wikileaks: the spy files

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

is the personal computer dead?

TechnologyReview | The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don't merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we're seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.

The transformation is one from product to service. The platforms we used to purchase every few years—like operating systems—have become ongoing relationships with vendors, both for end users and software developers. I wrote about this impending shift, driven by a desire for better security and more convenience, in my 2008 book The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It.

For decades we've enjoyed a simple way for people to create software and share or sell it to others. People bought general-purpose computers—PCs, including those that say Mac. Those computers came with operating systems that took care of the basics. Anyone could write and run software for an operating system, and up popped an endless assortment of spreadsheets, word processors, instant messengers, Web browsers, e-mail, and games. That software ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous to the dangerous—and there was no referee except the user's good taste and sense, with a little help from nearby nerds or antivirus software. (This worked so long as the antivirus software was not itself malware, a phenomenon that turned out to be distressingly common.)

Choosing an OS used to mean taking a bit of a plunge: since software was anchored to it, a choice of, say, Windows over Mac meant a long-term choice between different available software collections. Even if a software developer offered versions of its wares for each OS, switching from one OS to another typically meant having to buy that software all over again.
Advertisement

That was one reason we ended up with a single dominant OS for over two decades. People had Windows, which made software developers want to write for Windows, which made more people want to buy Windows, which made it even more appealing to software developers, and so on. In the 1990s, both the U.S. and European governments went after Microsoft in a legendary and yet, today, easily forgettable antitrust battle. Their main complaint? That Microsoft had put a thumb on the scale in competition between its own Internet Explorer browser and its primary competitor, Netscape Navigator. Microsoft did this by telling PC makers that they had to ensure that Internet Explorer was ready and waiting on the user's Windows desktop when the user unpacked the computer and set it up, whether the PC makers wanted to or not. Netscape could still be prebundled with Windows, as far as Microsoft was concerned. Years of litigation and oceans of legal documents can thus be boiled down into an essential original sin: an OS maker had unduly favored its own applications.

When the iPhone came out in 2007, its design was far more restrictive. No outside code at all was allowed on the phone; all the software on it was Apple's. What made this unremarkable—and unobjectionable—was that it was a phone, not a computer, and most competing phones were equally locked down. We counted on computers to be open platforms—hard to think of them any other way—and understood phones as appliances, more akin to radios, TVs, and coffee machines.

get root on your android...,

androidcentral | So you want to know about rooting your Android phone, eh? Yeah, it sounds a little scary. It's kind of a big leap, and it may involve a few steps. and quite possibly the use of a command prompt, which would require you to follow instructions and type words and stuff.

Here's rooting in a nutshell: Your Android smartphone is based on Linux. A big, bad, scary computer operating system known only by people with neck beards. (Only, not really. But mostly.) Anyhoo, Android apps need permission to access certain parts of Linux, and not all apps have this special "root" access. That includes a few basic things, like the camera flash, and the ability to take screen shots. There are a bunch of other apps that need root access for other reasons, too, but the basic premise is the same.

So should you root your phone? First thing to do is read this editorial, and decide if you want to go further. Then if you're the type who loves to mess with things, go for it. If you want to squeeze a little more functionality out of your phone, go for it. Need more convincing? Check out "Rooting Q&A -- Is it for me?"

what is rooting?

androidcentral | Each day more and more Android handsets are being sold, and that means users are faced with a major decision: To root, or not to root. Some of us will do it simply because we can, others will decide not to do it as they enjoy the phone as-is, but the majority of us will be on the fence about the whole idea of rooting.

Hopefully some of those questions can get answered and you’ll have a clearer picture of the process and some understanding to make the decision a bit easier. I’m sure this won’t answer every question you’ll have when considering whether or not to root your device, but hopefully this is a good start and a basis for further discussion.
What, exactly, is rooting?

Rooting your Android device involves adding in a small Linux application called “su”. It stands for SuperUser, and allows applications and commands to run with elevated permissions. Everything that runs code, whether it’s an application or the user, has a permission level set by the operating system.

Why Linux? Well the heart of the Android operating system is the Linux kernel. You'll hear a lot of nerdy geek-speak about the Linux kernel, but all you really need to know is that it's what is interfacing Android to your hardware, and ultimately has complete control. When you stray outside the "normal" way of using Android and start entering commands directly, the kernel is who you're talking to.

The root user is the boss and can do anything (good or bad) on the device. From simple things like clearing the cache from core applications, to more advanced things like wirelessly tethering a laptop or iPod touch through your phone, root can do it. The su program is a sort of gateway that lets applications or users act as root while doing tasks. If you’re the curious type (I know some of you are ;) ) here’s a more in-depth review of root as used in a Linux system by the Linux Information Project.

OK, so why would I want to root my phone?
Good question! Maybe you don’t. Everything in a Linux system is a file, or is treated as a file. Since Android runs on top of Linux, it acts the same way. Most of the files you will need to access or change are available to you without having elevated permissions. "Most" being the key term here. When you want to do things that affect or change the core software of your device -- like updating the version of Android on your phone, or adding a nice piece of software from another device -- you'll have to do it as root. Dream and Magic users have been running Eclair on their phones for a good while now, and it’s because they have rooted their device. Rooting also gives you access to some handy software that you couldn’t use otherwise. Things like a complete system backup or ad blocking software require you to root your device. Don’t root your phone just for the sake of rooting your phone, but if you come across something you feel you could use or would like to have, then consider it. You'll find that the open source community is usually pretty helpful and encouraging new people to do new things is common. And when you get to the point where you can lend a hand to the new folks, pay it forward.

sprint uses it to keep droids in the "4G" cattle pen...,

Gigaom | Carrier IQ supplies Sprint generalized data about how its customers’ smartphones perform on its network, but Sprint does not snoop into the private contents of those phones, Sprint said on Tuesday. While Sprint is primarily using that information to optimize both its network and how phones behave on it, the operator isn’t – and technically incapable of — tracking or viewing the contents of any message or media in the device, Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge said in an email. Here’s her full statement:

“Carrier IQ provides information that allows Sprint, and other carriers that use it, to analyze our network performance and identify where we should be improving service. We also use the data to understand device performance so we can figure out when issues are occurring. We collect enough information to understand the customer experience with devices on our network and how to address any connection problems, but we do not and cannot look at the contents of messages, photos, videos, etc., using this tool. The information collected is not sold and we don’t provide a direct feed of this data to anyone outside of Sprint.

