to understand the machine is to be able to control and exploit the machine...,

wikipedia |  The concept "of 'limerence' provides a particular carving up of the semantic domain of love,"^[7] and is an attempt at a scientific study into the nature of love. Limerence is considered as a cognitive and emotional state of being emotionally attached or even obsessed with another person, typically experienced involuntarily and characterized by a strong desire for reciprocation of one's feelings—a near-obsessive form of romantic love.^[8] For Tennov, "sexual attraction is an essential component of limerence...the limerent is a potential sex partner."^[9]

Limerence is sometimes also interpreted as infatuation, or what is colloquially known as a "crush"; however, in common speech, infatuation includes aspects of immaturity and extrapolation from insufficient information and is usually short-lived. Tennov notes how limerence "may dissolve soon after its initiation, as in an early teenage buzz-centered crush,"^[10] but is more concerned with the point when "limerent bonds are characterized by 'entropy' crystallization as described by Stendhal in his 1821 treatise On Love, where a new love infatuation perceptually begins to transform ... attractive characteristics are exaggerated and unattractive characteristics are given little or no attention....[creating] a limerent object'."

According to Tennov, there are at least two types of love: a) limerence, which she describes as (inter alia) "loving attachment"; and b) "loving affection," the bond that exists between an individual and his or her parents and children.^[11] She notes, however, that one form may evolve into the other: 'those whose limerence was replaced by affectional bonding with the same partner might say..."We were very much in love when we married; today we love each other very much"'.^[12] The distinction is comparable to that drawn by ethologists 'between the pair-forming and pair-maintaining functions of sexual activity',^[6] just as 'the attachment of the attachment theorists is very similar to the emotional reciprocation longed for in Tennov's limerence, and each is linked to sexuality'.^[13]

Limerence is characterized by intrusive thinking and pronounced sensitivity to external events that reflect the disposition of the limerent object towards the individual, and can be experienced as intense joy or as extreme despair, depending on whether the feelings are reciprocated. Basically, it is the state of being completely carried away by unreasoned passion or love, even to the point of addictive-type behavior. Usually, one is inspired with an intense passion or admiration for someone. Limerence can be difficult to understand for those who have never experienced it, and it is thus often dismissed by nonlimerents as ridiculous fantasy or a construct of romantic fiction.^[1]

Tennov differentiates between limerence and other emotions by asserting that love involves concern for the other person's welfare and feeling. While limerence does not require it, those concerns may certainly be incorporated. Affection and fondness exist only as a disposition towards another person, irrespective of whether those feelings are reciprocated, whereas limerence deeply desires return, but it remains unaltered whether it is returned or not. Physical contact with the object is neither essential nor sufficient to an individual experiencing limerence, unlike one experiencing sexual attraction.^{[citation needed]} Where early, unhealthy attachment patterns or trauma influence limerence, the limerent object may be construed as an idealization of the figure(s) involved in the original unhealthy attachment or trauma. Lack of reciprocation may, in such instances, actually serve to reinforce lessons learned in earlier, unhealthy bonding experiences, and hence to strengthen the limerence.

european neuroscientists boycotting the european version of BRAIN?

scientificamerican |  The Human Brain Project is an attempt to create a computerized facsimile of the entire brain, down to the level of individual molecules, within a 10-year time frame. It has always been viewed with skepticism by some neuroscientists, who view its objectives as impossibly ambitious. The project is principally the  brainchild of neuroscientist Henry Markram, who wrote for Scientific American on the topic. (A detailed story on the protest by Ian Sample appears in The Guardian. Also, check out this great book excerpt by Sebastian Seung that we ran on Markram and his desire to create a digital brain. Our coverage on this has been ongoing. Maybe also give a look  here and here.)

Here’s a snippet of the letter that was drafted by scientists to convey their discontent:

..we wish to express the view that the HBP [Human Brain Project] is not on course and that the European Commission must take a very careful look at both the science and the management of the HBP before it is renewed. We strongly question whether the goals and implementation of the HBP are adequate to form the nucleus of the collaborative effort in Europe that will further our understanding of the brain.

The letter calls for an independent review of the Human Brain Project or perhaps a reallocation of funding to an array of broad-based neuroscience projects that do not just focus on a SimBrain. If either of these options is not forthcoming, the scientists who signed the letter pledge to not participate in the project.

Not your usual Big Science outing, eh?

Markram got back to me with a comment:

It seems that it will take decades more for the neuroscience community to mature to the level of other disciplines. This is such an exciting direction that can bring everyone together to take on this grand challenge. Just so sad that it gets torn apart by scientists that don’t  want to understand, that believe second-hand rumors and just want money for their next experiment. For the first time in my career as a neuroscientist, I lose hope of neuroscience ever answering any real questions about how the brain works and its many diseases.

Then Zach Mainen, a principal investigator at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme in Portugal, got back about the reasons for the upsurge of criticism:

A large group (now more than 250) neuroscientists in Europe are trying to send a wake up call to the European Commission to say that the Human Brain Project is not an effective vehicle to form the hub of European neuroscience. Unlike the U.S. Brain initiative, the HBP is a narrowly focused information computing technology effort that, contrary to how it was sold, does not have a realistic plan for understanding brain function. We want the public to know that neuroscience research is not represented by the HBP. We hope that the open message to the EC can help to initiate a dialogue and find a better solution.

The Obama Administration’s brain initiative—possibly a multi-billion dollar undertaking, if fully funded—has also met with some grumbling, but at least some of that has subsided as major neuroscientists have assumed an important advisory role.

