stratification and supernatural punishment: cooperation or obedience?

ReligionBrain&Behavior | Schloss and Murray (S&M) have provided an insightful and important contribution to our understanding of the role of supernatural punishment in the evolution of religious systems. Future researchers will need to pay particular attention to their refinements of the cooperation enhancement (CE) and punishment avoidance (PA) approaches. While S&M acknowledge “considerable empirical support that … belief in supernatural sanctions [is associated with] recent, cosmopolitan religions” (p. 57) their approach could be further refined through greater attention to the role of social, economic and political stratification in the shaping of religious doctrine (Cronk, 1994). We argue that stratification and hierarchy are the critical elements in producing a cognitive ecology and social structure in which punishing gods can thrive.

Humans are famously obedient to authority (e.g., Milgram, 1963), and there is a great deal of empirical evidence that males in particular possess cognitive adaptations to assess dominance status and modify behavior accordingly. A number of visible traits including stature (Hensley, 1993), eye color (Kleisnera, Kočnara, Rubešováb, & Flegra, 2010), and facial structure (Mueller & Mazur, 1996) have been shown to signal dominance, and humans seem to use auditory clues as well. Subordinate men, for instance, unconsciously adjust their vocal pitch to that of a dominant conversation partner (Gregory & Webster, 1996; see also Gregory & Gallagher, 2002; Puts, Gaulin, & Verdolini, 2006; Puts, Hodges, Cárdenas, & Gaulin, 2007). Thus, humans seem to have a number of psychological adaptations that allow us to perceive and navigate status hierarchies effectively.
Hierarchy and stratification are important but not ubiquitous in human societies (Dubreuil, 2010), and there is considerable variation even among types of societies that are often painted with broad strokes. For example, hunter-gatherers are frequently labeled as egalitarian, but many such groups include some stratification (Kelly, 1995). Status differences based upon sex and age are particularly common (e.g., Hart and Pilling, 1979). Stratification may have its greatest incidence in larger human societies, but its seeds are present even among the smallest, most homogeneous groups.

Stratification is maintained through mechanisms of social control. Coercion is one obvious way to maintain control, but it can be costly. Manipulation through the use of signals is often a less costly and less risky alternative. As Schloss and Murray (2011) note, judgmental gods and judgment-based afterlife beliefs are not universal. Considerable evidence exists that such beliefs are rare among hunter-gatherer, small-scale, and egalitarian societies, and common among food producing, large-scale, and hierarchical societies. Swanson (1960) may have been the first to note an association between stratification and the belief in supernatural powers that reward and punish individuals according to how well they behave (see also Peregrine, 1996). Similarly, Roes and Raymond (2003) found an association between social complexity and the belief in moralizing gods. Most recently, Dickson, Olsen, Dahm, and Wachtel (2005) found an association between subsistence type (a common proxy for degree of stratification) and the belief that the quality of one's experience in the next life is contingent upon how one behaves in this one. While only 10% of food collecting societies maintain such beliefs, nearly 90% of plow agricultural societies have them. As societies become more socially, economically, and politically stratified, punitive, judgmental gods and judgmental afterlife beliefs become much more common.
Hierarchies can also serve to protect individuals from those lower in rank. If a worker objects to something her boss is telling her to do, the boss can always appeal to the hierarchy: “I, too, am just following orders.” When the top of the hierarchy is occupied by a capricious, omniscient, incorporeal being whose primary concern is obedience, a ruler's accountability is reduced even further. By enforcing the divinely prescribed order of things, the ruler is merely doing his or her job.

The hierarchical approach creates a framework in which the CE and PA approaches can be seen as working together. The CE viewpoint suggests that the threat of supernatural punishment enhances cooperation among all members of religious groups. An unstated assumption is that this cooperation benefits all participants. While the hierarchical perspective does not contradict that argument, it suggests that costs and benefits may be distributed unequally – those nearer the top of the hierarchy may benefit much more than those at the bottom. The PA account suggests that individuals subscribe to beliefs that include supernatural punishment in order to avoid real world punishment. In the hierarchical view, elites are using the threat of supernatural punishment as an inexpensive means of encouraging non-elites to follow the rules, but real-world punishment is, of course, a fallback option.

One of the predictions of the hierarchical perspective has already been supported: there is indeed a cross-cultural association between social stratification and belief in judgmental gods. We also predict a relationship at the individual level between the degree to which people believe in the hierarchical system and the strength of their beliefs in supernatural punishment.

why is all this "stuff" happening to america right now?

Video - Rapture, tribulation, left behind?

EndoftheAmericanDream | What in the world is happening to America? In more normal times it would be easy to dismiss Hurricane Irene as an isolated incident, but so far this year we have had some sort of a "major disaster" almost every single month. In addition to Hurricane Irene, this year we have also had truly unusual earthquakes, unprecedented tornadoes, historic flooding along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, horrific drought, massive wildfires and a continuous onslaught of nuclear radiation from Fukushima. Almost every single area of the United States has been affected by at least one of these disasters. So why is all of this stuff happening to America all of a sudden? Does anyone have any theories? Right now we are having a "once in a century" disaster every few weeks, and either we are just extremely "unlucky" or there is a reason why all of this is happening.

