beluga attempting "first contact" with these humans...,

psychologytoday | This story, hot off the press, of a captive beluga whale named Noc mimicking human voices is well-worth reporting (see also where there is a great video of Noc, and here). It's the first demonstration of a whale mimicking human voices.

Here's a great teaser to draw you into this fascinating discovery: “Who told me to get out?” asked a diver, surfacing from a tank in which a whale named NOC lived. The beluga’s caretakers had heard what sounded like garbled phrases emanating from the enclosure before, and it suddenly dawned on them that the whale might be imitating the voices of his human handlers." The abstract of the original research report can be seen here.

Canaries of the sea

Belugas are also called white whales and "canaries of the sea" because of their highly developed vocal repertoire. What Noc does is unexpected and fascinating. To wit, "These sounds are even more surprising because whales typically produce sounds in a completely different way from people, using their nasal tracts and not the voice box or larynx as humans do. To make these humanlike sounds, Noc had to vary the air pressure in his nasal tract while adjusting liplike valves and over-inflating sacs under his blowhole."

these humans are comically inconsistent

physorg | In economics, classical theory holds that we have consistent risk preferences, regardless of the precise decision, from investments to insurance programs and retirement plans. But studies in behavioral economics indicate that people's choices can vary greatly depending on the subject matter and circumstances of each decision.

Now a new paper (PDF) co-authored by an MIT economist brings a large dose of empirical data to the problem, by looking at the way tens of thousands of Americans have handled risk in selecting health insurance and retirement plans. The study, just published in the American Economic Review, finds that at most 30 percent of us make consistent decisions about financial risk across a variety of areas.

This empirical finding belies the notion that people are uniformly consistent in their approach to risk, across types of financial decisions—but it also shows that not everyone continually changes their risk tolerance, either.

"As economists, we often place great value on where people put their money in the real world," says Amy Finkelstein, the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT, who helped conduct the research. "Most extremes are not true in the reality, and we found our answer was in the middle."

science knows and understands shockingly little about emotions...,

The faces of former poster-child Big Don leading up to and immediately following yesterday's expulsion - start in lower right corner and go left, then upper right corner and go left - top middle is shit&shoe epiphany moment

 

ucla | While human emotions are clearly derived from a psychological foundation shared by social mammals, we likely possess some emotions that are considerably less developed, or wholly absent, in other creatures. Humans are unique in the extent of their reliance on socially transmitted information in coping with physical and social environments.

An important class of emotions consists of those which mediate the acquisition, use, and dissemination of cultural information. Admiration of successful persons involves a desire for proximity and a willingness to provide client services to obtain it, as well as a desire for close observation and imitation.

These patterns lead individuals to adopt ideas and practices of probable local utility. At a larger scale, conformity to cultural values, beliefs, and practices makes behavior predictable and allows for the advent of complex coordination and cooperation; shame and pride motivate an assessment of prevailing norms, an awareness of the presence of observers, and conformity to pervasive expectations when under observation. Conversely, contempt and moral outrage motivate publicizing the actions of nonconformists, excluding them from cooperative endeavors, and inflicting costs upon them. A richer understanding of the evolution of contempt and moral outrage is needed given that punishment plays a key role in maintaining cooperation.

Finally, while considerations of kin selection and reciprocal altruism indicate that many animals should experience emotions in a corporate fashion (i.e., harm to kin or allies is experienced as harm to self, etc.), humans link their identities to group membership at scales not explicable in terms of kin selection or reciprocal altruism, suggesting that the benefits of coordination and cooperation favored the evolution of highly developed human corporate sensibilities.

a new model of empathy?

WaPo | At the very least, the new experiment reported in Science is going to make people think differently about what it means to be a “rat.” Eventually, though, it may tell us interesting things about what it means to be a human being.

In a simple experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago sought to find out whether a rat would release a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could. The answer was yes.

The free rat, occasionally hearing distress calls from its compatriot, learned to open the cage and did so with greater efficiency over time. It would release the other animal even if there wasn’t the payoff of a reunion with it. Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive — which is a lot to expect of a rat.

The researchers came to the unavoidable conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy — and apparently selfless behavior driven by that mental state.

“There is nothing in it for them except for whatever feeling they get from helping another individual,” said Peggy Mason, the neurobiologist who conducted the experiment along with graduate student Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal and fellow researcher Jean Decety.

