Double-O been waging war on transparency

guardian | When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, his pledges of openness and transparency were not ancillary to his campaign but central to it. He repeatedly denounced the Bush administration as "one of the most secretive administrations in our nation's history", saying that "it is no coincidence" that such a secrecy-obsessed presidency "has favored special interests and pursued policies that could not stand up to the sunlight." He vowed: "as president, I'm going to change that." In a widely heralded 2007 speech on transparency, he actually claimed that this value shaped his life purpose:

"The American people want to trust in our government again – we just need a government that will trust in us. And making government accountable to the people isn't just a cause of this campaign – it's been a cause of my life for two decades."

His campaign specifically vowed to protect whistleblowers, hailing them as "the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government" and saying that "such acts of courage and patriotism. . . should be encouraged rather than stifled." Transparency groups were completely mesmerized by these ringing commitments. "We have a president-elect that really gets it," gushed Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, in late 2008; "the openness community will expect a complete repudiation of the Ashcroft doctrine." Here's just one of countless representative examples of Obama bashing Bush for excessive secrecy - including in the realm of national security and intelligence - and vowing a fundamentally different course:

Literally moments after he was inaugurated, the White House declared that "President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history". Obama continues even now to parade around as a historically unprecedented champion of openness. In a 2010 speech, he said "I will not stop fighting to open up government" and then praised himself this way: "we have put in place the toughest transparency rules in history: in history." Right this very minute, on the White House website, Obama is quoted this way: "My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government" because "transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing."

This week is Sunshine Week, created by transparency and civil liberties groups and media outlets as "a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information". The White House blog on Wednesday said that "we celebrate Sunshine Week - an appropriate time to discuss the importance of open government and freedom of information" and quoted the president this way: "Openness will strengthen our democracy, and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government."

Along with others, I've spent the last four years documenting the extreme, often unprecedented, commitment to secrecy that this president has exhibited, including his vindictive war on whistleblowers, his refusal to disclose even the legal principles underpinning his claimed war powers of assassination, and his unrelenting, Bush-copying invocation of secrecy privileges to prevent courts even from deciding the legality of his conduct (as a 2009 headline on the Obama-friendly TPM site put it: "Expert Consensus: Obama Mimics Bush On State Secrets"). Just this week, the Associated Press conducted a study proving that last year, the Obama administration has rejected more FOIA requests on national security grounds than in any year since Obama became president, and quoted Alexander Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney for its national security project, as follows:

"We've seen a meteoric rise in the number of claims to protect secret law, the government's interpretations of laws or its understanding of its own authority. In some ways, the Obama administration is actually even more aggressive on secrecy than the Bush administration."

Re-read that last sentence in italics. Most of those policies have been covered here at length, and I won't repeat them here. But what is remarkable is that this secrecy has become so oppressive and extreme that even the most faithful Democratic operatives are now angrily exploding with public denunciations.

iCue Testing: big beauracracy's bad business model but correct approach to education reform

technology review | Two iconic institutions. Six capital letters. One bittersweet tale. A new book from MIT Press recounts how MIT and NBC partnered up to revolutionize education and ended up learning some lessons of their own.

The More We Know: NBC News, Educational Innovation, and Learning from Failure describes the life and (slow) death of a product called iCue. The book is written by two people who worked on iCue, Eric ­Klopfer and Jason Haas. Klopfer is a professor of science education at MIT and director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program. Haas is a graduate student in the Media Lab. iCue was a—well, it defies easy description, and that was maybe part of the problem.

Simply, iCue was an attempt, born in 2005, to teach history, politics, literature, and more online through archival material. The main unit of content was a short video—typically a broadcast news clip—that appeared on a flippable "CueCard." The back of this virtual card held data and room for the user’s notes. The site featured course syllabi, test questions, games, and social networking.

Alex Chisholm and colleagues from MIT’s Department of Comparative Media Studies outlined the project and eventually partnered with NBC, which had the content, the money, and the audience. "It was a chance to try to get out into the world some of the ideas we had around games and media and education," ­Klopfer says. They wanted to influence learning and collect data on student behavior. Meanwhile, NBC wanted an in with a younger generation, and it eventually came to share the researchers’ passion for education as an end in itself.

