheromone-controlled via epigenetic effects on genetic predispositions - as these consistently express across species - from microbes to man.

THOSE - are genetic mechanisms of behavior.

Stupid, ignorant, political opportunists will instead leap to unfounded conclusions about IQ, aggression, and a host of other non-molecular, non-falsifiable narrative correlations suited to their own political agenda. 

Bad molecular biologists will lose track of the complex machinery under consideration and fall prey to darwinian nostrums relating the study of beak length and coat color "random mutation" as the cause of adaptive evolution. 

The smart money, symbiogenetically enlightened molecular biologists, will stay focused on the more compelling understanding that adaptive evolution is nutrient-dependent and pheromone-controlled through epigenetic feedback mechanisms within symbiotic cohorts, and that optimized and protracted symbiosis gives rise to speciation, not "red in tooth and claw" random mutation.

could this happen in the u.s.?

independent | With year-round sun and some of Brazil's best beaches, Recife draws a million foreign tourists a year, many of them on new direct flights from Britain and the rest of Europe. It seems odd then to find an electronic sign in the middle of the city which records the daily murder toll. But behind the narrow stretch of beach restaurants and high-rise apartments shown in the tourist brochures lies a violent city. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in Recife in the past year – up to 12 murders a day - making it Brazil's murder capital. Incredibly many of those who are doing the killing are the police.

So routine is murder in Recife that a small group of residents installed the electronic body count. Eduardo Machado, the group's chief organiser, explained that it was an attempt to shock the city fathers into action because, he claims, at present they are turning a blind eye.

"It's a perverse kind of killing," said Mr Machado. "I call it social cleansing because the people being killed are normally black, they're poor and they're from the slums that surround the city. They have become what I call 'the killables'."

Many of "the killables" are no more than children who've been driven on to the city's streets by the crushing poverty and violence of their homes in the sprawling slums – or favelas – that stretch back from the city.

rahm, if paragould won't do it, brush up on your portuguese..,

wikipedia | The Pacifying Police Unit (Portuguese: Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora, also translated as Police Pacification Unit), abbreviated UPP, is a law enforcement and social services program pioneered in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which aims at reclaiming territories, more commonly favelas, controlled by gangs of drug dealers. The program was created and implemented by State Public Security Secretary José Mariano Beltrame, with the backing of Rio Governor Sérgio Cabral. The stated goal of Rio's government is to install 40 UPPs by 2014.

For decades, many of Rio de Janeiro's favelas have been controlled by gangs of armed drug traffickers. Beginning with the first UPP that was implemented in Dona Marta in 2008, many of Rio's major favelas have received pacifying police forces; which are a permanent community presence within the favelas that have them. For decades, Rio has seen a cycle of police raiding favelas, having shootouts with traffickers, and then withdrawing again. And also part of the cycle were frequent wars between different traffickers, leading to more shootouts, endangering the lives of the people living in many of these favelas.

The favelas chosen for the UPP program have previously not paid for public utilities but would have to pay fees to whatever criminal organization controlled the area; this often leads to a recurrence of extortion and tax evasion.

Therefore the concept for the UPP (which was given even more impetus once Rio was chosen to host the FIFA World Cup and the Summer Olympic Games) was finally put into action as a first-step solution to deal with the urban cycle of violence.

martial law in paragould: rahm emanuel - hollar at your boy...,

salon | Updated, Jan. 30: According to local news reports, the police department canceled two subsequent town hall meetings to discuss the heavy handed policing plan. Following outrage from Paragould residents, the police cited “public safety concerns” to cancel the meetings. Meanwhile, Paragould’s mayor has reportedly dialed back his rhetoric around the amped up policing proposal and, according to the Arkansas Times, the mayor said patrolling police would not “constantly” be carrying assault rifles. Although announced to begin in January, no SWAT patrols have begun in Paragould yet.

Original: Following a rise in violent crime in Paragould, an Arkansas town of around 26,000 residents, the mayor and police chief announced that starting this month police in SWAT gear carrying AR-15s would patrol the streets.

“If you’re out walking, we’re going to stop you, ask why you’re out walking, and check for your ID,” police chief Todd Stovall told a December town hall meeting. As if to render the implementation of a visible police state more palatable, Stovall assured residents that police stops would not be based on any profiling: “We’re going to do it to everybody,” he said.

Stovall also told residents he had not consulted an attorney before instituting the plan. HuffPo’s Radley Balko noted that Paragould is not the first town to bring in such measures:

Using SWAT teams for routine patrols isn’t uncommon. Fresno did this for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The city sent its Violent Crimes Suppression Unit into poorer neighborhoods and stopped, confronted, questioned, and searched nearly everyone they encountered. “It’s a war,” one SWAT officer told Christian Parenti in a a report for The Nation (not available online). Another said, “If you’re 21, male, living in one of these neighborhoods, and you’re not in our computer, then there’s something definitely wrong.”

Fist tap Dale.

chicago: hands-off our guns, handle your ni-nis...,

nytimes | Not a single gun shop can be found in this city because they are outlawed. Handguns were banned in Chicago for decades, too, until 2010, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that was going too far, leading city leaders to settle for restrictions some describe as the closest they could get legally to a ban without a ban. Despite a continuing legal fight, Illinois remains the only state in the nation with no provision to let private citizens carry guns in public.

And yet Chicago, a city with no civilian gun ranges and bans on both assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, finds itself laboring to stem a flood of gun violence that contributed to more than 500 homicides last year and at least 40 killings already in 2013, including a fatal shooting of a 15-year-old girl on Tuesday.

To gun rights advocates, the city provides stark evidence that even some of the toughest restrictions fail to make places safer. “The gun laws in Chicago only restrict the law-abiding citizens and they’ve essentially made the citizens prey,” said Richard A. Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association. To gun control proponents, the struggles here underscore the opposite — a need for strict, uniform national gun laws to eliminate the current patchwork of state and local rules that allow guns to flow into this city from outside. 

“Chicago is like a house with two parents that may try to have good rules and do what they can, but it’s like you’ve got this single house sitting on a whole block where there’s anarchy,” said the Rev. Ira J. Acree, one among a group of pastors here who have marched and gathered signatures for an end to so much shooting. “Chicago is an argument for laws that are statewide or, better yet, national.” 