“Sprint is well known for our serious commitment to respecting and protecting the privacy and security of each customer’s personally identifiable information and other customer data. A key element of this involves communicating with our customers about our information privacy practices. The Sprint privacy policy makes it clear we collect information that includes how a device is functioning and how it is being used. Carrier IQ is an integral part of the Sprint service. Sprint uses Carrier IQ to help maintain our network performance.”

Sprint, like many of its operator brethren, is in the firing line as a new research from Android developer Trevor Eckhart discovered what he termed a “rootkit” buried in the guts of many Android phones. The Carrier IQ software tracks every keystroke in on the phones it is installed on, recording that information for Carrier IQ’s analytics purposes. It’s not clear if the information collected goes directly to the operators, handset makers or to Carrier IQ. But the applications cannot be disabled or uninstalled, and there’s no way opt out of its recording activities. (Kevin Tofel wrote earlier about how to detect Carrier IQ in your phone).

carrier iq disputes Mr. Mackey's claim...,

Video - some USB debug information about carrier iq.

LATimes | Carrier IQ, the beleagured online metrics company that has been accused of installing spy software on millions of smartphones, has broken its silence to say the critics have it wrong.

"While a few individuals have identified that there is a great deal of information available to the Carrier IQ software inside the handset, our software does not record, store or transmit the contents of SMS messages, email, photographs, audio or video," the company said in a statement released late Thursday.

The firm's defense came as as politicians and privacy organizations continued to question the little-known Mountain View, Calif., company, which designs communications analysis software used by some of the largest U.S. wireless carriers, including AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. The carriers say data collected on their behalf by Carrier IQ helps them improve their service.

Last week, 25-year-old system administrator named Trevor Eckhart released a video (above) purporting to show Carrier IQ's app recording smartphone users' every keypress, and implying that the company was therefore able to intercept users' private communications.

But security researchers have disagreed with conclusions drawn from Eckhart's analysis.

"It's not true," said Dan Rosenberg, a senior consultant at Virtual Security Research, who said the video shows only diagnostic information and at no point provides evidence the data is stored or sent back to Carrier IQ.

"I've reverse engineered the software myself at a fairly good level of detail," Rosenberg said. "They're not recording keystroke information, they're using keystroke events as part of the application."

The difference is subtle but important. To perform commands, applications need to know which buttons a user has pushed: Your email app needs to know when you tap the reply button, and your phone app needs to know which numbers you press in order to dial. Applications therefore pay attention to which buttons a user is pressing.

But listening for a button press does not mean an application is therefore sending a record of those button presses back to the company, researchers said.

System-related apps like Carrier IQ often allow users or phone engineers to tap a series of keys in order to bring up administrative options or to display information on the phone's performance. In order to show that data, apps needs to know the correct code was tapped in -- by identifying specific key presses, as it is shown doing in the video.

But Rosenberg said his look at the Carrier IQ program revealed "a complete absence of code" that would indicate key presses were being tracked and recorded or sent over the Internet by the phone.

Instead, the readouts on Eckhart's video that occur when he presses keys are "debugging messages" -- informational feedback meant to help smartphone programmers verify that their applications are working correctly. In this case, Carrier IQ's developers appear to have set up the program to display a diagnostic message when a key is pressed or when a text message is sent.

"It's just spitting debug messages to the internal Android log service," sad Jon Oberheide, a co-founder of Duo Security. "It appears that Carrier IQ is indeed collecting some metrics, but I have not seen any evidence that keystrokes, SMS messages or Web browsing session content are being transferred off the device."

Carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint have long disclosed that they collect and store information about users' locations, phone records and text messages. But what appeared to unnerve consumers and privacy observers was the possibility that the companies had gone a step further and were monitoring nearly every action a user performed on the phone.

about that little cootie in your droid...,

HuffPo | You might have heard about Carrier IQ, software that comes pre-installed on millions of smartphones that has the capability to record and store your keystrokes, the text messages you send and receive, the Internet websites you visit and more. If you own a smartphone -- a BlackBerry, an iPhone, an Android, a Windows Phone, whatever -- you are probably wondering whether or not Carrier IQ is on your smartphone, and if it is, how you can remove it.

Here is a rundown of everything we know about Carrier IQ, OS by OS. For a full background on Carrier IQ, what it does and why it has so many people nervous, read my colleague Gerry Smith's thorough piece from earlier.

ANDROID
The furor over Carrier IQ started with the discovery of the nosy software on Android smartphones and is only getting noisier (Senator Al Franken recently asked Carrier IQ for an explanation of its practices).

Unless you have a rooted Android device, you won't be able to see if your phone is running Carrier IQ. But here's what we know:

No Nexus smartphones (the Google Nexus One, the Nexus S and the Galaxy Nexus) have Carrier IQ software, according to a source who spoke with The Verge. That source also claimed that no Motorola Xoom tablets have Carrier IQ.

- Verizon, the largest mobile carrier in the United States, told GigaOM in an email that it did not install Carrier IQ on any of its smartphones.

- Sprint has issued a statement to The Verge. They do use Carrier IQ -- from their statement

Carrier IQ provides information that allows Sprint, and other carriers that use it, to analyze our network performance and identify where we should be improving service. We also use the data to understand device performance so we can figure out when issues are occurring. We collect enough information to understand the customer experience with devices on our network and how to address any connection problems, but we do not and cannot look at the contents of messages, photos, videos, etc., using this tool. The information collected is not sold and we don't provide a direct feed of this data to anyone outside of Sprint.

- AT&T and T-Mobile have not yet issued statements.

- The Kindle Fire tested negative for Carrier IQ, per Gizmodo.

- On Android phones, developer Trevor Eckhart has written an app that can detect and possibly remove Carrier IQ; however, your Android phone has to be "rooted," a step that the non-tech-savvy probably should not take. Better to wait for Carrier IQ and the carriers to resolve this mess than to risk bricking your phone, voiding the warranty or opening yourself up to malware.

WINDOWS PHONE
- 9to5Mac reports that Windows Phone appears to be totally free of Carrier IQ.

BLACKBERRY
Research in Motion told Business Insider that its phones do not have Carrier IQ preinstalled, nor does it authorize its carriers to do so. This does not mean, however, that carriers have not installed Carrier IQ without authorization.