The team realized it couldn’t capture much of the home test-prep market, and schools were a hard sell, too. Teachers couldn’t easily fit this collaborative and self-directed educational tool into their top-down teaching methods. NBC also watered down or eliminated games, social networking, and user-generated content, in part because of privacy concerns. Released free on the Web in 2008, iCue was shut down in 2011 after attracting only a few thousand users, mostly adults. Tens of millions of dollars had been spent. "This was a product to be proud of," Klopfer and Haas write, "but ultimately not the product that anyone at NBC News or MIT would have preferred to see make it to market."

The book offers lessons for academics, educational entrepreneurs, and established media companies eager to participate in massive open online course (MOOC) initiatives such as edX. One takeaway is that the educational system is built on strict standards that need to change before it can accommodate new models of interaction. Another is that media companies have a lot to offer but benefit from the guidance of academia. A third is that new educational products require patient incubation.

"Our goal," Haas says, "was to provide an accessible narrative as a way into the things we really care about."

kansas city gives it up for google....,

Harpers | In its 2010 National Broadband Plan, the Federal Communications Commission declared, “Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service.” It’s a worthy goal, given that nearly 100 million Americans still lack high-speed access to the Web. But how should this goal be achieved? The FCC could have looked back to successful New Deal programs that expanded access to electricity. In the early decades of the twentieth century, private holding companies controlled 94 percent of the power generation in the United States and kept the vast majority of rural areas dark. In response, Franklin Roosevelt persuaded Congress to nance locally owned electric cooperatives and large,government-owned bodies such as the Tennessee Valley Authority to bring powerto rural customers at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, the FCC’s plan primarily advocates a return to the Roaring Twenties. The agency argues that the market needs less regulation, not more—and that the best candidates to fund and control the nation’s next-generation networks are private companies. This is the philosophy that has brought Google to Kansas City, where the search-engine leviathan has signed a deal to build a citywide ber-optic network.

Why does Google feel so at home in Kansas City—rather than in, say, California, where the company is based? Why not build their fi rst citywide fi ber-optic network in a nearby community? According to Google vice president Milo Medin, the company has preferred to steer clear of such pesky statutes as the California Environmental Quality Act. “Many new California city proposals . . . were ultimately passed over in part because of the regulatory complexity here,” Medin told a congressional committee in 2011. “In fact, part of the reason we selected Kansas City for the Google Fiber project was [that] the city’s leadership and utility moved with eff ciency and creativity in working with us to craft a real partnership.” Conservative pundits have been much more explicit about what this kind of “partnership” means. In a blog post on the project, former FCC official Fred Campbell celebrated Google’s “rejection of the public-interest community’s regulatory agenda. . . . That’s the policy template that worked for the residents of Kansas City. It could work for the rest of America too.”

So why would an Internet-search company want to spend a fortune to install fiber-optic cable in Kansas City, Missouri, and neighboring Kansas City, Kansas? Freedom from regulatory headaches is one part of the equation: if such networks are the wave of the future, the time to jump in is now, before legislative oversight can ruin the party. But another explanation might be the treasure trove of user-behavior information that such a network represents. Data of this kind is so prized that a company like Google can afford to give away other services for free, as long as this bene cence opens up new markets . In Kansas City, low-income subscribers to the company’s slower, “free” Internet option will be giving Google details about each URL they visit, even if their accounts remain anonymous. And customers who plunk down $120 a month for the “Full Google Experience” will have their television-viewing habits individually tracked by Google’s data-mining elves. Is this a reasonable bargain? For Kansas City, it’s too late to ask. But history—and the success of municipally owned fiber-optic projects throughout the country—strongly suggest that we should look this gift horse in the mouth.

advanced bankster science: nation robbery

Leaky Bank Indeed.....,

NYTimes | Europe’s decision to force depositors in Cypriot banks to share in the cost of the latest euro zone bailout has sparked outrage in Cyprus and fears that a run on deposits over the weekend might spread to larger countries at risk like Spain and Italy.

Under an emergency deal reached early Saturday in Brussels, a one-time tax of 9.9 percent is to be levied on Cypriot bank deposits of more than 100,000 euros, or $130,000, effective Tuesday. That will hit wealthy depositors — mostly Russians who have put vast sums into Cyprus’s banks in recent years. But smaller deposits will also be taxed, at 6.75 percent, meaning that the banks will be confiscating money directly from retirees and ordinary workers to help pay the tab for the 10 billion euro bailout or $13 billion.

Most of the 10 billion euros will go to bail out Cypriot banks, which took a blow when their substantial holdings of Greek government bonds were written down as part of that country’s second bailout. The island’s banks are also laden with loans made to Greek companies and individuals, which have turned sour as Greece endures its fourth year of economic and financial crisis.