It will be interesting to see what happens next. One of the trendiest fields in all of science now has to contend with an unprecedented rebellion in the ranks that festers away as the whole world watches.

attention as an effect not a cause: (the basic function you cats typically conflate with consciousness)

cell |  Attention is commonly thought to be important for managing the limited resources available in sensory areas of the neocortex. Here we present an alternative view that attention arises as a byproduct of circuits centered on the basal ganglia involved in value-based decision making. The central idea is that decision making depends on properly estimating the current state of the animal and its environment and that the weighted inputs to the currently prevailing estimate give rise to the filter-like properties of attention. After outlining this new framework, we describe findings from physiological, anatomical, computational, and clinical work that support this point of view. We conclude that the brain mechanisms responsible for attention employ a conserved circuit motif that predates the emergence of the neocortex.

• •Current models of attention are based on the premise of limited sensory resources.
• •We propose that attention arises as a byproduct of value-based decision making.
• •Decision making requires estimating the current state of the animal and environment.
• •Filter-like properties of attention arise from weighted inputs to the current state.
• •The brain mechanisms involve a subcortical circuit motif that predates the neocortex.

pdf of full article

neurological evidence for chaos in the nervous system is growing...,

nautilus |  In one important way, the recipient of a heart transplant ignores its new organ: Its nervous system usually doesn’t rewire to communicate with it. The 40,000 neurons controlling a heart operate so perfectly, and are so self-contained, that a heart can be cut out of one body, placed into another, and continue to function perfectly, even in the absence of external control, for a decade or more. This seems necessary: The parts of our nervous system managing our most essential functions behave like a Swiss watch, precisely timed and impervious to perturbations. Chaotic behavior has been throttled out.

Or has it? Two simple pendulums that swing with perfect regularity can, when yoked together, move in a chaotic trajectory. Given that the billions of neurons in our brain are each like a pendulum, oscillating back and forth between resting and firing, and connected to 10,000 other neurons, isn’t chaos in our nervous system unavoidable?

The prospect is terrifying to imagine. Chaos is extremely sensitive to initial conditions—just think of the butterfly effect. What if the wrong perturbation plunged us into irrevocable madness? Among many scientists, too, there is a great deal of resistance to the idea that chaos is at work in biological systems. Many intentionally preclude it from their models. It subverts computationalism, which is the idea that the brain is nothing more than a complicated, but fundamentally rule-based, computer. Chaos seems unqualified as a mechanism of biological information processing, as it allows noise to propagate without bounds, corrupting information transmission and storage.

At the same time, chaos has its advantages. On a behavioral level, the arms race between predator and prey has wired erratic strategies into our nervous system.¹ A moth sensing an echolocating bat, for example, immediately directs itself away from the ultrasound source. The neurons controlling its flight fire in an increasingly erratic manner as the bat draws closer, until the moth, darting in fits, appears to be nothing but a tumble of wings and legs. More generally, chaos could grant our brains a great deal of computational power, by exploring many possibilities at great speed.

Motivated by these and other potential advantages, and with an accumulation of evidence in hand, neuroscientists are gradually accepting the potential importance of chaos in the brain.

cities should all be so densely-packed and gorgeous

 

the wages of dehumanizing drug "offenders"...,

WaPo |  The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General  has just released part of its report on the awful case of Daniel Chong. Here’s some background from the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Chong was a 24-year-old engineering student when he was caught up in the drug sweep by a DEA task force two years ago.

On the morning of April 21, 2012, Chong was detained with six other suspects and transported to the DEA field office, where agents determined that he was not involved in the ecstasy ring that was under investigation.

A self-confessed pot smoker, Chong told investigators he had gone to the University City apartment that Friday night to celebrate April 20 — an important day for marijuana users — and spent the night.

After being interviewed at the DEA field office Saturday, agents told Chong he would be released without charges and driven home soon.

But agents forgot about him and Chong spent the next four and half days inside the five-by-10-foot cell without food, water or a toilet. He said his screams for help went unanswered.

Chong was discovered near death on Wednesday afternoon. Agents called 911 and he was rushed to a hospital. Chong spent four days in the hospital for multiple conditions but has since recovered.

The OIG report is infuriating. We often call it the drug war, but we don’t even treat prisoners of war this way.

Four different federal drug agents saw or heard Daniel Chong during the five days he was handcuffed in a holding cell without food or water after a 2012 narcotics sweep, a U.S. Department of Justice report released on Tuesday found.

The agents did nothing because they assumed someone else was responsible for the detainee, and because there was no training for agents on how to track and monitor wards at the Kearny Mesa detention center, the report found.

So Chong wasn’t forgotten. He was ignored. The former would merely be callous incompetence. The latter is what happens when you’re conditioned to see drug offenders as less than human. To see Chong as a man dying in a cell would require some empathy. Drug Enforcement Agency agents aren’t trained to empathize with drug offenders. Quite the opposite. Because Chong is just a lowlife addict, it’s easy to pass him off as someone else’s responsibility. For the four DEA agents who saw Chong suffering, coming to his aid — hell, just preventing him from dying — wasn’t the moral obligation of a fellow human being, but a task to be assigned within the bureaucracy. That task hadn’t been assigned to them. So hey, it wasn’t their job.

taxpayers fund political propaganda training for the narcopopo

showmecannabis | Each year, hundreds of narcotics officers gather at the Lake of the Ozarks for a training conference hosted by the Missouri Narcotics Officers Association (MNOA). Most, if not all, of Missouri’s 27 multi-jurisdictional drug task forces send their officers to this conference, with some calling it the only training they receive all year. Missouri’s task forces spend tens of thousands of dollars of tax money allocated for training on this event each year, to learn such skills as “Tactical Survival During a Deadly Force Encounter” or “Risk Management and Undercover Operations” or…”Marijuana Legalization- Why NOT?”

