the social brain meets the reactive genome neuroscience, epigenetics and the new social biology

frontiersin |  The rise of molecular epigenetics over the last few years promises to bring the discourse about the sociality and susceptibility to environmental influences of the brain to an entirely new level. Epigenetics deals with molecular mechanisms such as gene expression, which may embed in the organism “memories” of social experiences and environmental exposures. These changes in gene expression may be transmitted across generations without changes in the DNA sequence. Epigenetics is the most advanced example of the new postgenomic and context-dependent view of the gene that is making its way into contemporary biology. In my article I will use the current emergence of epigenetics and its link with neuroscience research as an example of the new, and in a way unprecedented, sociality of contemporary biology. After a review of the most important developments of epigenetic research, and some of its links with neuroscience, in the second part I reflect on the novel challenges that epigenetics presents for the social sciences for a re-conceptualization of the link between the biological and the social in a postgenomic age. Although epigenetics remains a contested, hyped, and often uncritical terrain, I claim that especially when conceptualized in broader non-genecentric frameworks, it has a genuine potential to reformulate the ossified biology/society debate.

Profound conceptual novelties have interested the life-sciences in the last three decades. In several disciplines, from neuroscience to genetics, we have witnessed a growing (and parallel) crisis of models that tended to sever biological factors from social/environmental ones. This possibility of disentangling neatly what seemed to belong to the “biological” from the “environmental” and to attribute a sort of causal primacy to biological factors (equated with genetic) in opposition to social or cultural ones (thought of as being more superficial, or appearing later in the ontology of development) was part and parcel of very vocal research-programs in the 1990s. These programs were all more or less heirs of the gene-centrism of sociobiology: from evolutionary psychology, to a powerful nativism that was very influential in psychology and cognitive neuroscience with its obsessive emphasis on hardwiring culture or morality into the brain.

These programs have always received a barrage of criticisms from several intellectual traditions (Griffiths, 2009; Meloni, 2013a), particularly those with roots in ethology (Lehrman, 1953, 1970; Bateson, 1991; Bateson and Martin, 1999), and developmental biology (West and King, 1987; Griffiths and Gray, 1994; Gottlieb, 1997; Oyama, 2000a[1985],b; Oyama et al., 2001; Griffiths, 2002; Moore, 2003). However, never as in this last decade, we have had scientific evidence that the dichotomous view of biology vs. society and biology vs. culture is biologically fallacious (Meaney, 2001a).

Paradoxically, it was exactly the completion of the Human Genome Project that showed that the view of the gene as a discrete and autonomous agent powerfully leading traits and developmental processes is more of a fantasy than actually being founded on scientific evidence, as highlighted by the “missing heritability” case (Maher, 2008). The image of a distinct, particulate gene marked by “clearly defined boundaries” and performing just one job, i.e., coding for proteins, has been overturned in recent years (Griffiths and Stotz, 2013: 68; see also Barnes and Dupré, 2008; Keller, 2011). Although discussions are far from being settled, the work of the ENCODE consortium for instance has been crucial in showing the important regulatory functions of what, in a narrow “gene-centric view”, was supposed to be mere “junk DNA” (Encode, 2007, 2012; Pennisi, 2012). Not only does a very small percentage of the genome (less than 2%) act according to the classical definition of the gene as a protein-coding sequence, but most of the non-protein coding DNA in fact plays an important regulatory function. The genome is therefore today best described as a “vast reactive system” (Keller, 2011) embedded in a complex regulatory network with distributed specificity (Griffiths and Stotz, 2013). An important part of this regulatory network is involved in responding to environmental signals, which can cover a very broad range of phenomena, from the cellular environment around the DNA, to the entire organism and, in the case of human beings, their social and cultural dynamics.

To sum up a decade of empirical and conceptual novelties the conceptualization of the gene has become dynamic and “perspectival” (Moss, 2003), in what can be called the new “postgenomic view¹”; it addresses genes as part of a broader regulative context, “embedded inside cells and their complex chemical environments” that are, in turn, embedded in organs, systems and societies (Lewkowicz, 2010). Genes are now seen as “catalysts” more than “codes” in development (Elman et al., 1996), “followers” rather than “leaders” in evolution (West-Eberhard, 2003; Robert, 2004). The more genetic research has gone forward, the more genomes are seen to “respond in a flexible manner to signals from a massive regulatory architecture that is, increasingly, the real focus of research in ‘genetics’” (Griffiths and Stotz, 2013: 2; see also Barnes and Dupré, 2008; Dupré, 2012).

As Michael Meaney (2001a: 52, 58) wrote more than a decade ago: “There are no genetic factors that can be studied independently of the environment, and there are no environmental factors that function independently of the genome… . At no point in life is the operation of the genome independent of the context in which it functions.” Moreover, “environmental events occurring at a later stage of development … can alter a developmental trajectory” making meaningless any linear regression studies of nature and nurture. Genes are always “genes in context”, “context-dependent catalysts of cellular changes, rather “controllers” of developmental progress and direction” (Nijhout, 1990: 444), susceptible to be reversed in their expression by individual’s experiences during development (Champagne and Mashoodh, 2009).

of course we would never use the methods we went to the trouble to pioneer...,

telegraph |  A new genetic engineering technique pioneered by Professor Robert Winston could lead to countries like North Korea embarking on risky eugenics programmes, he has warned. 