The deposit tax, which is expected to raise 5.8 billion euros, was part of a bailout agreement reached in the early hours of Saturday morning after 10 hours of talks among finance ministers from euro countries and representatives of the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank.

The Cypriot bailout follows those for Greece, Portugal, Ireland and the Spanish banking sector — and is the first where bank depositors will be touched.

Public officials in Spain and Italy did their best over the weekend to portray the situation in Cyprus as unique, and to insist that deposits in those countries remained safe.

The economy of Cyprus represents not even half a percent of the combined output of the 17 countries that use the euro. Yet the impact of this weekend’s unexpected decision in Brussels to impose across-the-board losses on bank depositors could not be more far reaching.

After five years of bailouts financed largely by austerity-weary European taxpayers, wealthy nations like Germany and the Netherlands have decreed that from now on when a bank or country fails, it will be bond investors and perhaps even bank depositors who will be forced to pick up a big share of the bill. Fist tap Dale.

19th century schooling in the crosshairs of a changed cognitive ecology

NYTimes | WHEN I was a child, I liked to play video games. On my brother’s Atari, I played Night Driver. On his Apple II, I played Microwave, Aztec and Taipan! When I got to go to the arcade, I played Asteroids and Space Invaders.

Here’s what I learned: At a certain level on Microwave, the music from the bar scene in Star Wars comes on. If I am at the front line when aliens descend to Earth, we’ll all be in trouble. Also, dealing opium in the South China Sea is more lucrative than trading in commodities.

In short, I didn’t learn much of anything. My parents didn’t expect me to. I just had fun.

Today, educational technology boosters believe computer games (the classroom euphemism for video games) should be part of classroom lessons at increasingly early ages. The optimistic theory is that students wearied by the old pencil-and-paper routine will become newly enchanted with phonemic awareness when letters dressed as farm animals dance on a screen.

Last week, GlassLab (Games, Learning and Assessment Lab) unveiled a free version of the role-playing game SimCity created specifically for classrooms. According to its Web site, GlassLab’s mission, in part, is to show that “digital games with a strong simulation component may be effective learning environments.” At the new PlayMaker school in Los Angeles, financed in part by the Gates Foundation, a gaming curriculum includes adventure quests and other educational game apps. A 2012 report by the New Media Consortium identified “game-based learning” as one of the major trends affecting education in the next five years.

Meanwhile, many parents believe that games children play on home computers should edify children, improve their hand-eye coordination and inculcate higher math skills. The most popular apps in the Apple store for toddlers and preschoolers are educational. Even parents who scoff at the idea of toddlers learning from Dora gleefully boast about their 2-year-olds’ having mastered basic math on Mommy’s phone.

The concepts of work and play have become farcically reversed: schoolwork is meant to be superfun; play, like homework, is meant to teach. There’s an underlying fear that if we don’t add interactive elements to lower school curriculums, children won’t be able to handle fractions or develop scientific hypotheses — concepts children learned quite well in school before television.

phoenix in the climate crosshairs

Arizona's capital of Phoenix and neighboring towns in Maricopa County have undergone a major population boom in the last 40 years. The effects of this boom are seen in everything from the expansion of town and cities to an increased demand for fresh water. Michelle Fuller from Gilbert wrote asking to see these changes to the landscape; most visible in this series of images is how city streets and development are now covering the land that previously was used for agriculture. 

truth-out | If cities were stocks, you’d want to short Phoenix.

Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having exhausted local sources, it depends on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and dwindling) Colorado River.

In Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? You ask: What couldn’t?

And that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time -- New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City swamped by Sandy -- may arise from single storms, but the damage they do is the result of a chain reaction of failures -- grids going down, levees failing, back-up systems not backing up. As you might expect, academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns: infrastructure failure interdependencies. You wouldn’t want to use it in a poem, but it does catch an emerging theme of our time.

Phoenix’s pyramid of complexities looks shakier than most because it stands squarely in the crosshairs of climate change. The area, like much of the rest of the American Southwest, is already hot and dry; it’s getting ever hotter and drier, and is increasingly battered by powerful storms. Sandy and Katrina previewed how coastal cities can expect to fare as seas rise and storms strengthen. Phoenix pulls back the curtain on the future of inland empires. If you want a taste of the brutal new climate to come, the place to look is where that climate is already harsh, and growing more so -- the aptly named Valley of the Sun.

