Psychopaths' brains wired to seek rewards

According to an article published in Nature Neuroscience (14 March, 2010) and described in Eurekalert!:

The brains of psychopaths appear to be wired to keep seeking a reward at any cost, new research from Vanderbilt University finds. The research uncovers the role of the brain's reward system in psychopathy and opens a new area of study for understanding what drives these individuals.

"This study underscores the importance of neurological research as it relates to behavior," Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said. "The findings may help us find new ways to intervene before a personality trait becomes antisocial behavior."

"Psychopaths are often thought of as cold-blooded criminals who take what they want without thinking about consequences," Joshua Buckholtz, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology and lead author of the new study, said. "We found that a hyper-reactive dopamine reward system may be the foundation for some of the most problematic behaviors associated with psychopathy, such as violent crime, recidivism and substance abuse."

Previous research on psychopathy has focused on what these individuals lack, fear, empathy and interpersonal skills. The new research, however, examines what they have in abundance impulsivity, heightened attraction to rewards and risk taking. Importantly, it is these latter traits that are most closely linked with the violent and criminal aspects of psychopathy.

Icelanders tell UK & Dutch Governments to Screw Themselves!

I was hoping to find a newspaper somewhere, anywhere declaring solidarity with the people of Iceland against the tyranny of the high-priests of high-finance.  But alas nary a headline could be found stating "We are all Icelanders Now!"

To review, in 2008 all three of Iceland's banks collapsed due to their inability to refinance short-term debt and a concomitant run on deposits by European clients who had sought the supposed advantages of high-interest accounts offered by these banks and their Internet subsidiaries (i.e. Icesave).  The commercial collapse crippled the Icelandic economy and precipitated a severe economic recession that devalued the nation's currency by 90%, contracted GDP by 5.5% within the first six-months of 2009, and has already been estimated to exceed 75% of Iceland's GDP in total cost.  

In what may have become the most obscene misuse of legal authority, the government of the UK used anti-terrorism rules to take control of assets held in Britain by Landsbanki Islands hf.  Stephen Timms, financial secretary to the Treasury, said in Britain's Parliament that "To protect U.K. economic interests the government has frozen the funds and financial assets held by Landbanksi."  When Landsbanki failed, the UK government bailed out its citizens deposits.  However, the UK made it clear that it wanted this money returned from the Icelandic government, despite the fact that it never guaranteed the deposits.

In December 2009, the President of Iceland vetoed a bill, pushed by the UK and Netherlands, that would have effectively placed a usurious burden upon the citizens of Iceland by their European counterparts, for what was effectively bad private investments made by Europeans looking for easy money.  According to the Economist magazine:

The Landsbanki debts alone amount to over €12,000 for each of the country’s 320,000 citizens; total debts are approaching 1,000% of GDP. Such sums would take many decades to repay, and would strangle the economy in the meantime.

In addition, the governments of the UK and Netherlands have made both public and private threats that they were willing to force Iceland off the cliff and into financial oblivion.  The threats have including denying Iceland the opportunity for future EU membership and freezing current IMF loans, unless the citizens of the sovereign nation accepted Treaty of Versailles-like repatriations.  For example, the deal would require each Icelander to pay approximately $135 USD a month for eight years; the equivalent of 25% of an average four-member family's salary.

A referendum at the beginning of this month (March 2010) on the specifics of the debt-repayment scheme was rejected by more than 93% of the Icelandic population.  As the Christian Science Monitor notes:

a large portion of voters viewed the deal as an unfair result of their own government's failure to curtail the recklessness of a handful of bank executives, including those who expanded operations to seduce British and Dutch customers with generous returns from online savings.

Furthermore, another perspective is that Icelanders are convinced that the UK/Dutch duo are acting in bad faith and demanding excessive requirements on a country that provided the chieftains of high-capital exactly what they wanted: banking deregulation, pro-business policies, trans-national mobility of capital, and favorable financial products for European clients.  

What the citizens of the West should be saying is that the blackmailing of the people of Iceland by the dunces who have shown themselves equally inept at running their own economies, is not acceptable.  None of these assholes should be telling anyone what to do with their money.  All these bankers and useless government charlatans who turned a blind eye when the priests of high-capital were doing their dirty deeds need to be hung from a tree for facilitating the greatest economic collapse in human-history.  Instead the media has dismissed the issue as a peripheral item about a small and relatively unimportant country that grew too fast and too big.

Stiglitz Calls the US FED Corrupt

Last week Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University and recipient of the Nobel Memorial award in Economics (2001), made a set of explosive criticisms about the Federal Reserve at a public forum on financial reform that has largely been ignored by the mainstream media to date.    Tim Iacono at SeekingAlpha says, with respect to the comments, that they are, "patently obvious to anyone with a working knowledge of how the Federal Reserve system really works, yet, even to me they somehow seemed shocking."