The full statement:

RIM is aware of a recent claim by a security researcher that an application called “CarrierIQ” is installed on mobile devices from multiple vendors without the knowledge or consent of the device users. RIM does not pre-install the CarrierIQ app on BlackBerry smartphones or authorize its carrier partners to install the CarrierIQ app before sales or distribution. RIM also did not develop or commission the development of the CarrierIQ application, and has no involvement in the testing, promotion, or distribution of the app. RIM will continue to investigate reports and speculation related to CarrierIQ.

IPHONE
Noted iOS hacker chpwn found traces of Carrier IQ in iPhones running iOS 3.1.1 and up -- all the way up to iOS 5. However, it appears that the verison of Carrier IQ installed was tracking much less information than it was on Android phones.

it's all downhill from here...,

Video - Decadence: Decline of the Western World documentary trailer.

SMH | LET'S not exaggerate. This is not the end of days. It is merely the end of civilisation as we know it.

That is the sobering argument made in Decadence: Decline of the Western World. Five years in the making, the Australian documentary proposes that the West peaked in 1969 and is now dying.

''The West as we know it today begins with the Magna Carta in 1215,'' Pria Viswalingam, who wrote, produced and appears in the documentary, says.
Advertisement: Story continues below

''Then came the Renaissance, the founding of America and the Enlightenment, before the West peaked with the social revolutions of the 1960s.

''And 1969 was the peak. The Russians and the Americans took us beyond our earthly bounds, the My Lai Massacre shattered the image of us as the good guys and then there was all the sheer exuberance and peace, love and rock'n'roll of Woodstock before the Rolling Stones 'end of the '60s' concert at Altamont. Decadence depicts the West's decline ever since.''

Viswalingam is a former SBS TV presenter whose credits include Fork in the Road and Class. Having devoted a career to analysing culture and society, he says the symptoms of decay and decadence are unmistakeable.

Those symptoms include soaring suicide rates and the West's addiction to antidepressants. They include rampant individualism, emptying churches, a faltering sense of community and disintegrating families. And they include the West's obsessive devotion to money as the only true measure of worth.

''Treadmill consumption, growing income disparity, B-grade leadership, they're obvious signs of a culture adrift,'' he says.

"scientists" say it may be alright...,

LATimes | "Scientifically, these compounds are way too important not to study," said Johns Hopkins psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths, who conducted the psilocybin trial.

In their next incarnation, these drugs may help the psychologically wounded tune in to their darkest feelings and memories and turn therapy sessions into heightened opportunities to learn and heal.

"We're trying to break a social mind-set saying these are strictly drugs of abuse," said Rick Doblin, a public policy expert who founded the Multidisciplinary Assn. for Psychedelic Studies in 1986 to encourage research on therapeutic uses for medical marijuana and hallucinogens. "It's not the drug but how the drug is used that matters."

Regulators and medical researchers remain wary. But among at least some experts at the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, the shift in attitude "has been dramatic," Doblin said.

Researchers explored the usefulness of hallucinogenic agents as an adjunct to psychotherapy in the 1950s and '60s. But allegations that hallucinogens were used in government-funded "mind control" efforts, freewheeling experimentation by proponents like Dr. Timothy Leary, and the drugs' appeal to a generation in revolt quashed legitimate research for decades.

The thaw has been slow in coming. In 2008, Griffiths co-wrote a report in the Journal of Psychopharmacology comparing psilocybin with a placebo for people dealing with incurable diseases. Psilocybin resulted in "mystical experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance," according to the study, the first since 1972 to explore a hallucinogen's therapeutic value.

i think not...,

Wired | Technologists will become the next drug dealers, administering narcotics through brain stimulation, according to Rohit Talwar, the founder of Fast Future Research, speaking at Intelligence Squared’s If conference.

Talwar was charged by the government to investigate the drugs landscape over the next 20 years, exploring scenarios going beyond the traditional model of gangs producing and shipping drugs around the world.

He described how the world of genomic sequencing and services such as 23 and Me open up possibilities for tailoring drugs to the individual, delivering effects based on your physiology — which could apply just as effectively to narcotics as it could medicines.

He cited research from the University of California, Berkeley where neuroscientists were able to replicate images people were seeing based on the brain patterns of activity. When combined with transcranial magnetic stimulation — which has been used to inhibit brain functions such as the ability to speak or remember — it opens up the possibility of electronically delivering targeted highs.

He said: “You could also visualize the experience and then tailor the effect to what you want. This nano-bio-info-cogno convergence gets us into some very interesting spheres.”

One scenario he imagines would make use of biological proteins manufactured with information-processing technology to deliver effects that could be triggered by electromagnetic stimulation. He imagined that they could be used in a club environment where the DJ would release nanoparticles that the audience could ingest. These could then be used to trigger the desired state at a particular point during his or her set using an electrical stimulus (from a headset) into the crowd’s brains.

“The more we can understand the brain, the more we can deliver positive effects such as improved memory function. Do you want to get high? Mellow? Actually I want to live my life in my head as half-human half-cat,” he joked.

This sort of situation would mean that regulation of these “drugs” would move from trying to stop people from producing them to quality control. This sort of future could eliminate the cartels that control the drugs trade at the moment, because pharmaceutical companies might be able to corner the market and guarantee the quality of the experiences. Fist tap Dale.

the great antidepressant hypocrisy

Alternet | America’s ambivalent relationship with drugs and medication pushes us to ignore critical differences between drugs, while failing to appreciate useful similarities. When the Center for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced that one in ten Americans now takes an antidepressant—a 400% increase since 1988—there was a predictable media hand-wringing about "pill popping” and a rush to “quick fixes.”



What I always wonder when I hear these complaints is this: Have these people ever experienced depression themselves, or known someone who suffers from it? In over 20 years reporting on mental health, I’ve never actually come across a person whose first response to the slightest sadness was to seek medical help. (If you are or know of such a person, please do contact me—I’d love an interview).



In fact—and the research backs this up—most people with depression typically go untreated for years, or even decades, before finally getting treated. They often (as I personally did) tend to get lost in long, dangerous experiments in self-medication with legal or illegal drugs. Truth is, most people are reluctant to try antidepressants, rather than eagerly “ask their doctors” for the latest pill.



So why do we persist in believing that depression is over-medicated and everyone is popping Prozac like candy? The first reason is the cultural notion that mental illness should be rare.

