are humans obsolete?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sheldrake's morphogenetic field theory reduced to rubble and rubbish...,

nature |  It was an otherwise normal day in November when Madeline Lancaster realized that she had accidentally grown a brain. For weeks, she had been trying to get human embryonic stem cells to form neural rosettes, clusters of cells that can become many different types of neuron. But for some reason her cells refused to stick to the bottom of the culture plate. Instead they floated, forming strange, milky-looking spheres.

“I didn't really know what they were,” says Lancaster, who was then a postdoc at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna. That day in 2011, however, she spotted an odd dot of pigment in one of her spheres. Looking under the microscope, she realized that it was the dark cells of a developing retina, an outgrowth of the developing brain. And when she sliced one of the balls open, she could pick out a variety of neurons. Lancaster realized that the cells had assembled themselves into something unmistakably like an embryonic brain, and she went straight to her adviser, stem-cell biologist Jürgen Knoblich, with the news. “I've got something amazing,” she told him. “You've got to see it.”

Lancaster and her colleagues were not the first to grow a brain in a dish. In 2008, researchers in Japan reported¹ that they had prompted embryonic stem cells from mice and humans to form layered balls reminiscent of a cerebral cortex. Since then, efforts to grow stem cells into rudimentary organs have taken off. Using carefully timed chemical cues, researchers around the world have produced three-dimensional structures that resemble tissue from the eye, gut, liver, kidney, pancreas, prostate, lung, stomach and breast. These bits of tissue, called organoids because they mimic some of the structure and function of real organs, are furthering knowledge of human development, serving as disease models and drug-screening platforms, and might eventually be used to rescue damaged organs (see ‘The organoid bank’). “It's probably the most significant development in the stem-cell field in the last five or six years,” says Austin Smith, director of the Wellcome Trust/MRC Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge, UK.

The current crop of organoids isn't perfect. Some lack key cell types; others imitate only the earliest stages of organ development or vary from batch to batch. So researchers are toiling to refine their organoids — to make them more complex, more mature and more reproducible. Still, biologists have been amazed at how little encouragement cells need to self-assemble into elaborate structures. “It doesn't require any super-sophisticated bioengineering,” says Knoblich. “We just let the cells do what they want to do, and they make a brain.”

sleeping in r'lyeh our future partner in the conquest of space?

nature |  Coleoid cephalopods (octopus, squid and cuttlefish) are active, resourceful predators with a rich behavioural repertoire¹. They have the largest nervous systems among the invertebrates² and present other striking morphological innovations including camera-like eyes, prehensile arms, a highly derived early embryogenesis and a remarkably sophisticated adaptive colouration system^{1, 3}. To investigate the molecular bases of cephalopod brain and body innovations, we sequenced the genome and multiple transcriptomes of the California two-spot octopus, Octopus bimaculoides. We found no evidence for hypothesized whole-genome duplications in the octopus lineage^{4, 5, 6}. The core developmental and neuronal gene repertoire of the octopus is broadly similar to that found across invertebrate bilaterians, except for massive expansions in two gene families previously thought to be uniquely enlarged in vertebrates: the protocadherins, which regulate neuronal development, and the C2H2 superfamily of zinc-finger transcription factors. Extensive messenger RNA editing generates transcript and protein diversity in genes involved in neural excitability, as previously described⁷, as well as in genes participating in a broad range of other cellular functions. We identified hundreds of cephalopod-specific genes, many of which showed elevated expression levels in such specialized structures as the skin, the suckers and the nervous system. Finally, we found evidence for large-scale genomic rearrangements that are closely associated with transposable element expansions. Our analysis suggests that substantial expansion of a handful of gene families, along with extensive remodelling of genome linkage and repetitive content, played a critical role in the evolution of cephalopod morphological innovations, including their large and complex nervous systems.

 scientificamerican |  With the largest-known genome in the invertebrate world—similar in size to that of a house cat (2.7 billion base pairs) and with more genes (33,000) than humans (20,000 to 25,000)—the octopus sequence has long been known to be large and confusing. Even without a genetic map, these animals and their cephalopod cousins (squids, cuttlefishes and nautiluses) have been common subjects for neurobiology and pharmacology research. But a sequence for this group of mollusks has been "sorely needed," says Annie Lindgren, a cephalopod researcher at Portland State University who was not involved in the new research. "Think about trying to assemble a puzzle, picture side down," she says of octopus research to date. "A genome gives us a picture to work with."

Among the biggest surprises contained within the genome—eliciting exclamation point–ridden e-mails from cephalopod researchers—is that octopuses possess a large group of familiar genes that are involved in developing a complex neural network and have been found to be enriched in other animals, such as mammals, with substantial processing power. Known as protocadherin genes, they "were previously thought to be expanded only in vertebrates," says Clifton Ragsdale, an associate professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the new paper. Such genes join the list of independently evolved features we share with octopuses—including camera-type eyes (with a lens, iris and retina), closed circulatory systems and large brains.

Having followed such a vastly different evolutionary path to intelligence, however, the octopus nervous system is an especially rich subject for study. "For neurobiologists, it's intriguing to understand how a completely distinct group has developed big, complex brains," says Joshua Rosenthal of the University of Puerto Rico's Institute of Neurobiology. "Now with this paper, we can better understand the molecular underpinnings."