Lord Winston, 73, who is Britain’s leading fertility doctor, has just published new research showing it is possible to splice new genes into sperm.

It is hoped the development will be used to create pigs which have enough human DNA in their organs that they could be transplanted into humans without rejection.

But in theory, it also means that designer babies who are stronger, faster or more intelligent could be created through artificial insemination.

Currently the technique is only possible with an embryo, which is time-consuming and requires harvesting an egg and embarking on IVF.

Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, Lord Winston warned that the procedure opens the door to eugenics, particularly in countries like North Korea. 

“You could easily see how this kind of thing could be used in North Korea for example. 

“I don’t think it’s very likely it will be used in the UK in a mischievous way but I’ve no doubt that given the burgeoning market, given the desperation of people who want to enhance their children in all sorts of ways, humans might be tempted to use this and that therefore it does become a form of eugenics. 

“Every piece of science has an upside and a downside. There comes a point where you have to publish what you’ve been doing. 

“I’m not trying to make an exaggerated claim for what we have done at all but I think the reproductive technologies are being misused in my view. 

“This is far more likely to be a serious threat than cloning. Cloning seems a useless technology. You can choose the attributes you might want to try and produce. If you can make a mouse run faster, which we can, if you can make a mouse bigger, which we can then maybe people might want to try the same thing in humans.”

if violence is in your genes, ta loco...,

theverge | In 2009, an Italian court reduced a murderer's sentence by one year because doctors had identified a gene in the defendant's DNA, called MAOA, that had been linked to violent behavior. The ruling was controversial and some scientists objected to the sentence reduction. "MAOA findings have been generally used in murder trials, sometimes to suggest diminished capacity of the defendant to premeditate his criminal behavior," but most often to reduce a sentence, writes Paul Appelbaum, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, in an essay published today in Neuron. In the essay, Appelbaum explains that genetic evidence demonstrating a defendant's predisposition for antisocial behavior or mental illness is showing up in courtrooms at an ever-quickening pace. And that pace, he warns, might be outrunning the legal system's ability to interpret it.

"Premature introduction of genetic evidence in court carries a number of risks," said Appelbaum in an email to The Verge. "The most obvious is that the purported associations [between genetics and behavior] are not real and will be disproved over time." But even the most replicated and widely accepted findings, he said, can be misinterpreted by judges and jurors.

In the case of the Italian court, the gene that was used has indeed been associated with impulsiveness and criminal behavior among men in a number of studies. Moreover, childhood maltreatment has been linked to lower MAOA activity — providing a great example of how a genetic predisposition can be triggered by environmental factors. Most experts agree, however, that even evidence as strong as that surrounding MAOA shouldn't be used to absolve someone of responsibility for their actions. "The major mistake the people make is to think that if you've identified a cause, it must mean that people are excused or mitigated," says Stephen Morse, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania who has written on the subject. But that isn't how the law works. Only a limited number of impairments — such as failing to appreciate the wrongfulness of one's acts — are considered exculpatory. So "if someone is a rational agent," Morse says, "I don't care if they have bad genetics."

Jorim Tielbeek, a neuroscientist and criminologist at VU Medical Center Amsterdam who has studied the effects of genetics on antisocial behavior, agrees with Morse, stating in an email to The Verge that a "higher genetic liability towards committing a crime doesn't necessarily mean a lessened responsibility." Although scientists have made links between certain genes and antisocial behavior, Tielbeek says, there is "no clear predictive relationship between a single gene and a criminal act — especially since hundreds of genes are involved in criminal behavior, and that each have a very small effect."

the double-helix takes the witness stand

cell |  Advances in understanding genetic predispositions to behavioral and neuropsychiatric syndromes are squarely in the sights of the legal profession. With data suggesting substantial genetic contributions to the risk for criminal behavior (Tuvblad et al., 2011), attorneys have begun to explore the potential uses of genetic evidence in their clients’ defense (Denno, 2011). In addition, the first signs that genetic data may be of interest to the civil justice system have begun to appear. As is true whenever scientific data are introduced in court, these developments hold potential for assisting judges and juries with some of the difficult judgments that they face—but they also bring a substantial risk of misinterpretation and misuse.