What was it that Stiglitz said?

If we had seen a governance structure that corresponds to our Federal Reserve system, we would have been yelling and screaming and saying that country does not deserve any assistance, this is a corrupt governing structure.

The pseudo-public (and therefore pseudo-private) Federal Reserve has long pretended to the serve the public interest, while hansomely filling the vaults of the banks to whom they are supposed to supervise and regulate.  Since the the inception of the Great-Recession libertarians, progressive-liberals, and an assortment of economists have been asking tough questions about the conduct and competency of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke and the entire Federal Reserve system, which to date has blocked, scuttled, or diluted any attempts to allow transparent examination of its activities.  I too have been questioning the basis for the US Federal Reserve system (here, here, and here) for some time, and Stiglitz's comments, which I do not consider hyperbole, are a refreshing anodyne to the usual mealy-mouthed platitudes offered by the MSM on why meaningful examination of the Fed and financial system reform cannot occur.

The Unbearable Greed of AIG

In Hannah Arendt's chronology of Adolf Eichmann's trial by the State of Israel for his crimes against the Jewish people during the Second World War, it was clear that Eichmann thought of himself as a victim of chance who was not  directly accountable for the horrendous criminality pursued by the Third Reich.  In a recent Washington Post article titled, "Transcript reveals anger of AIG employees toward politicians, public" one can observe the same dismisal of accountability and latent victimization conjured by AIG employees and the perpetrators of one of the greatest economic meltdowns in human civilization.

To contextualize, AIG (American International Group Inc.) prior to September 2008, as listed by Forbes magazine, was the 18th largest publicly owned corporation in the world.  The company had been the largest underwriter of commercial and industrial insurance in the USA.  Due to the company's involvement in the sale of credit protection in the form of credit default swaps (CDSs) on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and a swift downgrade in its credit-rating, precipitated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, AIG suffered a liquidity crisis.  The American government driven by the perception that a global economic collapse would ensue if AIG failed, supplied the company with $180 billion in loans, stock investments and other commitments from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.

According to the WaPo, employees of AIG were less than enthusiastic of the public pillorying of  their beloved corporation in the months after the bailout.  Hannah Arendt explained that in bureaucracies there is a diffusion of responsibility due to the collective nature of the enterprise.  As a result, because most bureaucrats do not directly control the nature of how decisions are made, nor do they frequently control how those decisions are executed, these people do not accept personal responsibility for their contributions to what in the end are systematic failures of judgement and ethics.

Consider some of their statements:

One employee doing his best Adolf Eichmann imitation said, "I will stand behind every action I have taken in this company from Day One."

Another jackal of high-finance had this to say of the American public, the US government, and the corporate welfare that had saved his/her job, "To be honest with you, I really hope it blows up. I think the U.S. taxpayer deserves to lose a trillion dollars over this thing for the way they have behaved."

Upon hearing that NY State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo was investigating AIG for distributing hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to employees and was threatening to disclose the names of these individuals to the public, employees claimed that were being "blackmailed" and subject to "extortion."

The greed-heads shrieked that their windfalls were deserved and that the entire scapegoating process reeked of McCarthyism and "un-American" policies!

The reality is that these people will never accept that they are the one's responsible for the economic catastrophe that has befallen the entire planet.  In their mind it is the government's fault for allowing minorities to buy homes they could not afford.  It is never charlatans like themselves who are to blame for the greed and undisciplined excesses of their company.  It is someone else's fault, and as in the case of all narcissistic sociopaths, it is they who claim to be the real victims.

Keep hoping AIG and fiends, your dream of a global economic collapse may still happen.

Pole Dancing: A potential Olympic Sport

I'll have to admit I don't really watch any women's sports; in fact I rarely watch any sports.  While I think female sports is something to be pursued and awarded, I don't believe those sports like boxing, muscle-building, and other sports that attempt to emulate the physical strengths of men are necessarily the best outlets that highlight female athleticism.

I'll have to also admit that when I think of pole dancing I don't think of athletics; but there are those that do.  Twisting, contorting, and moving provocatively for the crowd won Katerina Witt a gold medal at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.  Female sexuality when coupled with raw talent has catapulted many women to international fame.  Anna Kournikova was never a great tennis player, but she did appeal to many male fans with her above average appearance.

So the thought of women pole dancing for the "gold" versus dollar bills slipped into a garter, doesn't strike me as obtuse.  No one doubts that a great deal of physical strength, endurance, and talent is necessary for the event.  So why then if sports dominated by prepubescent children as in gymnastics or sports that are dominated by artistic merit like figure skating, shouldn't pole dancing at least be given a chance to entertain the masses while allowing the ladies to strut their stuff.

