why disgust matters

Royal Society | The new synthesis about disgust is that it is a system that evolved to motivate infectious disease avoidance. There are vital practical and intellectual reasons why we need to understand disgust better. Practically, disgust can be harnessed to combat the behavioural causes of infectious and chronic disease such as diarrhoeal disease, pandemic flu and smoking. Disgust is also a source of much human suffering; it plays an underappreciated role in anxieties and phobias such as obsessive compulsive disorder, social phobia and post-traumatic stress syndromes; it is a hidden cost of many occupations such as caring for the sick and dealing with wastes, and self-directed disgust afflicts the lives of many, such as the obese and fistula patients. Disgust is used and abused in society, being both a force for social cohesion and a cause of prejudice and stigmatization of out-groups. This paper argues that a better understanding of disgust, using the new synthesis, offers practical lessons that can enhance human flourishing. Disgust also provides a model system for the study of emotion, one of the most important issues facing the brain and behavioural sciences today.

disease avoidance as a functional basis for stigmatization

Royal Society | Stigmatization is characterized by chronic social and physical avoidance of a person(s) by other people. Infectious disease may produce an apparently similar form of isolation—disease avoidance—but on symptom remission this often abates. We propose that many forms of stigmatization reflect the activation of this disease-avoidance system, which is prone to respond to visible signs and labels that connote disease, irrespective of their accuracy. A model of this system is presented, which includes an emotional component, whereby visible disease cues directly activate disgust and contamination, motivating avoidance, and a cognitive component, whereby disease labels bring to mind disease cues, indirectly activating disgust and contamination. The unique predictions of this model are then examined, notably that people who are stigmatized evoke disgust and are contaminating. That animals too show avoidance of diseased conspecifics, and that disease-related stigma targets are avoided in most cultures, also supports this evolutionary account. The more general implications of this approach are then examined, notably how it can be used to good (e.g. improving hygiene) or bad (e.g. racial vilification) ends, by yoking particular labels with cues that connote disease and disgust. This broadening of the model allows for stigmatization of groups with little apparent connection to disease.

parasite stress promotes homicide and child maltreatment

Royal Society | Researchers using the parasite-stress theory of human values have discovered many cross-cultural behavioural patterns that inform a range of scholarly disciplines. Here, we apply the theory to major categories of interpersonal violence, and the empirical findings are supportive. We hypothesize that the collectivism evoked by high parasite stress is a cause of adult-on-adult interpersonal violence. Across the US states, parasite stress and collectivism each positively predicts rates of men's and women's slaying of a romantic partner, as well as the rate of male-honour homicide and of the motivationally similar felony-related homicide. Of these four types of homicide, wealth inequality has an independent effect only on rates of male-honour and felony-related homicide. Parasite stress and collectivism also positively predict cross-national homicide rates. Child maltreatment by caretakers is caused, in part, by divestment in offspring of low phenotypic quality, and high parasite stress produces more such offspring than low parasite stress. Rates of each of two categories of the child maltreatment—lethal and non-lethal—across the US states are predicted positively by parasite stress, with wealth inequality and collectivism having limited effects. Parasite stress may be the strongest predictor of interpersonal violence to date.

infection link to mental illness...,

LATimes | Brody Kennedy was a typical sixth-grader who loved to hang out with friends in Castaic and play video games. A strep-throat infection in October caused him to miss a couple of days of school, but he was eager to rejoin his classmates, recalls his mother, Tracy.

Then, a week after Brody became ill, he awoke one morning to find his world was no longer safe. Paranoid about germs and obsessed with cleanliness, he refused to touch things and showered several times a day. His fear prevented him from attending school, and he insisted on wearing nothing but a sheet or demanding that his mother microwave his clothes or heat them in the dryer before dressing.

So began a horrific battle with a sudden-onset mental illness that was diagnosed as pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with streptococcus, or PANDAS. The puzzling name describes children who have obsessive-compulsive disorder that occurs suddenly — and often dramatically — within days or weeks of a simple infection, such as strep throat.

"He washed his hands over and over and was using hand-sanitizer nonstop," said Tracy Kennedy, who has home-schooled her 11-year-old son since early November. "He had never been like this before. Ever. He just woke up with it."

The bizarre illness, first recognized in the mid-1990s, has been cloaked in controversy. Now, however, studies are reinforcing the belief that some psychiatric illnesses can be triggered by ordinary infections and the body's immune response. While the theory remains unproved, the research raises the possibility that some cases of mental illness might be cured by treating the immune system dysfunction.