In Phoenix, it’s the convergence of heat, drought, and violent winds, interacting and amplifying each other that you worry about. Generally speaking, in contemporary society, nothing that matters happens for just one reason, and in Phoenix there are all too many “reasons” primed to collaborate and produce big problems, with climate change foremost among them, juicing up the heat, the drought, and the wind to ever greater extremes, like so many sluggers on steroids. Notably, each of these nemeses, in its own way, has the potential to undermine the sine qua non of modern urban life, the electrical grid, which in Phoenix merits special attention.

If, in summer, the grid there fails on a large scale and for a significant period of time, the fallout will make the consequences of Superstorm Sandy look mild. Sure, people will hunt madly for power outlets to charge their cellphones and struggle to keep their milk fresh, but communications and food refrigeration will not top their list of priorities. Phoenix is an air-conditioned city. If the power goes out, people fry.

um, no: people who speak the same language email one another...,

technologyreview | In 1992, the Harvard-based political scientist Samuel Hartington suggested that future conflicts would be driven largely by cultural differences. He went on to map out a new world order in which the people of the world are divided into nine culturally distinct civilisations.

These include: Western civilisation; Latin American civilisation; the Orthodox world of former Soviet Union countries; the Sinic civilisation including China, the Koreas and Vietnam; the Muslim world of the greater Middle East; Sub-Saharan Africa and so on.

His argument was that future conflicts would be based around the fault lines at the edges of these civilisations. He published this view in a now famous article called“The Clash of Civilizations in the politcal journal Foreign Affairs.

Certain events have since been used to support Huntington’s thesis–the War on Terror, for instance. But an interesting question is whether there is evidence at the social scale of a “Clash of Civilisations”.

Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Bogdan State at Stanford University in California and a few pals. These guys have analysed a global database of e-mail messages, and their locations, sent by  more than 10 million people over the space of a year. State and co say that the pattern of connections between these people, clearly reflects the civilisations mapped out by Huntington. In other words, the way we send e-mails is a reflection of the mesh of civilisations that is an important driver of future conflict.

visualizing how viral content spreads over twitter

infosthetics | ViralSearch [microsoft.com], developed by Jake Hofman and others of Microsoft Research, visualizes how content spreads over social media, and Twitter in particular.

ViralSearch is based on hundred thousands of stories that are spread through billions of mentions of these stories, over many generations. In particular, it reveals the typical, hidden structures behind the sharing of viral videos, photos and posts as an hierarchical generation tree or as an animated bubble graph. The interface contains an interactive timeline of events, as well as a search field to explore specific phrases, stories, or Twitter users to provide an overview of how the independent actions of many individuals make content go viral.

See also NYTLabs Cascade: How Information Propagates through Social Media for a visualization of a very similar concept.

evolution of political systems research

oxford | The overall aim of this project is to investigate the role of ritual in the evolution of social complexity, using a combination of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic evidence together with mathematical models simulating patterns of socio-political evolution over time. It is funded by an ESRC Large Grant on Ritual, Community and Conflict and SSHRC funding for a Cultural Evolution of Religion Consortium.

 

Much of the archaeological work has  focused on the early Neolithic site at Çatalhöyük where significant changes in ritual life accompanied the shift from foraging to agriculture and the emergence of the first complex societies. The work of Harvey Whitehouse, Camilla Mazzucato (Oxford) and Quentin Atkinson (Auckland) in collaboration with Ian Hodder and his team suggests that the domestication of animals and plants required increasingly routinized forms of collaborative labour, achieved through an increase in the frequency of communal rituals and the homogenization of cultural identity markers. To test our hypotheses further, we are currently building a regional database covering more than 60 sites in Anatolia and the Levant starting with the late epipaleolithic and ending at the start of the chalcolithic. An independently-funded research student (Mick Gantley) has been recruited to assist with this work, supervised by Whitehouse and Oxford archaeologists Amy Bogaard.

Since June 2011, Harvey Whitehouse, Peter Turchin and Pieter Francois are currently spearheading the construction of a large historical database addressing the same hypotheses as in the archaeological work and resulting in a coding rubric that is closely overlapping. The scope of the historical database is global and covers the past 5000 years covering variables on social complexity, ritual and warfare. Data are collected for every hundred years for over 200 polities. These polities have been chosen following a grid structure based on the Universal Transverse Mercator geographic coordinate system. In summer 2012 this project will be form part of the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC), supported by a six-year $3 million grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), as part of their new Partnership Grant initiative. CERC's research committee comprises Vancouver-based researchers Edward Slingerland (PI), Joseph Henrich, Ara Norenzayan, and Mark Collard, and European partners Armin Geertz and Jesper Sørensen (Aarhus University) and Harvey Whitehouse (Oxford University).

cognitive archeology of the west

ribbonfarm | Venkat’s recent post The Disruption of Bronze touched on a subject I’ve been pursuing fervently for the better part of a decade now: the time frame in which psychologically modern humans evolved. More than that, however, my interest is in why and how human psychology shifted to cause the sudden, radical changes that ultimately resulted in civilization.