According to pole dance advocates, "After a great deal of feedback from the pole-dance community, many of us have decided that it’s about time pole fitness is recognized as a competitive sport, and what better way for recognition than to be part of the 2012 Olympics held in London."

There is a reason why we forget

"Memories were meant to fade, Lenny. They're designed that way for a reason." Mace, Strange Days (1995).

***

A recent publication in the Journal Cell (free article available online) elaborates how researchers at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory discovered a protein that regulates forgetting of short-term memories.  In general, short-term memory refers to the capacity for holding a small amount of information in an animal's neural network (i.e. mind) in an active, readily available state for a short period of time.  The researchers "discovered that three kinds of forgetting – all involving the erasure of short-term memory – are regulated within neurons by the activity of a protein called Rac."  The research was conducted on Drosophila melangaster (fruit fly) both of the wild type (normal) and genetically engineered variety (via standard transposon mutagenesis) to evaluate short-term memory retention with respect to modulation of the Rac protein.

Naturally occurring Rac activation within neurons located in a fruit fly organ called the mushroom body was linked experimentally with three distinct memory-erasure tasks by CSHL Professor Yi Zhong, Ph.D., and colleagues at Tsinghua University in Beijing. One kind of erasure is associated with gradual short-term memory loss (previously considered "passive"); another entails an acute, rapid removal of short-term memory (e.g., "reversal learning"); a third involves a kind of erasure associated with new information that interferes with an existing short-term memory ("interference").

In all three kinds of erasure, the team has found, the process of forgetting is mediated by a mechanism dependent upon the activity level of Rac, a protein that belongs to the Rho family of GTPases. These are a type of protein known to act, among other things, as regulators of the cytoskeleton, the superstructure of cells. Importantly, Zhong and colleagues propose that Rac's role in erasing memory is directly related to its function as a cytoskeleton remodeling agent.

In genetically modified flies, the team elevated Rac activity in mushroom body neurons, which are the seat of olfactory-based memories in the fly. Elevated Rac activity had the effect of accelerating the decay of short-term memories. The process worked in the other direction, too. By inhibiting the activity of Rac they observed that short-term memories decayed more slowly than normal, lasting more than a full day rather than vanishing within three hours, as they do, on average, when Rac is not blocked.

The scientists reported that the Rac-dependent forgetting mechanism in flies did not affect mechanisms involved in the formation of new memories, specifically a pathway associated with the gene Rutabaga that is mediated by the enzyme adenylyl cyclase.

"The molecular basis of short-term memory really has been overlooked by the neuroscience community," says Zhong, a CSHL professor. "It has been widely assumed that such memory is degraded through passive cellular processes. Our experiments challenge the notion by providing evidence of a dedicated mechanism for removing several kinds of short-term memories."

The active forgetting mechanism that Zhong and colleagues have uncovered has potentially adaptive benefits for an organism, they speculate. "The Rac-mediated mechanism makes possible a forgetting strategy that can respond to environmental information," Zhong explains. "For instance, it could be advantageous to forget a memory in disuse that is no longer of biological significance, or a memory inconsistent with current circumstances."

"Forgetting Is Regulated through Rac Activity in Drosophila" appears online ahead of print in Cell February 19. The authors are: Yichun Shuai, Binyan Lu, Ying Hu, Lianzhang Wang, Kan Sun and Yi Zhong. The paper is available online at: DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2009.12.044

Republicans and Idiot America

Above are the results of a poll conducted by Research 2000 on behalf of the liberal blog DailyKos. It outlines the current opinions of those who are self-described Republicans. For those who have been paying attention to the nearly pornographic display of self-assured stupidity that accounts for political discourse from the so-called real Americans, the above results are expected.

The Economist magazine attempts to decompress the numbers as it relates to the American population at large.  While Bruce Bartlett, former George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan official, charges that "between 20% and 50% of the party is either insane or mind-numbingly stupid."  He further notes, that he does not consider himself to be a standing member of the lunatic fringe party.  A position that he expounded in his 2006 book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy."

What should be noted, is that affiliation to the Republican party is at historic lows, with recent polls placing popular support between 21-24%.   With moderate conservatives fleeing the party in the aftermath of the disastrous Bush years and the proliferation of anti-establishment factions, like the tea baggers and right-wing militia movements, the Republican base has been reduced to the cultists and Southerners.  It is not surprising then that these people, being not the most educated, socially mobile, or economically viable, would have regressive and anti-modernist views.  However, to believe that Obama is a socialist, Caribou Barbie (aka Sarah Palin) is more competent to run the nation, and that homosexuals should be purged from public schools, takes a level of ignorance that one would typically find amongst the illiterate citizens of third world banana republics.