Part of octopuses' sophisticated wiring system—which extends beyond the brain and is largely distributed throughout the body—controls their blink-of-an-eye camouflage. Researchers have been unsure how octopuses orchestrate their chromatophores, the pigment-filled sacs that expand and contract in milliseconds to alter their overall color and patterning. But with the sequenced genome in hand, scientists can now learn more about how this flashy system works—an enticing insight for neuroscientists and engineers alike.

straight out of a comic book: swarthy saracen devils violating the sanctity of....,

WaPo |  The leader of the Islamic State personally kept a 26-year-old American woman as a hostage and raped her repeatedly, according to U.S. officials and her family.

The family of Kayla Mueller said in an interview Friday that the FBI had informed them that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, had sexually abused their daughter, a humanitarian worker.

Mueller’s parents said the FBI first spoke to the family about the sexual assault in late June and provided more details two weeks ago. The bureau pieced together what happened to the American from interviews with other hostages and the captured wife of a senior Islamic State figure.

The FBI also told the Muellers that their daughter had been tortured.

“June was hard for me,” said Marsha Mueller, Kayla’s mother. “I was really upset with what I heard.”

The disclosure that Mueller was raped by Baghdadi adds to the grim evidence that the exploitation and abuse of women has been sanctioned at the highest levels of the Islamic State. The sexual enslavement of even teenage girls is seen as religiously endorsed by the group and regarded as a recruiting tool.

young patsies seduced by isis or by the fbi?

NYTimes |  Two months later, the affidavit says, an F.B.I. employee identified her “through social media platforms” as a supporter of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

The court document describes how two F.B.I. employees, posing as supporters of the terrorist group, engaged the couple in a long online courtship in which they repeatedly stated their desire to join the militants. Ms. Young wrote that she might be able to offer “medical aid” to the cause. Mr. Dakhlalla wrote that he was “willing to fight.”

But their messages were full of concerns. Mr. Dakhlalla wondered if he would be placed with other English-speaking recruits. Ms. Young was frustrated that family and community members in Starkville did not support the Islamic State. She also confessed that she had never traveled outside the United States. “I need help crossing from Turkey to Syria with my hijjrah partner,” Ms. Young wrote in early June, using the Arabic word for “emigration” or “journey.”

Ms. Young said they would leave under the pretense of being “newlyweds on our honeymoon.” On June 6, the couple performed an Islamic marriage ceremony. Mr. Harmon said that for the marriage to be valid under Islamic law, Ms. Young’s father was required to sign a contract. But the father, a police officer who friends say served in the United States military in Afghanistan, refused to do so.

After their arrest, the affidavit states, the couple confessed that they were on their way to join the Islamic State. On Tuesday, a federal magistrate in Oxford, Miss., ordered them held without bail, citing their methodical planning. They each face up to 20 years in prison on the charge of attempting and conspiring to knowingly provide material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization.

open thread: electoral rhetoric ≠ real life

thearchdruidreport |  If by some combination of sheer luck and hard campaigning, Bernie Sanders becomes the next president of the United States, it’s a safe bet that the starry-eyed leftists who helped put him into office will once again get to spend four or eight years trying to pretend that their candidate isn’t busy betraying all of the overheated expectations that helped put him into office. As Karl Marx suggested in one of his essays, if history repeats itself, the first time is tragedy but the second is generally farce; he didn’t mention what the third time around was like, but we may just get to find out.

The fact that this particular fantasy has so tight a grip on the imagination of the Democratic party’s leftward wing is also worth studying. There are many ways that a faction whose interests are being ignored by the rest of its party, and by the political system in general, can change that state of affairs. Unquestioning faith that this or that leader will do the job for them is not generally a useful strategy under such conditions, though, especially when that faith takes the place of any more practical activity. History has some very unwelcome things to say, for that matter, about the dream of political salvation by some great leader; so far it seems limited to certain groups on the notional left of the electorate, but if it spreads more widely, we could be looking at the first stirrings of the passions and fantasies that could bring about a new American fascism.

Meanwhile, just as the Democratic party in recent decades has morphed into America’s conservative party, the Republicans have become its progressive party. That’s another thing you’re not supposed to say in today’s America, because of the bizarre paralogic that surrounds the concept of progress in our collective discourse. What the word “progress” means, as I hope at least some of my readers happen to remember, is continuing further in the direction we’re already going—and that’s all it means. To most Americans today, though, the actual meaning of the word has long since been obscured behind a burden of vague emotion that treats “progressive” as a synonym for “good.” Notice that this implies the very odd belief that the direction in which we’re going is good, and can never be anything other than good.

For the last forty years, mind you, America has been moving steadily along an easily defined trajectory. We’ve moved step by step toward more political and economic inequality, more political corruption, more impoverishment for those outside the narrowing circles of wealth and privilege, more malign neglect toward the national infrastructure, and more environmental disruption, along with a steady decline in literacy and a rolling collapse in public health, among other grim trends. These are the ways in which we’ve been progressing, and that’s the sense in which the GOP counts as America’s current progressive party: the policies being proposed by GOP candidates will push those same changes even further than they’ve already gone, resulting in more inequality, corruption, impoverishment, and so on. 

So the 2016 election is shaping up to be a contest between one set of candidates who basically want to maintain the wretchedly unsatisfactory conditions facing the American people today, and another set who want to make those conditions worse, with one outlier on the Democratic side who says he wants to turn the clock back to 1976 or so, and one outlier on the Republican side who apparently wants to fast forward things to the era of charismatic dictators we can probably expect in the not too distant future. It’s not too hard to see why so many people looking at this spectacle aren’t exactly seized with enthusiasm for any of the options being presented to them by the existing political order.

those with the ears to listen hear the drums of war...,

sgtreport |  Please understand this, China fully understands consumers in the West are tapped out. They can see through the bogus numbers Washington produces and the wonks on Wall St. continually tout. They understand the Western system is built entirely on debt as in I OWE YOU! And they understand the system was set up originally as an “IOU nothing” system! They understand “it’s over”.

