no REALLY, how WILL you humans feed yourselves?

Video - More human for humans

Alternet | Come October, Atlas won't be shrugging, he'll be groaning as global population passes the 7 billion mark. Until very recently, demographers predicted that these numbers would peak in 2050 at just over 9 billion and then start to decline. The latest research, however, suggests that despite declining fertility across much of the world, population will continue to rise through this century to over 10 billion people.

With famine spreading in Somalia, another food crisis gripping North Korea, global food prices near a record high, and climate change threatening to reduce future harvests, the question continues to nag: are we outstripping our capacity to feed ourselves?

The good news is that the harvests this year promise to be bountiful. The bad news is that this increased grain production may still not be enough. The worse news is that millions more mouths to feed, over the long term, will increase pressure on the world's farmers to squeeze more and more food from less and less arable land.

In 2010, the world dipped into food reserves to make up for a 60-million-ton shortfall in grain production. This year, predicts the Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown, farmers will have to produce 100 million additional tons to meet last year's needs plus the increased demand. Based on a number of factors – better harvests in Russia versus droughts in China and the U.S. Midwest – Brown expects only an increase of about 80 million tons for 2011. The bottom line: food prices will continue to rise.

But that's just the short term. Most estimates of grain needs in 2050 suggest that production will have to increase by 70 percent. That means somehow conjuring a billion-plus tons of grain from the already strained resource base of Mother Earth.

There are basically four schools of thought on how to feed the world. The biotech crowd believes that genetic modification will eventually spur another Green Revolution that will dramatically boost yield per acre. The organics faction believes that industrial farming techniques have drained the aquifers and robbed the topsoil of nutrients, among other ecological ills, and only natural farming techniques can restore soil fertility and produce sustainable yields. Somewhere in the middle is the status-quo-plus gang, which believes that improvement of current practices can meet the needs of a growing world. And the fourth school is…well, I'll get to that in a moment.

how are you going to feed yourselves?

CSMonitor | Food and people. Thomas Malthus posed them as two forces rarely in balance. Plentiful food encourages population growth. A booming population devours more food than can be produced.

Students who learn of Malthus’s grim prediction usually take away two lessons. The first is the sharp contrast between arithmetic and geometric progression. Food supplies grow slowly, Malthus said. But consumers multiply like rabbits. A geometric progression outstrips an arithmetic one every time.

The second lesson is about why Malthus’s catastrophe hasn’t occurred. Most scholars think it is because the 19th-century Anglican parson didn’t have sufficient regard for technology and innovation. From the “green revolution” to global trade, from drip irrigation to entrepreneurial ingenuity, Homo sapiens learn and improve. We farm better, manage resources more carefully, and as education increases, birthrates fall.

A wise species – which is what “sapiens” means, after all – avoids a crash. That’s the story so far. But every rise in global food prices, every scene of malnutrition and starvation revives the old Malthusian fear. Malthus himself was careful not to predict when a judgment day would come. He simply noted a distinction between unlimited progress, of which he was skeptical, and “progress where the limit is merely undefined.” In other words, the jury may still be out.

Even if there hasn’t been one big catastrophe, there have been many regional ones since Malthus’s day. Famine in China, for instance, killed as many as 40 million people between 1958 and 1961. Bangladesh, Biafra, Ethiopia, and a dozen other regions suffered terrible food shortages in the 20th century. But these were not Malthusian events where a population outgrew its sustenance. Bad decisions – political incompetence, wars, brutal experiments such as Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” – were to blame.

We have about 40 years before the jury renders its final verdict on Malthus. The population of the planet is currently 6.9 billion. By 2050, it will hit 9.2 billion, according to the US Census Bureau. Because of declining birthrates, population specialists believe that will be the peak. Whether you think more population growth is good or bad, that’s the predicted trajectory.

quandary of the hyperactive agent-detection defect

Video - Richard Dawkins clowns the arch-bishop of Canterbury.

Guardian | In the last 10 years or so, the rise of American evangelicalism and the menace of Islamist fundamentalism, along with developments in physics and in theories of evolution and cosmogony, have encouraged a certain style of aggressive, often strident atheistic critique. Books such as Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great have sold in the millions. Beyond the unlikely success of these books, there has also been the spread of atheist and secularist websites and blogs, some of them intellectually respectable, others more dogmatic and limited (ie, pretty atrocious). The events of 11 September 2001 were the obvious spur. In The End of Faith, the American writer Sam Harris argued that as long as America remains swamped in Christian thinking, it will never defeat militant Islamism, since one backward religious system cannot prevail over another backward religious system. Atheism would be the key to unlock this uneasy stalemate. Academics such as Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have broader projects, perhaps – for them, the removal of our religious blinkers will result in a proper appreciation of the natural world, and of science's ability to describe and decode it.