"Some people get sick with whatever infection, and they recover and they're fine," says M. Karen Newell Rogers, an immunologist at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine in Temple, Texas, who studies such illnesses. "Other people get sick and recover, but they are not the same."

PANDAS is thought to be caused by antibodies generated as a result of an infection, usually strep. Normally, an infection causes the body to generate antibodies that fight the infection and promote healing. But in PANDAS, the antibody response is thought to go awry, attacking brain cells and resulting in OCD symptoms.

A greater understanding of the link between strep and OCD has opened the door to the study of other psychiatric or neurological illnesses that may be linked to improper immune response, including cases of autism, schizophrenia and anorexia.

u.n. envoy: u.s. isn't protecting Occupy protesters rights...,

Video - LAPD clearing out Occupy LA encampment.

HuffPo | The United Nations envoy for freedom of expression is drafting an official communication to the U.S. government demanding to know why federal officials are not protecting the rights of Occupy demonstrators whose protests are being disbanded -- sometimes violently -- by local authorities.

Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. "special rapporteur" for the protection of free expression, told HuffPost in an interview that the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights.

"I believe in city ordinances and I believe in maintaining urban order," he said Thursday. "But on the other hand I also believe that the state -- in this case the federal state -- has an obligation to protect and promote human rights."

"If I were going to pit a city ordinance against human rights, I would always take human rights," he continued.

La Rue, a longtime Guatemalan human rights activist who has held his U.N. post for three years, said it's clear to him that the protesters have a right to occupy public spaces "as long as that doesn't severely affect the rights of others."

In moments of crisis, governments often default to a forceful response instead of a dialogue, he said -- but that's a mistake.

"Citizens have the right to dissent with the authorities, and there's no need to use public force to silence that dissension," he said.

"One of the principles is proportionality," La Rue said. "The use of police force is legitimate to maintain public order -- but there has to be a danger of real harm, a clear and present danger. And second, there has to be a proportionality of the force employed to prevent a real danger."

And history suggests that harsh tactics against social movements don't work anyway, he said. In Occupy's case, he said, "disbanding them by force won't change that attitude of indignation."

Occupy encampments across the country have been forcibly removed by police in full riot gear, and some protesters have been badly injured as a result of aggressive police tactics.

New York police staged a night raid on the original Occupy Wall Street encampment in mid-November, evicting sleeping demonstrators and confiscating vast amounts of property.

The Oakland Police Department fired tear gas, smoke grenades and bean-bag rounds at demonstrators there in late October, seriously injuring one Iraq War veteran at the Occupy site.

Earlier this week, Philadelphia and Los Angeles police stormed the encampments in their cities in the middle of the night, evicting and arresting hundreds of protesters.

Protesters at University of California, Davis were pepper sprayed by a campus police officer in November while participating in a sit-in, and in September an officer in New York pepper sprayed protesters who were legally standing on the sidewalk.

"We're seeing widespread violations of fundamental First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of a National Lawyers Guild committee, which has sent hundreds of volunteers to provide legal representation to Occupations across the nation.

"The demonstrations are treated as if they're presumptively criminal," she said. "Instead of looking at free speech activity as an honored and cherished right that should be supported and facilitated, the reaction of local authorities and police is very frequently to look at it as a crime scene."

moving Occupation indoors for the winter

Video - homeowners at risk of foreclosure seek help from the Occupy movement.

DemocracyNow | A loose-knit coalition of activists known as "Occupy Homes" is working to stave off pending evictions by occupying homes at risk of foreclosure when tenants enlist its support. The movement has recently enjoyed a number of successes. We speak with Monique White, a Minneapolis resident who is facing foreclosure and recently requested the help of Occupy Minneapolis. Now two dozen of its members are occupying her home in order to stave off eviction. We are also joined by Nick Espinosa, an organizer with Occupy Minneapolis, and Max Rameau, a key organizer with Take Back the Land, who for the past five years has worked on direct actions that reclaim and occupy homes at risk of foreclosure. "The banks are actually occupying our homes," Rameau says. "This sets up for an incredible movement, where we have a one-two punch. On the one hand, we’re occupying them on their turf, and on the other, we’re liberating our own turf so that human beings can have access to housing, rather than them sitting vacant so that corporations can benefit from them sometime in the future." Fist tap Dale.

banker culpability for foreclosure crisis...,

NYTimes | If you want to understand why the Occupy movement has found such traction, it helps to listen to a former banker like James Theckston. He fully acknowledges that he and other bankers are mostly responsible for the country’s housing mess.