I do believe China wants to assume “a” if not THE reserve currency status in the future. They know they possess more gold than the U.S.. Would it not make sense to devalue your currency and even make it undervalued for the start of a new system for competitive reasons? Yes I know, they do not have enough gold to back the yuan currently …at current price. Will they pull a page out of FDR’s playbook and revalue gold higher since they are the largest hoarder in the world? Could they confiscate from their loyal citizens to leapfrog their holdings even further? Remember, the tried and true way(s) out of deflation are to print, devalue (versus neighbors AND gold) and of course go to war. Whether you want to believe it or not, we are now at war both financially and technologically. Unfortunately, financial and trade wars often times turn into hot wars. China just fired a shot heard ’round the world for those listening and it was not a celebratory shot by any means!

To finish, could it be China knows this will end in a complete collapse of the financial markets AND real economies of the world, in particular of the West? They already have the largest productive capacity in the world. Are they going to devalue their currency so it is “competitive” when the reset occurs? Have they stripped the West of their gold reserves leaving China with the greatest “monetary” hoard on the planet? Could there be a better position to be in than having the most “money” and greatest productive capacity …with a middle/lower class of your society numbering in the hundreds of millions needing “stuff” to truly enter the 21st century?

bout to be entertained by partisan establishment panty wadding unseen since the irving klaw era....,

Kahneman |  Yet the illusion of valid prediction remains intact, a fact that is exploited by people whose business is prediction—not only financial experts but pundits in business and politics, too. Television and radio stations and newspapers have their panels of experts whose job it is to comment on the recent past and foretell the future. Viewers and readers have the impression that they are receiving information that is somehow privileged, or at least extremely insightful. And there is no doubt that the pundits and their promoters genuinely believe they are offering such information. Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, explained these so-called expert predictions in a landmark twenty-year study, which he published in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Tetlock has set the terms for any future discussion of this topic.

Tetlock interviewed 284 people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends.” He asked them to assess the probabilities that certain events would occur in the not too distant future, both in areas of the world in which they specialized and in regions about which they had less knowledge. Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Which country would become the next big emerging market? In all, Tetlock gathered more than 80,000 predictions. He also asked the experts how they reached their conclusions, how they reacted when proved wrong, and how they evaluated evidence that did not support their positions. Respondents were asked to rate the probabilities of three alternative outcomes in every case: the persistence of the status quo, more of something such as political freedom or economic growth, or less of that thing.

The results were devastating. The experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned equal probabilities to each of the three potential outcomes. In other words, people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than nonspecialists.

Those who know more forecast very slightly better than those who know less. But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” Tetlock writes. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of The New York Times in ‘reading emerging situations.” The more famous the forecaster, Tetlock discovered, the more flamboyant the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” he writes, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

Tetlock also found that experts resisted admitting that they had been wrong, and when they were compelled to admit error, they had a large collection of excuses: they had been wrong only in their timing, an unforeseeable event had intervened, or they had been wrong but for the right reasons. Experts are just human in the end. They are dazzled by their own brilliance and hate to be wrong. Experts are led astray not by what they believe, but by how they think, says Tetlock. He uses the terminology from Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Hedgehogs “know one big thing” and have a theory about the world; they account for particular events within a coherent framework, bristle with impatience toward those who don’t see things their way, and are confident in their forecasts. They are also especially reluctant to admit error. For hedgehogs, a failed prediction is almost always “off only on timing” or “very nearly right.” They are opinionated and clear, which is exactly what television producers love to see on programs. Two hedgehogs on different sides of an issue, each attacking the idiotic ideas of the adversary, make for a good show.

Foxes, by contrast, are complex thinkers. They don’t believe that one big thing drives the march of history (for example, they are unlikely to accept the view that Ronald Reagan single-handedly ended the cold war by standing tall against the Soviet Union). Instead the foxes recognize that reality emerges from the interactions of many different agents and forces, including blind luck, often producing large and unpredictable outcomes. It was the foxes who scored best in Tetlock’s study, although their performance was still very poor. They are less likely than hedgehogs to be invited to participate in television debates.

granny goodness in trubble..., (or she's completely above the law)

nationalreview |  Hillary Clinton is in trouble. Or more accurately put, she should be in trouble — very big trouble, in fact. The latest from the Department of Justice is that, yes, they have seized Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server and an accompanying thumb drive.

The FBI has reportedly confiscated copies of the same e-mails from Hillary’s lawyer because it deemed the information contained in them too sensitive for him to keep. While attempting to defend the indefensible, a Clinton spokesman said that this merely shows that the former secretary of state is cooperating with a “security inquiry.” 

That pathetic spin was meant to prevent the American people from recognizing there is not just smoke but fire to the Hillary e-mail scandal. Too late. Already, the flames are visible. The most damning revelation about Hillary’s e-mails from the last 24 hours is not the details of the investigation into her homebrew server. What’s making headlines across the political spectrum is that some of the material she sent via her personal server was so sensitive that it was designated “Top Secret.” 