Banks Concerned about Populist Demands

The NY Times (1-Feb. '10) has an article, titled "Curveball Alters Talks on Wall St. Reform," that describes the current state of affairs amongst Democratic and Republican Senators tasked with crafting necessary financial regulatory legislation.  In it is a paragraph that really underscores the dirty secret that everyone knows:

But industry representatives and Democratic Congressional aides say the president’s new proposals have already provoked a sharp increase in the volume and energy of the lobbying on regulatory reform, with more chief executives stepping over their government relations staff to request personal meetings with lawmakers. The big banks, the lobbyists say, have become increasingly alarmed that the legislative process may move in unexpected directions outside their control.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) stated in the same article, "populism doesn’t give you either good regulatory activity or strong markets."  The faux-populism of both parties always reveals itself in the end.  But it's good to know which end of the pitchforks politicians would like to be on, if and when  the whole economic charade that is the US economy comes falling apart.

Eliot Spitzer on Obama's First Year

Spitzer who knows a thing or two about taking on established power, points out in the above video and in his 26-Jan. 2010 State article how Mr. Obama can re-assert the progressive liberal agenda in which he was elected to enact and save the Democrats from electoral defeat in the 2010 midterm elections.

In the article he basically calls Rahm Emanuel (WH Chief of Staff), Larry Summers (Director of the National Economic Council), and Tim Geithner (US Secretary of the Treasury) incompetent political operatives who are a liability to both the Obama presidency and the nation as a whole.

He also contends that the president's working model is useless and Obama needs to aggressively control the legislative process, rather than ceding it to congressional weaklings.

It is time for President Obama to imitate Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt: define the progressive agenda and impose party discipline, use the 59 votes in the Senate—still an overwhelming majority—and an equally robust majority in the House to make every effort to pass the critical pieces of the Democratic agenda and then let the Republicans try to counter.

Mr. Obama has failed repeatedly over the past year to heed the criticisms of those on his left-flank.  As a result, both him and the Democrats, by underwhelming and playing footsie with K-Street, are posed to lose massively in the 2010 midterm elections to the Republicans; whose only solution to America's problems is more war and less taxes.  If he wants the Democrats to continue being an appendage of the corporate state, then he should prepare himself to vacate the White House in 2012, because few who voted for a reformist agenda, to correct the extravagances of the Bush junta, will bother to do so again with the present course of action.

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Bernanke

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wrote on the (27th January, 2010) op-ed pages of USA Today, of his opposition to the re-appointment of Mr. Bernanke to Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of the USA.  He skewers Bernanke for his failure to be forthright about his activities as FED Chairman in the aftermath of the 2008 collapse and for not adequately addressing  the deregulatory mantra that still holds sway amongst FED officials and Wall Street. 

Despite what appeared to be a growing chorus of dissention, Mr Bernanke was reappointed by the Senate on Thursday evening; although with a historic number of oppositional votes (30 nays).  Stock markets responded favorably that the Global Arsonist had been given another term to evade accountability and ensure the wily casino-capitalists of Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. which also saw their stocks rise, are well taken care of by friends in high places.

Opposing view: Bernanke must go

Fed chair was asleep at the switch. Don’t reward him with a new term.
By Bernie Sanders

Today, the United States is in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. More than 17% of the American workforce is either unemployed or underemployed. Millions more have lost their homes, their savings, their health care and their pensions.

The immediate cause of this economic disaster is the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of the largest financial institutions in the country. One of the major functions of the Federal Reserve is to protect the safety and soundness of our financial institutions and to oversee their actions. It is clear to almost everyone that Chairman Bernanke was asleep at the switch while Wall Street became the largest gambling casino in the history of the world and hurtled into insolvency. His failure to adequately regulate financial institutions should not be rewarded with a reappointment.

As part of the huge taxpayer bailout of Wall Street, the Fed provided trillions of dollars in virtually zero-interest loans to large financial institutions. Bernanke consistently has refused to provide the transparency needed so that the American people can learn which banks received those loans. Our democracy cannot tolerate this kind of secrecy. We need a new Fed chairman who believes in transparency.

As the country desperately tries to work its way out of this severe recession, the Federal Reserve has the capability of playing a significant role in improving the economy for working families and small- and medium-sized businesses.

Today, it could protect consumers by lowering outrageously high credit card interest rates that millions are paying.

Today, it could help create millions of new jobs by providing low-interest loans to credit-worthy small businesses.

Today, at a time when four of the largest financial institutions issue two-thirds of the credit cards and half the mortgages, and when three out of the four largest are even bigger now that when we bailed them out last year, the Fed could begin the process of breaking up these "too big to fail" banks so we will never have to bail them out again.

We need a new Fed chairman who understands that his or her major task is to protect ordinary Americans, and not just Wall Street CEOs. Ben Bernanke must go.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., serves on the Budget Committee and has placed a procedural hold on the Bernanke nomination