As a regional vice president for Chase Home Finance in southern Florida, Theckston shoveled money at home borrowers. In 2007, his team wrote $2 billion in mortgages, he says. Sometimes those were “no documentation” mortgages.

“On the application, you don’t put down a job; you don’t show income; you don’t show assets,” he said. “But you still got a nod.”

“If you had some old bag lady walking down the street and she had a decent credit score, she got a loan,” he added.

Theckston says that borrowers made harebrained decisions and exaggerated their resources but that bankers were far more culpable — and that all this was driven by pressure from the top.

“You’ve got somebody making $20,000 buying a $500,000 home, thinking that she’d flip it,” he said. “That was crazy, but the banks put programs together to make those kinds of loans.”

Especially when mortgages were securitized and sold off to investors, he said, senior bankers turned a blind eye to shortcuts.

“The bigwigs of the corporations knew this, but they figured we’re going to make billions out of it, so who cares? The government is going to bail us out. And the problem loans will be out of here, maybe even overseas.”

One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.

These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.

Theckston, who has a shelf full of awards that he won from Chase, such as “sales manager of the year,” showed me his 2006 performance review. It indicates that 60 percent of his evaluation depended on him increasing high-risk loans.

In late 2008, when the mortgage market collapsed, Theckston and most of his colleagues were laid off. He says he bears no animus toward Chase, but he does think it is profoundly unfair that troubled banks have been rescued while troubled homeowners have been evicted. Fist tap Big Don.

why Occupation alone comprises an overwhelming DDOS...,

NYTimes | One area where the United States indisputably leads the world is incarceration.

The United States has 2.3 million people behind bars, almost one in every 100 Americans. The U.S. prison population has more than doubled over the past 15 years, and one in nine black children has a parent in jail.

Proportionally, the United States has four times as many prisoners as Israel, six times as many as Canada or China, eight times as many as Germany and 13 times as many as Japan.

With just a little more than 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for a quarter of the planet’s prisoners and has more inmates than the leading 35 European countries combined. Almost all the other nations with high per capita prison rates are in the developing world.

There’s also a national election in the United States soon. This issue isn’t on the agenda. It’s almost never come up with Republican presidential candidates; one of the few exceptions was at a debate in September when the audience cheered the notion of executions in Texas.

Barack Obama, the first black president, rarely mentions this question or how it disproportionately affects minorities. More than 60 percent of the United States’ prisoners are black or Hispanic, though these groups comprise less than 30 percent of the population.

“We’ve had a race to incarcerate that has been driven by politics, racially coded, get-tough appeals,” said Michelle Alexander, a law professor at Ohio State University who wrote “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

The escalating cost of the criminal-justice system is an important factor in the fiscal challenges around the United States. Nowhere is that more evident than in California, which is struggling to obey a court order requiring it to reduce its overcrowded prisons by 40,000 inmates.

Today, there are 140,000 convicts in California’s state prisons, who cost about $50,000 each per year. The state pays more on prisons than it does on higher education.

Yet the prisons are so crowded — as many as 54 inmates have to share one toilet — that Conrad Murray, the doctor convicted in the death of the pop star Michael Jackson, may be able to avoid most prison time. Fist tap Nana.

too simple and too smart for domestic "authority" to fathom...,

Video - comedian Lee Camp's prescient answer to the strategic and tactical dilemma facing domestic "authority"..,

fortunate is he who stands at the beginning ; he will know the end and not taste death

Video - Iran shoots down and recovers U.S. drone over eastern border.

NationalJournal | Two incidents that occurred on Sunday—Iran’s claim of a shoot-down of a U.S. drone, and an explosion outside the British embassy in Bahrain—may have been unrelated. But they appear to add to growing evidence that an escalating covert war by the West is under way against Iran, and that Tehran is retaliating with greater intensity than ever.

Asked whether the United States, in cooperation with Israel, was now engaged in a covert war against Iran’s nuclear program that may include the Stuxnet virus, the blowing-up of facilities and the assassination or kidnapping of scientists, one recently retired U.S. official privy to up-to-date intelligence would not deny it.

“It’s safe to say the Israelis are very active,” the official said, adding about U.S. efforts: “Everything that [GOP presidential candidate] Mitt Romney said we should be doing—tough sanctions, covert action and pressuring the international community -- are all of the things we are actually doing.” Though the activities are classified, a senior Obama administration official also would not deny that such a program was under way. He indicated that the U.S. was not involved in every action, referring to recent alleged explosions at Isfahan and elsewhere. But, he added: “I wouldn’t assume that everything we do is coordinated."