In considering current and future uses of behavioral and neuropsychiatric genetic evidence, the unhappy history of genetics in the courtroom cannot be ignored. Even before the structure of DNA was identified and the transmission of genetic information elucidated, courts recognized that behavioral traits could be handed down in families. However, judges’ understanding of genetics typically reflected the science of the day, and the consequences of their reliance on contemporary knowledge were not always salutary. For example, in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Buck v. Bell (274 U.S. 200, 1927), which upheld Virginia’s involuntary sterilization statute, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, appealing to the popular view that intellectual disability was passed from parent to child and was associated with promiscuity and crime, notoriously declared, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

Presumptions about the relationship between crime and hereditary intellectual deficiencies appear to have influenced the lower courts as well, with defendants who were viewed as “defective delinquents” often sent to state institutions where they could be confined indefinitely, rather than being sentenced to a fixed term in a correctional facility (Willrich, 1998). But the first use of genetic tests in the courts for their presumed relationship to criminal behavior did not arrive until the late 1960s and was based on data purporting to show that the XYY karyotype was linked to violent crime (Denno, 1996). Derived from a number of studies demonstrating overrepresentation of XYY men in correctional populations, the data were recruited by enterprising defense attorneys to argue that their clients’ violence was driven by genetic factors beyond their control, and thus that they could not be held criminally responsible for their behavior. Courts, however, were skeptical about the validity of data suggesting a causal link between the XYY karyotype and violent behavior and generally declined to admit karyotyping of defendants into evidence. As it turned out, the courts’ skepticism was fully justified—the purported link between XYY and violence has never been generally accepted (Stochholm et al., 2012).

to be a christian is to be a mystic: jesuits gonna work it out...,

kcstar | Are American nuns paying for the sins of a Jesuit priest who died in the 1950s?

It might seem that way, given the ongoing showdown between doctrinal hard-liners in the Vatican and leaders representing more than 40,000 U.S. sisters, with one of Rome’s chief complaints being the nuns’ continuing embrace of the notion of “conscious evolution.”

To many ears, “conscious evolution” probably sounds like a squishy catchphrase picked up after too much time in a New Age sweat lodge, and that’s pretty much how Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, leader of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, views it.

The German theologian bluntly told the Leadership Conference of Women Religious last month that the principles of “conscious evolution” — that mankind is transforming through the integration of science, spirituality and technology — are “opposed to Christian Revelation” and lead to “fundamental errors.”

That’s tough talk, and Mueller warned them that if the nuns persist in pursuing such dangerous ideas, Rome could cut them loose.

Yet those principles, and indeed the very term “conscious evolution,” also lead directly back to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French Jesuit who was by turns a philosopher and theologian, geologist and paleontologist.

It was Teilhard’s thinking about original sin and humanity’s future evolution that got him in trouble with church authorities, however.

Teilhard argued, for example, that creation is still evolving and that mankind is changing with it; we are, he said, advancing in an interactive “noosphere” of human thought through an evolutionary process that leads inexorably toward an Omega Point — Jesus Christ — that is pulling all the cosmos to itself.

“Everything that rises must converge,” as Teilhard put it, a phrase so evocative that Flannery O’Connor appropriated it for her story collection. This process of “complexification” — another of his signature terms — and Catholic theology could aid in that process if it, too, adapts.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/living/religion/article495984/U.S.-nuns-get-a-stern-warning-about-following-one-Jesuit%E2%80%99s-principles.html#storylink=cpy

pitiful, dying, southern baptist convention tapped for ideas, crying "respeck my authoritay!"

kcstar | For Southern Baptists, it’s happened again: Another annual report shows the denomination is losing members and baptizing fewer people.

The Rev. Fred Luter, outgoing president of the Southern Baptist Convention, thinks old-time methods to spread the Gospel have met a culture that’s younger, more diverse and doesn’t necessarily see the pew — or even sin — as a priority.

“Our society is just not what it used to be,” said Luter, who admitted he’s discouraged by the reports. “When I grew up there was a challenge by parents in the home that our sons and daughters would be in church. It was a given.… That day and time is gone.”

Luter said he and others will address the issue at this year’s annual meeting, which takes place Tuesday and Wednesday in Baltimore. But beyond calls for reversing the trend, there’s little sign of agreement on a way forward.

Though some have said the 15.7 million-member denomination needs to be more racially and ethnically inclusive, Luter, its first African-American president, thinks the main reason for decline is that all congregations need to take a role in evangelism.

“We have just not been very active in doing what we can to reach the lost and the unchurched in our nation,” said the 57-year-old New Orleans pastor.

Weeks before the denomination’s annual meeting, a task force charged with helping Southern Baptists “own the problem” released a report that noted these recent signs of trouble:

One-quarter of Southern Baptist churches reported “0 baptisms”

60 percent said they had baptized no youth (ages 12-17)

80 percent reported one or fewer young adult baptisms (ages 18-29)

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/living/religion/article495948/Southern-Baptists-face-yet-another-glum-report.html#storylink=cpy

you can't be catholic and libertarian

Alan Dershowitz claims Cardinal Maradiaga an Anti-Semite

WaPo |  For years, American Catholics have been under pressure to vote Republican.

Though no church leader ever put it quite that baldly, Cardinal Raymond L. Burke came close when he said the Democratic Party was in danger of becoming a “party of death.” Bishop Michael J. Sheridan of Colorado Springs has repeatedly suggested that Catholics shouldn’t be able to receive Communion if they vote for politicians who differ from church teaching on a few “non-negotiable” matters: abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia, same-sex marriage — and more recently, the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate.