Let's take a look at some of the bizarre disasters that have happened so for this year....

talking out of school on the unspeakable...,

Video - Joe Rogan meditating out loud on why it is the way it is.

dangerous white stereotypes?

Video - To Kill a Mockingbird

NYTimes | Not all blacks are unmoved by “The Help.” Indeed, among my friends, relatives and colleagues a wide range of views have been shared, including comments that some of us might want to establish a support group for strong black women who liked “The Help.”

It is unfair to the filmmakers and cast to expect a work of fiction to adhere to the standards of authenticity we would want for a documentary. But we also recognize that precious few works of art tackle the Civil Rights era, and what people coming of age in the 21st century learn about this era often stems from fictive rather than nonfictive sources.

Forty-eight years after Martin Luther King Jr. was accompanied by tens of thousands of black domestic workers to the National Mall in Washington to demand economic justice, it is not all that difficult to render black fictional characters with appealing attributes and praiseworthy talents. What is more difficult to accomplish is a verisimilar rendering of the white characters.

This movie deploys the standard formula. With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable, and not just because of their racism. Like the housewives portrayed in reality television shows, the housewives of Jackson treat each other, their parents and their husbands with total callousness. In short, they are bad people, therefore they are racists.

There’s a problem, though, with that message. To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.

Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.

But that wasn’t the case. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy. An analogue can be seen in the way popular culture treats Germans up to and during World War II. Good people were never anti-Semites; only detestable people participated in Hitler’s cause.

Cultures function and persist by consensus. In Jackson and other bastions of the Jim Crow South, the pervasive notion, among poor whites and rich, that blacks were unworthy of full citizenship was as unquestioned as the sanctity of church on Sunday. “The Help” tells a compelling and gripping story, but it fails to tell that one.

I have dim recollections of watching Dr. King in 1963, with the black maid who raised me — my mother. If my father wasn’t in the room, he was working to make sure there would be opportunities in my future. I have benefited enormously from their hard work and from the shift that American culture has undergone as the scaffolding of discrimination was dismantled.

My parents, and the countless other black Americans who not only endured but thrived within the limited occupational sphere granted them, would have been proud of what has been accomplished since 1963, but they would not have wanted us to whitewash that earlier world.

ready or not california, here they come...,

LATimes | Beginning Oct. 1, inmates from 33 California prisons who are released on parole will begin reporting to county probation officers rather than state parole agents. The new local authority over "post-release community supervision" will apply only to those whose convictions were for non-serious, nonviolent, non-sex-related offenses. On the same date, newly convicted "non-non-non" offenders will be remitted to county custody — to jail, or to community programs or other sentencing alternatives — instead of being sent to state prison. And newly accused defendants without outstanding warrants who need to be monitored until their trial dates may be required to wear electronic ankle bracelets in lieu of being incarcerated.

These three new approaches to dealing with criminal offenders and defendants are the primary components of AB 109, also known as public safety realignment. The bill, signed into law this year, is Sacramento's response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Plata, which ordered the sharp reduction of the state prison population to reduce overcrowding and address medical inadequacies that were so severe as to violate the 8th Amendment's strictures against cruel and unusual punishment.

To reformers, realignment represents a landmark transition from a generation's worth of tough-on-crime policies to a new, less expensive, more enlightened and more effective "smart on crime" approach. Prisoners now get little in the way of rehabilitation behind bars and little in the way of "reentry" support — such as substance-abuse treatment and counseling, medical attention, mental healthcare and housing — when they are paroled. Thus unprepared for life as healthy, productive and contrite citizens, they re-offend at an astonishing rate of 67.5%. In theory — in theory, mind you — counties are better equipped than the state to supervise and support low-level offenders, and are prepared to do it for less money.

But Los Angeles County supervisors are worried. And they should be. They have a checkered track record in oversight and administration. And they have knowledge of and experience with Sacramento and past attempts at realigning funds and services. Where hopeful reformers see a new smart-on-crime paradigm, the supervisors sense an all-too-familiar inadequately funded off-loading of state problems onto the counties.

drug decriminalization has failed?

Cato | Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and now a columnist for the Washington Post, has denounced libertarianism as "morally empty," "anti-government," "a scandal," "an idealism that strangles mercy," guilty of "selfishness," "rigid ideology," and "rigorous ideological coldness." (He's starting to repeat himself.)

In his May 9 column, "Ron Paul's Land of Second-Rate Values," he went after Rep. Paul for his endorsement of drug legalization in the Republican presidential debate. "Dotty uncle," he fumed, alleging that Paul has "contempt for the vulnerable and suffering." Paul holds "second-rate values," he added.

What did Paul do to set him off? He said that adult Americans ought to have the freedom to make their own decisions about their personal lives — from how they worship, to what they eat and drink, to what drugs they use. And he mocked the paternalist mindset: "How many people here would use heroin if it were legal? I bet nobody would say, 'Oh yeah, I need the government to take care of me. I don't want to use heroin, so I need these laws.'"