That’s right: According to the Clay County Drug Task Force, at a taxpayer funded conference supposedly dedicated to law enforcement training, Missouri’s narcotics officers were taught the latest anti-legalization talking points. What’s more, they received training credit hours (POST Certification) for their attendance at the class — all to become well-versed in the latest drug war propaganda.

You might notice the name of the conference is redacted in the document above. This conference name was not redacted in dozens of other documents obtained via open records requests , which provide the necessary context to discern that the document above must refer to the MNOA Conference. Interestingly, the Department of Public Safety only began redacting the name of this conference from documents I requested on task force grant funding after I began asking specific questions about these conference expenditures. More on that soon.

Taxpayers should be troubled by the notion that their money, allocated for the training of our law enforcement officers, is used to fund political propaganda. Missourians should be troubled by the notion that learning the latest anti-legalization talking points counts as training hours for law enforcement. Cannabis policy reform activists should be troubled by the fact that dismantling an 80-year-old marijuana-prohibition complex, already an uphill battle, becomes even harder when we are forced to fund political training for our opposition with tax dollars.

We will soon be releasing a comprehensive report on the political activities of the taxpayer-funded Missouri Narcotics Officers Association. Keep an eye out for that study later this month.

through cnu's looking glass...,

through the anthropocene looking glass...,

scientificamerican |  DNA sequencing and synthesis technologies might be used to create new microorganisms with potentially far-reaching environmental effects, thus contributing to the acceleration of the Anthropocene. But these technologies might also be used to mitigate and deal with some of the other consequences of anthropogenic climate change: by producing materials more sustainably, creating new antibiotics, and performing other ecosystem services. For their potential importance in both contributing to and dealing with the Anthropocene, the authors propose that the start of the Great Acceleration shouldn’t be 1945 or 1950, as most others have proposed, but 1953 — the year that Watson and Crick published the double helix structure of DNA.

This is a surprising proposal, because though they are increasingly powerful, DNA technologies haven’t created the same scale of global environmental impact as something like the steam engine. (At least not the microbial genome-scale synthetic biology that they mention in the article; genetic technologies in agriculture have certainly made big changes in land use, industrial farming practices, and other relevant Anthropocene measures). The hype surrounding novel biotechnological tools, however, frequently asserts that biology will enable technological solutions to the global problems that other technologies have caused. From algae that produce biofuels to bacteria that eat pollution to crops that can tolerate drought, biotechnologies are frequently defined by their potential to someday solve the ecological crises of the Anthropocene.

Perhaps rather than backdating the relevance of this sort of biotech, we might consider how this hype might lead us instead to a new phase of the Anthropocene. Now that we are coming to terms with the term “Anthropocene” and are proposing new technologies specifically to combat the problems caused by other technologies, the Great Acceleration might soon turn into a Great Technological Problem Feedback Loop. We might be setting ourselves towards a bio-techno-evolutionary arms race, where we design new technology that has an unforeseen impact on living things, then we design other problem-solving biotechnologies that have their own potential problems, and on and on.

In Through the Looking Glass the Red Queen tells Alice that “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” As we run to outpace technological problems of the past, are we creating the Red Queen’s Anthropocene of the future? This doesn’t mean that we should stop trying to solve the very real problems of the Anthropocene, but perhaps we need to think more about what it might mean to technologically “run twice as fast” to finally get somewhere else.

information-based fitness and the emergence of criticality in living systems

pnas |  Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to flock dynamics. However, a well-founded theory for understanding how and why interacting living systems could dynamically tune themselves to be poised in the vicinity of a critical point is lacking. Here we use tools from statistical mechanics and information theory to show that complex adaptive or evolutionary systems can be much more efficient in coping with diverse heterogeneous environmental conditions when operating at criticality. Analytical as well as computational evolutionary and adaptive models vividly illustrate that a community of such systems dynamically self-tunes close to a critical state as the complexity of the environment increases while they remain noncritical for simple and predictable environments. A more robust convergence to criticality emerges in coevolutionary and coadaptive setups in which individuals aim to represent other agents in the community with fidelity, thereby creating a collective critical ensemble and providing the best possible tradeoff between accuracy and flexibility. Our approach provides a parsimonious and general mechanism for the emergence of critical-like behavior in living systems needing to cope with complex environments or trying to efficiently coordinate themselves as an ensemble.

legalization has reduced colorado to a lawless dystopian hellscape..., NOT!

policymic |  It's now been six months since Colorado enacted its historic marijuana legalization policy, and two big things have already happened: 

1. Colorado's cash crop is turning out to be even more profitable than the state could have hoped. In March alone, taxed and legal recreational marijuana sales generated nearly $19 million, up from $14 million in February. The state has garnered more than $10 million in taxes from retail sales in the first four months — money that will go to public schools and infrastructure, as well as for youth educational campaigns about substance use.

According to his latest budget proposal, Gov. John Hickenlooper expects a healthy $1 billion in marijuana sales over the next fiscal year. That's nearly $134 million in tax revenue. Sales from recreational shops are expected to hit $600 million, which is a more than 50% increase over what was originally expected.