The most intense call to the ballot box came from Peoria Bishop Daniel R. Jenky, a Holy Cross priest who referred to the “calculated disdain of the president of the United States” in a homily ahead of the 2012 presidential election. “Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments,’’ Jenky said, “would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care. In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama — with his radical pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda — now seems intent on following a similar path.”

None of the protests that followed claimed that Jenky hadn’t made himself clear.

Now, though, the red papal loafer may be on the other foot, with economic conservatives being called out.

In Washington this week, the cardinal some consider the pontiff’s “vice-pope’’ mocked them outright at a conference called “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case against Libertarianism.” The Religion News Service story on the smackdown of trickle-down ran under the headline, “Catholic and libertarian? Pope’s top adviser says they’re incompatible.”

That adviser, Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, was introduced by AFL-CIO president Richard L. Trumka, and preached against deregulation and “worshipping idols, even if that idol is called ‘market economy.’ ’’ Rodríguez also called trickle-down economics a “deception,’’ and said the “invisible hand” of the market steals from and strangles the poor: “We are no longer to trust the blind forces and the invisible hand of the market. This economy kills. This is what the pope is saying.”

Some libertarians have described the pope’s economic views as naive and uninformed — and Rodríguez returned the favor. “Many of these libertarianists do not read the social doctrine of the church, but now they are trembling before the book of Picketty,’’ he said, referring to French economist Thomas Piketty’s best-seller, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” on the wealth disparities that have us headed into a new Gilded Age.

In some ways, the fight is over competing interpretations of the American story, said Meghan J. Clark, a moral theologian from St. John’s University. The libertarian telling of that story stars a frontiersman who carves the American West out of nothing, in radical autonomy, with only a hunting knife. Only, doesn’t that self-made man creating something out of nothing sound a lot like God? “That’s the [Catholic] problem with libertarianism,’’ Clark said. “It depends upon a human person who creates himself, and there’s no way to make that harmonious with Christ.”

The economy created by all those frontiersfolk is the unfettered free market, and Pope Francis himself recently reiterated his view that it is “an inhumane system. I didn’t hesitate to write in . . . “Evangelii Gaudium’ (“The Joy of the Gospel”) that this economic system kills,’’ Francis told reporters on his plane en route to Rome from Jerusalem. “And I repeat this.”

history shows that mass spying is always aimed at crushing dissent

zerohedge | In 1972, the CIA director relabeled “dissidents” as “terrorists” so he could continue spying on them.

During the Vietnam war, the NSA spied on Senator Frank Church because of his criticism of the Vietnam War. The NSA also spied on Senator Howard Baker.

Senator Church – the head of a congressional committee investigating Cointelpro – warned in 1975:

[NSA's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.

This is, in fact, what’s happened …

Initially, American constitutional law experts say that the NSA is doing exactly the same thing to the American people today which King George did to the Colonists … using “general warrant” type spying.

And it is clear that the government is using its massive spy programs in order to track those who question government policies. See this, this, this and this.

Todd Gitlin – chair of the PhD program in communications at Columbia University, and a professor of journalism and sociology – notes:

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has unearthed documents showing that, in 2011 and 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies were busy surveilling and worrying about a good number of Occupy groups — during the very time that they were missing actual warnings about actual terrorist actions.

From its beginnings, the Occupy movement was of considerable interest to the DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, while true terrorists were slipping past the nets they cast in the wrong places. In the fall of 2011, the DHS specifically asked its regional affiliates to report on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations, in addition to reporting on domestic terrorist acts and ‘significant criminal activity.’”

Aware that Occupy was overwhelmingly peaceful, the federally funded Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), one of 77 coordination centers known generically as “fusion centers,” was busy monitoring Occupy Boston daily. As the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff recently reported, they were not only tracking Occupy-related Facebook pages and websites but “writing reports on the movement’s potential impact on ‘commercial and financial sector assets.’”

It was in this period that the FBI received the second of two Russian police warnings about the extremist Islamist activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the future Boston Marathon bomber. That city’s police commissioner later testified that the federal authorities did not pass any information at all about the Tsarnaev brothers on to him, though there’s no point in letting the Boston police off the hook either. The ACLU has uncovered documents showing that, during the same period, they were paying close attention to the internal workings of…Code Pink and Veterans for Peace.

***

In Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, intelligence was not only pooled among public law enforcement agencies, but shared with private corporations — and vice versa.

Nationally, in 2011, the FBI and DHS were, in the words of Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, “treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity.” Last December using FOIA, PCJF obtained 112 pages of documents (heavily redacted) revealing a good deal of evidence for what might otherwise seem like an outlandish charge: that federal authorities were, in Verheyden-Hilliard’s words, “functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.” Consider these examples from PCJF’s summary of federal agencies working directly not only with local authorities but on behalf of the private sector:

• “As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month. By September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest.”

• “The FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint Terrorism Task Force disseminated information to… [22] campus police officials… A representative of the State University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI for information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and professors.”