Former undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who oversaw America’s Iran engagement during the Bush administration, asked Sunday about reports that the U.S. program began under George W. Bush, said he could not comment on intelligence matters.

In September, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, accused Great Britain, Israel and the U.S. of conducting attacks on him and other Iranian scientists."Six years ago the intelligence service of the UK began collecting information and data regarding my past, my family, the number of children," Abbasi-Davani told a news conference at the annual conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. Abbasi-Davani, who was said to have been wounded in 2010 car bomb explosion, said the attacks were carried out by Israel with the "support of the intelligence services of the United States and England."

Last week, Iranian protesters stormed the British embassy in Tehran. Dominick Chilcott, Britain's ambassador to Iran, later said the attack occurred "with the acquiescence and the support of the state." Then, on Sunday, Bahrain's interior ministry announced that an explosion occurred inside a minibus parked near the British Embassy. There were no immediate reports of serious damage or injuries.

U.S. officials alleged in October that agents acting for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which has increasingly exerted control over the Tehran regime, were involved in a plot to kill that Saudi ambassador to Washington in a restaurant. Iran denied the allegations. Then, on Sunday, in what have been another escalation, Iran’s news agency reported that Iranian armed forces shot down an unmanned U.S. spy plane that illegally crossed the country's eastern border.

Responding to the Iranian report, NATO command in Afghanistan released a terse statement Sunday: "The UAV to which the Iranians are referring may be a US unarmed reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week. The operators of the UAV lost control of the aircraft and had been working to determine its status."

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council in Washington, said the tit-for-tat incidents “add up to a very worrisome picture,” in part because “the Iranians are absorbing all of these assassinations without seeing the pace of their nuclear program slow down to the extent it would be acceptable to the West.” But if Iranian retaliations grow serious enough, he said, they could provide “the pretext for a much larger war” in which the Israelis, and possibly the Americans, launch a full attack on Iran.

what kind of war requires this kind of continuing investment?

AP | At Los Alamos National Laboratory, scientists and engineers refer to their planned new $6 billion nuclear lab by its clunky acronym, CMRR, short for Chemistry Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility. But as a work in progress for three decades and with hundreds of millions of dollars already spent, nomenclature is among the minor issues.

Questions continue to swirl about exactly what kind of nuclear and plutonium research will be done there, whether the lab is really necessary, and — perhaps most important — will it be safe, or could it become New Mexico's equivalent of Japan's Fukushima?

As federal officials prepare the final design plans for the controversial and very expensive lab, increased scrutiny is being placed on what in recent years has been discovered to be a greater potential for a major earthquake along the fault lines that have carved out the stunning gorges, canyons and valleys that surround the nation's premier nuclear weapons facility in northern New Mexico.

Final preparations for the lab — whose the high-end price tag estimate of $5.8 billion is almost $1 billion more than New Mexico's annual state budget and more than double the lab's annual budget — also comes as a cash-strapped Congress looks to trim defense spending and cut cleanup budgets at contaminated facilities like Los Alamos. It also comes as the inspector general recommends that the federal government consider consolidating its far-flung network of research labs.

Despite the uncertainty, the National Nuclear Safety Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy that oversees the nation's nuclear labs, is moving forward on final designs for the lab. Project director Herman Le-Doux says it has been redesigned with input from the nation's leading seismic experts, and the NNSA has "gone to great extremes" to ensure the planned building could withstand an earthquake of up to 7.3 magnitude.

Most seismic experts agree that would be a worst-case scenario for the area. But many people who live near the lab — and have seen it twice threatened by massive wildfires in 10 years — see no reason for taking the chance.

"The Department of Energy has learned nothing from the Fukushima disaster," said David McCoy, director of the environmental and nuclear watchdog group Citizens Action New Mexico, at a recent oversight hearing. That's become a common refrain since last year's earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused a meltdown at one of its nuclear plants. "The major lesson of Fukushima is ignored by NNSA: Don't build dangerous facilities in unsafe natural settings."

Lab officials say CMRR is needed to replace a 1940s era facility that is beyond renovation yet crucial to supporting its mission as the primary center for maintaining and developing the country's stockpile of nuclear weapons. While much of the work is classified, they insist the lab's mission is to do analytical work to support the nearby Plutonium Facility, or PF-4, which is the only building in the country equipped for making the pits that power nuclear weapons.

Watchdog groups, however, call it an effort by the DOE and NNSA to escalate the production of new nuclear weapons and turn what has largely been a research facility into a bomb factory.

Video - The Convair WS 125 atomic powered bomber.