I can't be the only reader who finds himself in broad agreement with the conclusions of the New Atheists, while disliking some of the ways they reach them. For these writers, and many others, "religion" always seems to mean either fundamentalist Islam or American evangelical Christianity. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and the more relaxed or progressive versions of Christianity are not in their argumentative sights. Along with this curious parochialism about the varieties of religious belief comes a simplistic reading of how people actually hold those beliefs. Terry Eagleton and others have rightly argued that, for millions of people, religious "belief" is not a matter of just totting up stable, creedal propositions ("I believe that Jesus is the son of God", "I believe that I will go to heaven when I die", and so on), but a matter of more unconscious, daily practice ("Now it is time to kneel down, face Mecca and pray"). This kind of defence of the deep embeddedness of religious practice has been influenced by Wittgenstein – for whom, say, kissing an icon was a bit like loving one's mother; something that cannot be subjected to an outsider's rational critique. Wittgenstein was obviously right, though this appeal to practice over proposition can also become a rather lazy way, for people like the Catholic Eagleton, of defending orthodox beliefs via the back door – as if a bishop encouraged his flock by saying, in effect: "It doesn't matter what you believe. Religion is not about propositions, but about practices. So stick at those practices: just keep on doing the church flowers and turning up every Sunday."

We know that plenty of people hold religious beliefs that are also propositions – they stand up and recite creeds on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays; they can tell you who will be punished in hell, and how; they believe that Allah is the one God, and so on. Prayer itself is a proposition: it proposes that God exists, and can be communicated with. Rather than simply declaring all religious belief to be non-propositional, which is manifestly untrue, it would be more interesting to examine what might be called the practice of propositional beliefs. We know that people believe all kinds of things, as propositions. But how do they believe them? In this area, the New Atheism has nothing very interesting to say, except to wish away all such beliefs.

But people's beliefs are often fluctuating and changing – it is why people lose their faith, or convert to faith in God. If you spend any time asking people what they believe, how they believe, and why they believe the propositions they espouse in church or temple or mosque, you find that there is nothing very straightforward about propositional belief. Recently, I spent some time with two Christian believers, both ordained. One is an academic theologian and university chaplain, the other a religious affairs journalist. The academic theologian was walking with me in a university town, and began a sentence, "I believe." And then he caught himself, and added: "I don't know what I believe, at the moment." A few weeks later, I met the religious affairs journalist, who had for several years been a parish priest. During the course of our conversation, he asserted: "It is impossible to be a serious Christian and believe in heaven and hell." When I, who was raised in a strongly and conventionally religious home, expressed surprise and suggested that once one stops believing in heaven one might as well stop believing in God, he said, more vehemently: "It's exactly the opposite: not believing in heaven and hell is a prerequisite for serious Christian belief." Trapped in the childhood literalism of my background, I had not entertained the possibility of Christian belief separated from the great lure and threat of heaven and hell.

why god is the best punisher

ReligionBelief&Behavior | why, if selfish behavior became especially costly in human history, evolution did not favor a simpler solution for suppressing selfishness other than God: “why invoke … the cognitively costly and seemingly excessive deterrence of belief in all-knowing, all-powerful agents, rather than just improve accuracy or globally reduce confidence in the ability to defect?” (p. 61). This is exactly the right question to ask, it presents the greatest challenge to SPH, and it remains unanswered by their analysis. I propose that there are several good reasons why God – or other supernatural agents – make the best deterrents against selfishness.

First, the cognitive science of religion suggests that supernatural beliefs are not “cognitively costly.” They may be behaviorally costly, but beliefs in supernatural agency and supernatural consequences are the cognitive default, and are most easily accessed (Atran, 2004; Boyer, 2001; Purzycki et al., 2011). Other solutions, if they are (or once were) rivals, might therefore have been trumped simply by ease of supernatural cognition (whatever the reasons for it).