Chicago’s experience reveals the complications inherent in carrying out local gun laws around the nation. Less restrictive laws in neighboring communities and states not only make guns easy to obtain nearby, but layers of differing laws — local and state — make it difficult to police violations. And though many describe the local and state gun laws here as relatively stringent, penalties for violating them — from jail time to fines — have not proven as severe as they are in some other places, reducing the incentive to comply. 

Lately, the police say they are discovering far more guns on the streets of Chicago than in the nation’s two more populous cities, Los Angeles and New York. They seized 7,400 guns here in crimes or unpermitted uses last year (compared with 3,285 in New York City), and have confiscated 574 guns just since Jan. 1 — 124 of them last week alone.

white power to the rescue..,

truthdig | Fliers reading “Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Wants You to Join” appeared in the mailboxes of white families in Memphis in early January. The Ku Klux Klan also distributed pamphlets a few days ago in an Atlanta suburb. The Tennessee Legislature last year officially declared July 13 as Nathan Bedford Forrest Day to honor his birthday. There are 32 historical markers honoring Forrest in Tennessee alone and several in other Southern states. Montgomery, Ala., which I visited last fall, has a gigantic Confederate flag on the outskirts of the city, planted there by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Confederate monuments dot Montgomery’s city center. There are three Confederate state holidays in Alabama, including Martin Luther King/Robert E. Lee Day. Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi also honor Lee’s birthday. Jefferson Davis’ birthday is a state holiday in Alabama and Florida. And re-enactments of Confederate victories in the Civil War crowd Southern calendars.

The steady rise of ethnic nationalism over the past decade, the replacing of history with mendacious and sanitized versions of lost glory, is part of the moral decay that infects a dying culture. It is a frightening attempt, by those who are desperate and trapped, to escape through invented history their despair, impoverishment and hopelessness. It breeds intolerance and eventually violence. Violence becomes in this perverted belief system a cleansing agent, a way to restore a lost world. There are ample historical records that disprove the myths espoused by the neo-Confederates, who insist the Civil War was not about slavery but states’ rights and the protection of traditional Christianity. But these records are useless in puncturing their self-delusion, just as documentary evidence does nothing to blunt the self-delusion of Holocaust deniers.

Those who retreat into fantasy cannot be engaged in rational discussion, for fantasy is all that is left of their tattered self-esteem. When their myths are attacked as untrue it triggers not a discussion of facts and evidence but a ferocious emotional backlash. The challenge of the myth threatens what is left of hope. And as the economy unravels, as the future looks bleaker and bleaker, this terrifying myth gains potency. 

when trees die, people die...,

theatlantic | The blight was first detected in June 2002, when the trees in Canton, Michigan, got sick. The culprit, the emerald ash borer, had arrived from overseas, and it rapidly spread -- a literal bug -- across state and national lines to Ohio, Minnesota, Ontario. It popped up in more distant, seemingly random locations as infested trees were unwittingly shipped beyond the Midwest.

Within four years of first becoming infested, the ash trees die -- over 100 million since the plague began. In some cases, their death has an immediate impact, as they fall on cars, houses, and people. In the long term, their disappearance means parks and neighborhoods, once tree-lined, are now bare.

Something else, less readily apparent, may have happened as well. When the U.S. Forest Service looked at mortality rates in counties affected by the emerald ash borer, they found increased mortality rates. Specifically, more people were dying of cardiovascular and lower respiratory tract illness -- the first and third most common causes of death in the U.S. As the infestation took over in each of these places, the connection to poor health strengthened.

The "relationship between trees and human health," as they put it, is convincingly strong. They controlled for as many other demographic factors as possible. And yet, they are unable to satisfactorily explain why this might be so.

In a literal sense, of course, the absence of trees would mean the near absence of oxygen -- on the most basic level, we cannot survive without them. We know, too, that trees act as a natural filter, cleaning the air from pollutants, with measurable effects in urban areas. The Forest Service put a 3.8 billion dollar value on the air pollution annually removed by urban trees. In Washington D.C., trees remove nitrogen dioxide to an extent equivalent to taking 274,000 cars off the traffic-packed beltway, saving an estimated $51 million in annual pollution-related health care costs.

 But a line of modern thought suggests that trees and other elements of natural environments might affect our health in more nuanced ways as well. Roger Ulrich demonstrated the power of having a connection with nature, however tenous, in his classic 1984 study with patients recovering from gall bladder removal surgery in a suburban Pennsylvania hospital. He manipulated the view from the convalescents' windows so that half were able to gaze at nature while the others saw only a brick wall. Those with trees outside their window recovered faster, and requested fewer pain medications, than those with a "built" view. They even had slightly fewer surgical complications.

drought is killing trees across the midwest

usatoday | Hundreds of thousands of trees died in the historic drought of 2012, and many more will succumb in the next few years, scientists say.

"This is just beginning," says Janna Beckerman, a plant pathologist at Indiana's Purdue University. "I suspect we'll see trees still dying for the next two or three years."

Indiana's white cedar and Florida cypress trees began dying in late summer, she says, and Alberta and Colorado blue spruce are succumbing now.

Trees affected by a 2010-11 drought still are dying across Louisiana, says Keith Hawkins, a Louisiana State University AgCenter forester. Some trees "reached a threshold from which they can't recover — especially older, larger trees," he says.

About 301 million trees died in rural Texas because of that drought, the Texas A&M Forest Service says.

Tree deaths are dismaying some communities:

• Brookings, S.D., has lost about 300 trees to drought, says Peter Colson, director of the city's Department of Parks, Recreation and Forestry. "It's expensive," he says. "The trees we plant run $35 to $200 a pop." The city cut back on tree planting last fall because "we didn't have the manpower or equipment to water hundreds of trees," Colson says.
• More than half the 88 big trees marked for removal in McPherson, Kan., last year "died just from drought," says city parks superintendent Paul Katzer. "We'll lose another 100 to 150 trees just from drought this year." For the first time, the city is siphoning water from two lakes to water trees this winter, he says.
• Brett O'Brien, natural resources supervisor for the Columbia, Mo., Parks and Recreation Department, says "a significant number" of that city's trees died because of dry conditions. "We lost a lot of Norway spruce and white pines, and some of the oaks, too," he says.