Gerson accused Paul of mocking not paternalists but addicts: "Paul is not content to condemn a portion of his fellow citizens to self-destruction; he must mock them in their decline." Gerson wants to treat them with compassion. But let's be clear: He thinks the compassionate way to treat suffering people is to put them in jail. And in the California case Brown v. Plata, the Supreme Court just reminded us what it means to hold people in prison:

California's prisons are designed to house a population just under 80,000, but ... the population was almost double that. The State's prisons had operated at around 200% of design capacity for at least 11 years. Prisoners are crammed into spaces neither designed nor intended to house inmates. As many as 200 prisoners may live in a gymnasium, monitored by as few as two or three correctional officers. As many as 54 prisoners may share a single toilet. Because of a shortage of treatment beds, suicidal inmates may be held for prolonged periods in telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets.

Gerson knows this. His May 27 column quoted this very passage and concluded, "[I]t is absurd and outrageous to treat [prisoners] like animals while hoping they return to us as responsible citizens."

Gerson contrasted the "arrogance" of Paul's libertarian approach to the approach of "a Republican presidential candidate [who] visited a rural drug treatment center outside Des Moines. Moved by the stories of recovering young addicts, Texas Gov. George W. Bush talked of his own struggles with alcohol. 'I'm on a walk. And it's a never-ending walk as far as I'm concerned... . I want you to know that your life's walk is shared by a lot of other people, even some who wear suits.'"

Gerson seems to have missed the point of his anecdote. Neither Bush nor the teenagers in a Christian rehab center were sent to jail. They overcame their substance problems through faith and personal responsibility. But Gerson and Bush support the drug laws under which more than 1.5 million people a year are arrested and some 500,000 people are currently in jail.

Our last three presidents have all acknowledged they used illegal drugs in their youth. Yet they don't seem to think — nor does Gerson suggest — that their lives would have been made better by arrest, conviction, and incarceration. If libertarianism is a second-rate value, where does hypocrisy rank?

Gerson seems to have a fantastical view of our world today. He writes, "[D]rug legalization fails. The de facto decriminalization of drugs in some neighborhoods — say, in Washington, D.C. — has encouraged widespread addiction."

This is mind-boggling. What has failed in Washington, D.C., is drug prohibition. As Mike Riggs of Reason magazine wrote, "I want to know where in D.C. one can get away with slinging or using in front of a cop. The 2,874 people arrested by the MPD for narcotics violations between Jan. 1 and April 9 of this year would probably like to know, too."

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, writes, "Crime rates have fluctuated over the past few decades — and currently are at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have soared. Quintupled. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color." Michael Gerson should ask Professor Alexander for a tour of these neighborhoods where he thinks drugs are de facto decriminalized.

In a recent Cato Institute report, Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University estimated that governments could save $41.3 billion a year if they decriminalized drugs, an indication of the resources we're putting into police, prosecutions, and prisons to enforce the war on drugs.

mexican elites fleeing their failing civil war...,

Video - Michelle Obama declares it safe to travel to Mexico.

WaPo | For years, national security experts have warned that Mexico’s drug violence could send a wave of refugees fleeing to the United States. Now, the refugees are arriving — and they are driving BMWs and snapping up half-million-dollar homes.

Tens of thousands of well-off Mexicans have moved north of the border in a quiet exodus over the past few years, according to local officials, border experts and demographers. Unlike the much larger population of illegal immigrants, they are being warmly welcomed.

“It goes counter to the conventional wisdom about the Mexican presence in the United States,” San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro said. The influx “is positive, it is entrepreneurial . . . and one of the keys to a very successful growing city like San Antonio.”

Castro estimates that Mexicans own at least 50,000 of the approximately 500,000 homes and apartments in his city of 1.3 million, which has a vibrant Hispanic culture. Many are in gated communities that have sprung up in the city’s sun-baked northern hills. One neighborhood built around a country club has so many residents from the Mexican city of Monterrey that it has been dubbed “Sonterrey.”

“I’ve never seen so many Maseratis and Porsches in my neighborhood,” said Carl Bohn, a businessman who lives in what is formally called Sonterra, a tranquil development of homes with red-tiled roofs, palm trees, colonnaded entrances and backyard pools.

Affluent Mexicans have long visited the United States for business and shopping. What’s different now is that they are coming to stay, fleeing cartel wars that have left more than 37,000 Mexicans dead in four years, according to U.S. and Mexican officials and analysts. The number of investment visas granted to Mexicans has risen sharply over the past five years.

“It’s a very substantial flow; I would say probably the largest since the 1920s, the last great period of upheaval in Mexico,” said Henry Cisneros, a former mayor of San Antonio who served in President Clinton’s Cabinet. “We have whole areas of San Antonio that are being transformed.”

The size of the new wave is difficult to measure, since some of the new arrivals hold dual citizenship or U.S. work visas or already had American vacation homes. One Mexican think tank, the Security and Civic Culture Observatory, estimated last year that 230,000 people had fled the violence-wracked border city of Juarez, with half going across Mexico’s northern border.

and now onto the collapse war on our southern border...,

Video - Casino Royale arson attack in Monterrey

WaPo | Hundreds of soldiers and federal agents are raiding casinos in this northern city, authorities said Saturday, two days after an arson attack on a gambling house killed 52 people and stunned a country that had become numb to massacres and beheadings.