Wikipedia | A nuclear aircraft is an aircraft powered by nuclear energy. Research into them was pursued during the Cold War by the United States and the Soviet Union as they would presumably allow a country to keep nuclear bombers in the air for extremely long periods of time, a useful tactic for nuclear deterrence. Neither country created any nuclear aircraft in production numbers. One design problem, never adequately solved, was the need for heavy shielding to protect the crew from radiation sickness. Since the advent of ICBMs in the 60s the tactical advantage of such aircraft was greatly diminished and respective projects were cancelled. Because the technology was inherently dangerous it was not considered in non-military contexts.

Unmanned missiles have been designed to use nuclear thermal rockets, but such designs were considered too dangerous for crews to fly.

Saenger-Bredt Spaceplane

Video - Recreation of the Sanger-Bendt orbital bomber.

Sanger Orbital Bomber - In June 1935 and February 1936, Dr. Eugen Sänger published articles in the Austrian aviation publication Flug on rocket-powered aircraft. This led to his being asked by the German High Command to build a secret aerospace research institute in Trauen to research and build his "Silverbird", a manned, winged vehicle that could reach orbit. Dr. Sänger had been working on this concept for several years, and in fact he had began developing liquid-fuel rocket engines. From 1930 to 1935, he had perfected (through countless static tests) a 'regeneratively cooled' liquid-fueled rocket engine that was cooled by its own fuel, which circulated around the combustion chamber. This engine produced an astounding 3048 meters/second (10000 feet/second) exhaust velocity, as compared to the later V-2 rocket's 2000 meters/second (6560 feet/second). Dr. Sänger, along with his staff, continued work at Trauen on the "Silverbird" under the Amerika Bomber program. The Sänger Amerika Bomber (or Orbital Bomber, Antipodal Bomber or Atmosphere Skipper) was designed for supersonic, stratospheric flight. The fuselage was flattened, which helped create lift and the wings were short and wedge shaped. There was a horizontal tail surface located at the extreme aft end of the fuselage, which had a small fin on each end. The fuel was carried in two large tanks, one on each side of the fuselage, running from the wings aft. Oxygen tanks were located one on each side of the fuselage, located forward of the wings. There was a huge rocket engine of 100 tons thrust mounted in the fuselage rear, and was flanked by two auxiliary rocket engines. The pilot sat in a pressurized cockpit in the forward fuselage, and a tricycle undercarriage was fitted for a gliding landing. A central bomb bay held one 3629 kg (8000 lb) free-falling bomb, and no defensive armament was fitted. The empty weight was to be approximately 9979 kg (22000 lbs). An interesting flight profile was envisioned for the "Silverbird". It was to be propelled down a 3 km (1.9 mile) long monorail track by a rocket-powered sled that developed a 600 ton thrust for 11 seconds (please see diagram below). After taking off at a 30 degree angle and reaching an altitude of 1.5 km (5100'), a speed of 1850 km/h (1149 mph) would be reached. At this point, the main rocket engine would be fired for 8 minutes and burn 90 tons of fuel to propel the "Silverbird" to a maximum speed of 22100 km/h (13724 mph) and an altitude of over 145 km (90 miles), although some sources list the maximum altitude reached as 280 km (174 miles). As the aircraft accelerated and descended under the pull of gravity, it would then hit the denser air at about 40 km (25 miles) and 'skip' back up as a stone does when skipped along water (please see drawing below). This also had the added benefit of cooling the aircraft after the intense frictional heating encountered when the denser air was reached. The skips would gradually be decreased until the aircraft would glide back to a normal landing using its conventional tricycle landing gear, after covering approximately 23500 km (14594 miles). The final test facilities for full-scale rocket engine tests were being built when Russia was invaded in June 1941. All futuristic programs were canceled due to the need to concentrate on proven designs. Dr. Sänger went on to work on ramjet designs for the DFS (German Research Institute for Gliding), and helped to design the Skoda-Kauba Sk P.14. Although the Luftwaffe did its best to stop Dr. Sänger from publishing his research results, a few copies went unaccounted for and made their way to other countries. After the war, he was asked to work (along with mathematician Irene Bredt) for the French Air Ministry, where in a bizarre plot, he was almost kidnapped by Stalin, who recognized the value of the Amerika Bomber.

bear in mind china's pressing domestic political needs, as well...,

Video - China will not hesitate to protect Iran even with a third World War.

been making fireworks for thousands of years....,

Video - China's subterranean great wall.