This is a jaw-slaps-the-table moment. Even for those of us who hold a very low opinion of Mrs. Clinton’s character, integrity, and judgment, this is a graver offense than many had contemplated. Merely the storage of “Top Secret” e-mails – never mind their dissemination over open channels to some individuals likely not cleared to read them — is a federal felony. On top of that, it is unthinkable that Hillary could have sent such sensitive information and not known at the time that it was sensitive.

scott free is obviously pro-choice, but partisan-primary tard rustling ain't easy...,

thinkprogress |  Current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump said that while he opposes abortion, he understands that Planned Parenthood helps a lot of women and we “have to look at the positives.” The women’s health organization currently had a 15 percent favorability rating — higher than any of the GOP presidential candidates.

Fox News host Sean Hannity asked the business mogul during an extended interview Tuesday night if half a billion dollars of taxpayer money should continue to go toward funding the abortion provider.
“They do good things,” Trump said, interrupting the question.

“Let’s say there’s two Planned Parenthoods in a way,” Trump continued. “You have it as an abortion clinic. Now that’s actually a fairly small part of what they do but it’s a brutal part and I’m totally against it and I wouldn’t do that. They also, however, service women.”

He went on to criticize former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), who said last week while criticizing Planned Parenthood that he’s “not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.”

“He was so bad,” Trump said. “It’s like, what is he doing? We have to help women. A lot of women are helped. So we have to look at the positives also for Planned Parenthood.”

quiet as it's kept, scott BEEN goin in on granny...,

thehill |  Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he is certain Hillary Clinton "committed a crime" with her email server.

But Trump told Fox News' Sean Hannity on Tuesday that the Democratic presidential front-runner might receive a free pass for her use of a private email server because of Democrats in high places.

"She committed a crime," Trump said. "[But] Democrats are all the prosecutors."

Clinton has reportedly agreed to turn over to Justice Department officials the private email server that she used while heading the State Department. She has maintained that she has followed all laws and protocols.

Trump said Clinton and GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush are both controlled by campaign donors — something he wouldn't have to worry about because of his own wealth.

"My income is $400 million per year," Trump said. "Sure, I would spend it — if I'm doing well."

Trump expressed gratitude to voters after recent polls show that two rival candidates who attacked him — Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry — have dipped in the polls after attacking him aggressively.

"I'm really very honored by that," Trump said.

did scott free just now spit truth on the unspeakable?

MEDIA ite | Donald Trump finally laid out his plan for dealing with Iran (or ISIS?) on Fox & Friends Tuesday, recommending that the United States “knock the hell out of them” and then “take the oil.” 

Host Steve Doocy asked Trump about his plans to deal with ISIS. But whether he was confused or misspoke, Trump started talking about Iran. “Iran is taking over Iraq 100%, just like I predicted years ago,” he said. “I say this, I didn’t want to go there in the first place. Now we take the oil.”

“We should have kept the oil,” Trump continued. “Now we go in, we knock the hell out of them, take the oil, we thereby take their wealth. They have so much money.”

“They have better internet connections than we do in the United States,” he complained. “They’re training our kids through the internet. We have to knock out

donald j. trump is hereby rechristened mr. miracle aka scott free...,

wikidpedia |  Scott Free is the son of Izaya (Highfather), the ruler of New Genesis, and his wife named Avia. As part of a diplomatic move to stop a destructive war against the planet Apokolips, Highfather agreed to an exchange of heirs with the galactic tyrant Darkseid; the exchange of heirs guaranteed that neither side would attack the other. Scott traded places with Darkseid's second-born son Orion.^[23]

Scott grew up in one of Granny Goodness' "Terror Orphanages" with no knowledge of his own heritage. As he matured, Scott rebelled against the totalitarian ideology of Apokolips. Hating himself for being unable to fit in, he was influenced by Metron to see a future beyond Darkseid. Scott became part of a small band of pupils who were tutored in secret by the rebel Himon,^[24] a New Genesian living as a "Hunger Dog" on Apokolips. It was at these meetings that he met fellow pupil Big Barda, who would later become his wife.^[25]

Eventually, Scott Free escaped and fled to Earth. His escape, long anticipated and planned for by Darkseid, nullified the pact between Darkseid and Highfather and gave Darkseid the excuse he needed to revive the war with New Genesis. Once on Earth, he became the protégé of a circus escape artist, Thaddeus Brown, whose stage name was Mister Miracle. Brown was impressed with Scott's skills (especially as supplemented with various advanced devices he had taken from his previous home). Scott befriended Brown's assistant, a dwarf named Oberon. When Thaddeus Brown was murdered, Scott Free assumed the identity of Mister Miracle.^[26] Barda later followed Scott to Earth, and the two used their powers, equipment, and skills in the war against Darkseid, who was still interested in recapturing both of them. Eventually, tired of being chased on Earth by Darkseid's servants, Scott returned to Apokolips and won his freedom by legal means, through trial by combat.

Scott Free later became a member of the Justice League International as did Barda and Oberon, which recast him and Big Barda as semi-retired super-heroes that sought to live quiet lives in the suburbs when they were not involved in Justice League-related adventures. In particular, Scott Free was recast as a hen-pecked husband, who often found himself on the receiving end of his wife's temper, over her desire to live a quiet life on Earth.