O'Brien is hesitant to plant new trees because "we have not really left the drought yet," he says. When he does replant, he's considering less vulnerable species such as the Kentucky coffeetree.

cities change temperatures for thousands of miles

ucar | Even if you live more than 1,000 miles from the nearest large city, it could be affecting your weather. In a new study that shows the extent to which human activities are influencing the atmosphere, scientists have concluded that the heat generated by everyday activities in metropolitan areas alters the character of the jet stream and other major atmospheric systems. This affects temperatures across thousands of miles, significantly warming some areas and cooling others, according to the study this week in Nature Climate Change.

The extra “waste heat” generated from buildings, cars, and other sources in major Northern Hemisphere urban areas causes winter warming across large areas of northern North America and northern Asia. Temperatures in some remote areas increase by as much as 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the research by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography; University of California, San Diego; Florida State University; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

At the same time, the changes to atmospheric circulation caused by the waste heat cool areas of Europe by as much as 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F), with much of the temperature decrease occurring in the fall.

The net effect on global mean temperatures is nearly negligible—an average increase worldwide of just 0.01 degrees C (about 0.02 degrees F). This is because the total human-produced waste heat is only about 0.3 percent of the heat transported across higher latitudes by atmospheric and oceanic circulations.

However, the noticeable impact on regional temperatures may explain why some regions are experiencing more winter warming than projected by climate computer models, the researchers conclude. They suggest that models be adjusted to take the influence of waste heat into account. Fist tap Dale.

does the future belong to open cities?

mondediplo | The Levant means “where the sun rises”: the eastern Mediterranean. Levant is a geographical word, free of associations with race or religion, defined not by nationality but by the sea. The great Levantine cities of Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut were windows on the world, ports more open and cosmopolitan than inland cities like Ankara, Damascus and Cairo. From the beginning Levantine cities were international. They shared defining characteristics: geography, diplomacy, language, hybridity, trade, pleasure, modernity and vulnerability. All are present in today’s global cities.

Levantine cities were trading cities, integrated into the economic systems of Europe and Asia. Like Hong Kong or Dubai today, they were synonymous with enterprise. Smyrna exported figs and raisins; Alexandria cotton; Beirut emigrants to the Americas and Africa. People and business, not monuments, were their main attraction. Thackeray wrote that he liked Smyrna because, having no monuments to visit, it produced no “fatigue of sublimity”.

Ports bring music as well as freedom, and Smyrna created its own sound, Smyrnaika or rebetiko. It was the music of rebels, particularly appreciated by the qabadays (Turkish) or dais (Greek) — the toughs who worked, gambled and fought with each other. Rebetiko songs mixed western polyphony and eastern monophony and described the sufferings of the poor, the torments of love or the pleasures of hashish. As early as the 17th century, according to the French consul, the Chevalier d’Arvieux, Beirut was distinguished from neighbouring ports by “parties of pleasure”. It still is. Beirut has become the capital of Arab night life.

Levantine cities also brought education and modernity. Modern Turkey was born in the Levantine port of Salonika, birthplace of Mustafa Kemal. The Young Turk revolution broke out there in 1908, helped by the protection of foreign consuls and the proximity of foreign states. Latife Hanim, the wife of Mustafa Kemal and the first Turkish woman to be unveiled in public, was educated at a French school in Smyrna.

In our new global age, geography is biting back at history. Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut are now trying to revive their cosmopolitan identities. Istanbul, by the 1970s entirely Turkish, is now a global business city again, the shopping centre of the Balkans and Black Sea. The Arab Spring shows the desire of people in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia to reconnect with the outside world and their Mediterranean past — break out of the prison of the nation state.

Today’s global cities — London, Paris, New York, Dubai — are new Levantine cities. (They have welcomed thousands of immigrants from Smyrna, Beirut and Alexandria.) Global cities share the same international character: increasingly different from their hinterlands, they act as educators, liberators and modernisers. Three hundred and fifty languages are spoken in London, and English is the new lingua franca.

The future belongs to cities with the energy and freedom of cosmopolitanism, rather than to inland capitals dominated by their military-industrial complex: to Beirut not Damascus; Dubai not Riyadh; New York not Washington. States are dinosaurs: cities are the future. The New York Times of 7 January 2012 called China “a thin political union composed of semi-autonomous cities.” We are all Levantines now.

is pedophilia a wetware based sexual orientation?

latimes | Like many forms of sexual deviance, pedophilia once was thought to stem from psychological influences early in life. Now, many experts view it as a sexual orientation as immutable as heterosexuality or homosexuality. It is a deep-rooted predisposition — limited almost entirely to men — that becomes clear during puberty and does not change.

The best estimates are that between 1% and 5% of men are pedophiles, meaning that they have a dominant attraction to prepubescent children.

Not all pedophiles molest children. Nor are all child molesters pedophiles. Studies show that about half of all molesters are not sexually attracted to their victims. They often have personality disorders or violent streaks, and their victims are typically family members.

By contrast, pedophiles tend to think of children as romantic partners and look beyond immediate relatives. They include chronic abusers familiar from the headlines — Catholic priests, coaches and generations of Boy Scout leaders.

Other pedophiles are "good people who are struggling," said Dr. Fred Berlin, a psychiatrist who heads the Johns Hopkins Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit. "They're tortured souls fighting like heck not to do this. We do virtually nothing in terms of reaching out to these folks. We drive it underground."

what comes first, the brain function or the behavior?

psychologicalscience | By examining patterns of brain activity in the fusiform face area -- a brain area involved in face perception -- the researchers were able to predict the race of the person that the participant was viewing, but only for those participants with stronger, negative implicit race attitudes.

These results suggest that the ways in which Black and White faces are represented in this brain region differ for people with a stronger, implicit race bias compared to people with less or no bias. This implies that people with stronger, negative implicit race attitudes may actually perceive Black and White faces to look more different.