Security forces had so far confiscated about 1,500 slot machines at 11 casinos in Monterrey and its surroundings and arrested three people, Mexico’s tax agency said. It said the continuing operation was meant to verify whether casinos had paid taxes or introduced slot machines illegally.

Thursday’s arson attack by gunmen was a macabre milestone in a conflict that the government says has claimed more than 35,000 lives since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against drug cartels in late 2006. Others put the death toll near 40,000.

The torching of the Casino Royale has raised questions over Mexico’s regulatory controls for fast-spreading gambling houses.

Authorities have not been able to reach the owners of two companies pointed out as titleholders of the casino. Jorge Domene, security spokesman for Nuevo Leon state, said an order to appear before state police has been issued for owners of the two companies, CYMSA Corp. and Vallarta Attractions and Emotions.

Casino Royale’s legal representative, Juan Gomez, told reporters that the shareholders of the business were Jorge Alberto and Raul Rocha Cantu. They will meet with police when authorities set the time, Gomez said.

Their family members have been prohibited from leaving the city, he said without offering details.

During the raids, which began Friday, about 700 soldiers, federal police and Treasury Department agents seized slot machines and put them in moving trucks.

Authorities did not say the raids were related to the arson. But one of the casinos searched was also registered under Vallarta Attractions and Emotions, according to the gaming unit of Mexico’s Interior Department. Information of the other locations was not immediately available.

Federal police deployed 1,500 offiers and sent Black Hawk helicopters to the state to step up security in this industrial metropolis of more than 4 million people. The Mexican army said it was sending in 1,500 soldiers.

Mayor Fernando Larrazabal said the Casino Royale and other 12 casinos violated municipal laws and were allowed to remain open after obtaining federal court injunctions.

The casino had been attacked twice before, including an incident in May when gunmen strafed it from the outside. Last month, gunmen killed 20 people at a bar in Monterrey.

Cartels often extort casinos and other businesses, threatening to attack them or burn them to the ground if they refuse to pay. But Gomez, the owners’ representative, said the Casino Royale had not received extortion threats.

Speaking at a news conference, he also said the casino had the appropriate permits and met safety standards.

Authorities have not blamed a specific drug-trafficking organization for the casino attack. But the city has been ensnared in a turf battle between the Gulf cartel and its offshoot, the Zetas, and is on track for record levels of killings this year.

chinese military clowns a lot like the u.s. military...,

Video - 1l33t chinese h@x0rs putting in work rotflmbao...,

EpochTimes | A standard, even boring, piece of Chinese military propaganda screened in mid-July included what must have been an unintended but nevertheless damaging revelation: shots from a computer screen showing a Chinese military university is engaged in cyberwarfare against entities in the United States.

The documentary itself was otherwise meant as praise to the wisdom and judgment of Chinese military strategists, and a typical condemnation of the United States as an implacable aggressor in the cyber-realm. But the fleeting shots of an apparent China-based cyber-attack somehow made their way into the final cut.

The screenshots appear as B-roll footage in the documentary for six seconds—between 11:04 and 11:10 minutes—showing custom-built Chinese software apparently launching a cyber-attack against the main website of the Falun Gong spiritual practice, by using a compromised IP address belonging to a United States university. As of Aug. 22 at 1:30pm EDT, in addition to Youtube, the whole documentary is available on the CCTV website. But by Aug. 25, multiple media noted that the video had been removed.

The screenshots show the name of the software and the Chinese university that built it, the Electrical Engineering University of China's People's Liberation Army—direct evidence that the PLA is involved in coding cyber-attack software directed against a Chinese dissident group.

The software window says "Choose Attack Target." The computer operator selects an IP address from a list—it happens to be 138.26.72.17—and then selects a target. Encoded in the software are the words "Falun Gong website list," showing that attacking Falun Gong websites was built into the software.

A drop-down list of dozens of Falun Gong websites appears. The computer operator chooses Minghui.org, the main website of the Falun Gong spiritual practice.

The IP address 138.26.72.17 belongs to the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB), according to an online trace.

The shots then show a big "Attack" button on the bottom left being pushed, before the camera cuts away.

"The CCP has leaked its top secret here," says Jason Ma, a commentator for New Tang Dynasty Television. "This is the first time we see clearly that one of the top Chinese military universities is doing this research and developing software for cyber-attacks. There's solid proof of it in this video," he said.

The Chinese Communist Party has consistently denied that it is involved in cyber-attacks, but experts have long suspected that the Chinese military engages in them.

"Now we've got proof," Ma says. "They're also extending their persecution of Falun Gong overseas, attacking a civil website in the U.S. These are the clear messages revealed in these six seconds of video."

dhs funds these babies for the local constabulary...,

Video - Shadowhawk UAV - coming soon to a disaster near you.