Occupy Wall Street as a Node of Resonance

spaceandpolitics | The North American insurrection began when a handful of people occupied public space and began producing resonance. This is the material force that toppled three political regimes in North Africa and can only be produced by multitudes coming together on the streets. Liberty Square became a human assemblage that debates, eats, sings, drums, marches, sleeps, and dreams together and, in doing so, turns space into a machine of resonance generation. This resonance is embodied in the human mic that makes bodies speak in unison and vibrate together. The node of resonance in New York has radiated its force in all directions and precipitated the emergence of a continental political movement whose spatial form is the rhizome: a de-centered, horizontal, multi-sited assemblage of myriad other nodes interconnected with each other and recognizing no authority other than the collective power generated by the nodes.

The temporality of this spatial form, also generated in Tunisia and Egypt, seems historically unique and deserves closer scrutiny. In what follows I seek to examine the shifting spatial form and affective pulsations of the nodes that make up the local articulations of a leaderless anti-capitalist network.

Nodes of resonance expand by affecting people elsewhere and making them resonate. But this expansion only takes place if it involves receptive audiences. Countless nodes of resonance dissipate because they encounter a limit in audiences that are not affected, or are affected negatively. In North America, the inspiration created by the node of resonance on Tahrir Square and the despair generated by Obama’s unapologetic embrace of the capitalist looters finally created a more receptive political topography, a fertile ground for the expansion and multiplication of anti-systemic spatial nodes.

Decagonal and Quasi-Crystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture

Peter Lu | The conventional view holds that girih (geometric star-and-polygon) patterns in medieval Islamic architecture were conceived by their designers as a network of zigzagging lines, where the lines were drafted directly with a straightedge and a compass. We show that by 1200 C.E. a conceptual breakthrough occurred in which girih patterns were reconceived as tessellations of a special set of equilateral polygons (girih tiles) decorated with lines. These tiles enabled the creation of increasingly complex periodic girih patterns, and by the 15th century, the tessellation approach was combined with self-similar transformations to construct nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries before their discovery in the West.

magic trip: ken kesey's search for a cool place

In 1964, Ken Kesey, the 29-year-old author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, gathered a group of friends for a freewheeling cross-country road trip. They painted a school bus psychedelic colors (a first), dropped acid, and shot the whole thing on 16mm...

a truly great loss indeed...,

The Scientist | Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis died last week (November 22) at the age of 73. She was best known for proposing the theory of endosymbiosis, which states that rather than evolving via genetic mutation, new species were more likely to have come about via parasitic or symbiotic relationships that became permanently inter-dependent over time.

“She was always stimulating; she always had a new idea, some new connection she had seen and she couldn’t wait to tell you about,” Steve Goodwin, Dean of the College of Natural Resources
 and the Environment told MassLive.com.

Margulis showed early aptitude in science, enrolling at the University of Chicago and earning her bachelor’s degree in zoology by the age of 18. Shortly thereafter she married her first husband, the astronomer Carl Sagan. The marriage ended by the time she got her doctorate in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965.

She developed her ideas on symbiosis in the late 1960s, and tried to publish her ideas in 15 journals before finally being accepted by the Journal of Theoretical Biology, according to The New York Times. Though it was highly controversial at the time, serial symbiosis is widely accepted among evolutionary scientists today.

In the 1970s, she became a supporter of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which proposed that the earth could be thought of as a complex system whose atmospheric and mineral components existed in symbiosis with living organisms, allowing biota as a whole to self-perpetuate.

She taught evolutionary biology for nearly 40 years, first at the Boston University and then at the University of Massachusetts, where I had the opportunity to experience her carefully crafted course. I came to the class expecting Margulis to expound on the theories that she had championed. Instead, she exposed our small seminar class to the experiments of many researchers whose work provided evidence for her ideas, and invited us to make own conclusions.

“If science doesn’t fit in with the cultural milieu, people dismiss science—they never reject their cultural milieu!” said Margulis in the book The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. In the same chapter, Richard Dawkins wrote: “I greatly admire Lynn Margulis’s sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy.”

According to The New York Times, Margulis died from a stroke. She is survived by a daughter Jennifer Margulis and three sons Dorion Sagan, Jeremy Sagan, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma.

williams syndrome may hold clues to autism, other disorders

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

MSNBC | Researchers have puzzled over that extreme friendliness for decades, pondering the causes and complicated traits that go with the syndrome that affects 1 in every 10,000 people, says Ursula Bellugi, a researcher at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., who has studied the disorder for a quarter-century.

They've come to believe that Williams syndrome, which is characterized by unique genetic markers and distinct behaviors, may actually hold the secrets to understanding other better-known disorders — including autism.

'Brink of a whole new world'
“We’re on the brink of a whole new world,” says Bellugi, 80, a professor and director of Salk’s Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience.

Now, thanks to a $5.5 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bellugi and team of prominent scientists are poised to use Williams syndrome to decode the ties between human genes and the way people act.

"We want to know: Are there links across the levels from the genes to behavior?" said Bellugi, who is leading a five-project program.

related to the microsychronization of body language hypothesis...,

Video - Paul Eckman talks about the genuine smile.

BBCNews | Researchers say people can spot whether a complete stranger has a certain "social gene" in just 20 seconds.

Two variants of the "oxytocin receptor gene" have been linked with social traits.

People judging the empathy of strangers - by studying the way they listened to people - predicted the genetic variant, a University of Toronto study showed.

The hormone oxytocin has a role in birth, production of milk and bonding between mother and baby.

It also seems to have a role in social skills and has variously been called the "love" or "cuddle" chemical.

Two variants of the oxytocin receptor gene - termed G and A - have been linked to social behaviour.

Studies have shown that people with two copies of G, compared with one of each or two of A, are at lower risk of autism and report higher levels of empathy, positive emotions and said they were more social.
Silent movie

Twenty three couples were filmed for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study. One described a moment of personal suffering while their partner listened.

Strangers then watched a 20 second silent recording of the exchange and scored the listener for their "prosocial traits", such as a caring nature or empathy.

GG people were found to be more prosocial than AG or AA people.

In the top 10 most trusted people, six were GG. In the 10 least trusted people, nine had at least one copy of A.

One of the researchers, Dr Aleksandr Kogan from the University of Toronto, said: "Our findings suggest even slight genetic variation may have tangible impact on people's behaviour, and that these behavioural differences are quickly noticed by others.

"Our study asked the question of whether these differences manifest themselves in behaviours that are quickly detectable by strangers, and it turns out they did."

Prof Sarina Rodrigues Saturn, from Oregon State University, said: "It was amazing to see how the data aligned so strongly by genotype.