2. Denver crime rates have suddenly fallen. Marijuana-related arrests, which make up 50% of all drug-related crimes, have plummeted in Colorado, freeing up law enforcement to focus on other criminal activity. By removing marijuana penalties, the state is estimated to save somewhere between $12 million and $40 million, according to the Colorado Center on Law and Policy.

 

According to government data, the Denver city- and county-wide murder rate has dropped 42.1% since recreational marijuana use was legalized in January. This is compared to the same period last year, a time frame encompassing Jan. 1 through May 31. Violent crime in general is down almost 2%, and major property crimes are down 11.5% compared to the same period in 2013.

As the Huffington Post notes, this is a far cry from wild-eyed claims by legalization opponents that legal weed was the devil's work and Colorado would see a surge in crime and drug use.

"Expect more crime, more kids using marijuana and pot for sale everywhere," said Douglas County Sheriff David Weaver in 2012. 

"I think our entire state will pay the price." Gov. Hickenlooper at one point said. "Colorado is known for many great things — marijuana should not be one of them" 

With only a quarter of the year's data to work from, it may be too soon to definitively attribute these changes to marijuana legalization, but the possibility of a correlative pattern is certainly worth noting.

We are witnessing the fruits of Colorado's legal weed experiment, and those fruits are juicy indeed.

shrooms provide lucid access to liminal qualia

wiley |  The study of rapid changes in brain dynamics and functional connectivity (FC) is of increasing interest in neuroimaging. Brain states departing from normal waking consciousness are expected to be accompanied by alterations in the aforementioned dynamics. In particular, the psychedelic experience produced by psilocybin (a substance found in “magic mushrooms”) is characterized by unconstrained cognition and profound alterations in the perception of time, space and selfhood. Considering the spontaneous and subjective manifestation of these effects, we hypothesize that neural correlates of the psychedelic experience can be found in the dynamics and variability of spontaneous brain activity fluctuations and connectivity, measurable with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Fifteen healthy subjects were scanned before, during and after intravenous infusion of psilocybin and an inert placebo. Blood-Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) temporal variability was assessed computing the variance and total spectral power, resulting in increased signal variability bilaterally in the hippocampi and anterior cingulate cortex. Changes in BOLD signal spectral behavior (including spectral scaling exponents) affected exclusively higher brain systems such as the default mode, executive control, and dorsal attention networks. A novel framework enabled us to track different connectivity states explored by the brain during rest. This approach revealed a wider repertoire of connectivity states post-psilocybin than during control conditions. Together, the present results provide a comprehensive account of the effects of psilocybin on dynamical behavior in the human brain at a macroscopic level and may have implications for our understanding of the unconstrained, hyper-associative quality of consciousness in the psychedelic state.

the neurological locus of consciousness?

newscientist | ONE moment you're conscious, the next you're not. For the first time, researchers have switched off consciousness by electrically stimulating a single brain area.

Scientists have been probing individual regions of the brain for over a century, exploring their function by zapping them with electricity and temporarily putting them out of action. Despite this, they have never been able to turn off consciousness – until now.

Although only tested in one person, the discovery suggests that a single area – the claustrum – might be integral to combining disparate brain activity into a seamless package of thoughts, sensations and emotions. It takes us a step closer to answering a problem that has confounded scientists and philosophers for millennia – namely how our conscious awareness arises.

Many theories abound but most agree that consciousness has to involve the integration of activity from several brain networks, allowing us to perceive our surroundings as one single unifying experience rather than isolated sensory perceptions.

One proponent of this idea was Francis Crick, a pioneering neuroscientist who earlier in his career had identified the structure of DNA. Just days before he died in July 2004, Crick was working on a paper that suggested our consciousness needs something akin to an orchestra conductor to bind all of our different external and internal perceptions together.

With his colleague Christof Koch, at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, he hypothesised that this conductor would need to rapidly integrate information across distinct regions of the brain and bind together information arriving at different times. For example, information about the smell and colour of a rose, its name, and a memory of its relevance, can be bound into one conscious experience of being handed a rose on Valentine's day.

The pair suggested that the claustrum – a thin, sheet-like structure that lies hidden deep inside the brain – is perfectly suited to this job (Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B, doi.org/djjw5m).

It now looks as if Crick and Koch were on to something. In a study published last week, Mohamad Koubeissi at the George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues describe how they managed to switch a woman's consciousness off and on by stimulating her claustrum. The woman has epilepsy so the team were using deep brain electrodes to record signals from different brain regions to work out where her seizures originate. One electrode was positioned next to the claustrum, an area that had never been stimulated before.

When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space, she didn't respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed. As soon as the stimulation stopped, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of the event. The same thing happened every time the area was stimulated during two days of experiments (Epilepsy and Behavior, doi.org/tgn)

identity, not ideology, is moving the world's bowels...,

WaPo |  There is, of course, a healthy nationalism that has often been part of the expansion of liberty and democracy. Britons and Americans take pride that their countries embody values they hold dear. Poles and now Ukrainians take pride in their struggles for independence and success. But today we seem to be witnessing mostly a different kind of nationalism, based on fear, insecurity and anxiety. And, as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin has noted, like a bent twig, this kind of nationalism always springs back with a vengeance.

Why is this happening now? One explanation is that as globalization and technological revolutions race ahead and transform the world, people feel uneasy with the pace of change and search for something to hold on to for succor and stability. If the bond is strongest at the level of the nation, nationalism surges. But if the national project is fragile or viewed as illegitimate, then you see the pull of older, deeper forces. From Catalonia to Scotland to the Middle East, subnational identities have taken on new meaning and urgency.