My view is that without an understanding of this shift, there can be no evolution beyond the devouring, predatory virus that is civilized culture. In a mere 10,000 years, civilization has all but wrecked the planet — a truly impressive horror.

Collapse (of either the slow or sudden variety, take your pick) is a certainty, in my opinion; what I needed, for my own sanity, was a context in which to fit this state of affairs. Does the story really begin and end with American avarice? Are humans condemned to repeat the rise-and-fall of civilizations until we wipe ourselves out for the last time? Is there no greater narrative arc here?

Civilizations rise and fall not in isolation, but as complexes. They follow the outbreak of certain memes, as evidenced by the archaeological record, in clusters of time and geography. In the West we humans do civilization not only because of what we think, but because we think our thoughts in a specific kind of way. It makes sense then that the narrative arc should begin with the emergence of our specific kind of thinking.

Pre-Conquest Consciousness

Anthropologist E. Richard Sorenson is best known in academic circles for pioneering what’s known as “visual anthropology”: the use of non-dialectic observational techniques in the field of anthropology, most often through the use of film. Academics are, however, notorious for missing the forest for the trees; Sorenson’s real contribution came as a result of his techniques.

Visual anthropology made it possible for Sorenson to identify patterns of behavior inherent across isolated, unrelated, primitive tribes. Underlying these behavioral patterns is a type of mindset which Sorenson calls “pre-conquest consciousness,” which he describes thus:

Most of us know about subliminal awareness—the type of awareness lurking below actual consciousness that powerfully influences behavior. Freud brought it into the mainstream of Western thought through exhaustively detailed revelations of its effects on behavior. But few, including Freud, have spoken of liminal consciousness, which is therefore rarely recognized in modern scholarship as a separate type of awareness. Nonetheless, liminal awareness was the principal focus of mentality in the preconquest cultures contacted, whereas a supraliminal type that focuses logic on symbolic entities is the dominant form in postconquest societies.
. . .
From the Latin language underlying our Western heritage we can understand that liminal awareness, by definition, occurs on the threshold of consciousness. This concept, though abstract, provides a useful term. In the real life of these preconquest people, feeling and awareness are focused on at-the-moment, point-blank sensory experience—as if the nub of life lay within that complex flux of collective sentient immediacy. Into that flux individuals thrust their inner thoughts and aspirations for all to see, appreciate, and relate to. This unabashed open honesty is the foundation on which their highly honed integrative empathy and rapport become possible. When that openness gives way, empathy and rapport shrivel. Where deceit becomes a common practice, they disintegrate.

Where consciousness is focused within a flux of ongoing sentient awareness, experience cannot be clearly subdivided into separable components. With no clear elements to which logic can be applied, experience remains immune to syntax and formal logic within a kaleidoscopic sanctuary of non-discreteness. Nonetheless, preconquest life was reckoned sensibly—though seemingly intuitively.

Given the widespread nature of Sorenson’s findings, and the almost complete absence of supraliminal symbology in any given culture’s archaeological record prior to its own Neolithic Revolution, it would appear that this liminal consciousness is the default psychology of anatomically modern humans. “Pre-conquest” peoples do not have the capacity for intellectual abstraction, not because they are less intelligent — the homo sapiens sapiens brain has not changed physically for something like 200,000 years — but because their mental capabilities are focused entirely on the here and now. Gods and goddesses, writing, numbers and the like cannot exist in the “complex flux of collective sentient immediacy” because they have no physicality with which to be either sentient or immediate. Such things exist entirely in the abstract. They are, for all intents and purposes, not real.

music in human evolution?

meltingasphalt | I just finished the strangest, most disconcerting little book. It’s called Why Do People Sing?: Music in Human Evolution by Joseph Jordania.

If the title hasn’t already piqued your interest, its thesis surely will. The thesis is wild, bold, and original, but makes an eerie amount of sense. If true, it would be a revolution — and I don’t use the term lightly — in how we understand the evolution of cooperation, warfare, and religion, not to mention music and maybe even language.