"It makes sense that a gene crucial for social processing would yield these findings; other studies have shown that people are good at judging people at a distance and first impressions really make an impact." Fist tap Dale.

psychopaths have brain issues

Video - Paul Eckman talks about microexpressions in lie detection.

Newswise | Images of prisoners’ brains show important differences between those who are diagnosed as psychopaths and those who aren’t, according to a new study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.

The results could help explain the callous and impulsive anti-social behavior exhibited by some psychopaths.

The study showed that psychopaths have reduced connections between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), the part of the brain responsible for sentiments such as empathy and guilt, and the amygdala, which mediates fear and anxiety. Two types of brain images were collected. Diffusion tensor images (DTI) showed reduced structural integrity in the white matter fibers connecting the two areas, while a second type of image that maps brain activity, a functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI), showed less coordinated activity between the vmPFC and the amygdala.

“This is the first study to show both structural and functional differences in the brains of people diagnosed with psychopathy,” says Michael Koenigs, assistant professor of psychiatry in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “Those two structures in the brain, which are believed to regulate emotion and social behavior, seem to not be communicating as they should.”

The study, which took place in a medium-security prison in Wisconsin, is a unique collaborative between three laboratories,

UW-Madison psychology Professor Joseph Newman has had a long term interest in studying and diagnosing those with psychopathy and has worked extensively in the Wisconsin corrections system. Dr. Kent Kiehl, of the University of New Mexico and the MIND Research Network, has a mobile MRI scanner that he brought to the prison and used to scan the prisoners’ brains. Koenigs and his graduate student, Julian Motzkin, led the analysis of the brain scans.

The study compared the brains of 20 prisoners with a diagnosis of psychopathy with the brains of 20 other prisoners who committed similar crimes but were not diagnosed with psychopathy.

“The combination of structural and functional abnormalities provides compelling evidence that the dysfunction observed in this crucial social-emotional circuitry is a stable characteristic of our psychopathic offenders,’’ Newman says. “I am optimistic that our ongoing collaborative work will shed more light on the source of this dysfunction and strategies for treating the problem.”

Newman notes that none of this work would be possible without the extraordinary support provided by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, which he called “the silent partner in this research.” He says the DOC has demonstrated an unprecedented commitment to supporting research designed to facilitate the differential diagnosis and treatment of prisoners.

The study, published in the most recent Journal of Neuroscience, builds on earlier work by Newman and Koenigs that showed that psychopaths' decision-making mirrors that of patients with known damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). This bolsters evidence that problems in that part of the brain are connected to the disorder.

“The decision-making study showed indirectly what this study shows directly – that there is a specific brain abnormality associated with criminal psychopathy,’’

schwaller de lubicz foretold the stygian depths of this evil...,

Video - Chris Busby on the abyssal reaches of the unspeakable.

ConflictandHealth | Background - Recent reports have drawn attention to increases in congenital birth anomalies and cancer in Fallujah Iraq blamed on teratogenic, genetic and genomic stress thought to result from depleted Uranium contamination following the battles in the town in 2004. Contamination of the parents of the children and of the environment by Uranium and other elements was investigated using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry. Hair samples from 25 fathers and mothers of children diagnosed with congenital anomalies were analysed for Uranium and 51 other elements. Mean ages of the parents was: fathers 29.6 (SD 6.2); mothers: 27.3 (SD 6.8). For a sub-group of 6 women, long locks of hair were analysed for Uranium along the length of the hair to obtain information about historic exposures. Samples of soil and water were also analysed and Uranium isotope ratios determined.

Results
Levels of Ca, Mg, Co, Fe, Mn, V, Zn, Sr, Al, Ba, Bi, Ga, Pb, Hg, Pd and U (for mothers only) were significantly higher than published mean levels in an uncontaminated population in Sweden. In high excess were Ca, Mg, Sr, Al, Bi and Hg. Of these only Hg can be considered as a possible cause of congenital anomaly. Mean levels for Uranium were 0.16 ppm (SD: 0.11) range 0.02 to 0.4, higher in mothers (0.18 ppm SD 0.09) than fathers (0.11 ppm; SD 0.13). The highly unusual non-normal Fallujah distribution mean was significantly higher than literature results for a control population Southern Israel (0.062 ppm) and a non-parametric test (Mann Whitney-Wilcoxon) gave p = 0.016 for this comparison of the distribution. Mean levels in Fallujah were also much higher than the mean of measurements reported from Japan, Brazil, Sweden and Slovenia (0.04 ppm SD 0.02). Soil samples show low concentrations with a mean of 0.76 ppm (SD 0.42) and range 0.1-1.5 ppm; (N = 18). However it may be consistent with levels in drinking water (2.28 μgL-1) which had similar levels to water from wells (2.72 μgL-1) and the river Euphrates (2.24 μgL-1). In a separate study of a sub group of mothers with long hair to investigate historic Uranium excretion the results suggested that levels were much higher in the past. Uranium traces detected in the soil samples and the hair showed slightly enriched isotopic signatures for hair U238/U235 = (135.16 SD 1.45) compared with the natural ratio of 137.88. Soil sample Uranium isotope ratios were determined after extraction and concentration of the Uranium by ion exchange. Results showed statistically significant presence of enriched Uranium with a mean of 129 with SD5.9 (for this determination, the natural Uranium 95% CI was 132.1 < Ratio < 144.1).

Conclusions
Whilst caution must be exercised about ruling out other possibilities, because none of the elements found in excess are reported to cause congenital diseases and cancer except Uranium, these findings suggest the enriched Uranium exposure is either a primary cause or related to the cause of the congenital anomaly and cancer increases. Questions are thus raised about the characteristics and composition of weapons now being deployed in modern battlefields.

UH-UNH!!! that deadly radioactive waste y'alls now!!!

AsahiShimbun | During court proceedings concerning a radioactive golf course, Tokyo Electric Power Co. stunned lawyers by saying the utility was not responsible for decontamination because it no longer "owned" the radioactive substances.

“Radioactive materials (such as cesium) that scattered and fell from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant belong to individual landowners there, not TEPCO,” the utility said.

That argument did not sit well with the companies that own and operate the Sunfield Nihonmatsu Golf Club, just 45 kilometers west of the stricken TEPCO plant in Fukushima Prefecture.

The Tokyo District Court also rejected that idea.

But in a ruling described as inconsistent by lawyers, the court essentially freed TEPCO from responsibility for decontamination work, saying the cleanup efforts should be done by the central and local governments.