Second, God works because God is “excessive.” Error management theory (EMT) shows that assessment mechanisms that aim for the true probability of an event (e.g., the true probability p of detection for cheating) will be suboptimal because, given some distribution of mistakes (centered around estimates of p), half the time we will overestimate p (and get away with it), and half the time we will underestimate p (and get caught). Therefore, simply “improving accuracy” (in estimating p), as S&M suggest, will not necessarily help. Indeed, if false negative errors (assuming secrecy and getting caught) are more costly than false positive errors (assuming detection and missing a reward), then only exaggerated estimates of the probability of detection (e.g., a false belief that supernatural agents are watching you) will avoid the worst errors. EMT thus suggests that the best solution to avoiding the problem of detection is a mechanism that overestimates the true probability of detection. If humans are already overconfident about their likelihood of getting away with cheating, as S&M argue, then the counter-balancing bias would need to be greater still. Their concern that God is a “seemingly excessive” deterrent is prescient – the threat of punishment may need to be excessive, such as an omniscient and omnipotent God, as this is the only way (or at least one good way) to make overconfident humans avoid dangerous mistakes (Johnson, 2009b).

Third, one response to the EMT argument above is to accept the point – we need biased, not accurate, assessment – but to invoke a non-religious cognitive bias to correct the problem instead of God. However, as S&M already point out, the problem arises in part because of overconfidence in avoiding detection, so we cannot simultaneously postulate a bias in underconfidence in avoiding detection as well. God offers an alternative tool to solve the problem in a different way.

Fourth, cognitive biases might act as cautionary mind-guards, but they suffer two weaknesses: (1) a cognitive bias may suppress selfishness but has no consequences, whereas God suppresses selfishness and punishes if cheating is discovered; (2) a cognitive bias only affects individuals, with no external validation, whereas a belief in supernatural punishment is a shared aspect of culture that is reinforced by the whole community and bolstered by explanations of multiple events.

Fifth, the empirical evidence suggests that people do expect supernatural punishment for selfish behavior (even atheists in some cases), while there is a lack of evidence for alternative psychological mechanisms (only overconfidence, as noted, which works in the opposite direction).
Sixth, some empirical evidence suggests that religious beliefs are more effective at suppressing selfish behavior and promoting cooperation than equivalent non-religious beliefs (e.g., Sosis & Bressler, 2003). So even if alternative mechanisms exist now or in the past, religion may have had the competitive edge in selection.

Seventh, God offers better detection. Since humans are limited by the laws of nature, real-world detection is by no means certain to occur. By contrast, supernatural agents, though variable in power and motives, are peculiar precisely because of their ability to be in many places at one time and to have access to people's thoughts and actions. No human can match the detection abilities of God.

Eighth, God offers better punishment. We might fear detection by other humans, but how bad can the consequences be? Typical punishments are some form of sanction, which may deter some, but not all. Even major punishments such as death are somewhat finite. The thing about God is that God's punishments can be significantly worse than any earthly punishments that humans could inflict: they are certain, possibly worse than death, and infinite. No human can match the punishing abilities of God.

Ninth, supernatural punishment may trump other solutions, even good ones, because of a range of evolutionary constraints (Johnson, 2009a; McKay & Dennett, 2009): (1) economics – a fear of supernatural agency may have been biologically cheaper or more efficient to select or sustain than alternatives; (2) history – a capacity for supernatural beliefs may have been more readily available, especially given the recent evolution of theory of mind (itself necessary for beliefs in supernatural agents and agency), which gave rise to the very problem we are trying to solve (the increased costs of selfishness with social transparency); (3) adaptive landscape – fear of detection and punishment by supernatural agents may have been a small step up the local fitness peak from fear of detection and punishment by human agents, even if better solutions from, say, corrective cognitive biases occupy higher fitness peaks beyond uncrossable valleys in the adaptive landscape.

To summarize this section, supernatural agents may be the only way (or at least one good way) of scaring people into avoiding costly social mistakes, especially given the human overconfidence in avoiding detection that S&M identify. “Simple prudence” (S&M, 2011), “cautious action policies” (McKay & Dennett, 2009), or even relying on our “conscience,” may not be good enough. As long as people believe it (an important caveat, of course), deterrence by supernatural agents is vastly superior to any alternative. In the ideal type (an all-powerful God), supernatural punishment solves several tricky game theoretical problems: (1) cheats are automatically detected (God is omniscient); (2) cheats are automatically punished (God is omnipotent); (3) there are no “second-order free riders” (God does the punishing); (4) there are no reprisals against punishers (no vigilantes are needed); and (5) there are fewer first-order free riders (reducing the necessity and thus the costs of real-world monitoring and punishment). The ideal type may be rare because in traditional societies supernatural agents typically do not have the full complement of powers as above, but the theoretical logic remains even if there is variance in the extent of supernatural agent capabilities and the extent to which people believe in them. Despite variation, supernatural agents are much better than humans at solving the game theoretical problems of cooperation.

supernatural punishment: what traits are being selected?