It is a strange mixture of insecurity and assertiveness. People worry that their society is changing beyond recognition and that they are being ruled by vast, distant forces — the European Union in Brussels, the International Monetary Fund or the federal government in Washington — that are beyond their control. And by people who do not share their values.

In the United States, we do see one parallel: the rise of the tea party. Scholars Vanessa Williamson and Theda Skocpol concluded that immigration is a central issue — perhaps the central issue — for tea party members, something that has been reinforced by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s loss in his primary election in Virginia. I don’t recognize my country anymore, say Mike Huckabee, Glenn Beck and many others on the right. The same line could be repeated by every one of those European nationalists who won in the polls in May.

In an age of globalization, elites have discussions about political ideology — more government, less government — but, as Samuel Huntington noted many years ago, the bottom-up force that seems to be moving the world these days is political identity. The questions that fill people with emotion are “Who are we?” and, more ominously, “Who are we not?”

catholic church institutionally complicit in much of the southern border suffering...,

churchandstate |  In his invaluable Daily Email, Joe Bish, Senior Population Communications Associate, at Population Media Center keeps us up-to-date with current population news.

His July 3rd post recited the all too rare example of truth telling about this current immigration crisis on our Southern border by an organization in the field of reproductive rights.

Getting this point of a long trend across about the connection between immigration and population as practiced by Catholic authorities represents an important breakthrough.

Big media like the July 3rd Today Show on NBC showed the hoards of aliens (still dubbed “undocumented immigrants” by their announcers) pouring into a town in Southern California, causing great anger and massive protests from its citizens. But NBC did not tell us WHY!

brookings tells its failed symbolic experiment to "wrap that isht up"!

WaPo | After making fighting income inequality an early focus of his second term, President Obama has largely abandoned talk of the subject this election year in a move that highlights the emerging debate within the Democratic Party over economic populism and its limits.

During the first half of this year, Obama shifted from income inequality to the more politically palatable theme of lifting the middle class, focusing on issues such as the minimum wage and the gender pay gap that are thought to resonate with a broader group of voters.

The pivot is striking for a president who identified inequality as one of his top concerns after his reelection, calling it “a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe.” 

The shift also underscores the ongoing dispute between the Democratic Party’s liberal and moderate wings over how to address inequality issues. Whereas the left takes a more combative tone, seeking to focus on the income gap and what it views as the harmful influence of big business and Wall Street, more centrist forces in the party favor an emphasis on less-divisive issues.

White House officials say the change in the president’s rhetoric was driven by a desire to focus not just on the problem — economic inequality — but also on solutions that could address it. Others close to the White House contend that the move is at least partly driven by Democratic polling that found that talking about income inequality does not register strongly with the American public and risks accusations of class warfare.

we have hit peak america...,

foreignpolicy |  American leadership in the world is imperiled. And at a fundamental level, the American people sense it. A number of recent polls show that more Americans than ever before -- nearly 60 percent, in some cases -- believe U.S. power is waning.

In other words, a greater number of Americans are worried about diminishing U.S. influence today than in the face of feared Soviet technological superiority in the late 1950s, the Vietnam quagmire of the late 1960s, the 1973 oil embargo, the apparent resurgence of Soviet power around the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and the economic concerns that plagued the late 1980s -- the five waves of so-called declinist anxiety that political scientist Samuel Huntington famously identified. 

Many analysts have attributed Americans' current anxiety to the aftershock of waging two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the polls actually reflect something deeper and more potent -- a legitimate, increasingly tactile uncertainty in the minds of the American people created by changes in the world and in America's competitive position, which they feel far more immediately than do the participants in Washington policy debates. Average Americans do not experience the world through the lens of great-power rivalry or U.S. leadership abroad, but rather through that of an increasingly competitive globalized labor market, stagnating income growth among the middle class, and deep and unresolved worries about their children's future. A recent CNN poll, for instance, found that Americans think by a 2-to-1 margin that their children's lives will be worse than their own. They are questioning the promise of growth and expanding opportunity -- the very substance of the American dream. 

This anxiety is real and justified, and it lies behind much of the public's support for withdrawing from the world, for retrenchment. Yet American leadership and engagement remain essential. The United States cannot hide from the world. Rather, it must compete. And if it competes well, it can restore not only its economic health, but also its strength for the long haul. That resilience will preserve Americans' ability to determine their fate and the nation's ability to lead in the way its interests require. 

Unfortunately, absent from current discussions about U.S. foreign policy has been a hardheaded assessment of what it will actually take to rejuvenate and compete. Policymakers and experts have not yet taken a clear-eyed look at the data and objectively analyzed the fundamental shifts under way globally and what they mean for America's competitive position. Nor have they debated the steps necessary to sustain U.S. power over the long term. 

Many foreign-policy experts seem to believe that retaining American primacy is largely a matter of will -- of how America chooses to exert its power abroad. Even President Obama, more often accused of being a prophet of decline than a booster of America's future, recently asserted that the United States "has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world." The question, he continued, is "not whether America will lead, but how we will lead."

good, phukkem, and I hope he burns in hell...,

NYTimes |  Decades before David and Charles Koch bankrolled right-wing causes, Mr. Scaife and Joseph Coors, the beer magnate, were the leading financiers of the conservative crusade of the 1970s and ’80s, seeking to reverse the liberal traditions of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

Mr. Scaife (pronounced Skayf) inherited roughly $500 million in 1965, and with more family bequests and income from trust funds and investments in oil, steel and real estate, nearly tripled his net worth over his lifetime. But unlike his forebears, who were primarily benefactors of museums, public art collections, education and medicine, he gave hundreds of millions to promote conservative political causes.