• An entity called the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the private sector,” sent around information regarding Occupy protests at West Coast ports [on Nov. 2, 2011] to “raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity.” The DSAC report contained “a ‘handling notice’ that the information is ‘meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…’ Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) reported to DSAC on the relationship between OWS and organized labor.”

• DSAC gave tips to its corporate clients on “civil unrest,” which it defined as running the gamut from “small, organized rallies to large-scale demonstrations and rioting.” ***

• The FBI in Anchorage, Jacksonville, Tampa, Richmond, Memphis, Milwaukee, and Birmingham also gathered information and briefed local officials on wholly peaceful Occupy activities.

• In Jackson, Mississippi, FBI agents “attended a meeting with the Bank Security Group in Biloxi, MS with multiple private banks and the Biloxi Police Department, in which they discussed an announced protest for ‘National Bad Bank Sit-In-Day’ on December 7, 2011.” Also in Jackson, “the Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a ‘Counterterrorism Preparedness’ alert” that, despite heavy redactions, notes the need to ‘document…the Occupy Wall Street Movement.’”

***

In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee learned … that the Tennessee Fusion Center was “highlighting on its website map of ‘Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity’ a recent ACLU-TN letter to school superintendents. The letter encourages schools to be supportive of all religious beliefs during the holiday season.”

***

Consider an “intelligence report” from the North Central Texas fusion center, which in a 2009 “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” described, in the ACLU’s words, “a purported conspiracy between Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbying groups, the anti-war movement, a former U.S. Congresswoman, the U.S. Treasury Department, and hip hop bands to spread tolerance in the United States, which would ‘provide an environment for terrorist organizations to flourish.’”

***

And those Virginia and Texas fusion centers were hardly alone in expanding the definition of “terrorist” to fit just about anyone who might oppose government policies. According to a 2010 report in the Los Angeles Times, the Justice Department Inspector General found that “FBI agents improperly opened investigations into Greenpeace and several other domestic advocacy groups after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and put the names of some of their members on terrorist watch lists based on evidence that turned out to be ‘factually weak.’” The Inspector General called “troubling” what the Los Angeles Times described as “singling out some of the domestic groups for investigations that lasted up to five years, and were extended ‘without adequate basis.’

Subsequently, the FBI continued to maintain investigative files on groups like Greenpeace, the Catholic Worker, and the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, cases where (in the politely put words of the Inspector General’s report) “there was little indication of any possible federal crimes… In some cases, the FBI classified some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its ‘acts of terrorism’ classification.”  Fist tap Big Don.

vodafone reveals that other governments use them like a 3rd world nsa

WaPo | Britain’s Vodafone revealed Friday that several governments are collecting surveillance data directly from its networks without any legal review and publicly urged more safeguards against such unfettered access to the private communications of its customers.

The declarations, made by the world’s second-largest cellular carrier, show that the type of access to telecommunications networks enjoyed by the U.S. National Security Agency also occurs in other countries where legal protections almost certainly are lower. Vodafone’s networks span much of Europe and parts of Africa and Asia.

The company said that voice, Internet and other data could be collected without any court review in “a small number” of nations. Although the company does not name them, news reports suggested that one is Britain, whose GCHQ intelligence agency is a close partner of the NSA in filtering the world’s Internet traffic.

“It is a healthy reminder that no amount of legal reform in the United States will solve the problem if there isn’t an international solution,” said Peter Eckersley, director of technology projects for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that is based in San Francisco.

Vodafone’s statements, coming in the company’s first report on data demands made by authorities in the countries where it operates, were unusually pointed, detailed and sober by the standards of the “transparency reports” issued by a growing number of companies since the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The Vodafone report includes an 88-page annex detailing laws and experiences in 29 nations where, collectively, government agencies have made millions of data requests of the company.

In several of those countries — South Africa, Turkey, Egypt and others — publishing even such rudimentary totals of requests are prohibited by law. The report merely summarizes the legal standards there rather than quantifying the extent of government data collection.

“Refusal to comply with a country’s laws is not an option,” the company said in its report. “If we do not comply with a lawful demand for assistance, governments can remove our licence to operate, preventing us from providing services to our customers. Our employees who live and work in the country concerned may also be at risk of criminal sanctions, including imprisonment.”

sons of wichita

WaPo |  Much of “Sons of Wichita” is spent tracing the two-decade legal battle between the siblings over control of Koch Industries — Charles and David on one side vs. Bill and, occasionally, Frederick. The fight became so nasty that the brothers at one point hired private investigators to dig up dirt on one another. Bill’s investigators “pilfered trash from the homes and offices of Charles, David, and three of their lawyers, bribing janitors and trash collectors,” Schulman writes.

The family war played out before jurors in a Topeka, Kan., courtroom in 1998, in the case of Koch v. Koch Industries, during which David broke down in tears on the stand recounting his twin’s attempt to assert control over the company. When Charles and David prevailed, Bill told reporters that he would appeal, adding, “These guys are crooks.”

The brothers would not reconcile until 2001, meeting for dinner at Bill’s Palm Beach mansion to sign a final settlement that divvied up their father’s property. It was the first time they had shared a meal in almost 20 years.