These aircraft offer not only extended ISR capabilities but all four variants can be weaponized with select payloads to include but not limited to 40mm grenade launchers, full and semi-automatic small arms, as well as a multitude of SIGINT collection units.

murray rothbard's 1972 dissection of the cult of ayn rand..,

Video - sendup of ayn rand from the virtue of selfishness

LewRockwell | In the America of the 1970s we are all too familiar with the religious cult, which has been proliferating in the last decade. Characteristic of the cult (from Hare Krishna to the "Moonies" to EST to Scientology to the Manson Family) is the dominance of the guru, or Maximum Leader, who is also the creator and ultimate interpreter of a given creed to which the acolyte must be unswervingly loyal. The major if not the only qualification for membership and advancement in the cult is absolute loyalty to and adoration of the guru, and absolute and unquestioning obedience to his commands. The lives of the members are dominated by the guru’s influence and presence. If the cult grows beyond a few members, it naturally becomes hierarchically structured, if only because the guru cannot spend his time indoctrinating and watching over every disciple. Top positions in the hierarchy are generally filled by the original handful of disciples, who come to assume these positions by virtue of their longer stint of loyal and devoted service. Sometimes the top leadership may be related to each other, a useful occurrence which can strengthen intra-cult loyalty through the familial bond.

The goals of the cult leadership are money and power. Power is achieved over the minds of the disciples through inducing them to accept without question the guru and his creed. This devotion is enforced through psychological sanctions. For once the acolyte is imbued with the view that approval of, and communication with, the guru are essential to his life, then the implicit and explicit threat of excommunication – of removal from the direct or indirect presence of the guru – creates a powerful psychological sanction for the "enforcement" of loyalty and obedience. Money flows upward from the members through the hierarchy, either in the form of volunteer labor service contributed by the members, or through cash payments.

It should be clear at this point in history that an ideological cult can adopt the same features as the more overtly religious cult, even when the ideology is explicitly atheistic and anti-religious. That the cults of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Trotsky, and Mao are religious in nature, despite the explicit atheism of the latter, is by now common knowledge. The adoration of the cult founder and leader, the hierarchical structure, the unswerving loyalty, the psychological (and when in command of State power, the physical) sanctions are all too evident.

The Exoteric and the Esoteric

Every religious cult has two sets of differing and distinctive creeds: the exoteric and the esoteric. The exoteric creed is the official, public doctrine, the creed which attracts the acolyte in the first place and brings him into the movement as a rank-and-file member. The quite different creed is the unknown, hidden agenda, a creed which is only known to its full extent by the top leadership, the "high priests" of the cult. The latter are the keepers of the Mysteries of the cult.

But cults become particularly fascinating when the esoteric and exoteric creeds are not only different, but totally and glaringly in mutual contradiction. The havoc that this fundamental contradiction plays in the minds and lives of the disciples may readily be imagined. Thus, the various Marxist-Leninists cults officially and publicly extol Reason and Science, and denounce all religion, and yet the members are mystically attracted to the cult and its alleged infallibility.

Thus, Alfred G. Meyer writes of Leninist views on party infallibility:

Lenin seems to have believed that the party, as organized consciousness, consciousness as a decision-making machinery, had superior reasoning power. Indeed, in time this collective body took on an aura of infallibility, which was later elevated to a dogma, and a member’s loyalty was tested, in part, by his acceptance of it. It became part of the communist confession of faith to proclaim that the party was never wrong.... The party itself never makes mistakes.1

If the glaring inner contradictions of the Leninist cults make them intriguing objects of study, still more so is the Ayn Rand cult, which, while in some sense is still faintly alive, flourished for just ten years in the 1960s; more specifically, from the founding of the Nathaniel Branden lecture series in early 1958 to the Rand-Branden split ten years later. For not only was the Rand cult explicitly atheist, anti-religious, and an extoller of Reason; it also promoted slavish dependence on the guru in the name of independence; adoration and obedience to the leader in the name of every person’s individuality; and blind emotion and faith in the guru in the name of Reason.

Virtually every one of its members entered the cult through reading Rand’s lengthy novel Atlas Shrugged, which appeared in late 1957, a few months before the organized cult came into being. Entering the movement through a novel meant that despite repeated obeisances to Reason, febrile emotion was the driving force behind the acolyte’s conversion. Soon, he found that the Randian ideology sketched out in Atlas was supplemented by a few non-fiction essays, and, in particular, by a regular monthly magazine, The Objectivist Newsletter (later, The Objectivist).

mike wallace 1959 ayn rand interview

NakedCapitalism | I found this interview intriguing for two reasons. First, I must confess to not realizing that Rand’s philosophy was rooted in the counterfactual belief that people are rational. Every social science (ironically, save mainstream economics) puts human irrationality and inconsistency front and center. Nobel prize winner Herbert Simon studied how woefully limited human cognitive capacities. More Nobels have been awarded for behavioral economics, which (among other things) has catalogued numerous cognitive biases.

Second, the questions that Wallace raises with Rand illustrate how much social values have changed in 50 years.

Video - Part one of three part interview

stetson kennedy rip...,

Video - Audio overview of the late great Stetson Kennedy.

LATimes | Author and folklorist Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and delivered a major blow by exposing 'all their secret handshakes, passwords and how silly they were,' one scholar says.

Author and folklorist Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan six decades ago and exposed its secrets but decades later was criticized for appearing to exaggerate his exploits, died Saturday at a medical center near St. Augustine, Fla. He was 94.