Although the legal battle has moved to a higher court, observers said that if the district court’s decision stands and becomes a precedent, local governments' coffers could be drained.

The two golf companies in August filed for a provisional disposition with the Tokyo District Court, demanding TEPCO decontaminate the golf course and pay about 87 million yen ($1.13 million) for the upkeep costs over six months.

TEPCO's argument over ownership of the radioactive substances drew a sharp response from lawyers representing the Sunfield Nihonmatsu Golf Club and owner Sunfield.

“It is common sense that worthless substances such as radioactive fallout would not belong to landowners,” one of the lawyers said. “We are flabbergasted at TEPCO’s argument.”

koch bros got a "first call" from mf global...,

Video - Max Keiser on MF Global and a Koch Bros/MF Global hook-up

frank miller and the rise of cryptofascist hollywood

Guardian | The film 300, directed by Zack Snyder, based on a Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name, is just what you would expect from the heavily freighted right-wing filmic propaganda of the post-9/11 period: the Greeks, from which our own putative democracies are descended, must fight to the death against a vast but incompetent army of Persians (those hordes of the Middle East), who are considered here unworthy of characterisation – in fact, every character in the film is unworthy of characterisation – and the noble Spartans (the Greeks in question) achieve heroism despite their glorious deaths on the field at Thermopylae, by virtue of the moral superiority of their belief system and their unmatched courage. Ruthless enemy! From the Middle East! Heroic, rugged individualists! A big, sentimental score! Lots and lots of blue-screen! Endless amounts of body parts spewing theatrical blood!

It's a barely watchable film, but what from Hollywood these days is not similarly unwatchable, when so many high-profile releases are based on a medium, the comic book, made expressly to engage the attentions of pre- and just post-pubescent boys. At least comic books themselves are so politically dim-witted, so pie-in-the-sky idealistic as to be hard to take seriously. But in the films of this era, the Marvel and DC era of Hollywood, even when the work is not self-evidently shilling for large corporations (with product placement) or militating for a libertarian and oligarchical political status quo (which makes a fine environment for large, multinational corporations), the work is doing nothing at all to oppose these things. Paying your $12.50, these days, is not unlike doing a few lines of cocaine and pretending you don't know about the headless bodies in Juarez.

With this in mind, an honest recognition of cinematic propaganda, we shouldn't be shocked by Frank Miller's comments about Occupy Wall Street. It is naive to be shocked by them. But let's evaluate the particulars of his remarks just the same. Miller tries to repel the OWS message ("Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty titbits of narcissism you've been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you've heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism") by reminding us that we are at war. This despite the fact that OWS is focused primarily on income inequality, and thus mainly taken up with domestic politics, such that OWS doesn't really take a position on the "ruthless enemy" and doesn't need to. Miller's particular approach, the warmongering approach, is self-evidently reminiscent of the Bush/Cheney years, in which any domestic reversal was followed by an elevated level on the colour-coded risk-assessment wheel. But in this post-Iraq war moment – when the most aggravated conspiracies we seem to have in New York City involve, for example, a lone Dominican guy who advertises his hatred of the government on Facebook and who may have been entrapped by local police – our "ruthless enemy" just doesn't seem quite as numerous as Miller's Persian hordes.

Beyond Bush-Cheney fear-mongering, Miller's further complaint seems to be that people who camped outdoors in Zuccotti Park for two months were not terribly clean. (The Spartans were no doubt tidier in Thermopylae.) But if the crowd of 32,000 who turned up to march in NYC last Thursday – after the "pond scum" had been ejected from the park – are any indication, this hygiene issue is no longer a reliable talking point for Miller (or for Newt Gingrich, the rightwing posterboy of the late 80s who has now entered the race for the Republican presidential noimination). The 32,000 included some professional types, at least one retired police officer and lots of elderly people, many of whom had recently showered. Same thing at UC Davis, and at Berkeley. Those college kids usually have showers in their dorms.

Miller also accuses the OWS protesters of being too technologically savvy. For example, he accuses them of playing Lords of Warcraft. Now, I admit it, I know nothing of multiplayer online role-playing games, nor do I own an iPhone nor an iPad. Nevertheless, I maintain I am correct in imagining that what Miller actually means here is World of Warcraft. This superficial mistake (suggests what should be plain: that Miller wrote his jeremiad quickly, perhaps late at night, when a lack of restraint is often linked with the onset of unconsciousness. He didn't bother to reread it. He therefore overlooks at least one obvious point. Namely, no one is more likely to play World of Warcraft than the kind of adolescent boy who also thinks 300 is quality cinematic product.

Miller's hard-right, pro-military point of view is not only accounted for in his own work, but in the larger project of mainstream Hollywood cinema. American movies, in the main, often agree with Frank Miller, that endless war against a ruthless enemy is good, and military service is good, that killing makes you a man, that capitalism must prevail, that if you would just get a job (preferably a corporate job, for all honest work is corporate) you would quit complaining. American movies say these things, but they are more polite about it, lest they should offend. The kind of comic-book-oriented cinema that has afflicted Hollywood for 10 years now, since Spider-Man, has degraded the cinematic art, and has varnished over what was once a humanist form, so Hollywood can do little but repeat the platitudes of the 1%. And yet Hollywood tries still not to offend.

Does that make American cinema cryptofascist? Is "cryptofascist" a word that you can use in an essay like this? I keep trying to find a space somewhere between "propagandistic" and "cryptofascist" to describe my feelings about Miller's screed. But perhaps it's more accurate to say the following: whatever mainstream Hollywood cinema is now, Frank Miller is part of it. And Frank Miller has done Occupy Wall Street a service by reminding us that our allegedly democratic political system, which increases inequality and decreases class mobility, which is mostly interested in keeping the disenfranchised where they are, requires a mindless, propagandistic (or "cryptofascist") storytelling medium to distract its citizenry. We should be grateful for the reminder. And we might repay the favor by avoiding purchase of tickets to Miller's films.

surplus labor and the inevitability of the cull...,

NYTimes | AMERICA, like other modern countries, has always had some surplus workers — people ready to work but jobless for extended periods because the “job creators,” private and public, have been unable or unwilling to create sufficient jobs. When the number of surplus workers rose sharply, the country also had ways of reducing it.

However, the current jobless recovery, and the concurrent failure to create enough new jobs, is breeding a new and growing surplus pool. And some in this pool are in danger of becoming superfluous, likely never to work again.