“There is a common misconception that sharing and helping is a cultural occurrence. But this is not a cultural event. It is part of our biological inheritance,” she added.

The idea that animals have emotional lives and are capable of detecting emotions in others has been gaining ground for decades. Empathic behavior has been observed in apes and monkeys, and described by many pet owners (especially dog owners). Recently, scientists demonstrated “emotional contagion” in mice, a situation in which one animal’s stress worsens another’s.

But empathy that leads to helping activity — what psychologists term “pro-social behavior” — hasn’t been formally shown in non-primates until now.

If this experiment reported Thursday holds up under scrutiny, it will give neuroscientists a method to study empathy and altruism in a rigorous way.

are animals moral creatures?

yahoo | Does Mr. Whiskers really love you or is he just angling for treats?

Until recently, scientists would have said your cat was snuggling up to you only as a means to get tasty treats. But many animals have a moral compass, and feel emotions such as love, grief, outrage and empathy, a new book argues.

The book, "Can Animals Be Moral?" Oxford University Press, October 2012), suggests social mammals such as rats, dogs and chimpanzees can choose to be good or bad. And because they have morality, we have moral obligations to them, said author Mark Rowlands, a University of Miami philosopher.

"Animals are owed a certain kind of respect that they wouldn't be owed if they couldn't act morally," Rowlands told But while some animals have complex emotions, they don't necessarily have true morality, other researchers argue. [5 Animals With a Moral Compass]

Moral behavior?

Some research suggests animals have a sense of outrage when social codes are violated. Chimpanzees may punish other chimps for violating certain rules of the social order, said Marc Bekoff, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and co-author of "Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals" (University Of Chicago Press, 2012).

Male bluebirds that catch their female partners stepping out may beat the female, said Hal Herzog, a psychologist at Western Carolina University who studies how humans think about animals.

And there are many examples of animals demonstrating ostensibly compassionate or empathetic behaviors toward other animals, including humans. In one experiment, hungry rhesus monkeys refused to electrically shock their fellow monkeys, even when it meant getting food for themselves. In another study, a female gorilla named Binti Jua rescued an unconscious 3-year-old (human) boy who had fallen into her enclosure at the Brookline Zoo in Illinois, protecting the child from other gorillas and even calling for human help. And when a car hit and injured a dog on a busy Chilean freeway several years ago, its canine compatriot dodged traffic, risking its life to drag the unconscious dog to safety.

All those examples suggest that animals have some sense of right and wrong, Rowlands said."I think what's at the heart of following morality is the emotions," Rowlands said. "Evidence suggests that animals can act on those sorts of emotions."

today's music...,

great brubeck fresh air interview from 1999

npr | This interview was originally broadcast in 1999. Brubeck died on Wednesday at age 91.

In 1954, polls in the leading jazz magazines Metronome and Downbeat selected Dave Brubeck's band as the year's best instrumental group. That same year, Brubeck was the second jazz musician ever featured on the cover of Time Magazine (the first being Louie Armstrong).

Brubeck celebrated a milestone in 2009, when his seminal album Time Out, featuring the hits "Take Five" and "Blue Rondo a la Turk," celebrated its 50th anniversary. Brubeck marked the occasion with an outdoor concert at the Newport Jazz Festival. A month later, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced that he would be a 2009 Kennedy Center Honoree.

In 1999, Brubeck talked to Terry Gross about his decades in the music industry. He explained that he grew up on a 45,000-acre ranch in California, the son of a music teacher and a cattle rancher.

Though Brubeck and his two older brothers studied piano with their mother, the future jazz pianist initially didn't take lessons for very long. He quit when he was 11 to focus on his first love: rodeo roping. But his mother, who thought he was talented at the piano, wouldn't allow him to rope anything larger than a yearling.

"She didn't want my fingers to become hurt," Brubeck said. "My uncle, who was also a rodeo roper, got his finger caught between the saddle horn and the rope, and it took his finger off. And he used to kid the other cowboys and say, 'I would've been a great pianist like my nephew Dave, had I not lost this finger.'"

Brubeck returned to studying the piano after his first year of college, after his zoology teacher offered him some advice. The teacher noticed that Brubeck's attention span seemed more focused on the music school across the street.