During his time in the League, Scott developed an intense rivalry with Justice League villain Manga Khan. The villainous intergalactic trader and black marketer repeatedly kidnapped Scott, ultimately convincing Scott's conniving former manager Funky Flashman into forging documents forcing Scott to work for Manga as his personal entertainer. To force him to go along willingly, Khan replaced Scott with a lifelike robot who was ultimately murdered by Despero during his first mission with the Justice League. Scott ultimately escaped from Manga Khan's clutches and reunited with his wife and friends, though the shock was enough to cause Scott to ultimately quit the League and to take on a protégé in the form of Shiloh Norman.

this is a modok thing, boris badenov couldn't possibly understand....,

wikipedia |  MODOK (also written as M.O.D.O.K.; acronym for Mental/Mobile/Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing) is a fictional supervillain that appears in comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character first appeared in Tales of Suspense #93 (September 1967), and later made his first full appearance in Tales of Suspense #94. He was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Debuting in the Silver Age of Comic Books, MODOK has appeared in over four decades of Marvel continuity, also starring in the limited series Super-Villain Team-Up: MODOK's Eleven #1–5 (September – December 2008) and a self-titled one-shot publication MODOK: Reign Delay #1 (November 2009).

George Tarleton is a technician for the organization Advanced Idea Mechanics (AIM). He was born in Bangor, Maine. Having recently created the artifact the Cosmic Cube, the AIM scientists use advanced mutagenics to alter Tarleton and create the super intelligent MODOC (acronym for Mental Organism Designed Only for Computing) to study and improve the object. MODOC, however, becomes ambitious and kills its former masters and takes control of AIM. Calling itself MODOK (Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing), it comes into conflict with the hero Captain America, who is intent on rescuing SHIELD agent Sharon Carter from AIM.^[3]

MODOK becomes a recurring foe for Captain America, battling the hero on three more occasions, with the last encounter revealing the villain's origin.^[4] MODOK also battles Namor the Sub-Mariner and Doctor Doom, who is intent on claiming the Cosmic Cube.^[5]

MODOK reappears and kidnaps Betty Ross, changing her into the mutant Harpy in a bid to destroy the Hulk. The character follows the Hulk and the Harpy to a floating aerie, where the Hulk's alter ego Bruce Banner cures Ross of her condition. MODOK and an AIM team arrive in time to kill the creature the Bi-Beast, the guardian of the aerie, but not before activating a self-destruct mechanism, forcing the characters to flee.^[6] MODOK also accepts the offer of the other-dimensional being the Black Lama and participates in the "War of the Supervillains", but fails to capture the prize when defeated by Iron Man.^[7]

AIM becomes dissatisfied with the lack of scientific advancement and MODOK's obsession with seeking revenge against metahumans, ousting him from power. MODOK attempts to regain control of the organization and prove his worth by unleashing a nerve agent on New York City, which is prevented by Ms. Marvel and the Vision.^[8] MODOK seeks revenge against Ms. Marvel, attempting to mind control the heroine^[9] and then hire assassin Deathbird to kill her;^[10] Ms. Marvel overcomes these obstacles and finally defeats MODOK.^[11]

MODOK's ambitions grow and he seeks world domination, but is thwarted by Iron Man and superhero team the Champions.^[12] After an attempt to plunder the resources of the Savage Land and a battle with the savage Ka-Zar and the Hulk,^[13] the character develops a new biological agent called Virus X. MODOK's attempts to test the agent on the homeless is prevented by the Thing, Sub-Mariner, and Captain America, although the villain escapes and the Thing almost dies when exposed to the virus.^[14]

what trump supporters are really thinking in their own words...,

WaPo |  The media loves Donald Trump. And who can blame them? In an era when political candidates present the blandest, safest, focus-grouped versions of themselves to the public, Trump's brash antics -- "pure political id," as my colleague Chris Cillizza says -- guarantee, if nothing else, an interesting read.

But because Trump is such a larger-than-life character, we tend to overlook the most interesting part of his candidacy -- the millions of Republican primary voters with whom his message resonates so strongly. The rise of Trump isn't really about Trump, but rather the political moment we find ourselves in, where a foul-mouthed businessman and reality TV star with no political experience is a front-runner for the highest office in the land.

This weekend a fascinating reddit thread opened a window into the minds of a certain type of Trump supporter. In the popular AskReddit section of the site, a Redditor asked Trump supporters to explain what they saw in the guy. And they did -- the thread has generated nearly 13,000 comments so far. Here's what some of them said.

trump knows and has been very open about the real unemployment rate for a long time now...,

forbes |  After Donald Trump announced his latest bid for the presidency, I reached out to get details on Trump’s plan to replace Obamacare, and posted that interview on FORBES last week. But for many FORBES readers, the most eye-catching part of the interview wasn’t Trump’s plan for health care.

It was what the Trump campaign said about unemployment.

“Mr. Trump believes that the real unemployment rate is over 18%, not the reported 5.5%,” a spokesperson told me.

Trump’s distrust of the government’s job statistics isn’t new. In July, he even suggested that the U.S. unemployment rate could be as high as 40% — well above what the Bureau of Labor Statistics has found.

u.s. corporate press desperate to marginalize donald trump...,

slate | To understand the rise of Donald Trump, you’d do well not to fixate on the fact that he’s running under the Republican banner. During Thursday night’s Fox News debate, Trump made it clear that failing to secure the GOP nomination wouldn’t stop him from exploring an independent candidacy. And honestly, he’d be crazy not to. Trump is very far from a Republican regular. He represents an entirely different phenomenon, one that bears little resemblance to garden-variety American conservatism. That’s why Republicans shouldn’t fool themselves into believing that one lackluster debate performance will send him packing.