I have my reservations about Jordania’s theory (and his book), but I’ll save them for a later time. As Daniel Dennett once wrote about another remarkable theory:

I think first it is very important to understand [the] project, to see a little bit more about what the whole shape of it is, and delay the barrage of nitpicking objections and criticisms until we have seen what the edifice as a whole is. After all, on the face of it, [the project] is preposterous… [but] I take it very seriously.

These are exactly my feelings about Jordania’s project. Seemingly preposterous, but worth taking very seriously.

do humans really punish altruistically?

royalsociety | Some researchers have proposed that natural selection has given rise in humans to one or more adaptations for altruistically punishing on behalf of other individuals who have been treated unfairly, even when the punisher has no chance of benefiting via reciprocity or benefits to kin. However, empirical support for the altruistic punishment hypothesis depends on results from experiments that are vulnerable to potentially important experimental artefacts. Here, we searched for evidence of altruistic punishment in an experiment that precluded these artefacts. In so doing, we found that victims of unfairness punished transgressors, whereas witnesses of unfairness did not. Furthermore, witnesses’ emotional reactions to unfairness were characterized by envy of the unfair individual's selfish gains rather than by moralistic anger towards the unfair behaviour. In a second experiment run independently in two separate samples, we found that previous evidence for altruistic punishment plausibly resulted from affective forecasting error—that is, limitations on humans’ abilities to accurately simulate how they would feel in hypothetical situations. Together, these findings suggest that the case for altruistic punishment in humans—a view that has gained increasing attention in the biological and social sciences—has been overstated.

bigger eyes, weaker social networks?

bbcnews | A study of Neanderthal skulls suggests that they became extinct because they had larger eyes than our species. As a result, more of their brains were devoted to seeing in the long, dark nights in Europe, at the expense of high-level processing. By contrast, the larger frontal brain regions of Homo sapiens led to the fashioning of warmer clothes and the development of larger social networks.

The study is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Neanderthals are a closely related species of human that lived in Europe from around 250,000 years ago. They coexisted and interacted briefly with our species until they went extinct about 28,000 years ago, in part due to an ice age.

The research team explored the idea that the ancestor of Neanderthals left Africa and had to adapt to the longer, darker nights and murkier days of Europe. The result was that Neanderthals evolved larger eyes and a much larger visual processing area at the backs of their brains.

The humans that stayed in Africa, on the other hand, continued to enjoy bright and beautiful days and so had no need for such an adaption. Instead, these people, our ancestors, evolved their frontal lobes, associated with higher-level thinking, before they spread across the globe.

Eiluned Pearce of Oxford University decided to check this theory. She compared the skulls of 32 Homo sapiens and 13 Neanderthals.

 

Ms Pearce found that Neanderthals had significantly larger eye sockets - by an average of 6mm from top to bottom. Fist tap Dale.

right-wing nuttery about the human effects of "austerity"

stratfor | In last week's Geopolitical Weekly, George Friedman discussed how the global financial crisis has caused a global unemployment crisis and how Europe has become the epicenter of that crisis. He also noted that rampant unemployment will give way to a political crisis as austerity measures galvanize radical political parties opposed to the status quo.

Because unemployment is so pervasive, jobless, disenchanted people are joining radical parties espousing a wide variety of ideologies. Examples include populist euroskeptic parties, such as Italy's Five Star movement; far-right parties, such as Greece's Golden Dawn party; and anti-austerity leftist groups, such as Greece's Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza. With unemployment in Greece at 27 percent, it is not surprising to see both radical right-wing and radical left-wing groups gaining support from those who have become deeply disaffected by the crises.

In fact, Greece has a long history of left-wing radicalism inclined toward violence. The 1970s saw the rise of radical group 17 November, and more recent years marked the rise of such groups as the Revolutionary Struggle and the Conspiracy of Fire Cells.

Given this history and the manner in which the current crises are producing disaffected, radicalized and unemployed people, we thought it would be worth examining radical far-left groups in Greece and the types of violence they can be expected to conduct. It is also important to remember that Greece is not the only country in which the population, particularly the left, is radicalizing. Italy, too, has seen increased leftist radicalism. What is happening in these two countries could herald things to come elsewhere in Europe.

bankster "austerity" throttling italian companies too

telegraph | Confindustria, the business federation, said 29pc of Italian firms cannot meet "operational expenses" and are starved of liquidity. A "third phase of the credit crunch" is underway that matches the shocks in 2008-2009 and again in 2011.

