In the News

[Tomas]

This guy thought he had the best tattoo in the world, until he went to prison...
http://www.foresta-gump.ca/poem.asp

PS - I found this on Donna's website. Thanks.

[Beingof1]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/07/davis-besse-nuclear-power-plant_n_1578668.html

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/06/san-onofre-offline-through-summer.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaFy-fykplw

The damage to reactor two at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant may be more more serious than the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) originally disclosed, according to results of an internal investigation that were released this week.



Will you please wake up and experience higher consciousness.

[Cahoot]

Obama Phone: Gov to Spend $2.4 Billion On Millions of Free Phones In 2012

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/f ... 2_02092012

*

Obama’s data advantage

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77213.html

[Tomas]

Obama Phone: Gov to Spend $2.4 Billion On Millions of Free Phones In 2012

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/f ... 2_02092012

Why not? These smart phones have GPS and RFID tags implanted, gotta keep tabs on where the 'poor folk are' at any given moment. As a bonus, all conversations are digitally recorded and archived in some spook computer. Just about as good as a micro chip implanted in the hand or earlobe.

It's progress folks, keep pushing till your body rots.

[Beingof1]

Geo-Engineering

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf0khstYDLA&feature=related

[Beingof1]

If This Does Not Get Thru To You; Nothing Will!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Trj_5J02k

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Gender studies, always as fascinating as disputable: "Men and women really DO see things differently".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healt ... Dulux.html

Men have 25 per cent more neurons in the visual cortex of the brain than women, a change that is evident even before birth. Prof Abramov said: “We suggest that, since these neurons are guided by the cortex during embryogenesis, that testosterone plays a major role, somehow leading to different connectivity between males and females.” Evolutionary biologists believe differences could be the result of men and women performing different tasks for millennia, the so-called ‘hunter-gatherer hypothesis’.

But John Barbur, professor of optics and visual science at City University, London, disputed the findings on colour differences. He said it was true that many more men than women had congenital defects that caused imperfect colour vision: eight per cent compared to 0.5 per cent. However, he argued: "Among those who don't exhibit loss of colour vision, men tend to have better colour vision than women." Women might pay more attention to colour differences, he said, but that did not mean they could actually distinguish between them better.

[brad walker]

From Otherkin to Transethnicity: Your Field Guide to the Weird World of Tumblr Identity Politics

[brad walker]

New Caledonian crows may reason like humans about hidden causal agents

[Cahoot]

Ex-Security Team Leader In Libya: "Multiple Pleas" For "More, Not Less" Security Staff
http://keyetv.com/news/top-stories/stor ... html?wap=0

what was going on here?

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Sydney restaurant kisses lips urinals goodbye

Feminist, former political adviser and writer Anne Summers said the design was offensive: "Misogyny is very widespread, and this is just an example of misogyny".

[Cathy Preston]

Not the first time the golden shower urinal has made the news http://www.expatica.com/nl/news/local_news/orders-flow-in-after-lips-urinal-controversy-5926.html

Is this a perfect example of how women themselves are the worst offenders when it comes to the sexual objectification of women?

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Yeah, the feminist critic as well as the female designer in the story seem remarkably out of touch with the world they live in considering how they interpreted the design. The critic sees the sexual overtone as humilation for personal reasons and the designer didn't allow herself to see it as receptive open mouth at all, let alone the sexual references it carried.

[Kunga]

Icelands' Peaceful Revolution

http://crazyemailsandbackstories.wordpr ... backstory/

[Jamesh]

Chinese Eugenics
Geoffrey Miller
Evolutionary psychologist, NYU Stern Business School and University of New Mexico; author of The Mating Mind and Spent

China has been running the world's largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China's ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.

When I learned about Chinese eugenics this summer, I was astonished that its population policies had received so little attention. China makes no secret of its eugenic ambitions, in either its cultural history or its government policies.

For generations, Chinese intellectuals have emphasized close ties between the state (guojia), the nation (minzu), the population (renkou), the Han race (zhongzu), and, more recently, the Chinese gene-pool (jiyinku). Traditional Chinese medicine focused on preventing birth defects, promoting maternal health and "fetal education" (taijiao) during pregnancy, and nourishing the father's semen (yangjing) and mother's blood (pingxue) to produce bright, healthy babies (see Frank Dikötter's book Imperfect Conceptions). Many scientists and reformers of Republican China (1912-1949) were ardent Darwinians and Galtonians. They worried about racial extinction (miezhong) and "the science of deformed fetuses" (jitaixue), and saw eugenics as a way to restore China's rightful place as the world's leading civilization after a century of humiliation by European colonialism. The Communist revolution kept these eugenic ideals from having much policy impact for a few decades though. Mao Zedong was too obsessed with promoting military and manufacturing power, and too terrified of peasant revolt, to interfere with traditional Chinese reproductive practices.

But then Deng Xiaoping took power after Mao's death. Deng had long understood that China would succeed only if the Communist Party shifted its attention from economic policy to population policy. He liberalized markets, but implemented the one-child policy —partly to curtail China's population explosion, but also to reduce dysgenic fertility among rural peasants. Throughout the 1980s, Chinese propaganda urges couples to have children "later, longer, fewer, better"—at a later age, with a longer interval between birth, resulting in fewer children of higher quality. With the 1995 Maternal and Infant Health Law (known as the Eugenic Law until Western opposition forced a name change), China forbade people carrying heritable mental or physical disorders from marrying, and promoted mass prenatal ultrasound testing for birth defects. Deng also encouraged assortative mating through promoting urbanization and higher education, so bright, hard-working young people could meet each other more easily, increasing the proportion of children who would be at the upper extremes of intelligence and conscientiousness.