Go to almost any European democracy and you will find that the parties of the center-right and center-left that have dominated the political scene since the Second World War are losing ground to new political movements. What these movements have in common is that they manage to blend populism and nationalism into a potent anti-establishment brew. One of the first political figures to perfect this brand of politics was the very Trumpian Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian media tycoon who rose to power as part of a coalition of right-of-center parties in the mid-1990s, and who has been in and out of power ever since, dodging corruption charges and worse all the while. More recently, the miserable state of Europe’s economies has fueled the rise of dozens of other parties. Britain’s Labour Party has been devastated by the rise not only of the leftist Scottish National Party, but also by UKIP, a movement of the right that has been growing at Labour’s expense by campaigning against mass immigration, and by largely abandoning what had been its more libertarian line on the welfare state. UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, has a penchant for bombast that endears him his working-class base, which might sound familiar to you.

u.k. corporate press betrays electorate and goes to work marginalizing popular labor mp

medialens |  In May, voters grasped Spanish political orthodoxy and shook it like a rag doll:

'The anti-austerity party Podemos claimed its biggest victory in Barcelona, where activist Ada Colau seized control of the city hall. Podemos and Ciudadanos... made advances across the country that will give them a chance to shape policy for the first time.'

Podemos also backed the campaign of Manuela Carmena, a 71-year-old labour-rights lawyer, who ended 24 years of rule by Spain's hard-right Popular party in the capital, Madrid. These were major triumphs in the face of fierce and united corporate media opposition. Jose Juan Toharia, president of polling firm Metroscopia, said:

'Tomorrow's Spain doesn't feel identified with the establishment parties.'

A Guardian leader commented:

'Together, the two traditional parties have seen their support shrink from two-thirds of the poll in 2011, to just over half. Podemos and Ciudadanos have filled the void. The two-party system that had dominated Spain since the end of dictatorship in 1978 is crumbling.'

MP Jeremy Corbyn, reportedly 'far ahead of his rivals in the Labour leadership election', has explicitly called for Labour to learn from Greece's Syriza, Spain's Podemos and the Scottish National Party by campaigning against 'austerity'. Corbyn said:

'I have been in Greece, I have been in Spain. It's very interesting that social democratic parties that accept the austerity agenda and end up implementing it end up losing a lot of members and a lot of support. I think we have a chance to do something different here.'

This echoes a comment made by Podemos' leader Pablo Iglesias in an interview with Tariq Ali. Iglesias suggested that Podemos and Syriza offered potent examples that had already been followed in Scotland:

'We saw this in the UK. The Scottish National Party [SNP] really beat the Labour Party by criticising austerity and criticising cuts, which are related to the failure of the "third way" policies of Tony Blair and Anthony Giddens.'

One might think that, in discussing the popularity of Corbyn's leadership bid, a rational media would give serious attention to the visions, strategies and success of Podemos, Syriza and the SNP. For example, we can imagine in-depth interviews with Iglesias and Colau on Corbyn's prospects. We can imagine discussions of how a weakening of the two-party grip on Spanish politics might be repeated outside Scotland in the UK, where similarly moribund political conditions apply. As former ambassador, Craig Murray, has observed:

'[I]f the range of possible political programmes were placed on a linear scale from 1 to 100, the Labour and Conservative parties offer you the choice between 81 and 84.'

And yet, we have not seen a single substantive discussion of these issues in any UK national newspaper. The Lexis media database records 1,974 articles mentioning Corbyn over the last month.

Of these, just 29 mentioned Podemos. Our search of articles mentioning both 'Corbyn' and 'Pablo Iglesias' yielded zero results, as did our searches for 'Corbyn' and 'Ada Colau', and 'Corbyn' and 'Manuela Carmena'. Lexis found 133 Guardian articles mentioning Corbyn over the last month, with three of these containing mentions in passing of SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon. The Independent had 47 hits for Corbyn, with one article mentioning Sturgeon.

These would appear to be natural sources and comparisons, particularly given Corbyn's explicit references to them. Instead, we found complete indifference combined with a ruthless and relentless campaign to trash Corbyn across the so-called media 'spectrum'.

consciousness began when the gods stopped speaking...,

nautil.us |  The book sets its sights high from the very first words.  “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind!” Jaynes begins. “A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries.”

To explore the origins of this inner country, Jaynes first presents a masterful precis of what consciousness is not. It is not an innate property of matter. It is not merely the process of learning. It is not, strangely enough, required for a number of rather complex processes. Conscious focus is required to learn to put together puzzles or execute a tennis serve or even play the piano. But after a skill is mastered, it recedes below the horizon into the fuzzy world of the unconscious. Thinking about it makes it harder to do. As Jaynes saw it, a great deal of what is happening to you right now does not seem to be part of your consciousness until your attention is drawn to it. Could you feel the chair pressing against your back a moment ago? Or do you only feel it now, now that you have asked yourself that question?

Consciousness, Jaynes tells readers, in a passage that can be seen as a challenge to future students of philosophy and cognitive science, “is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.” His illustration of his point is quite wonderful. “It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.”

Perhaps most striking to Jaynes, though, is that knowledge and even creative epiphanies appear to us without our control. You can tell which water glass is the heavier of a pair without any conscious thought—you just know, once you pick them up. And in the case of problem-solving, creative or otherwise, we give our minds the information we need to work through, but we are helpless to force an answer. Instead it comes to us later, in the shower or on a walk. Jaynes told a neighbor that his theory finally gelled while he was watching ice moving on the St. John River. Something that we are not aware of does the work.

The picture Jaynes paints is that consciousness is only a very thin rime of ice atop a sea of habit, instinct, or some other process that is capable of taking care of much more than we tend to give it credit for. “If our reasonings have been correct,” he writes, “it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things that we do, but were not conscious at all.”

