Vision Circle

As Net Energy Continues to Fall....,

you are going to hear more and more debate about "free markets" vs. "government intervention". Obviously, this is a political question: so-called free market "special interests" (one dollar, one vote) vs. "common interests" (one person, one vote).

The Hansonian admonition for today requires that you exercise enough free will to remind yourself that economics like war is politics by other means, and yes, the end-game has nothing to do with truth, rather, it's about fitness. Those free marketers, who actually bother to rationalize their arguments, base them on three false assumptions and deliberate lies:

#1. "Wants" are the identical to "needs". So-called conservatives (it's boilerplate economic theory) deliberately lie about this because they want you to believe that Donald Trump "needs" another million dollar painting on the wall of one of his mansions just as badly as a welfare mother needs health care for her children. This amounts to a license for the rich to hog limited resources (on a spherical planet, all resources are "limited").

#2. People are "rational utility maximizers". Although even economists admit this is a lie, it still boilerplate economic theory. Economists MUST lie about this because if people are being manipulated by marketing, then the so-called "free market" is inherently immoral.

#3. The market is "efficient". This is central to economic theory, but it's also a deliberate lie (an "idiosyncratic redefinition"). Economists know that people who do not have economic training are going to assume that "efficient" is used in the same way that engineers use the word: acting or producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort.

But for economists, "efficient" means "efficient distribution" of resources: i.e., the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The reason economists use idiosyncratic redefinitions instead of coining new terms (like every other discipline) is to make them better liars.

Idiosyncratic redefinition allows economists to stand in front of your
local Rotary Club and appear to HONESTLY use words that mean one thing to them, while Club members think they mean something completely different. This is how economists avoid our innate ability to spot liars.

Far from being "efficient", the so-called "free market" is the MOST
INEFFICIENT aspect of our society. A back-of-the-envelope calculation by Tom Wayburn suggests that the so-called "free market" WASTES 90% of our natural resources. In other words, we could be self-sufficient in oil (and bring our troops home) by ending "the market" and reorganizing into a new type of "common interest" government instead of the "special interest" government we have had since inception (see the founding of America).

On a spherical planet, governed by the laws of thermodynamics, "the market" WILL end -- sooner or later, one way or another.

Is there anyone who doesn't understand these points above?

Crack, Congress, and the Million Man March

It is time that crack cocaine laws change. Policymakers must have the courage to rationally reform them, and to directly confront issues of racial disparity. Perhaps the Millions More Movement can be the beginning of a grassroots catalyst that encourages those on Capitol Hill and in the White House to mend this “crack” in our justice system.

Nkechi Taifa states the painfully obvious that conservative apologists inexplicably refuse to touch at BlackCommentator

The 10th anniversary of the Million Man March also marks the 10th anniversary of a missed opportunity to dramatically reduce the number of African Americans in prison.

Bill Clinton, jokingly referred to as the “first black president,” could have made the decisive difference a decade ago by remedying one of the most notorious illustrations of disparity in the criminal justice system – the singling out of crack cocaine offenders for harsher punishment than powder cocaine offenders.

This sentencing law treats possession of just five grams of crack cocaine (the weight of five packets of sweet and low) the same as the trafficking of 500 grams of powder cocaine (about the weight of a one pound bag of sugar). In other words, one receives the same five year mandatory sentence for 5 grams of crack as for 500 grams of powder. But because powder cocaine can very easily be converted to crack, to punish crack cocaine offenses at a quantity ratio 100 times greater than its original powder form, is irrational.

Despite prevalent stereotypes, the majority of documented crack users are white. The “war on drugs,” however, has been primarily fought in inner-city black communities. This law enforcement policy has caused a disproportional number of low-level black drug abusers to be herded to prison under the crack laws, serving unreasonably harsh sentences.

On October 16, 1995, not coincidentally the day of the Million Man March, then President Clinton eloquently appealed for “fairness and equality” in a riveting address on race relations on a college campus, in which he stressed the need to “root out racism” from the criminal justice system.

Ironically, two days after that speech, the justice and equality that a million black men had marched to the steps of the Capitol to demand, was deferred. Congress voted against equalizing the quantities for the sentencing of crack and powder cocaine offenses.

This vote was suspect because lawmakers rejected the wisdom of their own bipartisan Sentencing Commission, which had meticulously researched and analyzed cocaine and federal sentencing policy over a two-year period. The Commission had come to the unanimous conclusion that the sentences for crack cocaine were too great and must be changed. Shamefully, out of over 500 recommendations submitted by the expert Commission since its inception, this was the first one Congress chose to ignore.

The ball was then in Mr. Clinton’s court. Congressional Black Caucus members pointedly appealed to the president to eradicate the disparity in cocaine sentencing. This was the first “test,” they declared, in the wake of the Million Man March, to prove he would “root out” unjust policies and practices. A coalition of civil rights groups at that time declared that eliminating this unjust law would have been “as easy as the stroke of a pen.” Unfortunately, Mr. Clinton failed to turn his eloquently delivered words on race relations into deeds, instead siding with the congressional majority and disregarding rationally based reform. And prisons continued to be built – and filled – throughout the 1990s.