The death was announced on his website.

In his 1954 book "I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan," Kennedy wrote that he gained entrance to the Klan by posing as an encyclopedia salesman and using the name of an uncle who was a Klan member. The book was rereleased in 1990 as "The Klan Unmasked."

"Exposing their folklore — all their secret handshakes, passwords and how silly they were, dressing up in white sheets" was one of the strongest blows delivered to the Klan, Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, told the Associated Press in 2007.

"If they weren't so violent, they would be silly," said Bulger, who wrote her doctoral thesis on Kennedy's work as a folklorist.

After a back injury kept him out of the military during World War II, Kennedy began crusading against what he called "homegrown racial terrorists." He served as director of fact-finding for the southeastern office of the Anti-Defamation League and as director of the Anti-Nazi League of New York.

With evidence salvaged from the grand dragon's wastebasket, he enabled the Internal Revenue Service to press for collection of an outstanding $685,000 tax lien from the Klan in 1944 and he helped draft the brief used by the state of Georgia to revoke the Klan's national corporate charter in 1947. He also testified in other Klan-related cases.

In the late 1940s, Kennedy exposed the Klan's secrets on the national stage through the "Superman" radio series, which used information he provided in episodes titled "Clan of the Fiery Cross."

remembering King's thoughts...,

Video - MLK at Riverside Church

DesMoinesRegister | My master's thesis published at Iowa State analyzed how the New York Times reported King in the 1960s; to the Register’s credit, unlike the Times that ridiculed King in his last year, you quote King's prophetic warning in Iowa that this country was building “an empire of military bases.”

King's alarm — what he described as “the evil of militarism” — is ringing loud; our military adventures are so difficult to explain in terms of rationale, that few try or are even asked.

The doctrinal system equates patriotism synonymous with militarism; this is a far cry from the intellect of a King or even James Madison, who stated that a people cannot exist both ignorant and free.

In an Iowa classroom, I was brought to tears last week by a white woman who cut through the clutter and said in front of everybody that we have buried Dr. King.

As I thought about it, I decided citizens have not had the last word, yet.

— Jeffrey J. Weiss, Catholic Peace Ministry, director, Des Moines

riker's prisoners locked up and on their own...,

SolitaryWatch | “We are not evacuating Rikers Island,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a news conference this afternoon. Bloomberg annouced a host of extreme measures being taken by New York City in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, including a shutdown of the public transit system and the unprecedented mandatory evacuation of some 250,000 people from low-lying areas. But in response to a reporter’s question, the mayor stated in no uncertain terms (and with more than a hint of annoyance) that one group of New Yorkers on vulnerable ground will be staying put.

New York City is surrounded by small islands and barrier beaches, and a glance at the city’s evacuation map reveals all of them to be in Zone A (already under a mandatory evacuation order) or Zone B–all, that is, save one. Rikers Island, which lies in the waters between Queens and the Bronx, is not highlighted at all, meaning it is not to be evacuated under any circumstances.

According to the New York City Department of Corrections’ own website, more than three-quarters of Rikers Island’s 400 acres are built on landfill–which is generally thought to be more vulnerable to natural disasters. Its ten jails have a capacity of close to 17,000 inmates, and normally house at least 12,000, including juveniles and large numbers of prisoners with mental illness–not to mention pre-trial detainees who have yet to be convicted of any crime. There are also hundreds of corrections officers at work on the island.

We were not able to reach anyone at the NYC DOC for comment–but the New York Times‘s City Room blog reported: “According to the city’s Department of Correction, no hypothetical evacuation plan for the roughly 12,000 inmates that the facility may house on a given day even exists. Contingencies do exist for smaller-scale relocations from one facility to another.”

For a warning of what can happen to prisoners in a hurricane we need only look back at Katrina, and the horrific conditions endured by inmates at Orleans Parish Prison in New Orleans. According to a report produced by the ACLU: Fist tap Brotherbrown.

you.are.on.your.own....,

Video - Leonard Cohen First We Take Manhattan

SHTF | The east coast earthquake(s) are just the latest example of how unprepared we are for an emergency or major disaster.

Whether we’re talking about earthquakes, snow storms, hurricanes, floods, electrical outages or terrorist attacks, government officials, as well as individuals, have demonstrated time and again that we have a psychological inability to cope with high stress situations, a lack of foresight to stock emergency reserves, and have failed to prepare effective emergency response plans.

Though we hardly felt any movement here in the city of New York as a result of the earthquake, panic seemed to overtake a lot of people, as indicated by various news programs and social networking sites.

A single tremor was enough to cause mass confusion, building evacuations and cell phone service outages across the city.

So, I ask, are we ready for this possibility [Hurricane Irene], New York?

Consider: This region, more than any other, relies on electrical power. From high rise apartment buildings, to business computers, to the subway system, a massive power outage caused by a hurricane will have a significant impact on people’s lives.

Imagine if you were sick or paralyzed, and stuck on a building’s 35th floor without elevator service for days. Or, simply picture the isolation caused by television and cell phone outages. Ask yourself, where are your flashlights? Your radio? How will you keep up to date with important emergency information if the storm knocks out electrical services?