In a research report the group said the economy was caught in a "vicious circle" where banks are too frightened to lend, driving more companies over the edge. A thousand are going bankrupt every day.

Franco Bernabè, the head of Telecom Italia, echoed the warnings, lamenting that firms are literally "dying from lack of liquidity". He called on the Bank of Italy to take bolder action to head off disaster. "The Italian economy is being suffocated. The country must intervene rapidly to reinject funds into the economy", he said.

Fulvio Conti, head of the energy group Enel, exhorted Rome to give the economy an immediate shot in the arm by paying €48bn in state arrears to companies, arguing that this can be done without breaching EU deficit rules. This would amount to fiscal stimulus of 1.5pc of GDP.

Late payments have become a chronic problem across the board in Italy, with 47,000 official complaints last year. The research group CGIA di Mestre said half of small companies cannot pay their staff on time.

The pleas for action come as a new report by Standard & Poor's warns that default rates in Europe have reached the highest level since the global crisis in 2009, with most of the carnage concentrated in the Club Med bloc.

remember this when you hear beppe grillo called everything but a child of god...,

zerohedge | “Whom does the money belong to?  Who does its ownership belong to?  To the State fine…then to us, we are the State. You know that the State doesn’t exist, it is only a legal entity.  WE are the state, then the money is ours…fine.  Then let me know one thing.  If the money belongs to us…Why…do they lend it to us??”

- Beppe Grillo in 1998

If you really want to know why Beppe Grillo is causing Central Planners throughout the European continent to wet themselves, this video will show you.  There’s a real revolution happening in Italy.  This guy is the real deal and he understands the heart of the whole issue plaguing the world.  All I can say is:  WOW.

more than 65% of italian families struggling...,

gazettadelsud | More than 65% of Italian families cannot make it to the end of the month with their current salaries, a report by the Bank of Italy said on Tuesday. The alarm launched by the country's central bank said that those hardest hit are young families and renters whose monthly income is not sufficient to cover living expenses.

Double-O's Death Squads

guardian | The film Dirty Wars, which premiered at Sundance, can be viewed, as Amy Goodman sees it, as an important narrative of excesses in the global "war on terror". It is also a record of something scary for those of us at home – and uncovers the biggest story, I would say, in our nation's contemporary history.

Though they wisely refrain from drawing inferences, Scahill and Rowley have uncovered the facts of a new unaccountable power in America and the world that has the potential to shape domestic and international events in an unprecedented way. The film tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US assassins, armed with ever-expanding "kill lists". It was JSoc that ran the operation behind the Navy Seal team six that killed bin Laden.

Scahill and Rowley track this new model of US warfare that strikes at civilians and insurgents alike – in 70 countries. They interview former JSoc assassins, who are shell-shocked at how the "kill lists" they are given keep expanding, even as they eliminate more and more people.

Our conventional forces are subject to international laws of war: they are accountable for crimes in courts martial; and they run according to a clear chain of command. As much as the US military may fall short of these standards at times, it is a model of lawfulness compared with JSoc, which has far greater scope to undertake the commission of extra-legal operations – and unimaginable crimes.

JSoc morphs the secretive, unaccountable mercenary model of private military contracting, which Scahill identified in Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, into a hybrid with the firepower and intelligence backup of our full state resources. The Hill reports that JSoc is now seeking more "flexibility" to expand its operations globally.

JSoc operates outside the traditional chain of command; it reports directly to the president of the United States. In the words of Wired magazine:

"JSoc operates with practically no accountability."

Scahill calls JSoc the president's "paramilitary". Its budget, which may be in the billions, is secret.

What does it means for the president to have an unaccountable paramilitary force, which can assassinate anyone anywhere in the world? JSoc has already been sent to kill at least one US citizen – one who had been indicted for no crime, but was condemned for propagandizing for al-Qaida. Anwar al-Awlaki, on JSoc's "kill list" since 2010, was killed by CIA-controlled drone attack in September 2011; his teenage son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki – also a US citizen – was killed by a US drone two weeks later.