For those who follow the Kochs and their political activities, “Sons of Wichita” does not provide major revelations about how they operate. But Schulman lays out a cogent narrative of Charles Koch’s political evolution, starting as a member of his father’s John Birch Society. When an acquaintance visited the family home in the 1960s, Charles Koch blanched when he saw him carrying a worn copy of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” Hemingway “was a communist,” Charles explained to the guest, who had to leave the book on the stoop outside.

After Fred Koch’s death in 1967, Charles broke with the Birch Society over its support for the Vietnam War. He embraced libertarianism and began bankrolling the movement, helping launch a new think tank, the Cato Institute, in 1977. It was the beginning of what would grow into a far-flung constellation of academic programs, think tanks and politically active nonprofits that now make up the Koch network. (The term “Kochtopus” was coined early on by a libertarian critic who charged Charles with trying to buy the party.)

As his political involvement deepened, Charles initially regarded the GOP with disdain.

what economics can learn from theology about human beings...,

journaltalk |  It seems to me that the dominant narrative of mainstream economics in the past few decades has been one of conquest. If economists engaged with ‘foreigners’ from other fields, it was usually only because they wanted to colonize them. After all, economics may quite well be the last social science where the word imperialism is treated with affection. George Stigler endorsed the field as “an imperial science” that had “been aggressive in addressing central problems in a considerable number of neighboring social disciplines, and without any invitations,” offering an eschatological vision in which he praised “Heinrich Gossen, a high priest of the theory of utility-maximizing behavior” and heralded “the spread of the economists’ theory of behavior to the entire domain of the social sciences” (Stigler 1984, 311-313). Similarly, Gary Becker (1997/1993, 52) argued that “The rational choice model provides the most promising basis presently available for a unified approach to the analysis of the social world by scholars from different social sciences.”

Yet behind this imperialistic rhetoric there has also been a growing feeling of frustration: despite all the battles, economists’ rational proposals, chiseled to perfection, are often ignored. What’s worse, the very methodological foundations of economic science seem to be crumbling as it spreads over an ever growing territory—just like in the case of the (temporarily) eternal imperial Rome (Cullenberg, Amariglio, and Ruccio 2001). Today, the paths to truths seem to be winding and numerous, and some economists are finally willing to admit that unrealistic assumptions are likely to lead to unrealistic, and irrelevant, worlds.2

The core of the trouble with mainstream economics is, I believe, its vision of a utility maximizing human being—the infamous Max U (McCloskey 2010, 297; Lipka 2013). How can we overcome the flatness of the Beckerian-Stiglerian framework? It will perhaps sound daring to economists who have pride in the practicality of their science when I suggest that the place to ask for help is—take a deep breath—theology.

in the u.s., 42% believe in a creationist view of human origins...,

gallup |  More than four in 10 Americans continue to believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago, a view that has changed little over the past three decades. Half of Americans believe humans evolved, with the majority of these saying God guided the evolutionary process. However, the percentage who say God was not involved is rising.

This latest update is from Gallup's Values and Beliefs survey conducted May 8-11. Gallup first asked the three-part question about human origins in 1982.

The percentage of the U.S. population choosing the creationist perspective as closest to their own view has fluctuated in a narrow range between 40% and 47% since the question's inception. There is little indication of a sustained downward trend in the proportion of the U.S. population who hold a creationist view of human origins. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who adhere to a strict secularist viewpoint -- that humans evolved over time, with God having no part in this process -- has doubled since 1999.

Religiousness, Age, Education Related to Americans' Views

Historically, Americans' views on the origin of humans have been related to their religiousness, education, and age.

• Religiousness relates most strongly to these views, which is not surprising, given that this question deals directly with God's role in human origins. The percentage of Americans who accept the creationist viewpoint ranges from 69% among those who attend religious services weekly to 23% among those who seldom or never attend.
• Educational attainment is also related to these attitudes, with belief in the creationist perspective dropping from 57% among Americans with no more than a high school education to less than half that (27%) among those with a college degree. Those with college degrees are, accordingly, much more likely to choose one of the two evolutionary explanations.
• Younger Americans -- who are typically less religious than their elders -- are less likely to choose the creationist perspective than are older Americans. Americans aged 65 and older -- the most religious of any age group -- are most likely to choose the creationist perspective.

are you ready for nuclear war?

paulcraigroberts |  Pay close attention to Steven Starr’s guest column, “The Lethality of Nuclear Weapons.” http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/05/30/lethality-nuclear-weapons/ Washington thinks nuclear war can be won and is planning for a first strike on Russia, and perhaps China, in order to prevent any challenge to Washington’s world hegemony.

The plan is far advanced, and the implementation of the plan is underway. As I have reported previously, US strategic doctrine was changed and the role of nuclear missiles was elevated from a retaliatory role to an offensive first strike role. US anti-ballistic missile (ABM) bases have been established in Poland on Russia’s frontier, and other bases are planned. When completed Russia will be ringed with US missile bases.