Telegraph | The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Georgetown University students under the instruction of a former Pentagon official have assembled the largest body of public knowledge yet about a vast network of secret tunnels dug by China's secretive Second Artillery Corps, responsible for nuclear warheads.

The 363-page study has not yet been published, but has already sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top US defence officials, including the Air Force vice chief of staff, the Post reported.

"It's not quite a bombshell, but those thoughts and estimates are being checked against what people think they know based on classified information," it quoted an unnamed Defense Department strategist as saying.

The newspaper said critics of the report had questioned the students methods, which included using internet-based sources like Google Earth, blogs, military journals and even a fictionalised Chinese TV show.

But the Post also said the students were able to obtain a 400-page manual produced by the Second Artillery and usually only available to Chinese military personnel.

2012 national defense authorization act

Wired | Here’s the best thing that can be said about the new detention powers the Senate has tucked into next year’s defense bill: They don’t force the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial. They just let the military do that. And even though the leaders of the military and the spy community have said they want no such power, the Senate is poised to pass its bill as early as tonight.

There are still changes swirling around the Senate, but this looks like the basic shape of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Someone the government says is “a member of, or part of, al-Qaida or an associated force” can be held in military custody “without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” Those hostilities are currently scheduled to end the Wednesday after never. The move would shut down criminal trials for terror suspects.

But far more dramatically, the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

An amendment that would limit military detentions to people captured overseas failed on Thursday afternoon. The Senate soundly defeated a measure to strip out all the detention provisions on Tuesday.

So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it’s pretty likely to pass.

It would be one thing if the military was clamoring for the authority to become the nation’s jailer. But to the contrary: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opposes the maneuver. So does CIA Director David Petraeus, who usually commands deference from senators in both parties. Pretty much every security official has lined up against the Senate detention provisions, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to FBI Director Robert Mueller, who worry that they’ll get in the way of FBI investigations of domestic terrorists. President Obama has promised to veto the bill.

Which is ironic. After all, Obama approved of the execution without trial of Anwar al-Awlaki, al-Qaida’s YouTube preacher, based entirely on the unproven assertion that Awlaki was dangerous. Awlaki was an American citizen. So Obama thinks he has the right to kill Americans the government says are terrorists, but he doesn’t want the military to lock them up forever without trial. OK then.

Weirder still, the bill’s chief architect, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), tried to persuade skeptics that the bill wasn’t so bad. His pitch? “The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States,” he said on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill would just let the government detain a citizen in military custody, not force it to do that. Reassured yet?

Civil libertarians aren’t. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said it “denigrates the very foundations of this country.” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) added, “it puts every single American citizen at risk.”

But there’s a reason this measure goes into the defense bill: Voting against the defense bill is usually considered political suicide. That’s why the bill will almost certainly pass tonight. If Obama backs down from his veto threat, get ready to see Americans at Guantanamo Bay. Fist tap Davera.

gutting the privacy act

NYTimes | The Privacy Act of 1974 allows a person to sue a federal agency for intentionally disclosing personal, confidential information without permission. But the government is trying to limit the force of that law and make it harder to hold agencies accountable for such violations.

In Federal Aviation Administration v. Cooper, a case argued this week in the Supreme Court, the government contends that the statute allows a plaintiff to recover “actual damages” only for monetary losses, but not for emotional distress.

Stanmore Cooper brought the suit because in an exchange of data to identify medically unfit pilots, the Social Security Administration gave the Federal Aviation Administration confidential information that revealed that he was H.I.V.-positive and was receiving disability benefits. He was devastated when he learned of this revelation. He experienced anxiety, sleeplessness and other serious problems. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for not disclosing his H.I.V. status to the F.A.A., but he sued the government for severe mental and emotional distress.

The Supreme Court held in 2004 that it is necessary to show actual damages in a lawsuit under the Privacy Act but did not say whether nonmonetary harm like emotional distress comes under that heading. In Mr. Cooper’s case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that it does. It found support in Congress’s intent to provide relief for “any damages”; in the Supreme Court’s view that in privacy cases “the primary damage is the mental distress from having been exposed to public view”; and in the law in seven other federal circuits.

The government, however, contends that the statute does not explicitly allow damages for emotional distress claims. To counter this argument, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out that “the person who is subject to this, to this embarrassment, this humiliation, doesn’t have out-of-pocket costs, but is terribly distressed, nervous, anxious, and all the rest.” If Congress did not intend to allow damages for emotional distress, she said, “Then maybe Congress shouldn’t have passed this statute.”