This arrangement – where death squads roam under the sole control of the executive – is one definition of dictatorship. It now has the potential to threaten critics of the US anywhere in the world.

drones over there, total surveillance over here...,

aljazeera | The massive surveillance apparatus built up over the last 10 years is the domestic companion of the overseas drone killings. It is one outcome of this deep decay of the liberal state. While much is not known about either, we know enough to recognise its potential for enormous abuse. What is known is that there are at least 10,000 buildings across the US, with a massive concentration in Washington, DC, engaged in ongoing surveillance of all of us residing in the territory of the US. Surveillance and counter-terrorism activities employ about one million professionals with top level secret clearance. One estimate has it that every day over two billion emails are tracked. And on and on along these lines.

The basic logic of such a surveillance system is that for our security as citizens we are all being surveilled, or potentially so. That is to say, the logic of the system is that we must all be considered suspect in a first step in order to ensure our safety. Who, then, have we the citizens become, or turned into? Are we the new colonials?

The source of this excess of executive power is a foundational distortion at the heart of the liberal state. The liberal state was never meant to bring equality of opportunity and full recognition of all members of the polity. Inequality was at its core since its beginning - between owners of the means of production and those who only had their labour to sell in the market. But even so, the so-called Keynesian period throughout much of the west engendered a prosperous working class and an expanding modest middle class. It was a partial democratising of the economy. In the 1980s, this began to disintegrate.

In the 2000s, just about all liberal democracies were in sharp decline, with growing inequality, weakened unions, impoverishment of the modest middle classes, and an enormous capture of the country's profits by the top layer of firms and households. This is all captured in a couple of numbers found in the US census: In 1979, the top 1 percent of earners in New York City received 12 percent of all the compensation to workers in the city, a reasonable level of inequality in a complex economy such as is NYC. (This share excludes non-compensation sources of wealth, such as capital gains, inheritance, etc.) In 2009, the top 1 percent received 44 percent - a level of inequality that cannot be good for the city's economy.

At its most extreme, this combination of massive surveillance and savage inequality may be signalling a new phase in the long history of liberal democracies, one where the executive branch gains power partly through its increasingly international activities. Over the last 20 years and more, this incipient internationalism has been deployed in support of developing a global economy and fighting the "War against Terrorism"; thus the big-bank bailout is not so much a "return of the strong nationalist state" as some would have it, but rather the use by the executive branch of national law and national taxpayers' money to rescue a global financial system.

This is a kind of internationalism. Pity it is being deployed for this. It is possible that these new international capabilities of the executive branch might be reoriented to more worthy aims - climate change, global hunger, global poverty and many others requiring new types of internationalisms.Fist tap Arnach.

questioning the jewish state

NYTimes | Any state that “belongs” to one ethnic group within it violates the core democratic principle of equality, and the self-determination rights of the non-members of that group.

If the institutions of a state favor one ethnic group among its citizenry in this way, then only the members of that group will feel themselves fully a part of the life of the state. True equality, therefore, is only realizable in a state that is based on civic peoplehood. As formulated by both Jewish- and Palestinian-Israeli activists on this issue, a truly democratic state that fully respects the self-determination rights of everyone under its sovereignty must be a “state of all its citizens.”

This fundamental point exposes the fallacy behind the common analogy, drawn by defenders of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, between Israel’s right to be Jewish and France’s right to be French. The appropriate analogy would instead be between France’s right to be French (in the civic sense) and Israel’s right to be Israeli.

Leif Parsons

I conclude, then, that the very idea of a Jewish state is undemocratic, a violation of the self-determination rights of its non-Jewish citizens, and therefore morally problematic. But the harm doesn’t stop with the inherently undemocratic character of the state. For if an ethnic national state is established in a territory that contains a significant number of non-members of that ethnic group, it will inevitably face resistance from the land’s other inhabitants. This will force the ethnic nation controlling the state to resort to further undemocratic means to maintain their hegemony. Three strategies to deal with resistance are common: expulsion, occupation and institutional marginalization. Interestingly, all three strategies have been employed by the Zionist movement: expulsion in 1948 (and, to a lesser extent, in 1967), occupation of the territories conquered in 1967 and institution of a complex web of laws that prevent Israel’s Palestinian citizens from mounting an internal challenge to the Jewish character of the state. (The recent outrage in Israel over a proposed exclusion of ultra-Orthodox parties from the governing coalition, for example, failed to note that no Arab political party has ever been invited to join the government.) In other words, the wrong of ethnic hegemony within the state leads to the further wrong of repression against the Other within its midst.

There is an unavoidable conflict between being a Jewish state and a democratic state. I want to emphasize that there’s nothing anti-Semitic in pointing this out, and it’s time the question was discussed openly on its merits, without the charge of anti-Semitism hovering in the background.