One of Deng's legacies is China's current strategy of maximizing "Comprehensive National Power". This includes economic power (GDP, natural resources, energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, owning America's national debt), military power (cyberwarfare, anti-aircraft-carrier ballistic missiles, anti-satellite missiles), and 'soft power' (cultural prestige, the Beijing Olympics, tourism, Chinese films and contemporary art, Confucius Institutes, Shanghai's skyscrapers). But crucially, Comprehensive National Power also includes "biopower": creating the world's highest-quality human capital in terms of the Chinese population's genes, health, and education (see Governing China's Population by Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winkler).

Chinese biopower has ancient roots in the concept of "yousheng" ("good birth"—which has the same literal meaning as "eugenics"). For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children. The current "gaokao" exams for university admission, taken by more than 10 million young Chinese per year, are just the updated version of these imperial exams—the route to educational, occupation, financial, and marital success. With the relaxation of the one-child policy, wealthier couples can now pay a "social fostering fee" (shehui fuyangfei) to have an extra child, restoring China's traditional link between intelligence, education, wealth, and reproductive success.

Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more "next-generation" DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.

The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state. Given what I understand of evolutionary behavior genetics, I expect—and hope—that they will succeed. The welfare and happiness of the world's most populous country depends upon it.

My real worry is the Western response. The most likely response, given Euro-American ideological biases, would be a bioethical panic that leads to criticism of Chinese population policy with the same self-righteous hypocrisy that we have shown in criticizing various Chinese socio-cultural policies. But the global stakes are too high for us to act that stupidly and short-sightedly. A more mature response would be based on mutual civilizational respect, asking—what can we learn from what the Chinese are doing, how can we help them, and how can they help us to keep up as they create their brave new world?

[Jamesh]

The above is from The Edge and there are other interesting comments to this year's big question.
WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?

http://edge.org/responses/q2013

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Fearless brain-damaged patients are terrified of suffocation

"Fear" is a highly subjective experience that's hard to describe, and we cannot know exactly how the three brain-damaged patients experienced it. Indeed, LeDoux argues that using words such as "fear" and "pleasure" to describe our feelings is problematic, and that it's time to rethink the emotional brain. Rather than being functions of the brain with their own pathways, fear and pleasure should be thought of as the end results of a system of survival circuits that together regulate functions such as arousal and motivation to meet our basic needs. These survival circuits are present in other animals, and what we call "emotions" may be our interpretation of the accompanying changes in physiology and behaviour.

[SeekerOfWisdom]

Just about as good as a micro chip implanted in the hand or earlobe.

This very concept and its reality just leaves me speechless, thank god I have wizened up enough to let things be, or this would frustrate the shit out of me.

[Cahoot]

Obama Phone: Gov to Spend $2.4 Billion On Millions of Free Phones In 2012

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/f ... 2_02092012

Why not? These smart phones have GPS and RFID tags implanted, gotta keep tabs on where the 'poor folk are' at any given moment. As a bonus, all conversations are digitally recorded and archived in some spook computer. Just about as good as a micro chip implanted in the hand or earlobe.

It's progress folks, keep pushing till your body rots.

Speaking freely to the propagandist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyyHegP255g

[Tomas]

Obama Phone: Gov to Spend $2.4 Billion On Millions of Free Phones In 2012

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/f ... 2_02092012

Why not? These smart phones have GPS and RFID tags implanted, gotta keep tabs on where the 'poor folk are' at any given moment. As a bonus, all conversations are digitally recorded and archived in some spook computer. Just about as good as a micro chip implanted in the hand or earlobe.

It's progress folks, keep pushing till your body rots.

Speaking freely to the propagandist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyyHegP255g

Excellent video. Thanks, Cahoot.

[Cahoot]

My pleasure. Sharp guy.

*

“If there was a party called the logic party I would be a member of that.”
- Dr. Benjamin Carson

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Males' superior spatial ability likely is not an evolutionary adaptation

The average superiority of males over females in spatial navigation may just be a “side effect” of testosterone, he said. ... Researchers tend to overlook the fact that many physical and behavioral traits arise as a consequence of random events, or are simply side effects of other changes that offer real evolutionary advantages

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Somewhat interesting phrases on the lack of progress of sciences like quantum physics.

'A bunch of big egos' are strangling science

What we're living with today is a bunch of mysteries and misconceptions that came about partly because people couldn't imagine nature being as interesting as it really is, and partly because a bunch of big egos got in the way and wouldn't let the revolution proceed. .. When we're done with this revolution, we will have a way of thinking about the universe that's vastly more intuitive and vastly more inspiring. -- Carver Mead, microelectronics pioneer

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Finally proof for panspermia and putting the book of Genesis to rest?

[Diebert van Rhijn]

The last item of course does not go unchallenged. This is a good summary from Phil Plait at Slate's Bad Astronomy.

No, Life Has Still Not Been Found in a Meteorite

I guess this goes the way of the red rain then....