ReligionBrain&Behavior | In their critical analysis of supernatural punishment (SP) theories, Schloss and Murray (2011) tease apart two distinct but often conflated adaptationist approaches to religion: those that argue that religious belief enhances cooperation (cooperation enhancement, CE), and those that say that it helps people to withstand the temptation to cheat, helping them avoid the costs of being punished (punishment avoidance, PA). They also make a distinction between individual selection and group selection. However, they pay little attention to the traits that are the targets of selection: evolved psychological dispositions, flexible behavioral strategies, or culturally transmitted norms. These three types of traits roughly correspond to three styles of evolutionary approach to human behavior: evolutionary psychology, behavioral ecology, and dual inheritance theories (Smith, 2000). Each has a different expected temporal scale in which adaptive change takes place – this constrains the plausibility of particular hypotheses and their mutual compatibility.

Evolutionary psychologists explain our behavioral repertoire as a result of evolved psychological adaptations, which were shaped in ancestral environments. Let us examine PA accounts from this perspective. If belief in SP is an ancient adaptation, we would expect it to have emerged in small, egalitarian groups, where there is a tendency to punish all defection. The strong connection between detection and defection costs in such societies is said to favor the evolution of God-fearing psychological mechanisms. However, the purported egalitarianism of ancient human groups is to some extent an idealization, because evidence for social inequality, in the form of lavish beadwork in children's burials, dates back at least to the Upper Paleolithic (Vanhaeren & d'Errico, 2005). It is unlikely that in such societies everyone would have faced the same risk of being punished. Also, ethnographic parallels show that at least some small-scale egalitarian societies (e.g. Ju’/hoansi, Kalahari hunter-gatherers) practice mainly low-cost forms of punishment, including gossip and jokes at the expense of the offender (Wiessner, 2005). The low cost of punishment (for both offender and punisher) seems incompatible with PA. As Wiessner (2005, p. 135) says: “[this] informal means of punishment would be ineffective or insufficient in a larger-scale society with less mobility.” Taken together, it seems unlikely that PA emerged in ancestral environments. For the evolutionary psychologist, CE thus remains the only viable option, but it then still remains unclear, as Schloss and Murray aptly point out, why religion, rather than other forms of group-level activities, would enhance cooperation. Indeed, the plenitude of Upper Palaeolithic mobiliary art, such as Magdalenian Venus figurines, and their geographic clustering in distinct styles suggest that art may have been used to affirm group identity and group commitment (De Smedt & De Cruz, in press).

Behavioral ecology takes the current environment as the relevant context of adaptation, and builds models on the basis of expected utility of different behaviors. As organisms are expected to optimize their behavioral repertoire to their ecological and social contexts, this approach predicts little or no mismatch between expected and actualized fitness benefits. Forms of CE that see religion as costly signaling are compatible with this approach, because it expects individuals to make flexible, optimal choices, which could include a choice for a religious affiliation that allows for costly signaling. However, this places limitations on the explanatory scope of SP theories. They cannot explain, for example, why hunter-gatherers or medieval villeins would be religious, since there is little point in the costly signaling of one's membership in a religious community if there is no freedom of religious choice. After all, a “free market” of religious groups is a relatively recent and not globally widespread phenomenon, mainly restricted to northern America (Finke & Stark, 1989). Many European countries have state-funded churches with low levels of expected commitment, which makes competition by smaller high-commitment religious groups harder. Prior to the eighteenth century, religious choice was quasi nonexistent, as the treatment of religious minorities in Europe exemplifies – one need but think of the massacre of the Cathars in southern France, or the historical persecution of Protestants. There is still no freedom of religion for the present-day Iraqi housewife. So, although behavioral ecology allows for CE, it seems to be limited in explanatory scope.