He never ran for public office or gave speeches to promote his political views. Indeed, he was notoriously withdrawn, rarely giving interviews or addressing controversies that regularly engulfed him. He had a longstanding drinking problem, engaged in bitter feuds with relatives, friends and employees, and found his troubled life examined in the press and online, despite phalanxes of lawyers, spokesmen and retainers paid to insulate him from endless public fascination with his wealth and power.

But in written answers to questions by The Washington Post in 1999, he said concerns for America motivated him. “I am not a politician, although like most Americans I have some political views,” he said. “Basically I am a private individual who has concerns about his country and who has resources that give me the privilege — and responsibility — to do something to help my country if I can.”

He had the caricatured look of a jovial billionaire touting “family values” in America: a real-life Citizen Kane with red cheeks, white hair, blue eyes and a wide smile for the cameras. Friends called him intuitive but not intellectual. He told Vanity Fair his favorite TV show was “The Simpsons,” and his favorite book was John O’Hara’s “Appointment in Samarra,” about a rich young Pennsylvanian bent on self-destruction.

In his first foray into national politics, in 1964, Mr. Scaife backed Senator Barry M. Goldwater, the Arizona Republican, who lost his presidential bid in a landslide. In 1972, Mr. Scaife gave $1 million to the re-election war chest of President Richard M. Nixon, including $45,000 to a secret fund linked to the Watergate scandal. And in the 1980s, Mr. Scaife ardently supported Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

my red beards gestalt: divine right of a jewish state, bet not be no caliphate...,

WND |  The Jerusalem-based Temple Institute has taken on the goal of rebuilding the Third Jewish Temple, regarded by Jews and Christians as a precursor to the coming of the Messiah.

The plan is guaranteed to provoke world conflict, since the Islamic Dome of the Rock now sits on the presumed Temple site.

And while the preparations seem to be lining up, a major obstacle remains – the absence of a red heifer, required in the biblical book of Numbers, Chapter 19, for the purification that is essential before worship.

Until now, according to the institute.

The organization posted a video this month showing what appears to be a perfect red heifer that is being raised at an unidentified location in the United States.

“In truth, the fate of the entire world depends on the red heifer,” the institute says.

“For G-d has ordained that its ashes alone are the single missing ingredient for the reinstatement of biblical purity – and thereafter, the rebuilding of the Holy Temple.”

The Temple Institute says purification with the red heifer “reminds us that man has the potential to rise above his transitory physical existence, with all its false sense of hopelessness and misery … the impurity of death.”

“This is the role of the Third Temple for all mankind, and this is the Messianic vision of the future: the call to live an eternal life, liberated from the sham and unhappiness which is the sum total of the human condition for so many people. Fist tap Big Don.

onward, to rome!

telegraph |  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed leader of the 'Islamic State' stretching across Iraq and Syria, has vowed to lead the conquest of Rome as he called on Muslims to immigrate to his new land to fight under its banner around the globe. 

Baghdadi, who holds a PhD in Islamic studies, said Muslims were being targetted and killed from China to Indonesia. Speaking as the first Caliph, or commander of the Islamic faithful since the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, he called on Muslims to rally to his pan-Islamic state.

"Those who can immigrate to the Islamic State should immigrate, as immigration to the house of Islam is a duty," he said in an audio recording released on a website used by the group formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.

"Rush O Muslims to your state. It is your state. Syria is not for Syrians and Iraq is not for Iraqis. The land is for the Muslims, all Muslims.

"This is my advice to you. If you hold to it you will conquer Rome and own the world, if Allah wills."

Having claimed the title of "caliph", Baghdadi appealed to "judges and those who have military and managerial and service skills, and doctors and engineers in all fields."

abu omar al-shishani

nationalpost |  A young, red-bearded ethnic Chechen has rapidly become one of the most prominent commanders in the breakaway Al-Qaeda group that has overrun swaths of Iraq and Syria, illustrating the international nature of the movement.

Omar Al-Shishani, one of hundreds of Chechens who have been among the toughest jihadi fighters in Syria, has emerged as the face of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS), appearing frequently in its online videos — in contrast to the group’s Iraqi leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, who remains deep in hiding and has hardly ever been photographed.

In a video released by the group over the weekend, Mr. Al-Shishani is shown standing next to the group’s spokesman among a group of fighters as they declare the elimination of the border between Iraq and Syria. The video was released just hours before the extremist group announced the creation of a caliphate — or Islamic state — in the areas it controls.

“Our aim is clear and everyone knows why we are fighting. Our path is toward the caliphate,” the 28-year-old Mr. Al-Shishani declares. “We will bring back the caliphate, and if God does not make it our fate to restore the caliphate, then we ask him to grant us martyrdom.”

too good to stay in the comments: capitalism is a system by which the past DEVOURS the future

truth-out |  Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century gives us a few clues, though not by any means, the whole picture. Replete with startling empirical evidence in the form of charts, graphs, informative statistics, mathematical-logical expressions and astute critical-historical analyses, Piketty's work draws a number of sobering conclusions about the present dynamics of wealth and income distribution that exposes not merely the dark underside of capitalism but a central contradiction within it. Thus, Piketty concludes ". . . wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future."