The government’s restricted interpretation would gut the point of the Privacy Act, and in too many cases would allow agencies to act improperly with impunity.

atheists can not be trusted...,

NationalPost | Many religious people don’t like atheists, and in fact would apparently rate them alongside rapists on levels of trust, suggests a new Canadian study that claims to be one of the first psychological probes into anti-atheist prejudice.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon conducted a series of studies that found a deep level of distrust toward those who don’t believe in God, deeming them to be among the least trusted people in the world — despite their growing ranks to an estimated half billion globally.

“There’s this persistent belief that people behave better if they feel like God is watching them,” said Will Gervais, lead study author and doctoral candidate in the social psychology department at UBC. “So if you’re playing by those rules, you’re going to see other people’s religious beliefs as signals of how trustworthy they might be.”

The research began a few years ago, when a series of polls revealed atheists to be some of the least liked people in areas with religious majorities, which is to say, much of the world. In one poll, only 45% of American respondents said they would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate and overwhelmingly preferred to vote for African American, Jewish and female candidates. Americans also rated atheists as the group that least agrees with their vision for the country and the group they’d most disapprove of their child marrying.

The resulting paper, published in the current online issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, includes six studies all designed to measure people’s perception of an atheist’s trustworthiness. The first study asked 351 Americans from across the country to compare the trustworthiness of an atheist and a gay man, since both represent groups often described as threatening to majority religious values. They rated atheists significantly higher than gay men on distrust, though lower on levels of disgust.

The second study recruited 105 UBC undergrads —they purposely targeted a more liberal sample from a less-religious nation — to test whether distrust of atheists is more pronounced than distrust of other groups, including Muslims. The students read a description of an untrustworthy man who pretended to leave insurance information after backing his car into a parked vehicle and were asked to say whether it was more likely the man was either a Christian, Muslim, rapist or an atheist. People were far more likely to say he was either an atheist or a rapist and not part of a religious group. They did not significantly differentiate atheists from rapists, something Mr. Gervais found disconcerting.

“It’s pretty shocking that we get the same magnitude of distrust towards atheists simply because they don’t believe [in God],” said the researcher, who is himself an atheist. “With rapists, they’re distrusted because they rape people. Atheists are viewed as sort of a moral wild card.”

Another among the six studies found people are more likely to hire someone for a job that requires high levels of trust, such as a daycare worker, if they believe they are religious. They would hire atheists for a low trust job, such as a waitress, the study found.

The levels of distrust were more pronounced among respondents who said they were religious, said Mr. Gervais. One of the studies measured how much people thought believing God is watching makes you a better person.

one-time thought crime...,

NYTimes | Border Patrol agents pursue smugglers one moment and sit around in boredom the next. It was during one of the lulls that Bryan Gonzalez, a young agent, made some comments to a colleague that cost him his career.

Stationed in Deming, N.M., Mr. Gonzalez was in his green-and-white Border Patrol vehicle just a few feet from the international boundary when he pulled up next to a fellow agent to chat about the frustrations of the job. If marijuana were legalized, Mr. Gonzalez acknowledges saying, the drug-related violence across the border in Mexico would cease. He then brought up an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition that favors ending the war on drugs.

Those remarks, along with others expressing sympathy for illegal immigrants from Mexico, were passed along to the Border Patrol headquarters in Washington. After an investigation, a termination letter arrived that said Mr. Gonzalez held “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and esprit de corps.”

After his dismissal, Mr. Gonzalez joined a group even more exclusive than the Border Patrol: law enforcement officials who have lost their jobs for questioning the war on drugs and are fighting back in the courts.

In Arizona, Joe Miller, a probation officer in Mohave County, near the California border, filed suit last month in Federal District Court after he was dismissed for adding his name to a letter by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which is based in Medford, Mass., and known as LEAP, expressing support for the decriminalization of marijuana.

“More and more members of the law enforcement community are speaking out against failed drug policies, and they don’t give up their right to share their insight and engage in this important debate simply because they receive government paychecks,” said Daniel Pochoda, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which is handling the Miller case.

Mr. Miller was one of 32 members of LEAP who signed the letter, which expressed support for a California ballot measure that failed last year that would have permitted recreational marijuana use. Most of the signers were retired members of law enforcement agencies, who can speak their minds without fear of action by their bosses. But Mr. Miller and a handful of others who were still on the job — including the district attorney for Humboldt County in California and the Oakland city attorney — signed, too.

LEAP has seen its membership increase significantly from the time it was founded in 2002 by five disillusioned officers. It now has an e-mail list of 48,000, and its members include 145 judges, prosecutors, police officers, prison guards and other law enforcement officials, most of them retired, who speak on the group’s behalf.