Dual inheritance theories examine human behavior as a product of culturally transmitted norms that have effects on genetic fitness, and that can thus become part of a feedback loop. This approach is the most congenial to the possibility of group selection. In particular, groups must be distinct from each other and form cohesive wholes for group selection to occur. Group selection also requires that the fitness benefits of altruistic groups over selfish groups must outweigh the fitness benefits of selfish individuals over altruistic individuals within mixed groups (Sterelny, 1996). Human cultures, with their ethnic markers and distinct languages, do exhibit high between-group variation, and considerable within-culture homogeneity, allowing for group selection to occur. It is within this context that we can situate Norenzayan and Shariff's (2008) argument that belief in supernatural sanction is a group-level adaptive cultural response to life in large societies, where interactions between unrelated and unacquainted agents become increasingly important. However, as they themselves point out, the presence of large, cooperative and not very religious groups indicates that secular institutions like the police can be equally successful in instilling cooperation. From the perspective of dual inheritance theory, PA seems thus not very likely, since people in at least some societies (e.g. agnostic Scandinavian countries) can withstand the temptation to cheat when effective punitive mechanisms are present without belief in divine punishment.

While different SP theories are not all mutually incompatible, some of them may be so because of their divergent assumptions about the temporal scale on which selection acts and which traits are the targets of selection. Depending on the style of evolutionary approach one chooses, contrasting SP theories can be fleshed out. However, like most SP theorists, Schloss and Murray and remain inexplicit about whether psychological mechanisms, behavioral strategies or cultural traits play the most prominent role in their review of the evolution of religious behavior.

no seriously, how ARE you humans going to feed youselves?

Alternet | Come October, Atlas won't be shrugging, he'll be groaning as global population passes the 7 billion mark. Until very recently, demographers predicted that these numbers would peak in 2050 at just over 9 billion and then start to decline. The latest research, however, suggests that despite declining fertility across much of the world, population will continue to rise through this century to over 10 billion people.

With famine spreading in Somalia, another food crisis gripping North Korea, global food prices near a record high, and climate change threatening to reduce future harvests, the question continues to nag: are we outstripping our capacity to feed ourselves?

The good news is that the harvests this year promise to be bountiful. The bad news is that this increased grain production may still not be enough. The worse news is that millions more mouths to feed, over the long term, will increase pressure on the world's farmers to squeeze more and more food from less and less arable land.

In 2010, the world dipped into food reserves to make up for a 60-million-ton shortfall in grain production. This year, predicts the Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown, farmers will have to produce 100 million additional tons to meet last year's needs plus the increased demand. Based on a number of factors – better harvests in Russia versus droughts in China and the U.S. Midwest – Brown expects only an increase of about 80 million tons for 2011. The bottom line: food prices will continue to rise.

But that's just the short term. Most estimates of grain needs in 2050 suggest that production will have to increase by 70 percent. That means somehow conjuring a billion-plus tons of grain from the already strained resource base of Mother Earth.

There are basically four schools of thought on how to feed the world. The biotech crowd believes that genetic modification will eventually spur another Green Revolution that will dramatically boost yield per acre. The organics faction believes that industrial farming techniques have drained the aquifers and robbed the topsoil of nutrients, among other ecological ills, and only natural farming techniques can restore soil fertility and produce sustainable yields. Somewhere in the middle is the status-quo-plus gang, which believes that improvement of current practices can meet the needs of a growing world. And the fourth school is…well, I'll get to that in a moment.

evolutionary accounts of belief in supernatural punishment

ReligionBrain&Behavior | Although largely unaddressed by evolutionary theory for more than a century after Darwin, over the last decade a wide range of adaptationist, byproduct, and memetic explanations have emerged for various recurrent features of religious belief and practice. One feature that has figured prominently in adaptationist accounts of religion is belief in the reality of moralizing, punishing supernatural agents. However, there is at present no unified theory of what fitness-relevant feature of the selective environment to which this cognitive predisposition is adapted. We distinguish two divergent and often conflated approaches to supernatural punishment theory which hypothesize the adaptive character of such beliefs arise from the fact that they increase cooperation or decrease the cost of incurring punishment for norm violations. We evaluate these, and group and individual selectionist versions, in view of game theoretic models, experimental studies, and ethnographic data in light of which each proposal is plausible but with which none is fully concordant.

stratification and supernatural punishment: cooperation or obedience?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video - Rapture, tribulation, left behind?

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

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

talking out of school on the unspeakable...,

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

dangerous white stereotypes?

Video - To Kill a Mockingbird

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

drug decriminalization has failed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mexican elites fleeing their failing civil war...,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video - Casino Royale arson attack in Monterrey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video - sendup of ayn rand from the virtue of selfishness

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

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

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

The Exoteric and the Esoteric

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

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

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

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

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

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

mike wallace 1959 ayn rand interview

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

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

Video - Part one of three part interview

stetson kennedy rip...,

Video - Audio overview of the late great Stetson Kennedy.

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

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

The death was announced on his website.

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

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

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

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

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

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