The currently jobless and the so-called discouraged workers, who have given up looking for work, total about 15 percent of the work force, not including the invisible discouraged workers the government cannot even find to count.

In the old days — before Social Security, welfare and Medicaid — poverty-caused illnesses killed off or incapacitated some of the people who could not find jobs. Even earlier, some nations sold their surplus workers as slaves, while the European countries could send them to the colonies.

In addition, wars were once labor-intensive enterprises that absorbed the surplus temporarily, and sufficient numbers of those serving in the infantry and on warships were killed or seriously enough injured so that they could not add to the peacetime labor surplus.

The old ways of reducing surplus labor are, however, disappearing. Decades of medical and public health advances, as well as Medicare and Medicaid, have reduced the number of poverty-related deaths. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have left many more service members injured than killed.

Over the past quarter-century, one very costly way of decreasing the surplus has been the imprisonment of people, mostly dark-skinned men, for actual and invented offenses. Felons are not often hired when they leave prison. Many, at least those who do not become recidivists, become surplus and then superfluous labor. As incarceration becomes less affordable for financially strapped states, inmates will reach surplus or superfluous status at a younger age.

Meanwhile, new ways of increasing surplus labor have appeared. One is the continued outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries; the other is the continuing computerization and mechanization of manufacturing and of services not requiring hands-on human contact. Continuing increases in worker productivity add yet more to the surplus. So does the unwillingness of employers to even consider hiring people who have been unemployed for a long time.

When the jobless recovery ends and the economy is restored to good health, today’s surplus will be reduced. New technology and the products and services that accompany it will create new jobs. But unless the economy itself changes, eventually many of these innovations may be turned over to machines or the jobs may be sent to lower-wage economies.

In fact, if modern capitalism continues to eliminate as many jobs as it creates — or more jobs than it creates — future recoveries will not only add to the amount of surplus labor but will turn a growing proportion of workers into superfluous ones. Fist tap Nana.

the poor, the near poor, and you...,

NYTimes | What is it like to be poor? Thankfully, most Americans do not know, at least not firsthand. And times are tough for the middle class. But everyone needs to recognize a chilling reality: One in three Americans — 100 million people — is either poor or perilously close to it.

The Times’s Jason DeParle, Robert Gebeloff and Sabrina Tavernise reported recently on Census data showing that 49.1 million Americans are below the poverty line — in general, $24,343 for a family of four. An additional 51 million are in the next category, which they termed “near poor” — with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line.

As for all of that inspirational, up-by-their-bootstrap talk you hear on the Republican campaign trail, over half of the near poor in the new tally actually fell into that group from higher income levels as their resources were sapped by medical expenses, taxes, work-related costs and other unavoidable outlays.

The worst downturn since the Great Depression is only part of the problem. Before that, living standards were already being eroded by stagnating wages and tax and economic policies that favored the wealthy.

Conservative politicians and analysts are spouting their usual denial. Gov. Rick Perry and Representative Michele Bachmann have called for taxing the poor and near poor more heavily, on the false grounds that they have been getting a free ride. In fact, low-income workers do pay up, if not in federal income taxes, then in payroll taxes and state and local taxes.

Asked about the new census data, Robert Rector, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation told The Times that the “emotionally charged terms ‘poor’ or ‘near poor’ clearly suggest to most people a level of material hardship that doesn’t exist.” Heritage has its own, very different ranking system, based on households’ “amenities.” According to that, the typical poor household has roughly 14 of 30 amenities. In other words, how hard can things be if you have a refrigerator, air-conditioner, coffee maker, cellphone, and other stuff?

The rankings ignore the fact that many of these are requisites of modern life and that things increasingly out of reach for the poor and near poor — education, health care, child care, housing and utilities — are the true determinants of a good, upwardly mobile life.

the truth about the crackdown on Occupy

Guardian | The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality. US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

you're already in the Greatest Depression...,

Video - Steve Keen: Government should print money to pay off our debts

BBCNews | Economist Steve Keen is one of the few economists to have predicted the global financial crisis and now he says we are already in a Great Depression. He says the way to escape it is to bankrupt the banks, nationalise the financial system and pay off people's debt.

He admits what he is advocating is radical but says it is time governments gave money to debtors to pay down debt instead of to creditors such as banks who have held onto it.

occupy democracy

Video - Robert Reich; The Real Public Nuisance

MovetoAmend | On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions.

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule. We Move to Amend.

Read our proposed amendment.

January 20, 2012: Move to Amend Occupies the Courts!

Inspired by our friends at Occupy Wall Street, and Dr. Cornel West, Move To Amend is planning bold action to mark the second anniversary of the infamous Citizens United v. FEC decision!

Occupy the Courts will be a one day occupation of Federal courthouses across the country, including the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Friday January 20, 2012.

Move to Amend volunteers across the USA will lead the charge on the judiciary which created — and continues to expand — corporate personhood rights.

Americans across the country are on the march, and they are marching OUR way. They carry signs that say, “Corporations are NOT people! Money is NOT Speech!” And they are chanting those truths at the top of their lungs! The time has come to make these truths evident to the courts.

Join us Friday, January 20, 2012 at a Federal Court building near you!

when they came after ward churchill

Video - Documentary in Ward Churchill and the little Eichmanns controversy.

Wikipedia | Ward Churchill, former ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote an essay in September 2001 titled Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens about the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which he argued that American foreign policies provoked the attacks. He described what he called the "technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire" in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns," i.e. as those who banally conduct their duties in the service of evil.

In response to 2005 publicity from the mass media and in weblogs, Churchill was both widely condemned and widely defended. Some defenders who did not agree with Churchill's analysis and/or with his inflammatory phrasing nonetheless felt that the attacks on Churchill represented efforts at intimidation against academic discourse and suppression of political dissent.

At the height of the controversy, the University ordered an inquiry into Churchill's research, and then fired him on July 24, 2007, leading to a claim from some scholars that he was fired over the ideas he expressed. Churchill filed a lawsuit against the University of Colorado for unlawful termination of employment. In April 2009 a Denver jury found that Churchill was wrongly fired, awarding him $1 in damages. On July 7, 2009, Judge Larry Naves vacated the ruling and determined that the university does not have to rehire or pay Churchill.

whiteRabbit

Video - Excavating an ant megalopolis

organelle | “The kingdom of the insects on Earth dwarfs our human population to insignificance. Although we share the same surface area, insects are barely aware of human presence unless we swat them, cropdust, step on an ant mound, or examine them under our microscopes. As far as the vast insect world is concerned, contact with humans is a rare and usually traumatic occurrence. Such is the narrow focus of insects.