The past devours the future. But, what if the bizarre inverted logic of capitalism has always been its real point? What if, under the rubric of capitalism, the powerful elite are given permission to act as if it simply doesn't matter whether their ever-expanding wealth might actually devour the future, or "wear the world out faster" to borrow a phrase from Orwell? Do they not often appear to live in an all-consuming present - get what you can for yourself right now, and don't worry about others, or even about tomorrow? Moreover, is not such an attitude, sanctioned by capitalism, the reason why this particular economic system requires endless cycles of economic crisis?

Perhaps Piketty's point is that if it doesn't matter to the elite, it should at least matter to us. But if it does matter, then it is up to the rest of us - including experts like Piketty who grasp the reality of capitalism better than anyone else - to imagine real alternatives to such an economic system, to think outside of the present paradigm of endless development, profit maximization and disastrous austerity measures imposed on whole populations. Despite the apparently glaring "logical" contradiction within capitalism, Piketty still holds to the idea that it can be properly disciplined through a progressive annual tax on wealth. It is not the conclusion he should have reached given his thorough and prescient analysis.

Of course, Piketty is by no means alone in wanting to save capitalism from itself. Capitalism - no matter what its excesses, or how destructive it is for life or democracy - is invariably held as our default economic system, grudgingly acceded to even by popular left-oriented economists such as Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini or Joseph Stiglitz. As Chrystia Freeland unabashedly concludes in Plutocrats, The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, despite all its faults, we continue to need capitalism because, "very much like democracy," it is "the best system we've figured out so far." [1] Thus, if capitalism appears to go wrong, this is not because it is grounded on a misreading of history, internal contradictions, false theories about nature or human nature, or misguided moral and political presuppositions. Rather, the excesses of capitalism are simply a question of "bad management' and a political unwillingness to properly regulate it by imposing the right sort of checks and balances.

In fact, Piketty's proposed wealth tax solution may do more to obscure than resolve the really existing contradictions of capitalism. Looking at the history of capitalism, it is difficult not to conclude that growing inequality expresses a fundamental property of  and not a contradiction within capitalism. Inequality is built into capitalism. If there is a contradiction here it is a material not a logical one. In other words, it is the contradiction between an economic system that is radically indifferent to the health and well-being of the planet as a whole versus the economic, moral and environmental obligation to preserve and sustain such health and well-being.  Fist tap Vic.

wrecked RECD (really existing capitalist democracy)

alternet |  “Capitalism” is a term now commonly used to describe systems in which there are no capitalists: for example, the worker-owned Mondragon conglomerate in the Basque region of Spain, or the worker-owned enterprises expanding in northern Ohio, often with conservative support – both are discussed in important work by the scholar Gar Alperovitz. 

Some might even use the term “capitalism” to refer to the industrial democracy advocated by John Dewey, America’s leading social philosopher, in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Dewey called for workers to be “masters of their own industrial fate” and for all institutions to be brought under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business.” 

The truncated democracy that Dewey condemned has been left in tatters in recent years. Now control of government is narrowly concentrated at the peak of the income scale, while the large majority “down below” has been virtually disenfranchised. The current political-economic system is a form of plutocracy, diverging sharply from democracy, if by that concept we mean political arrangements in which policy is significantly influenced by the public will. 

There have been serious debates over the years about whether capitalism is compatible with democracy. If we keep to really existing capitalist democracy – RECD for short – the question is effectively answered: They are radically incompatible. 

It seems to me unlikely that civilization can survive RECD and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it. But could functioning democracy make a difference? 

Let’s keep to the most critical immediate problem that civilization faces: environmental catastrophe. Policies and public attitudes diverge sharply, as is often the case under RECD. The nature of the gap is examined in several articles in the current issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

capitalist industrial civilization = M.A.D

collapseofindustrialcivilization |  Radical, wide-scale planning should have been executed decades ago in response to the Limits to Growth study. Instead, we carried on with business-as-usual as the natural world underwent cataclysmic, mass extinction level changes. Every day, the insanity of capitalist industrial civilization(CIC) is on full display as we entertain ourselves with the illusion of token political gestures towards “sustainability”. None of it changes our death march over the cliff of extinction. Nature died long ago with man’s discovery of fossil fuels which fed his terminal overshoot. Any isolated pockets of remaining wilderness are trampled underfoot, amounting to no more than a mere novelty destination commercialized by the tourist industry.

Enslaved to his own self-destructive technology, CIC continues to toxify and irradiate the planet, plasticize the oceans, and disrupt the chemical conditions that allow for life. A society that dehumanizes everything with the fetishization of technology and money will always see disaster as a money-making opportunity. Anthropogenic climate disruption is no exception. Competition amongst nations and corporations for economic/military supremacy, wealth, and power demands that the energy resources to be exploited first are those with the highest available ERoEI, i.e. fossil fuels. The charts bear out this cutthroat strategy and so do the actions of nation states who have made it a legal duty to maximize greenhouse gases. Giving up the competitive advantage of coal, oil, and gas ensures you will be eaten alive in the global economy. Thus nation states are locked into a capitalist race to the grave. The nasty greenhouse gas-emitting side effects of these fuels are simply another negative externality quietly pushed onto future generations. However, physical reality will eventually overtake a fake mass-media culture consumed by the idolatry of materialism and greed. The Earth doesn’t bail out a species that continuously spends more than it saves. Instead, the biospheric slate is wiped clean to make way for the next bout of evolutionary events.

pitchforks and plutocrats around that signpost up ahead...,

politico | But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?

I see pitchforks.

At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.

But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.