Tobias Brosch notes that "these results suggest it may be possible to predict differences in implicit race bias at the individual level using brain data." Elizabeth Phelps adds "although these findings may be of interest given the behavioral and societal implications of race bias, our ability to predict race bias based on brain data is relatively modest at this time."

can black america have a decent conversation?

clutch | While perusing several of the hundreds of Django Unchained conversations happening on social media, I began to get this nagging feeling that just wouldn’t go away. It had nothing to do with the hatred hurled at Spike Lee or the brittle enthusiasm over Quentin Tarantino. It didn’t have anything to do with the film’s slant towards colorism and depiction of the White-Savior Complex as heroism — or even why the Tupac song at the end stopped right when I was getting into it.

All of that faded in light of the revelation that we — as in black descendants of slaves in America — converse as if we hate each other.

*And please skip the “Who is we?” question. If it’s not for you, the browse button is that way.*

Sambo, coon, nigger, nigga, and Uncle Tom have all been spoken with such a deep-seated hatred and resentment that I have literally recoiled from my screen at times — in disbelief, in dismay, in sadness. And it’s not just Django; any conversation that involves race spirals out of control so swiftly it’s as combustible as a lit match on gasoline. I asked myself, “Why are we using plantation language to insult one another?” “Why are all these black people fighting over a white man’s rendition of slavery, or a black woman sleeping with a white man (see: Scandal); or the infallibility (or cultural mirage) of a black president?” And the answer is simple:

Because some of us are still slaves.

Oh, the shackles aren’t there — for those of us not in the Prison Industrial Complex — but the damage has been done. And we are still divided into a contemporary version of what Ancestor Malcolm called House Negroes and Field Negroes.

sheriff, you can count on me...,

rawstory | A Wisconsin sheriff has drawn criticism from other public officials for a radio commercial telling residents not to wait for authorities to help them and to arm themselves for protection.

According to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. can be heard in the ad saying, “With officers laid off and furloughed, simply calling 911 and waiting is no longer your best option. You could beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide under the bed, or you can fight back.”

Clarke also encourages residents to sign up for firearms training courses, saying, “I need you in the game,” and, “We’re partners now. Can I count on you?”

what's that africom cover story again?

antiwar | But Patrick Meehan, chairman of the US Congressional committee that drew up the report, said “While I recognize there is little evidence at this moment to suggest Boko Haram is planning attacks against the [US] homeland, lack of evidence does not mean it cannot happen.”

Washington’s interest in Africa goes back at least to 2007, when the Pentagon’s AFRICOM was formed, long before rebels in Libya or militants in Mali were a threats to exaggerate.

The dominant way of thinking in Washington is that the US should be involved in every corner of the planet, and the pressure to always “do something” is intense.

But as Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations recently commented with regards to the intervention in Mali, “Some things that happen on the other 94% of the earth that isn’t the US, has nothing to do with the US, nor requires a US response.”

racism is racism...,

esquire | There is no point in mincing words. What the Virginia legislature is entertaining now in regards to its election laws is flatly fcking racist.  That it is in response to changing demographics that make Virginia a tough get for the Republicans in presidential elections now doesn't matter. That it is what we have come to expect from Republican-majority state legislatures around the country now doesn't matter. That it's naked opportunism doesn't matter.  That it may not pass doesn't matter. This is a legislature acting to devalue African American voters to the advantage of white voters. This is Jim Crow bullshit, and no politician who deals in it, and no political party that continues to support said politician, is worthy of support by decent people in the year 20-goddamn-13.

The bill would apportion electors by congressional district to the candidate who wins each of the state's 11 districts. The candidate who carries a majority of the districts would also win the two electors not tied to congressional districts. Sen. Charles W. "Bill" Carrico, R-Grayson, said the change is necessary because Virginia's populous, urbanized areas such as the Washington, D.C., suburbs and Hampton Roads can outvote rural regions such as his, rendering their will irrelevant.

Thank you, Senator "Bill," for making it plain. There are now more people in the "urbanized" areas -- and you don't need the Enigma machine to decode that baby, do you, Paul Ryan? -- than there are in the "rural" areas so, therefore, the system is unfair because white people don't win any more. It's not like we shouldn't know it when we see itm because it's not like we haven't seen this before.   Fist tap Dale.

will the next great crisis massively shift america toward conservatism?

naturalnews | There is a very good reason why people who live in cities tend to be liberal while those who live in rural areas tend to be conservative. In a city, the existence of nearby neighbors, the shared dependence on infrastructure and the close proximity of police stations automatically lends itself to a socialist mindset. On issues like guns, city people seem to be unable to imagine why anyone would "need" a rifle, for example, and because all guns scare them, they would prefer to force everyone across the country to turn them all in.

People who live in rural areas, in great contrast, have every reason to be more conservative and independent. Their local sheriff might be 30 minutes away in an emergency, meaning that self protection is truly up to you and can't simply be delegated to someone else. Self-reliance means survival. In rural living, firearms are absolutely necessary tools to protect your animals from predators, eliminate varmints that are destroying your garden, and provide real security for legitimate threats to your safety. People who live in cities tend not to be able to understand these things because they can't imagine country life.

Because cities pack so many people in such a small space, there is a commonsense basis for lots of little laws and regulations on things like noise, littering and even your car's emissions. After all, one incredibly noisy person living in an apartment can prevent a hundred people from getting to sleep, so noise ordinances make sense where people live in close proximity.

Out in the country, where the nearest house might be a quarter-mile away, noise ordinances make no sense. Regulations on every little detail of the lives of the people simply don't fly.

FACT: Today, about 80% of the U.S. population lives in cities.

the systematic appropriation of shining manhood reaches endgame...,

guardian | Yesterday, I highlighted the extraordinary anti-war speech Martin Luther King gave in 1967, in which he said, among other things, that the US government is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and the leading exponent of "the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long." The speech was devoted to arguing that America's militarism and war-fighting were degrading the soul of the nation and the citizenry and - for financial, political and cultural reasons - were making domestic progress impossible.