"He said, 'Brubeck, your mind is not here with these frogs in the formaldehyde,'" Brubeck said. " 'Your mind is across the lawn, at the conservatory. Will you please go over there next year?'"

Brubeck agreed and started taking classes at the conservatory. But he had a secret: Despite his lessons as a child, he couldn't read music. Once the dean of the conservatory found out, he threatened to not graduate Brubeck.

"But when some of the younger teachers heard this, they went to the dean and said, 'You're making a big mistake, because he writes the best counterpoint that I've ever heard,'" Brubeck said. "So they convinced the dean to let me graduate. And the dean said, 'You can graduate if you promise never to teach and embarrass the conservatory.' And that's the way I've gotten through life, is having to substitute other things for not being able to read well. But I can write, which is something very few people understand."

dopamine: not about pleasure anymore...,

uconn | “Often, depressed people say they don’t want to go out with their friends,” says Salamone. But it’s not that they don’t experience pleasure, he says – if their friends were around, many depressed people could have fun.

“Low levels of dopamine make people and other animals less likely to work for things, so it has more to do with motivation and cost/benefit analyses than pleasure itself,” he explains.

In essence, says Salamone, this is how amphetamines work, which increase dopamine levels and help people motivate to focus on tasks at hand.

“When you give people amphetamines, you see them putting more effort into things,” he says.

The big implications of this change in understanding come at the level of overlapping motivational symptoms of depression with those seen in other disorders such as schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease. Symptoms of fatigue may be related to low levels of dopamine or changes in other parts of the same brain circuitry.

On the one hand, this lack of perceived energy is maladaptive, because it reduces the tendency to interact with the environment. But, Salamone says, it could also reflect the body’s attempt to save energy in a crisis.

He points out that new ideas in science are traditionally met with criticism. But after all the mounting evidence, he says he’s no longer regarded as “a crazy rebel,” but simply someone who thought differently.

“Science is not a collection of facts. It’s a process,” he says. “First we thought dopamine was involved only in movement. Then that faded and we thought it was pleasure. Now we’ve gone beyond that data on pleasure.”

Although he has thought about writing a popular-press book, he’s not sure he really wants to go to the public and “debunk” the dopamine hypothesis of pleasure and reward. But if he ever does, one thing is for sure.

“I can sum up all this work with one phrase, which would make a great book title,” he says. “Dopamine: it’s not about pleasure anymore.” Fist tap Arnach.

pervitin

amphetamines | In a letter dated November 9, 1939, to his "dear parents and siblings" back home in Cologne, a young soldier stationed in occupied Poland wrote: "It's tough out here, and I hope you'll understand if I'm only able to write to you once every two to four days soon. Today I'm writing you mainly to ask for some Pervitin ...; Love, Hein."

Pervitin, a stimulant commonly known as speed today, was the German army's -- the Wehrmacht's -- wonder drug.

On May 20, 1940, the 22-year-old soldier wrote to his family again: "Perhaps you could get me some more Pervitin so that I can have a backup supply?" And, in a letter sent from Bromberg on July 19, 1940, he wrote: "If at all possible, please send me some more Pervitin." The man who wrote these letters became a famous writer later in life. He was Heinrich Boell, and in 1972 he was the first German to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in the post-war period.

Many of the Wehrmacht's soldiers were high on Pervitin when they went into battle, especially against Poland and France -- in a Blitzkrieg fueled by speed. The German military was supplied with millions of methamphetamine tablets during the first half of 1940. The drugs were part of a plan to help pilots, sailors and infantry troops become capable of superhuman performance. The military leadership liberally dispensed such stimulants, but also alcohol and opiates, as long as it believed drugging and intoxicating troops could help it achieve victory over the Allies. But the Nazis were less than diligent in monitoring side-effects like drug addiction and a decline in moral standards.