Jaynes believes that language needed to exist before what he has defined as consciousness was possible. So he decides to read early texts, including The Iliad and The Odyssey, to look for signs of people who aren’t capable of introspection—people who are all sea, no rime. And he believes he sees that in The Iliad. He writes that the characters in The Iliad do not look inward, and they take no independent initiative. They only do what is suggested by the gods. When something needs to happen, a god appears and speaks. Without these voices, the heroes would stand frozen on the beaches of Troy, like puppets.

Speech was already known to be localized in the left hemisphere, instead of spread out over both hemispheres. Jaynes suggests that the right hemisphere’s lack of language capacity is because it used to be used for something else—specifically, it was the source of admonitory messages funneled to the speech centers on the left side of the brain. These manifested themselves as hallucinations that helped guide humans through situations that required complex responses—decisions of statecraft, for instance, or whether to go on a risky journey.

The combination of instinct and voices—that is, the bicameral mind—would have allowed humans to manage for quite some time, as long as their societies were rigidly hierarchical, Jaynes writes. But about 3,000 years ago, stress from overpopulation, natural disasters, and wars overwhelmed the voices’ rather limited capabilities. At that point, in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, bits and pieces of the conscious mind would have come to awareness, as the voices mostly died away. That led to a more flexible, though more existentially daunting, way of coping with the decisions of everyday life—one better suited to the chaos that ensued when the gods went silent. By The Odyssey, the characters are capable of something like interior thought, he says. The modern mind, with its internal narrative and longing for direction from a higher power, appear.

race-baiting 101

There is a deep commonality between the vilification of police and teachers.  Interestingly, police and teachers have two things in common. First, they are largely from the same social class, the lower-middle or working class. Second, in overwhelming majority, they are drawn from the population of working class whites. 

Ever since the sixties, these heavily unionized and politically active working class whites have been tasked with keeping the largely Black and Hispanic underclass under control. This is an impossible task for them. They lack the personal, professional, cultural, and psychic resources to accomplish this task. 

At the very least, they're drawing a paycheck for trying and failing, and to that extent, they have been spared the indignities of membership in the underclass themselves. 
 

All kinds of "solutions" for the "problems" of the police and teachers have been and are being proposed. None of these solutions will work.

I am calling attention to the socio-economic and racial demographic fact that the composition of the public school teacher and urban overseer cadres are the same, and that these represent a continuation of an American Original divide and conquer strategy of intentional race-baiting.

jobs lost in the u.s. since 2007

zerohedge |  Who says America has a jobs problem? As the chart below shows, the "New Economy" may pay abysmally, but at least it promises a little to everyone (or to paraphrase a famous phrase "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"). Nowhere is that more obvious than in the chart showing the monthly change in waiter and bartender jobs.

Here is the bottom line: in the past 65 months, or nearly five and a half years starting with March 2010, or when the jobs "recovery" really kicked in, jobs for waiters and bartenders (aka food service and drinking places) have declined just once.

This is a statistically abnormal hit rate of nearly 99%, and one which we assume has everything to do with the BLS' charge of not so much reporting reality as finding loopholes in the goalseeked model to report that the US keeps adding over 200,000 jobs every month or bust.

Putting this number in context, the US has allegedly added 376K bartenders in the past year, and 3 million since March 2010.

roughly 60% of the civilian work force is fully employed and 40% are marginally employed or unemployed

zerohedge |  Officially, the unemployment rate in the U.S. is 5.6%, meaning 5.6% of the work force is temporarily out of a job and actively seeking another one. This low number reflects nearly full employment, as 3% to 4% of the work force is typically in the process of quitting/being laid off and finding another job.

Typically, periods of nearly full employment are economically good times, as household income is bolstered and employers have to pay a bit more to hire workers when the labor market is tight.

But these do not feel like good times for most households, despite the low unemployment rate. Earnings are stagnant for 90% of the work force, and employers are only paying a competitive premium for workers in very select fields (programmers adept at Python and mobile user interfaces, etc.)

This creates a cognitive dissonance between the low official unemployment rate and the real economy, which is behaving like an economy with much higher rates of unemployment, i.e. sluggish hiring, stagnant wages, difficulty in finding jobs, and very little pressure on employers to pay more for typical jobs.

Let's start by trying to calculate the work force--the number of people who could get a job if they wanted to. This isn't quite as straightforward as we might imagine, because the two primary agencies that compile these statistics use slightly different categories.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calculates the civilian noninstitutional population as everyone 16 and older who is not in active-duty military service or in prison. The BLS reckons this to be about 250 million people, out of a total population of about 317 million residents: Household Data (BLS)

The BLS subtracts 93 million people who are not in the labor force, leaving about 157 million people in the civilian work force--roughly half the nation's population.

Of these, 148.8 million have a job of some sort and 8.6 million are unemployed.

The Census Bureau calculates the civilian noninstitutional population as everyone who is not in active-duty military service or in prison. (You can download various data on the U.S. population on this Census Bureau website: Age and Sex Composition in the United States: 2012. I am using Table 1 data.)

The Census Bureau places the civilian noninstitutional population at 308.8 million in 2012. Since roughly 4 million people are born and 2.6 million die in the U.S. each year, we can adjust this upward by roughly 3.5 million to bring it up to date (mid-2015) to 312 million.

inflation is far higher and gdp is far lower...,

zerohedge |  Statistics have become very misleading: in particular we are being badly misled into believing that the US is teetering on the edge of price deflation, because the US official rate of inflation is barely positive, a level that US bonds and therefore all other financial markets have priced in without accepting it is actually significantly higher.