“No one wants to be fired and have to fight for their job in court,” said Neill Franklin, a retired police officer who is LEAP’s executive director. “So most officers are reluctant to sign on board. But we do have some brave souls.”

Mr. Miller was accused of not making clear that he was speaking for himself and not the probation department while advocating the decriminalization of cannabis. His lawsuit, though, points out that the letter he signed said at the bottom, “All agency affiliations are listed for identification purposes only.”

He was also accused of dishonesty for denying that he had given approval for his name to appear on the LEAP letter. In the lawsuit, Mr. Miller said that his wife had given approval without his knowledge, using his e-mail address, but that he had later supported her.

Kip Anderson, the court administrator for the Superior Court in Mohave County, said there was no desire to limit Mr. Miller’s political views.

“This isn’t about legalization,” Mr. Anderson said. “We’re not taking a stand on that. We just didn’t want people to think he was speaking on behalf of the probation department.”

Mr. Miller, who is also a retired police officer and Marine, lost an appeal of his dismissal before a hearing officer. But when his application for unemployment benefits was turned down, he appealed that and won. An administrative law judge found that Mr. Miller had not been dishonest with his bosses and that the disclaimer on the letter was sufficient.

In the case of Mr. Gonzalez, the fired Border Patrol agent, he had not joined LEAP but had expressed sympathy with the group’s cause. “It didn’t make sense to me why marijuana is illegal,” he said. “To see that thousands of people are dying, some of whom I know, makes you want to look for a change.”

Since his firing, Mr. Gonzalez, who filed suit in federal court in Texas in January, has worked as a construction worker, a bouncer and a yard worker. He has also gone back to school, where he is considering a law degree.

“I don’t want to work at a place that says I can’t think,” said Mr. Gonzalez, who grew up in El Paso, just across the border from Ciudad Juárez, which has experienced some of the worst bloodshed in Mexico.

wikileaks: the spy files

CBSNews | President Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address, warned that the military-industrial complex could "endanger our liberties or democratic processes." Today WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange is warning that the surveillance-industrial complex is even more dangerous.

A set of nearly 300 documents that the document-leaking Web site published today reveals how extensive and privacy-invasive the secretive multi-billion dollar industry devoted to surveillance technology has become.

"We are in a world now where not only is it theoretically possible to record nearly all telecommunications traffic out of a country, all telephone calls, but where there is an international industry selling the devices now to do it," Assange said in a video interview today.

What WikiLeaks has dubbed the "Spy Files" is a collection of marketing and technical documents, including previously-unreleased presentations from companies that showed up at government-only conferences like ISS World Europe, billed as a gathering in 2008 for "telecom operators, law enforcement," and employees of spy agencies.

Amesys, a unit of French technology firm Bull SA, boasts in a leaked document how it can aid governments in moving from eavesdropping on one person to "full country traffic monitoring," including automatic translation and mapping of real-world social networks based on who's talking to who.

Amesys's presentation offers a one-stop shop for nationwide monitoring, including GSM cell phone communications, satellite signals, Internet communications, and phone calls. The company boasts of a "huge range of sensors and analyzing probes" and -- in an echo of what the former East German secret police attempted decades earlier -- a "centralized intelligence system gathering all information."

There were hints about the extent of Amesys' surveillance apparatus before, including in an August article in the Wall Street Journal that described a room used by Moammar Gadhafi's secret police to monitor Internet traffic in Libya. The room sported Amesys logos, manuals, and posters, the article said.

But the WikiLeaks' new leaks, which resume a dry spell for the group when it effectively halted disclosures after a series of U.S. Defense Department and State Department documents, are likely to draw more attention to the surveillance-industrial complex and could lead to more legal oversight and reform efforts.

Amesys did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNET. It did distribute a statement in September that it sold "analysis hardware" to Libya to help it fight terrorism, and included a vague threat of legal action against anyone who damages its "image or reputation."

Not all of the documents in WikiLeaks' archive are actual leaks. An HP brochure describing "technology that supports global law enforcement" is publicly available (PDF) on the company's Web site.

Earlier this week, an attorney representing Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks' alleged source for the U.S. government files who is now facing criminal charges, suggested that the megabytes of classified data his client allegedly turned over didn't truly harm national security. Manning, an Army private, was charged last July with sending a military video to a person not authorized to receive it and with obtaining "more than 150,000 diplomatic cables" from the State Department. A preliminary hearing in Manning's case has been scheduled for later this month.