After it was first introduced into the market in 1938, Pervitin, a methamphetamine drug newly developed by the Berlin-based Temmler pharmaceutical company, quickly became a top seller among the German civilian population. According to a report in the Klinische Wochenschrift ("Clinical Weekly"), the supposed wonder drug was brought to the attention of Otto Ranke, a military doctor and director of the Institute for General and Defense Physiology at Berlin's Academy of Military Medicine. The effects of amphetamines are similar to those of the adrenaline produced by the body, triggering a heightened state of alert. In most people, the substance increases self-confidence, concentration and the willingness to take risks, while at the same time reducing sensitivity to pain, hunger and thirst, as well as reducing the need for sleep. In September 1939, Ranke tested the drug on 90 university students, and concluded that Pervitin could help the Wehrmacht win the war. At first Pervitin was tested on military drivers who participated in the invasion of Poland. Then, according to criminologist Wolf Kemper, it was "unscrupulously distributed to troops fighting at the front."

po thangs...,

quaint...,

the mysterious noh mask

plosone | A Noh mask worn by expert actors when performing on a Japanese traditional Noh drama is suggested to convey countless different facial expressions according to different angles of head/body orientation. The present study addressed the question of how different facial parts of a Noh mask, including the eyebrows, the eyes, and the mouth, may contribute to different emotional expressions. Both experimental situations of active creation and passive recognition of emotional facial expressions were introduced.

Methodology/Principal Findings

In Experiment 1, participants either created happy or sad facial expressions, or imitated a face that looked up or down, by actively changing each facial part of a Noh mask image presented on a computer screen. For an upward tilted mask, the eyebrows and the mouth shared common features with sad expressions, whereas the eyes with happy expressions. This contingency tended to be reversed for a downward tilted mask. Experiment 2 further examined which facial parts of a Noh mask are crucial in determining emotional expressions. Participants were exposed to the synthesized Noh mask images with different facial parts expressing different emotions. Results clearly revealed that participants primarily used the shape of the mouth in judging emotions. The facial images having the mouth of an upward/downward tilted Noh mask strongly tended to be evaluated as sad/happy, respectively.

Conclusions/Significance

The results suggest that Noh masks express chimeric emotional patterns, with different facial parts conveying different emotions This appears consistent with the principles of Noh which highly appreciate subtle and composite emotional expressions, as well as with the mysterious facial expressions observed in Western art. It was further demonstrated that the mouth serves as a diagnostic feature in characterizing the emotional expressions. This indicates the superiority of biologically-driven factors over the traditionally formulated performing styles when evaluating the emotions of the Noh masks.

only virtual now...,

lincoln uncensored...,

dailyreckoning | In order to understand Lincoln’s passion for preserving the Union, you have to put yourself into a different era of federal finance. There was but one source of revenue: the tariff. There were no internal taxes. There was no “too big to fail,” because there was no central bank capable of bailing out an entire industrial base. As Lincoln himself said by way of explanation, “The tariff is to the government what a meal is to the family” (1861). The South’s ports collected 75% of all federal tax revenue. Without that revenue — that’s what secession meant — the federal government would be starved.

So in one sense, Lincoln was doing only what we’ve come to expect of presidents. One only has to imagine how Bush or Obama or any modern American president would react to the prospect of a 75% cut in incoming revenue — especially if there were no central bank to make up the difference. Would any modern president let the people go, just stand by, and let the federal government starve? Let every opportunity for graft, payoffs, spending on projects, and patronage just evaporate? No chance.

The controversy has raged for a long time about whether the Civil War was really about slavery. It depends on the meaning of “about.” In terms of Lincoln’s motivation, the Fallon book makes it indisputably clear that it was not the desire to end slavery that drove Lincoln’s prosecution of the war, but the need for national unity, which in turn comes down to enforcing the revenue stream. Anyone who knows anything about how politics operates can see this very clearly. In fact, I don’t even know why this would be a controversial claim at all. Why does the head of any state put down rebellion? To liberate people or to enslave them?

As for the motivation of the South to secede, matters become more complex. The desire to shore up slavery and protect the territory from the abolitionists played a large and even decisive role, given that most everyone assumed that slavery was essential to the South. There was also the desire on the part of Southern elites to set up a new government that could form its own trading relationships with foreign nations. And though the demand for secession is an essential right of a free people, the new Confederate government drafted, taxed, and inflated in a way that contradicts every other principle of liberty.

The lesson here is that no government or power of any size or scale can be relied upon to defend liberty. And governments in wartime come into their own, stopping at nothing to protect their power at the people’s expense.

is secession a right?

mises | The issue has been addressed with unsurpassed clarity by one of the foremost of all classical liberals, Ludwig von Mises.