In order to prepare for this hurricane, ultimately we have to think not of the earthquake, which caused no lasting damage, but rather everything that went wrong during this past winter’s big snowstorm.

People were unable to leave their apartments, and emergency buildings were essentially unable to move around on the streets. We were woefully under-prepared, and most city workers had to play catch up to fix the significant problems that resulted from the storm.

Source: Fox News

Once cell phone service went out following high volumes of calls across the eastern seaboard, local police, fire and medical response was effectively shut down. Add congestion and confusion on roadways and you have a recipe for disaster.

The earthquakes this week were minor events in terms of severity and damage. But consider what might happen in a prolonged regional-disaster. Hurricane Katrina was such an incident, albeit still a short-term event, and luckily the rest of the country was unaffected. Emergency response took a week or more in some instances, and it reportedly took some three days to get bottled water into New Orleans. Bottled Water! And this is with a completely intact national infrastructure around the disaster zone.

Images of the looting, violence, preventable deaths and confiscatory martial law sweeps were beamed to millions of Americans. No one was paying attention, save a few individuals willing to think outside the box of complaceny and the status quo.

We realize the government has spent billions of our tax dollars making preparations. But how that money has been directed and managed is anybody’s guess. When it comes down to it, whatever preparations are being made by emergency preparedness experts at DHS, FEMA and other agencies, they will likely not benefit you all that much. If the time ever came that the infrastructure of the entire United States, not just an isolated region, experienced a far-from-equilibrium event we need to assume help is not coming. No ambulances. No police. No grocery delivery trucks. And no electricians to fix the power.

put your ID in your left shoe...,

Video - Gov. Christie 'Irene a 'Serious, Significant Event'

TheComingDepression | Officials in New Jersey have ordered a mandatory evacuation which could affect 750,000 people as Hurricane Irene looms.

Though this news is not directly related to the coming economic depression, we thought we’d publish it to alert our readers in the area to take cover and precautions.

The Philadelphia Inquirer said officials in Cape May county have told people to leave from 8am local time tomorrow.

The hurricane is expected to hit the north eastern seaboard of America this weekend.

It is predicted to hit North Carolina before working its way up the coast.

More than 50m people could be in the path of the storm.

The mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, warned residents to expect tropical storm conditions.

Washington is also on alert for heavy storms.

Train services in the capital have been cancelled and workers are trying to protect power lines.

Mayor Vincent Gray took to his Twitter account to ask residents to study emergency evacuation routes.

Irene, a category three storm with winds of up to 120mph (195km) has already caused damage in the Bahamas.

Those who choose to ignore the mandatory evacuation order have been asked to place an ID card in their left shoe so they may be identified if necessary.

does the fbi organize almost all the terror plots in the u.s.?

RT | The Federal Bureau of Investigation employs upwards of 15,000 undercover agents today, ten times what they had on the roster back in 1975.

If you think that’s a few spies too many — spies earning as much as $100,000 per assignment — one doesn’t have to go too deep into their track record to see their accomplishments. Those agents are responsible for an overwhelming amount of terrorist stings that have stopped major domestic catastrophes in the vein of 9/11 from happening on American soil.

Another thing those agents are responsible for, however, is plotting those very schemes.

The FBI has in recent years used trained informants not just to snitch on suspected terrorists, but to set them up from the get-go. A recent report put together by Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkley analyses some striking statistics about the role of FBI informants in terrorism cases that the Bureau has targeted in the decade since the September 11 attacks.

The report reveals that the FBI regularly infiltrates communities where they suspect terrorist-minded individuals to be engaging with others. Regardless of their intentions, agents are sent in to converse within the community, find suspects that could potentially carry out “lone wolf” attacks and then, more or less, encourage them to do so. By providing weaponry, funds and a plan, FBI-directed agents will encourage otherwise-unwilling participants to plot out terrorist attacks, only to bust them before any events fully materialize.

Additionally, one former high-level FBI officials speaking to Mother Jones says that, for every informant officially employed by the bureau, up to three unofficial agents are working undercover.

The FBI has used those informants to set-up and thus shut-down several of the more high profile would-be attacks in recent years. The report reveals that the Washington DC Metro bombing plot, the New York City subway plot, the attempt to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and dozens more were all orchestrated by FBI agents. In fact, reads the report, only three of the more well-known terror plots of the last decade weren’t orchestrated by FBI-involved agents.

The report reveals that in many of the stings, important meetings between informants and the unknowing participants are left purposely unrecorded, as to avoid any entrapment charges that could cause the case to be dismissed. Perhaps the most high-profile of the FBI-proposed plots was the case of the Newburgh 4. Around an hour outside of New York City, an informant infiltrated a Muslim community and engaged four local men to carry out a series of attacks. Those men may have never actually carried out an attack, but once the informant offered them a plot and a pair of missiles, they agreed. Defense attorneys cried “entrapment,” but the men still were sentenced to 25 years apiece.

"The problem with the cases we're talking about is that defendants would not have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents," Martin Stolar tells Mother Jones. Stolar represented the suspect involved in a New York City bombing plot that was set-up by FBI agents. "They're creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror." For their part, the FBI says this method is a plan for "preemption," "prevention" and "disruption."