There are two possible approaches to assessing the true rate of price inflation. You can either reverse all the tweaks government statisticians have implemented over the decades to reduce the apparent rate, or you can collect a statistically significant sample of price data independently and turn that into an index. John Williams of Shadowstats.com is well known for his work on the former approach, but until recently I was unaware that anyone was attempting the latter. That is until Simon Hunt of Simon Hunt Strategic Services drew my attention to the Chapwood Index, which deserves wider publicity.

This is from the website: "The Chapwood Index reflects the true cost-of-living increase in America. Updated and released twice a year, it reports the unadjusted actual cost and price fluctuation of the top 500 items on which Americans spend their after-tax dollars in the 50 largest cities in the nation." It is, therefore, statistically significant, and it consistently shows price inflation to be much higher than that indicated by the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

the war on drugs corrupted american policing and the rule of law beyond repair...,

 

theatlantic |  The 2012 documentary The House I Live In critically examines the War on Drugs, deeming it a failure that has bloated American prisons and led to an adoption of flawed policing policies. Now, Congress seems poised to seriously amend these tough federal sentencing laws that caused a huge increase in the number of Americans who are incarcerated—especially addressing the high incarceration rate of minority drug offenders. In this clip from the documentary, The Wire's creator, David Simon, describes how the strategies behind the War on Drugs have actually destroyed law enforcement's power of deterrence and increased cynicism among enforcement agents. 

For more information, visit the Independent Lens website. The full film can be purchased at http://www.thehouseilivein.org/.

criminal overseers gone wild and their corrupt union gone even wilder...,

theatlantic |  On-duty police officers appear to be eating edible pot products—OC Weekly transcribes words they spoke while egging one another on. (“Those candy bars are pretty good,” one said. “I kinda feel light-headed though.”) Other dialogue offers a number of insights into the subculture of this narcotics unit. Take the woman with an amputated leg that police encountered on entering the dispensary. “Did you punch that one-legged old benita?” one police officer asks another. The other cop laughingly replied, “I was about to kick her in her fucking nub.” These are people Santa Ana taxpayers empower to use lethal force at their discretion.

Later, OC Weekly got access to a fuller version of the footage. They marvel at what it contains:

Hon. Jonathan Fish has been an Orange County Superior Court Judge since 2008, but before that he was a prosecutor with the district attorney’s office who specialized in narcotics cases.

In the footage, an unidentified Santa Ana Police officer is talking to another cop as they wrap up their raid on the marijuana dispensary.

“You ever work with John Fish, the DA?” the officer asks.
“He was just in when I got there,” his partner responds.

“He's the judge that signed our warrant,” the first officer continues, adding that he had just spoken with Judge Fish and had enjoyed a good laugh with him about their old times together. “He's the fucker that pulled into a gas station on our way to the Staples Center and goes, ‘Let's buy some beers and drink 'em out of a red cup.’ I go, ‘That’s not going to be obvious.’ There we are at an am/pm getting styrofoam cups and pouring our beers into them. That fucking blew me away.”

That is all part of the backstory.

What’s new is the way that the cops caught misbehaving on camera and the police union that represents them have responded to an internal police investigation—not with embarrassment, contrition, and public apologies, as would befit trustworthy people of good character, but with shameless, discrediting chutzpah: They’ve sued to keep now public video of their indefensible behavior from their overseers!

apartheid - the repressed

thisamericanlife |  Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite a lot of evidence that it works- desegregation. This week, Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district in Missouri that, just a few years ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program. It's the first of a two-part series.

school segregation - nothing changed...,

propublica |  News reports in the days and weeks after Brown’s death often noted his recent graduation and college ambitions, the clear implication that the teen’s school achievements only deepened the sorrow over his loss.

But if Brown’s educational experience was a success story, it was a damning one.

The Normandy school district from which Brown graduated is among the poorest and most segregated in Missouri. It ranks last in overall academic performance. Its rating on an annual state assessment was so dismal that by the time Brown graduated the district had lost its accreditation. 

About half of black male students at Normandy High never graduate. Just one in four graduates enters a four-year college. The college where Brown was headed is a troubled for-profit trade-school that a U.S. Senate report said targeted students for their “vulnerabilities,” and that at one time advertised itself to what it internally called the area’s “Unemployed, Underpaid, Unsatisfied, Unskilled, Unprepared, Unsupported, Unmotivated, Unhappy, Underserved!” 

A mere five miles down the road from Normandy is the wealthy county seat where a grand jury recently decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Brown. Success there looks drastically different. The Clayton Public Schools are predominantly white, with almost no poverty to speak of. The district is regularly ranked among the top 10 percent in the state. More than 96 percent of students graduate. Fully 84 percent of graduates head to four-year universities.

Brown’s tragedy, then, is not limited to his individual potential cut brutally short. His schooling also reveals a more subtle, ongoing racial injustice: the vast disparity in resources and expectations for black children in America’s stubbornly segregated educational system. 

As ProPublica has documented in a series of stories on the resegregation of America’s schools, hundreds of school districts across the nation have been released from court-enforced integration over the past 15 years. Over that same time period, the number of so-called apartheid schools — schools whose white population is 1 percent or less — has shot up. The achievement gap, greatly narrowed during the height of school desegregation, has widened.

“American schools are disturbingly racially segregated, period,” Catherine Lhamon, head of the U.S. Education Department’s civil rights office, said in an October speech. “We are reserving our expectations for our highest rigor level of courses, the courses we know our kids need to be able to be full and productive members of society, but we are reserving them for a class of kids who are white and who are wealthier.”