The right of self-determination … thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time … their wishes are to be respected and complied with.[5]

Mises emphasizes that this right

extends to the inhabitants of every territory large enough to form an independent administrative unit. If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done.[6]

Once one has grasped Mises's point, the fallacy in an often-heard argument is apparent. Some have held that the Southern states acted "undemocratically" in refusing to accept the results of the election of 1860. Lincoln, after all, received a plurality of the country's popular vote.

To a Misesian, the answer is obvious: so what? A majority (much less a plurality) has no right to coerce dissenters. Further, the argument fails on its own terms. It was not undemocratic to secede. The Southern states did not deny that Lincoln was in fact the rightfully elected president. Rather, they wanted out just because he was. Democracy would oblige them only to acknowledge Lincoln's authority had they chosen to remain in the Union.

But a problem now arises. I have endeavored to defend secession from an individual-rights standpoint. Notoriously, Mises did not acknowledge natural rights. I fear that, like Jeremy Bentham, he regarded declarations of rights as "nonsense on stilts." Why, then, did Mises accept self-determination?

Mises's reasoning is characteristically incisive. If people are compelled to remain under a government they do not choose, then strife is the likely outcome. Recognition of the right to secede "is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars."[7] Mises's argument does not rest on natural rights, but it is of course consistent with the approach I have sketched out. Regardless of one's moral theory, it is surely a strong point in favor of a view that it has beneficial consequences.

the death of "near death"

ScientificAmerican | You careen headlong into a blinding light. Around you, phantasms of people and pets lost. Clouds billow and sway, giving way to a gilded and golden entrance. You feel the air, thrusted downward by delicate wings. Everything is soothing, comforting, familiar. Heaven.

It’s a paradise that some experience during an apparent demise. The surprising consistency of heavenly visions during a “near death experience” (or NDE) indicates for many that an afterlife awaits us. Religious believers interpret these similar yet varying accounts like blind men exploring an elephant—they each feel something different (the tail is a snake and the legs are tree trunks, for example); yet all touch the same underlying reality. Skeptics point to the curious tendency for Heaven to conform to human desires, or for Heaven’s fleeting visage to be so dependent on culture or time period.

Heaven, in a theological view, has some kind of entrance. When you die, this entrance is supposed to appear—a Platform 9 ¾ for those running towards the grave. Of course, the purported way to see Heaven without having to take the final run at the platform wall is the NDE. Thrust back into popular consciousness by a surgeon claiming that “Heaven is Real,” the NDE has come under both theological and scientific scrutiny for its supposed ability to preview the great gig in the sky.

But getting to see Heaven is hell—you have to die. Or do you?

Neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander claimed that “Heaven is Real”, making the cover of the now defunct Newsweek magazine. His account of Heaven was based on a series of visions he had while in a coma, suffering the ravages of a particularly vicious case of bacterial meningitis. Alexander claimed that because his neocortex was “inactivated” by this malady, his near death visions indicated an intellect apart from the grey matter, and therefore a part of us survives brain-death.

Alexander’s resplendent descriptions of the afterlife were intriguing and beautiful, but were also promoted as scientific proof. Because Alexander was a brain “scientist” (more accurately, a brain surgeon), his account carried apparent weight.

Scientifically, Alexander’s claims have been roundly criticized and, in my view, successfully refuted. Academic clinical neurologist Steve Novella removes the foundation of Alexander’s whole claim by noting that his assumption of cortex “inactivation” is flawed:

Alexander claims there is no scientific explanation for his experiences, but I just gave one. They occurred while his brain function was either on the way down or on the way back up, or both, not while there was little to no brain activity.

In another takedown of the popular article, neuroscientist Sam Harris (with characteristic sharpness) also points out this faulty premise, and notes that Alexander’s evidence for such inactivation is lacking:

The problem, however, is that “CT scans and neurological examinations” can’t determine neuronal inactivity—in the cortex or anywhere else. And Alexander makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fMRI, PET, or EEG—nor does he seem to realize that only this sort of evidence could support his case.