The US Air Force's Global Strike Command yesterday posted a truly vile bit of propaganda in which it appropriates King's image, name and words in order to claim that he would "be proud to see our Global Strike team . . . standing side-by-side ensuring the most powerful weapons in the US arsenal remain the credible bedrock of our national defense" (ellipses in original):

"The Department of Defense is a leader in equal opportunity for all patriots seeking to serve this great nation. . . The vigilant warriors in AFGSC understand they are all equal and unified in purpose to provide a safe, secure and effective deterrent force for the United States. . . .
"Dr. King would be proud to see our Global Strike team - comprised of Airmen, civilians and contractors from every race, creed, background and religion - standing side-by-side ensuring the most powerful weapons in the US arsenal remain the credible bedrock of our national defense. . . Our team must overlook our differences to ensure perfection as we maintain and operate our weapon systems. . . Maintaining our commitment to our Global Strike team, our families and our nation is a fitting tribute to Dr. King as we celebrate his legacy."

The US military - which is currently bombing Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen at least, all in secret - just exploited one of the 20th Century's greatest proponents of nonviolence and most vehement opponents of US militarism as a public face for its aggression and violence in the world. While King may have preferred to see an integrated military rather than one divided by racial strife, his condemnations of US militarism were particularly harsh when it came to the way the US military taught American citizens to embrace a culture of violence ("I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government").

stephen obama is candyland's greatest asset...,

democracynow | Premiering this week at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the new documentary "Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield" follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill to Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen as he chases down the hidden truths behind America’s expanding covert wars. We’re joined by Scahill and the film’s director, Rick Rowley, an independent journalist with Big Noise Films. "We’re looking right now at a reality that President Obama has essentially extended the very policies that many of his supporters once opposed under President Bush," says Scahill, author of the bestseller "Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army" and a forthcoming book named after his film. "One of the things that humbles both of us is that when you arrive in a village in Afghanistan and knock on someone’s door, you’re the first American they’ve seen since the Americans that kicked that door in and killed half their family," Rowley says. "We promised them that we would do everything we could to make their stories be heard in the U.S. ... Finally we’re able to keep those promises." [includes rush transcript]

the next war?

tomdispatch | Once upon a time, former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping suggested that Asia’s Pacific powers and wannabes should “put aside differences and jointly develop resources.”  That was, of course, when China itself was still something of a wannabe and no one was talking about it becoming the world’s largest economy.  Now, it’s the rising power on planet Earth, achieving a more-than-century-old dream of returning to national greatness -- as well as an eye-blistering, health-endangering level of industrial and car pollution that has its own name, “airpocalypse.” Problem is the idea of regional cooperation turns out to have been the real dream and now, it seems, everyone in the Pacific basin has woken up.

“Jointly develop”?  What an ephemeral thought at a time when the urge to power up ever more cars and factories (sending yet more pollution, not to speak of greenhouse gases, into Asian and planetary skies) has merged with advances in drilling technology for “extreme energy.”  Together, they have made a series of previously unremarkable islets in the Pacific -- which just happen to have prospective oil and natural gas reserves under them -- look too valuable to resist claiming. So China, Japan, and various other Asian countries are insisting those bits of land are theirs and theirs alone.  Toss in that hideous imponderable national pride and, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare points out today, you have the potential for one of the dumber, more destructive face-offs in recent history.  With its usual fabulous timing, the U.S., already heavily garrisoning parts of Asia, has jumped in with both feet, only exacerbating tensions in the region, while promising to bring more of its own weaponry to bear, and sell more of that weaponry to its allies.

As Klare, author of the invaluable The Race for What’s Left (just out in paperback), indicates, this couldn't be more ludicrous.  After all, China, Japan, and the U.S. are so economically intertwined that one can’t twitch without the others suffering.  In other words, any kind of conflict among them is bound to make mincemeat of their collective economic wellbeing.  In fact, last October, after a confrontation over some of those islands, angry anti-Japanese protests and calls for boycotts of Japanese goods swept China.  The uproar briefly closed Japanese plants in that country, took a bite out of Japanese car sales, and knocked down Japanese stock prices.  Japan's economy took a serious hit as well, which should surprise no one since China has recently pulled ahead of the U.S. as that country’s major export market.  All of this, until tamped down, threatened the wellbeing of the global economy, and yet it was a mere hiccup in terms of what might be coming.

What better argument could there be for self-interested cooperation in the Pacific, if only anyone in the involved countries, including ours, were actually walking the walk, instead of just intermittently talking the talk?

do we need technology to help us remember the future?

wired | If you want to recall moments in your life, you’ve got thousands of photos and emails to help you. Forgot the details of a news story from last month? Google’s got your back. The high tech dream of lifelogging”—capturing everything important to you—is increasingly becoming real.

But there’s one big area where our digital recall falls short: prospective memory.

Today’s tech helps mostly with retrospective or semantic memory, events or facts we’ve encountered in the past. Prospective memory is different. It’s our ability to remember to remember something—like stopping to grab the dry cleaning on the way home.

As it turns out, this is where our pain really lies.

Sure, it’s embarrassing when our retrospective memory fails, like when you space out on a colleague’s name. But failures of prospective memory can wreck your career or life: Forget to attend a crucial meeting or file a tax document on time and things go downhill from there. Microsoft researcher Abigail Sellen has studied everyday memory lapses, and she found that people didn’t complain much about forgetting the past. What really killed them was forgetting the future. Prospective memory is about getting things done.

Unfortunately, buffing your brain with memory-training tricks won’t necessarily help. Some studies have found that people who are better at remembering facts are actually worse at remembering tasks. Call it the absentminded-professor effect.

Why does prospective memory fail? Partly because it’s tricky to cue. Prospective recall is about doing task A when we’re in place B or at time C. But place B or time C on its own doesn’t always clearly indicate that you have to do something.

“The thing with prospective memory,” Sellen says, “is giving you the right trigger at the right time and place.” Fist tap Dale.

internalizing the internet...,

thescientist | Over the next 10 years, people will increasingly shape their view of themselves and their position in the world using their interactions on Facebook, online games, and other social media, rather than traditional identity-shaping features, such as religion, job, ethnicity, and age, according to a report released by the Government Office for Science's Foresight program of the United Kingdom. While the study acknowledges that the trend can have both positive and negative effects on individuals, it predicts that online identities will have an overall profound impact on society in the near future.