The report also reveals that, of the 500-plus prosecutions of terrorism-related cases they analyzed, nearly half of them involved the use of informants, many of whom worked for the FBI in exchange for money or to work off criminal charges. Of the 158 prosecutions carried out, 49 defendants participated in plots that agent provocateurs arranged on behalf of the FBI.

subrealists on the eastside - ACHTUNG!

Wunderground | The floodwalls protecting Manhattan are only five feet above mean sea level. During the December 12, 1992 Nor'easter, powerful winds from the 990 mb storm drove an 8-foot storm surge into the Battery Park on the south end of Manhattan. The ocean poured over the city's seawall for several hours, flooding the NYC subway and the Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corporation (PATH) train systems in Hoboken New Jersey. FDR Drive in lower Manhattan was flooded with 4 feet of water, which stranded more than 50 cars and required scuba divers to rescue some of the drivers. Mass transit between New Jersey and New York was down for ten days, and the storm did hundreds of millions in damage to the city. Tropical Storm Floyd of 1999 generated a storm surge just over 3 feet at the Battery, but the surge came at low tide, and did not flood Manhattan. The highest water level recorded at the Battery in the past century came in September 1960 during Hurricane Donna, which brought a storm surge of 8.36 feet to the Battery and flooded lower Manhattan to West and Cortland Streets. However, the highest storm surge on record in New York City occurred during the September 3, 1821 hurricane, the only hurricane ever to make a direct hit on the city. The water rose 13 feet in just one hour at the Battery, and flooded lower Manhattan as far north as Canal Street, an area that now has the nation's financial center. The total surge is unknown from this greatest New York City hurricane, which was probably a Category 2 storm with 110 mph winds. NOAA's SLOSH model predicts that a mid-strength Category 2 hurricane with 100-mph winds could drive a 15 - 20 foot storm surge to Manhattan, Queens, Kings, and up the Hudson River. JFK airport could be swamped, southern Manhattan would flood north to Canal Street, and a surge traveling westwards down Long Island Sound might breach the sea walls that protect La Guardia Airport. Many of the power plants that supply the city with electricity might be knocked out, or their docks to supply them with fuel destroyed. The more likely case of a Category 1 hurricane hitting at high tide would still be plenty dangerous, with waters reaching 8 - 12 feet above ground level in Lower Manhattan. Given the spread in the models, I predict a 20% chance that New York City will experience a storm surge in excess of 8 feet that will over-top the flood walls in Manhattan and flood the subway system. This would most likely occur near 8 pm Sunday night, when high tide will occur and Irene should be near its point of closest approach. Such a storm surge could occur even if Irene weakens to a tropical storm on its closest approach to New York City.

the psychological roots of resource overconsumption

TheOilDrum | The essay below is an updated and edited version of a post I wrote here a few years ago, I'm Human, I'm American and I'm Addicted to Oil. Richard Douthwaite, Irish economist and activist, (and a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute), invited me to contribute it as a chapter in the just released book Fleeing Vesuvius, which is a collection of articles generally addressing "how can we bring the world out of the mess it finds itself in"? My article dealt with the evolutionary underpinnings of our aggregate behavior - neural habituation to increasingly available stimuli, and our penchant to compete for status given the environmental (cultural) cues of our day. And how, after we make it through the likely upcoming currency/claims bottleneck, we would be wise to adhere to an evolutionary perspective in considering a future (more) sustainable society.

Humans have an innate need for status and for novelty in their lives. Unfortunately, the modern world has adopted very energy- and resource-intensive ways of meeting those needs. Other ways are going to have to be found as part of the move to a more sustainable world.

Most people associate the word “sustainability” with changes to the supply side of our modern way of life such as using energy from solar flows rather than fossil fuels, recycling, green tech and greater efficiency. In this essay, however, I will focus on the demand-side drivers that explain why we continue to seek and consume more stuff.

When addressing ‘demand-side drivers’, we must begin at the source: the human brain. The various layers and mechanisms of our brain have been built on top of each other via millions and millions of iterations, keeping intact what ‘worked’ and adding via changes and mutations what helped the pre-human, pre-mammal organism to incrementally advance. Brain structures that functioned poorly in ancient environments are no longer around. Everyone reading this page is descended from the best of the best at both surviving and procreating which, in an environment of privation and danger where most ‘iterations’ of our evolution happened, meant acquiring necessary resources, achieving status and possessing brains finely tuned to natural dangers and opportunities.

This essay outlines two fundamental ways in which the evolutionarily derived reward pathways of our brains are influencing our modern overconsumption. First, financial wealth accumulation and the accompanying conspicuous consumption are generally regarded as the signals of modern success for our species. This gives the rest of us environmental cues to compete for more and more stuff as a proxy of our status and achievement. A second and more subtle driver is that we are easily hijacked by and habituated to novel stimuli. As we shall see, the prevalence of novelty today eventually demands higher and higher levels of neural stimulation, which often need increased consumption to satisfy. Thus it is this combination of pursuit of social status and the plethora of novel activities that underlies our large appetite for resource throughput.