Anti-ballistic missiles, known as “star wars,” are weapons designed to intercept and destroy ICBMs. In Washington’s war doctrine, the US hits Russia with a first strike, and whatever retaliatory force Russia might have remaining is prevented from reaching the US by the shield of ABMs.

The reason Washington gave for the change in war doctrine is the possibility that terrorists might obtain a nuclear weapon with which to destroy an American city. This explanation is nonsensical. Terrorists are individuals or a group of individuals, not a country with a threatening military. To use nuclear weapons against terrorists would destroy far more than the terrorists and be pointless as a drone with a conventional missile would suffice.

The reason Washington gave for the ABM base in Poland is to protect Europe from Iranian ICBMs. Washington and every European government knows that Iran has no ICBMs and that Iran has not indicated any intent to attack Europe.

No government believes Washington’s reasons. Every government realizes that Washington’s reasons are feeble attempts to hide the fact that it is creating the capability on the ground to win a nuclear war.

The Russian government understands that the change in US war doctrine and the US ABM bases on its borders are directed at Russia and are indications that Washington plans a first strike with nuclear weapons on Russia.

China has also understood that Washington has similar intentions toward China. As I reported several months ago, in response to Washington’s threat China called the world’s attention to China’s ability to destroy the US should Washington initiate such a conflict.

a metaphor for how we explain acts of violence?

slate |  It’s so much easier to talk about Slender Man than about the girl who was stabbed 19 times over the weekend. Horrific violence sends us reeling, hunting for significance and explanations, veering down side streets to avoid our own loss of power. We seek out skeleton key–like details we can use to unlock the newest awful narrative. We want to know why it happened.

In the wake of the Isla Vista, California, shootings in May, many people pored over the reasons for Elliot Rodger’s rampage. Did all those men and women die because of guns? Mental illness?
Misogyny? Hollywood representations of college hedonism? Or, wait—were we focusing too hard on the psychology of a maniac? Whatever the precise mix of factors ultimately was, everyone on the Internet had a different theory. The #YesAllWomen hashtag proliferated across Twitter like a house fire, situating Rodger on a sexist continuum that drew in everyday examples: being catcalled, being groped at a bar. As a productive and necessary conversation unfolded, and a lot of men woke up to the realities of misogyny, others asked whether there wasn’t something unseemly in how writers were shaping the tragedy, reducing its convolutions to tidy arguments about pet causes. And then more people countered that these arguments matter.

A vacuum of meaning opens up behind atrocity, and people fill it by looking at the facts through their personal viewfinders. That is why there’s a kind of poetic justice to the two girls attributing their acts to Slender Man. He’s the perfect metaphor for the becauses we collectively brainstorm—an Internet phantom who looks a little different to everyone. Slender Man is not an explanation for anything—he’s a bogey with elastic limbs who can look like a normal guy or a tentacled nightmare—but, it seems, he’s better than no reason at all.  

the slender man

wikipedia |  The Slender Man (also known as Slender Man or Slenderman) is a fictional character that originated as an Internet meme created by Something Awful forums user Eric Knudsen (a.k.a. "Victor Surge") in 2009. It is depicted as resembling a thin, unnaturally tall man with a blank and usually featureless face, wearing a black suit. Stories of the Slender Man commonly feature him stalking, abducting, or traumatizing people, particularly children.^[1] The Slender Man is not confined to a single narrative, but appears in many disparate works of fiction, mostly composed online.^[2]

Origin 

The Slender Man was created on a thread in the Something Awful Internet forum begun on June 8, 2009, with the goal of editing photographs to contain supernatural entities. On June 10, a forum poster with the user name "Victor Surge" contributed two black and white images of groups of children, to which he added a tall, thin spectral figure wearing a black suit.^[3][4] Previous entries had consisted solely of photographs; however, Surge supplemented his submission with snatches of text, supposedly from witnesses, describing the abductions of the groups of children, and giving the character the name, "The Slender Man":

We didn't want to go, we didn't want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time…
1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.

One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as “The Slender Man”. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.
1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.^[4]

These additions effectively transformed the photographs into a work of fiction. Subsequent posters expanded upon the character, adding their own visual or textual contributions.^[3][4]

where business interests ARE political interests...,

billmoyers |  In this excerpt from Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, authors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson explain the significance of the Powell Memorandum, a call-to-arms for American corporations written by Virginia lawyer (and future U.S. Supreme Court justice) Lewis Powell to a neighbor working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

 In the fall of 1972, the venerable National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) made a surprising announcement: It planned to move its main offices from New York to Washington, D.C. As its chief, Burt Raynes, observed:

We have been in New York since before the turn of the century, because
we regarded this city as the center of business and industry.
But the thing that affects business most today is government. The
interrelationship of business with business is no longer so important
as the interrelationship of business with government. In the last several
years, that has become very apparent to us.[1]

To be more precise, what had become very apparent to the business community was that it was getting its clock cleaned. Used to having broad sway, employers faced a series of surprising defeats in the 1960s and early 1970s. As we have seen, these defeats continued unabated when Richard Nixon won the White House. Despite electoral setbacks, the liberalism of the Great Society had surprising political momentum. “From 1969 to 1972,” as the political scientist David Vogel summarizes in one of the best books on the political role of business, “virtually the entire American business community experienced a series of political setbacks without parallel in the postwar period.” In particular, Washington undertook a vast expansion of its regulatory power, introducing tough and extensive restrictions and requirements on business in areas from the environment to occupational safety to consumer protection.[2]