“This report shows that ‘identity’ is not a simple notion,” Sir John Beddington, head of the UK Government Office for Science, wrote in the foreword of the report. “People can have many different overlapping identities, which are fundamental to their individuality. Identities can exercise a powerful influence on the health and well being of communities, and the degree to which they can build up social capital.”

what the fbi doesn't want you to know about its "secret" surveillance methods...,

eff | The FBI had to rewrite the book on its domestic surveillance activities in the wake of last January’s landmark Supreme Court decision in United States v. Jones. In Jones, a unanimous court held that federal agents must get a warrant to attach a GPS device to a car to track a suspect for long periods of time. But if you want to see the two memos describing how the FBI has reacted to Jones — and the new surveillance techniques the FBI is using beyond GPS trackers — you’re out of luck. The FBI says that information is “private and confidential.”

Yes, now that the Supreme Court ruled the government must get a warrant to use its previous go-to surveillance technique, it has now apparently decided that it’s easier to just keep everything secret. The ACLU requested the memos under the Freedom of Information Act — which you can see FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann waving around in public here — and the FBI redacted them almost entirely.

Though the FBI won’t release the memos, we do have some information from other sources on the surveillance techniques federal agents are already using. And for the most part the FBI contends they do not need a warrant, and one wonders, given the public nature of this information, why they are officially claiming its "secret." Fist tap Arnach.

all wars are banker's wars...,

whatreallyhappened | The German government recently asked for the return of some of their gold bullion from the Bank of France and the New York Federal Reserve. France has said it will take 5 years to return Germany's gold. The United States has said they will need 8 years to return Germany's gold. This suggests strongly that the Bank of France and the NY Federal Reserve have used the deposited gold for other purposes, and they are scrambling to find new gold to cover the shortfall and prevent a gold run. So it is inevitable that suddenly France invades Mali, ostensibly to combat Al Qaeda, with the US joining in. Mali just happens to be one of the world's largest gold producers with gold accounting for 80% of Mali exports. War for the bankers does not get more obvious than that!

You have been raised by a public school system and media that constantly assures you that the reasons for all these wars and assassinations are many and varied. The US claims to bring democracy to the conquered lands (they haven't; the usual result of a US overthrow is the imposition of a dictatorship, such as the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iran's democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh and the imposition of the Shah, or the 1973 CIA overthrow of Chile's democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende, and the imposition of Augusto Pinochet), or to save a people from a cruel oppressor, revenge for 9-11, or that tired worn-out catch all excuse for invasion, weapons of mass destruction. Assassinations are always passed off as "crazed lone nuts" to obscure the real agenda.

The real agenda is simple. It is enslavement of the people by creation of a false sense of obligation. That obligation is false because the Private Central Banking system, by design, always creates more debt than money with which to pay that debt. Private Central Banking is not science, it is a religion; a set of arbitrary rules created to benefit the priesthood, meaning the owners of the Private Central Bank. The fraud persists, with often lethal results, because the people are tricked into believing that this is the way life is suppoed to be and no alternative exists or should be dreamt of. The same was true of two earlier systems of enslavement, Rule by Divine Right and Slavery, both systems built to trick people into obedience, and both now recognized by modern civilizatyion as illegitimate. Now we are entering a time in human history where we will recognize that rule by debt, or rule by Private Central Bankers issuing the public currency as a loan at interest, is equally illegitimate. It only works as long as people allow themselves to believe that this is the way life is supposed to be.

the colonial powers never really left...,

National Post |  Africa may have achieved independence, but the old colonial ties are still important as France’s decision to send troops to Mali to fight Islamist extremists shows. The old colonial powers in Africa may no longer be the rulers, but they still exert influence and have strong economic and political links. David McDonald, professor of the Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, says, “The French and the English were much more strategic in terms of recognizing that they wanted to maintain neo-colonial linkages with their former colonies. So it was shedding the direct authoritarian power at the barrel of a gun and replacing that with independence, but an independence that was, and is still to some extent, extremely dependent on the political and economic will of the former colonial masters.” – The National Post’s Rubab Abid and Richard Johnson look at the former colonies and former colonial powers who still dabble inside the continent they once owned.  Fist tap Dale.

at least get your story together fellas...,

LeMonde | French former Prime Minister Alain Juppé has called for clarification of France’s objectives in Mali, after current Defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian appeared to suggest that the French army was intent on eliminating the islamists from the North.

“The original aim was to stop the jihadists and terrorists from reaching Bamako,” Juppé told French radio station Europe 1. “I have the impression today that we have undertaken the total re-capture of Malian territory, which is an immense task.”

“France does not have the means to do this alone” Juppé declared. “We must be more active in re establishing constitutional order in Mali”.

He said that only an African force could help restore such order in Mali.

When French president François Hollande launched the offensive on 11 January, he spoke of stopping the advance of the islamists from the North and protecting the 6,000 French citizens in Mali.

Jean-François Copé, of the opposition UMP party like Juppé, also raised questions about France’s military intervention in Mali, in an interview on French television station BFM-TV.

“Is it a struggle against international terrorism? Is it a struggle against terrorism in the region? Is it to allow the re unification of Mali?”

poverty's effect on learning redux...,

aera-l | In response to my post "Barriers to Better K-12 Math Education: Poverty and the Inadequate Undergraduate Education of Prospective K-12 Teachers [Hake (2013)] at Ed Wall (2013b), in his Math-Learn post at made 2 points: (1) My statement that Wall implied that the dumbing down of elementary school mathematics in the U.S. is due to Math Education Researcher's preoccupation with the secondary years is "more than a little un-thoughtful." (2) His post "Re: Do We Learn All the Math We Need For Ordinary Life Before 5th Grade?" [Wall (2013a)] at had more to do with (a) his agreement with David Hawkins - see signature quote - which Wall assumes I have refuted, and (b) people such as myself who " 'imply' that children are less than capable because of their socioeconomic status." [Non-subscribers to Math-Learn can access Wall's post by taking a minute to "Join this List" at the Math-Learn archives.]