And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

capitalists spread prosperity only when threatened by global rivalry, radical movements and the risk of uprisings at home

guardian |  Back in the 90s, I used to get into arguments with Russian friends about capitalism. This was a time when most young eastern European intellectuals were avidly embracing everything associated with that particular economic system, even as the proletarian masses of their countries remained deeply suspicious. Whenever I'd remark on some criminal excess of the oligarchs and crooked politicians who were privatising their countries into their own pockets, they would simply shrug.

"If you look at America, there were all sorts of scams like that back in the 19th century with railroads and the like," I remember one cheerful, bespectacled Russian twentysomething explaining to me. "We are still in the savage stage. It always takes a generation or two for capitalism to civilise itself."

"And you actually think capitalism will do that all by itself?"

"Look at history! In America you had your robber barons, then – 50 years later – the New Deal. In Europe, you had the social welfare state … "

"But, Sergei," I protested (I forget his actual name), "that didn't happen because capitalists just decided to be nice. That happened because they were all afraid of you."

He seemed touched by my naivety.

At that time, there was a series of assumptions everybody had to accept in order even to be allowed to enter serious public debate. They were presented like a series of self-evident equations. "The market" was equivalent to capitalism. Capitalism meant exorbitant wealth at the top, but it also meant rapid technological progress and economic growth. Growth meant increased prosperity and the rise of a middle class. The rise of a prosperous middle class, in turn, would always ultimately equal stable democratic governance. A generation later, we have learned that not one of these assumptions can any longer be assumed to be correct.

The real importance of Thomas Piketty's blockbuster, Capital in the 21st Century, is that it demonstrates, in excruciating detail (and this remains true despite some predictable petty squabbling) that, in the case of at least one core equation, the numbers simply don't add up. Capitalism does not contain an inherent tendency to civilise itself. Left to its own devices, it can be expected to create rates of return on investment so much higher than overall rates of economic growth that the only possible result will be to transfer more and more wealth into the hands of a hereditary elite of investors, to the comparative impoverishment of everybody else.

charlatans, cranks, and kansas...,

NYTimes |  Two years ago Kansas embarked on a remarkable fiscal experiment: It sharply slashed income taxes without any clear idea of what would replace the lost revenue. Sam Brownback, the governor, proposed the legislation — in percentage terms, the largest tax cut in one year any state has ever enacted — in close consultation with the economist Arthur Laffer. And Mr. Brownback predicted that the cuts would jump-start an economic boom — “Look out, Texas,” he proclaimed.

But Kansas isn’t booming — in fact, its economy is lagging both neighboring states and America as a whole. Meanwhile, the state’s budget has plunged deep into deficit, provoking a Moody’s downgrade of its debt. 

There’s an important lesson here — but it’s not what you think. Yes, the Kansas debacle shows that tax cuts don’t have magical powers, but we already knew that. The real lesson from Kansas is the enduring power of bad ideas, as long as those ideas serve the interests of the right people.

Why, after all, should anyone believe at this late date in supply-side economics, which claims that tax cuts boost the economy so much that they largely if not entirely pay for themselves? The doctrine crashed and burned two decades ago, when just about everyone on the right — after claiming, speciously, that the economy’s performance under Ronald Reagan validated their doctrine — went on to predict that Bill Clinton’s tax hike on the wealthy would cause a recession if not an outright depression. What actually happened was a spectacular economic expansion. 

Nor is it just liberals who have long considered supply-side economics and those promoting it to have been discredited by experience. In 1998, in the first edition of his best-selling economics textbook, Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw — very much a Republican, and later chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers — famously wrote about the damage done by “charlatans and cranks.” In particular, he highlighted the role of “a small group of economists” who “advised presidential candidate Ronald Reagan that an across-the-board cut in income tax rates would raise tax revenue.” Chief among that “small group” was none other than Art Laffer.

And it’s not as if supply-siders later redeemed themselves. On the contrary, they’ve been as ludicrously wrong in recent years as they were in the 1990s. For example, five years have passed since Mr. Laffer warned Americans that “we can expect rapidly rising prices and much, much higher interest rates over the next four or five years.” Just about everyone in his camp agreed. But what we got instead was low inflation and record-low interest rates.

So how did the charlatans and cranks end up dictating policy in Kansas, and to a more limited extent in other states? Follow the money.

unemployment problem is bigger than nyc and la combined...,

cnnmoney | Forget the unemployment rate. The employment rate -- the percentage of adult Americans who hold a job -- has barely budged in the past three years. It's hovering near its lowest level in three decades, and it's unlikely to improve when the Labor Department releases its May jobs report on Friday. 

About 58.6% of the civilian population over age 16 had a job as of April, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This rate -- officially called the "employment-population ratio" -- has been stuck in that range for several years. The last time it was this low was in 1983.

Looking at the job market using that measure paints a stark picture. Sure, companies have been hiring, but they've been creating jobs at a pace that merely keeps up with recent population growth. It's not enough to also make up for the jobs lost in the crisis.

That's why the needle simply hasn't moved.

Related: Unemployment problem is bigger than NYC and LA combined

Contrast that with the tale told by the unemployment rate, which fell from 10% in October 2009 to 7.5% in April. The unemployment rate only includes jobless people who have searched for work in the last four weeks. It skips over those who left the labor force entirely because they retired, went back to school, or simply gave up on finding a job.

"The unemployment rate is really not that helpful right now in understanding trends in job opportunities because we've had so many dropouts," said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group.

The employment-population ratio isn't perfect either.

Over time, it's expected to decline as the U.S. population ages. Eventually, a wave of Baby Boomer retirements will leave a smaller proportion of the U.S. population participating in the workforce.