In corporate circles, this pronounced and sustained shift was met with disbelief and then alarm. By 1971, future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell felt compelled to assert, in a memo that was to help galvanize business circles, that the “American economic system is under broad attack.” This attack, Powell maintained, required mobilization for political combat: “Business must learn the lesson . . . that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.” Moreover, Powell stressed, the critical ingredient for success would be organization: “Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”[3]

Powell was just one of many who pushed to reinvigorate the political clout of employers. Before the policy winds shifted in the ’60s, business had seen little need to mobilize anything more than a network of trade associations. It relied mostly on personal contacts, and the main role of lobbyists in Washington was to troll for government contracts and tax breaks. The explosion of policy activism, and rise of public interest groups like those affiliated with Ralph Nader, created a fundamental challenge. And as the 1970s progressed, the problems seemed to be getting worse. Powell wrote in 1971, but even after Nixon swept to a landslide reelection the following year, the legislative tide continued to come in. With Watergate leading to Nixon’s humiliating resignation and a spectacular Democratic victory in 1974, the situation grew even more dire. “The danger had suddenly escalated,” Bryce Harlow, senior Washington representative for Procter & Gamble and one of the engineers of the corporate political revival was to say later. “We had to prevent business from being rolled up and put in the trash can by that Congress.”[4]

Powell, Harlow, and others sought to replace the old boys’ club with a more modern, sophisticated, and diversified apparatus — one capable of advancing employers’ interests even under the most difficult political circumstances. They recognized that business had hardly begun to tap its potential for wielding political power. Not only were the financial resources at the disposal of business leaders unrivaled. The hierarchical structures of corporations made it possible for a handful of decision-makers to deploy those resources and combine them with the massive but underutilized capacities of their far-flung organizations. These were the preconditions for an organizational revolution that was to remake Washington in less than a decade — and, in the process, lay the critical groundwork for winner-take-all politics.

the memo that spawned right-wing think tanks, lobbies, and the contemporary "corporations as persons" movement...,

reclaimdemocracy | Introduction - In 1971, Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memorandum was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell’s nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Powell Memo did not become available to the public until long after his confirmation to the Court. It was leaked to Jack Anderson, a liberal syndicated columnist, who stirred interest in the document when he cited it as reason to doubt Powell’s legal objectivity. Anderson cautioned that Powell “might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice…in behalf of business interests.”

Though Powell’s memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration’s “hands-off business” philosophy.

Most notable about these institutions was their focus on education, shifting values, and movement-building — a focus we share, though often with sharply contrasting goals.*  (See our endnote for more on this.)

So did Powell’s political views influence his judicial decisions? The evidence is mixed. Powell did embrace expansion of corporate privilege and wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a 1978 decision that effectively invented a First Amendment “right” for corporations to influence ballot questions. On social issues, he was a moderate, whose votes often surprised his backers.

lying without opposition: reagan's veto of the fairness doctrine laid the groundwork for the partisan peasant right wing...,

latimes |  President Reagan, intensifying the debate over whether the nation's broadcasters must present opposing views of controversial issues, has vetoed legislation to turn into law the 38-year-old "fairness doctrine," the White House announced Saturday.

The doctrine, instituted by the Federal Communications Commission as public policy in 1949, requires the nation's radio and television stations to "afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views on issues of public importance."

"This type of content-based regulation by the federal government is, in my judgment, antagonistic to the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment," Reagan said in his veto message. "In any other medium besides broadcasting, such federal policing of the editorial judgment of journalists would be unthinkable."

Staunch Opposition

The legislation had been staunchly opposed not only by the Administration, but also by the nation's broadcasters, who maintain that the FCC policy is an unconstitutional intrusion that has a chilling effect on their operations.

Opponents also contend that the explosive growth of the telecommunications industry in recent years makes the fairness doctrine obsolete. In his veto message, Reagan noted that the FCC has concluded "that the doctrine is an unnecessary and detrimental regulatory mechanism."

The legislation containing the doctrine passed the House on a 302-102 vote on June 3 and had been approved by the Senate in April on a 59-31 vote.

If the measure does not become law, the fairness doctrine and its obligations still will remain in effect as FCC policy. However, supporters have been seeking to codify the regulation for fear that the FCC could act to repeal it--particularly in light of a federal appeals court ruling last year that concluded that the doctrine was not a law, leaving its enforcement up to the FCC.

Former FCC Chairman Mark S. Fowler had pressed for repeal of the fairness doctrine and, the June 22 issue of Broadcasting magazine said, helped to write Reagan's veto message.

In 1985 the FCC, under Fowler's leadership, issued a report on the doctrine calling it constitutionally "suspect" and said that "if it were up to the commission, it would hold the doctrine unconstitutional."