Here I refute Wall's 2 points with emphasis on Wall's incorrect point 2b: "people such as myself 'imply' that children are less than capable because of their socioeconomic status." On the contrary, I implied that children *in poverty* are less capable of *academic achievement* than children not in poverty.

I think that children in poverty are probably just as *inherently* capable as children not in poverty, but societal and home factors conspire against their academic achievement. For example many of them: (a) are subjected to poor teaching, (b) attend dilapidated schools with high student and teacher turnover, (c) have academically uninvolved parents, (d) partake of few out-of-school enrichment activities, (e) have limited access to books, (f) receive inadequate nutrition, (g) live in slums, (h) come from broken families, (i) are threatened by gang violence, (j) have few academic role models, and (k) suffer from environmental hazards such as lead poisoning.

words indicating labour in most european languages originate in an imagery of compulsion, torment, affliction and persecution

guardian | In the modern experience, poverty is closely associated with unemployment or the absence of work. Since the earliest poor laws, work has been advocated as the remedy for poverty. Politicians repeatedly tell us that "work must pay" and that, like the good woman in the Book of Proverbs, none should eat "the bread of idleness". Setting the poor to labour has been seen as the surest guarantor of combating poverty; and the Christian era has been dominated by the idea of a fair reward for an honest day's work. The labourer is worthy of his hire.

But work has not always been a way out of poverty. For it is also axiomatic that it is the lot of humankind to labour, and not necessarily in the hope of achieving more than a bare subsistence. The etymology of all the words for "work" in European languages suggests work as coercion, certainly not for the prosperity of the worker, but as a fulfilment of human destiny. Ecclesiastes 3:22 declares: "There is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion." Words indicating labour in most European languages originate in an imagery of compulsion, torment, affliction and persecution. The French word travail (and Spanish trabajo), like its English equivalent, are derived from the Latin trepaliare – to torture, to inflict suffering or agony. The word peine, meaning penalty or punishment, also is used to signify arduous labour, something accomplished with great effort. The German Arbeit suggests effort, hardship and suffering; it is cognate with the Slavonic rabota (from which English derives "robot"), a word meaning corvee, forced or serf labour. In romance languages, words from the Latin laborare have come to mean ploughing or tilling the earth, although in Italian, lavoro also means work in general. The Latin meaning was anything accomplished with difficulty and struggle.

and the church that you get...,

With session number three pending, I thought I'd briefly recap the topics covered in sessions one and two, with modest/brief/mild impressions of the instructional intentions/aims of Sister Mary Margaret - our instructor in returning christian initiation for adults - who happens to bear a more than passing resemblance to Mother Angelica.

Session 1. was presented as an introduction to the Angelus Prayer;

The Angel of the Lord declared to Mary:
And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.

    Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of
    our death. Amen.

Behold the handmaid of the Lord: Be it done unto me according to Thy word.

    Hail Mary . . .

And the Word was made Flesh: And dwelt among us.

    Hail Mary . . .


Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Let us pray:

Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts; that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ, Thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of His Resurrection, through the same Christ Our Lord.

Amen.

But we could more accurately have known and understood this session as the "miraculous fruit of the womb" lesson.

Sister Mary Margaret's ninety minute exegesis on this prayer focused exclusively on the serially re-presented old testament account of female barreness capped off with a quick reminder of how that theme was echoed in the gospel with the story of Elizabeth the mother of John the Baptist. The highlight of the evening's presentation came when Sister Mary Margaret was at the peak of warmness to her theme and blurted out "how miraculous it was that our lord would see fit to bestow the sexual pleasures on old women who had passed their time but persevered by faith".  That the kindly sister's conception of these stories is completely literal and thoroughly personal - was abundantly clear. That the subtext of her lesson was about the special nature of the fruit of the womb was also rather transparently obvious.

The sister was both asserting a biblical grounding for controversial church teaching and authority, and, jigging a lure to see if any of the participants in returning christian initiation disagreed with the same.

Session 2. was a "behind the scenes" show and tell on the uniqueness and exclusivity of the Catholic franchise.

We were taken on a tour of the sachristy

Shown all the sacred vessels

Shown the interior and the contents of the tabernacle

Shown the location of the reliquary - but not its contents - in this case beneath the altar.

The church doctrine on literal transubstantiation was carefully underscored - as well as the specific nature of the church as that communion of persons authorized and in good standing to participate in this literal, physical supernatural network maintained by God's vicars.

Sister Mary Margaret recounted for us the prayerful dream she had had as a little girl - that she would one day lead instruction in the mystery of the communion, and how as an old woman, her prayer had been answered by faith and perseverance.

the church that you want...,

digilander | Combined, the virtue of both the dianoia and nous is called "theoria," that is, contemplation. But a better description is the vision of God. In another respect, the combined dianoetic and noetic perfection of phronesis in the service of conscience is sophia. Sophia or wisdom is the perfection of know-how in being a member of the Church or it is the intrapersonal perfection of our synergistically skilled participation in interpersonal communion. Thus, sophia is the graced skill of communing in a way that conscience is perfectly actualized and fulfilled as skilled agape. But perhaps the most descriptive term for the nature of specifically Christian contemplation is gnosis. The term gnosis emphasizes the intimate personal familiarity (including direct self-knowledge in the form of immediate and inwardly honest clear self-experiencing) we have of persons in their singular uniqueness (their haecceitas, according to Duns Scotus, who, after the 1277 Condemnations against trends that went too far towards re-paganizing Christian theology which the Roman Catholic Religious Organization [RCRO] did not reverse, such as found in Aquinas, sought to restore the earlier western view shared with the east that beyond and higher than the cognitio abstractiva in the service of scientia (the Greek episteme) was an intimate cognitio singularis or simplex intuitiva (the Greek gnosis) of persons in their singular uniqueness). In the LXX, it is the term used for sexual intercourse as when Adam "knew" Eve in Genesis. Through phronesis and sophia, but also most importantly, through agape or love, which is the perfection of conscience (syneidesis), gnosis is born. Because God is Trinity and reality is ultimately and inescapably interpersonal relationships, gnosis is thereby higher than episteme or science which deals with natural types and kinds. Episteme used to be the high contemplative ideal in ancient Greek philosophy which did not recognize persons in their individual singularity as an ultimate or hypostatic reality over impersonal nature (physis) even if this impersonal nature was the unknown God or Unmoved Mover.