Likewise, perhaps a species of greater intelligence, greater technology, and much smaller population coexists with us on Earth, living who-knows-where, and only infrequently do they step on our "nests" of humanity, or examine us under their microscopes. Perhaps we cannot even recognize the presence of the "Others" unless it's a case of deliberate interference on their part, a rare and traumatic occurrence. Such is the narrow focus of humans.” — Charles Miller, from Home Field Advantage, The Anomalist: 8, Spring 2000

My own experience is that even a single instance of what we call ‘an insect’ is ‘more than any alien we could invent’, and so are the animals and plants, funguses, bacteria, etc. The unified body of the insectoid intelligence of Terra is so far beyond anything we can model it puts the sum of our fantastic fictions to shame. The problem around Earth is not ‘where are the aliens?’, it’s the opposite: Why is everything everywhere swimming in aliens whose intelligence and prowess we cannot credential?

Allow me to suggest that as a species, humanity is ‘missing a crucial idea’ from our lexicons of ‘what stuff is’. The crucial idea is simple: the game is about transtemporally distributed multi-sentience. Forget competition, that’s a token standing in the way of us seeing what’s actually going on around here.

Now, and for the last 4.5 billion years, the only game in town has been this: pure alien. The unfortunate cause for the ignorance and isolation of our species from each other and our potentials is simple: we’re taught to be xenophobic, and to have hysterically violent responses to novelty. As a species, we enact these ‘ways of knowing’ catastrophically, such that our intelligence actually inverts and becomes a sophisticated mimetic momentum which we are bound to feed and accomplish in our minds and world. The ‘opposite of knowing’ — omnicide.

It is crucial that we understand: we live right now in a universe where a local life-form as ‘simple’ as a slug is already billions of ‘times’ more elegant than the sum of technology our species will ever produce. It’s hard to explain how significant this is, because understanding it clearly changes what a human mind is and may become. The truth of our planet is so beyond our understanding that we must find a way to step outside all of what we’ve come to know, before we can have any hope of glimpsing what is right here, now, accessible and present. We don’t have to discard what we believe we’ve learned, but we do need to be able to set all of it completely aside, and go look — together, in person, at what and who is actually going on around here. It’s nothing like the models we’ve been pretending around. At all.

the arch of metahistory: eternal conflict

Video - Prehistoric figurations of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca

metahistory | Both myth and science seem to agree on an ontology in which the universe is catastrophically transformative, from the supernova to the binary star to the Cretaceous Extinction. If science is telling us the truth, then myth has not been lying to us about the war in heaven — William Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape

To create society within the setting of a natural habitat raises many complex issues regarding how human needs may conflict with the environment or harmonize with it. Stories of an original paradisical state or Golden Age may be more than mere fantasies about the mysterious past of humanity. These myths encode the belief that humankind lived without conflict when it was totally immersed in the bond with Sacred Nature. (Basic Reading: Memories and Visions of Paradise)

When it departs from that bond, everything changes.

In the arch of metahistory, the left-hand side represents the long passage from evolutionary roots in prehistory to the recorded origins of civilization. Long before the first evidence of historical origins — for instance, the earliest traces of the first Dynasty in Egypt, dated to around 3400 BCE — the human species had been engaged in defining itself as distinct from nature, forming settlements and societies, introducing culture. The “struggle for survival” involves conflict with nature, but socialization introduces other kinds of conflict. The complexities of power-sharing and the differentiation of individuals according to their capacities present many occasions for strife and confusion. The necessity of leadership in any social order introduces the possibility of conflict over who will assume that role. Conflicts that arise within society are initially assessed and resolved by trial and error, but gradually a sense of order emerges, rules and norms of behavior are established, and society becomes (ideally) a self-regulating organism. This development reflects the theme of Moral Design whose position across the arch is complementary to Eternal Conflict.

Eternal Conflict may be inherent to the cosmos at large, but is it endemic to human nature?

The origin of violent and destructive behavior in the human species has been widely debated through the ages. Renegade psychologist Wilhelm Reich (Suggested Reading) proposed a theory that has recently been upgraded by James DeMeo. According to Reich, “character armoring” is a form of blocked behavior that reverses the life-force (which he called orgone), thus producing a drive toward death and destruction. DeMeo attributes armoring to traumatic stress that occurred in the Old World around 4000 BC due to severe changes in climate. His theory is comprehensively argued in Saharasia, an historical application of Reichian theory that covers 6 millennia of human experience. Like Reich, DeMeo refutes the argument that violence is a tragic flaw innate to homo sapiens. In his view, climatic trauma and territorial loss are enough to provoke intrahuman conflict on a vast scale. [See www.orgonelab.org]

For years, historians assumed that warfare was the primary motive behind civilization, but recent discoveries at the “mother city” of Caral in Peru challenge that theory. (SIDEBAR on Caral). We know precious little about how prehistorical civilized societies managed conflict, but it is fairly certain that War Gods did not appear until full-blown civilization arrived. Hence warfare may not have been so much the catalyst for civilization as a consequence of it. If homo sapiens is truly a social animal, social order could have emerged without the need for violent force to control and subdue human energies. Once it was established, however, stability and continuity might well have become problematic. War and strife could have arisen over the transfer of power consolidated in the social order. This development is reflected in the origin myths of many cultures, stories of war and strife among the Gods or between Gods and humans. The founders of nations are often twins who compete to the death: Horus and Set in Egypt, Romulus and Remus in Italy. Even the creation of the world often begins with a scenario of warring twins. Twinning is a universal mytheme applied in countless instances to describe Eternal Conflict.

In Greek mythology battles between generations of Gods were recorded in the poetic cosmogony of Hesiod: Celestial Gods versus Titans versus Olympians. The script suggests that conflict is generational, a belief restated in the Old Testament in the notion that the sins of the parents are visited on the children. The shift from an earlier generation to a later one exemplifies the transfer of power. The shift is constant, and so the conflict it introduces will be perpetual although the nature of the conflict will change as the generations evolve.

What modern science understands to be opposing principles in nature, such as gravitation and centrifugal force, was commonly represented in ancient myth by battling gods, such as Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca in MesoAmerican traditions. The traits of these warring deities were often complex, because they simultaneously reflected both forces operating both in nature and in the human psyche. (Aztec Codex)