Without a scientific foundation for Alexander’s claims, skeptics suggest he had a NDE later fleshed out by confirmation bias and colored by culture. Harris concludes in a follow-up post on his blog, “I am quite sure that I’ve never seen a scientist speak in a manner more suggestive of wishful thinking. If self-deception were an Olympic sport, this is how our most gifted athletes would appear when they were in peak condition.”

literal holocaust and hell on earth...,

Crisis in the Congo: Uncovering The Truth explores the role that the United States allies, Rwanda and Uganda, have played in triggering the greatest humanitarian crisis at the dawn of the 21st century. Fist tap Bro. Makheru.

gog and magog: top lives off the yield of the bottom

ukcolumn | For those of us who, after many years of careful and detailed research, now understand the hidden machinations of global finance and who are aware of the secretive network of criminals and traitors who seek world government on their terms, this annual spectacle of corporate celebration and respectability by people who are not household names clearly masks an evil that must now be exposed quickly and effectively.

With the exception of a few thousand very powerful people, the entire world’s population, all seven billion of us, are trapped ... trapped into a criminal debt creating banking ‘system’ that has taken hundreds of years to perfect and to come to fruition. This ‘system’ results in enslavement and servitude. It creates dreadful unhappiness amongst ordinary decent people and causes wars, debt, starvation, pollution and environmental destruction. It feeds on greed, fear and division. It forces people onto the corporate treadmills of mass mindless production and mass mindless consumption. It uses lies, deception, intimidation and entrapment at all times. It is a system that is so clever and so cunning that most of the world is completely oblivious to its existence. It is a system that allows a few winners at the expense of a huge number of losers. It is a system that considers itself to be unbeatable and indestructible and is now so arrogant that it believes it can control everything and everyone on its terms. It is a system where psychopaths and sociopaths can flourish. And without question the centre of this system, the heart of this global corporate beast is the innocent sounding Square Mile known as the City of London.

Put very simply, the banking dynasties, such as the House of Rothschild, control the political processes around the world to such an extent that their network of private central banks have the right to create money completely out of thin air and then charge interest on that ‘nothingness’. The polite term is ‘Fractional Reserve Lending’ but in reality it is just simple fraud. The result is that the whole world is currently drowning in a sea of fraudulent debt.

The USA now has a National Debt of over 16 trillion dollars, whilst the UK owes its creditors over one trillion pounds. The planned contagion of spiralling and unlawful debt is now sweeping over Europe with a renewed vigour. Greece and Spain are being torn apart by appalling austerity measures to the point that civil war or military intervention are now being openly talked about on the streets. Italy is giving all the signs that its economy is now entering into very stormy waters indeed. Ireland, Portugal, France and Belgium are already in a mess and are unlikely to see their debts become more manageable. Tens of millions of people have experienced a major downturn in their quality of life, along with their prospects for a more secure and better future, as unlawful austerity measures brought in by corrupt politicians begin to bite. Even the stronger economies of Germany, The Netherlands and Luxembourg have now been downgraded by Moody’s, the Rothschild controlled credit rating agency.

why israel lost the u.n. palestine vote...,

Slate | Four days ago, the United Nations General Assembly voted to accept Palestine as a non-member observer state. The vote was 138 to 9, with 41 abstentions. Israel tried to squelch the resolution, then tried to defeat it, then scoffed that the vote meant nothing, but punished the Palestinians anyway by announcing new settlements and withholding Palestinian tax revenue. Now even the United States is ticked off. How has Israel managed to lose the vote in a landslide and alienate its friends? By blowing its credibility on ludicrous complaints.

former assistant secretary of state for africa got some splainin to do...,

foreignpolicy | Televised comments made by Amb. Susan Rice shortly after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi have dominated the debate over her probable nomination for secretary of state. This is a bit surprising, since it's clear that she played only a marginal role in the affair and appears to have just been reading from the briefing notes provided. It's also unfortunate that the "scandal" has crowded out a healthy discussion of her two-decade record as U.S. diplomat and policymaker prior to Sept. 2012 -- and drawn attention away from actions for which she bears far greater responsibility than Benghazi.

Her role in shaping U.S. policy toward Central Africa should feature high on this list. Between 1993 and 2001, she helped form U.S. responses to the Rwandan genocide, events in post-genocide Rwanda, mass violence in Burundi, and two ruinous wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

She did not get off to an auspicious start. During her first year in government, there was a vigorous debate within the Clinton administration over whether to describe the killing in Rwanda as a "genocide," a designation that would necessitate an international response under the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention. In a now infamous incident from that April, which was reported in her now State Department colleague Samantha Power's book, A Problem from Hell, Rice -- at the time still a junior official at the National Security Council -- stunned her colleagues by asking during a meeting, "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional midterm] election?"