In contrast to not only Buddhism and Yoga but also to all forms of western Christianity, Orthodoxy teaches that the hypostasis of the Father, a person, is the personal source of the Son and Spirit, and thus, is the source of the divine nature (physis) and essence (ousia). Personhood trumps nature even if it is divine nature. By contrast, except for Bonaventure who insisted on the monarchia of the person of the Father as the source of the divine being, the west never understood the importance of this point, as Augustine admits, and thus, western trinitarian theology typically begins, paganistically and mistakenly, with the divine ousia.

Because our destiny is to partake, as the Church, in the divine trinitarian life after its Likeness, the entire substance of the spiritual life of the Christian is relationships. It is all about improving the quality of how well you relate to others: God or neighbor. There is no quality of relationship to God that is not intrinsically tied to the quality of how well one relates to the least of these your neighbors. Prayer is relationship. In sharp contrast to Buddhist, Yogic, or pagan Greek forms of contemplation (theoria), Orthodox contemplation is gnosis because it is personal relationship. There is no advance in prayer that is not an advance in how one is in relationships. If there is a block in the prayer life, the same block is there in your relationships.

One might almost want to say the self-emptying quality of the Incarnation or its kenosis applies to the mystical life. While for us God should be our highest priority, perhaps we are safe to say that in the prayer life God isn't his first or highest priority in his relation to us. Rather, "being in the form of God, [he] did not consider it something to be held onto, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men (Philippians 2: 6-7) so that he places Himself on an equal level with our neighbors. That is, He doesn't, so to speak, push His way through the crowd we neglect and ignore in order to insist that He be known to us before others. Rather, we have no relation to Him that is not made contingent by Him upon our relation to others. Or, think of the some of the sentences of the Lord's Prayer as formulas within which other variables can be plugged in, so instead of "forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us" we might substitute "relate to us as we relate to others." Again, a block in the quality of the prayer life is a block in how we relate to others.

So, instead of merging "alone into the supreme Alone" after having transcended the allegedly merely personal and merely ethical sphere, as the famous pagan RCRO pseudo-Meister Eckhart (student of Aquinas) put it, Hesychast spirituality is the transfiguration and deification of our society and fellowship with persons - whether divine or fellow creature. In Hesychasm, there is no transcendence of or leaving behind or leave-taking of the ethical, interpersonal, or personal sphere for some state allegedly "beyond good and evil." Since reality is inescapably interpersonal, ethical virtue is the very point and goal of the spiritual life of the Christian. There is a Jewish saying, "if you want to end with God, you have to begin with God. And inconveniently, God gives you people." The same principle applies to why ethics is a preliminary practice in Christian spirituality. Given a trinitarian God, ethics is the beginning of the spiritual life because it is the very substance and goal of the spiritual life.

This is what makes the Jesus Prayer different from a mantra (contrary to a whole list of Jesuit publications). Like a mantra, it does indeed still, calm, and focus the mind's noetic power of wakeful attentiveness. But, according to the niptic Fathers in the Philokalia, the Jesus Prayer only works correctly and serves the intended purpose if and only if conducted within the context of an ethical askesis and participation in the life of the Church. Its whole point is to awaken our deeper ethical and interpersonal responsiveness to others within the Communion of Saints. The essence of the various forms of dianoetic and noetic training found in the Hesychast tradition, the whole Hesychast pharmacopeia, so to speak, is encapsulated within the Jesus Prayer as one pill that does not require the careful and expert supervision of a great staretz that the other forms do.

Unlike a mantra, the Jesus Prayer expresses a personal plea. Not only that, it is a personal plea for mercy. Mercy for what? Mercy because like the servant who owed and was forgiven the great debt of 10,000 Talents, we fail to forgive as we have been forgiven, to love as we have been loved, and because we otherwise fail in our relationships. The Jesus Prayer captures all the poignancy of our situation. Sin is missing the point. The awakening and focussing point of the Jesus Prayer is our relationships to each other, whether God or neighbor. Whether you are curious about, or have encountered, or have to study in college the various mystical, meditative, yoga, or contemplative traditions, or whether you are preparing for missions in places where these traditions thrive in their authentic form and not in some watered-down American New Age form, don't let their apparent similarities fool you into missing the point of Hesychast spirituality.

the religion of man number two...,

"In the first place," he always said, "religion is a relative concept; it corresponds to the level of a man's being; and one man's religion might not be at all suitable for another man, that is to say, the religion of a man of one level of being is not suitable for a man of another level of being.

"It must be understood that the religion of man number one is of one kind; the religion of man number two is of another kind; and the religion of man number three is of a third kind. The religion of man number four, number five, and further is something of a kind totally different from the religion of man number one, number two, and number three.

"In the second place religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he 'lives' his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy. Whether he likes it or not he shows his attitude towards religion by his actions and he can show his attitude only by his actions. Therefore if his actions are opposed to those which are demanded by a given religion he cannot assert that he belongs to that religion. The vast majority of people who call themselves Christians have no right whatever to do so, because they not only fail to carry out the demands of their religion but they do not even think that these demands ought to be carried out.

"Christianity forbids murder. Yet all that the whole of our progress comes to is progress in the technique of murder and progress in warfare. How can we call ourselves Christians?

"No one has a right to call himself a Christian who does not carry out Christ's precepts. A man can say that he desires to be a Christian if he tries to carry out these precepts. If he does not think of them at all, or laughs at them, or substitutes for them some inventions of his own, or simply forgets about them, he has no right whatever to call himself a Christian.

"I took the example of war as it is the most striking example. But even without war the whole of life is exactly the same. People call themselves Christians but they do not realize that not only do they not want, but they are unable, to be Christians, because in order to be a Christian it is necessary not only to desire, but to be able, to be one.