Ten years have come and gone. Nearly a million black people are now in prison – largely because the harsh crack cocaine laws have remained unchanged. Politics, however, must not continue to drive sentencing policy. Now is the time for progressives and conservatives to join together to rectify the missed opportunity of the past. Congress must listen to the advice of its own Sentencing Commission, which concluded that revising this one law “would better reduce the gap [in sentencing between African Americans and other racial groups], and it would dramatically improve the fairness of the federal sentencing system.”

During the past decade the historic Million Man March has spawned several other national marches, including this past weekend’s Millions More Movement, pulling together not just men, but women, youth, and families as well. But the continuation of harsh and irrational sentencing laws is tearing these very families apart. These laws have thrust unprecedented numbers of women into the criminal justice system, subsequently terminating parental rights to their children. They have resulted in the warehousing of youth for prison terms at the beginning of their adulthood, creating in the process an epidemic of physical, mental, and public health issues. And those who manage to return to communities at the conclusion of decades-long sentences are confronted with staggering barriers to successful reintegration into society, oftentimes causing renewal of the same harmful cycles that put them in prison in the first place.

It is time that crack cocaine laws change. Policymakers must have the courage to rationally reform them, and to directly confront issues of racial disparity. Perhaps the Millions More Movement can be the beginning of a grassroots catalyst that encourages those on Capitol Hill and in the White House to mend this “crack” in our justice system.

Nkechi Taifa, Esq., is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Open Society Institute and an Adjunct Professor at Howard University School of Law.

http://www.blackcommentator.com/155/155_think_crack_congress_mmm_pf.html

Liar, Liar, Brain's on Fire

The theory that Yang and colleagues have developed is the extra connections between nerve cells give liars a greater ability to lie. Dr. Raine put it this way: "Lying takes a lot of effort." For example, "You have to be able to understand the mindset of the other person (and) to suppress your emotions or regulate them because you don't want to appear nervous."

Their theory is partly based on two observations, Yang said:

Young children do not lie well and their prefrontal cortex has less white matter proportionately than it will later in life.

Autistic people, whose prefrontal cortex has the "converse pattern of grey/white ratio to that shown by the liar group," also do not lie easily.

Previous studies have shown that moral decisions involve the prefrontal cortex. "If these liars have a 14 percent reduction in grey matter, that means that they are less likely to care about moral issues or are less likely to be able to process moral issues," Dr. Raine said.

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 30-"Any fool can tell the truth," wrote British author Samuel Butler, "but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well."

Not so, according to a new study. All it takes to lie well -- or at least consistently and deliberately -- is a slightly abnormal brain, one with more white matter and less grey matter in the prefrontal cortex than the rest of us.

"Their brains are different," said Yaling Yang, MS, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California here.

"They have more connections between the nerve cells, which gives them a better ability to lie," Yang said in an interview, "and (because) they have decreased grey matter, which is associated with impulsivity and inhibition, they can't inhibit their tendency to lie."

To conduct the study -- published in the current edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry -- the researchers interviewed 108 volunteers from five temporary employment agencies in Los Angeles. A series of psychological tests and interviews found 12 people -- 11 men and one woman -- who had a history of repeated lying.

Additionally, the researchers found two control groups -- 15 men and one woman who exhibited signs of antisocial personality disorder but were not pathological liars and 15 men and six women who were normal controls.

The "liars" met the criteria for pathological lying or for conning and manipulative behavior on a standard psychopathy checklist, the deceitfulness criterion for antisocial personality disorder on the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-IV diagnostic manual, or admitted telling lies to obtain sickness benefits.

"We looked for things like inconsistencies in their stories about occupation, education, crimes and family background," said Adrian Raine, D.Phil, a psychology professor at the university and a co-author of the study.

Then the subjects underwent structural MRI imaging, Dr. Raine said. The MRI examinations found that the liars had significantly more white matter and slightly less grey matter than the other groups.

Specifically:

On average, the liars had 25.7% more prefrontal white matter, compared to the antisocial controls, and 22.2% more than the normal controls.
The liars showed a 35.7% decrease in ratio of grey to white matter in the region, compared to antisocial controls, and a 41.7% decrease in the ratio, compared to controls.
On an absolute scale, the liars had 14% less grey matter than the normal controls.

The theory that Yang and colleagues have developed is the extra connections between nerve cells give liars a greater ability to lie. Dr. Raine put it this way: "Lying takes a lot of effort." For example, "You have to be able to understand the mindset of the other person (and) to suppress your emotions or regulate them because you don't want to appear nervous."

Their theory is partly based on two observations, Yang said:

Young children do not lie well and their prefrontal cortex has less white matter proportionately than it will later in life.
Autistic people, whose prefrontal cortex has the "converse pattern of grey/white ratio to that shown by the liar group," also do not lie easily.

Previous studies have shown that moral decisions involve the prefrontal cortex. "If these liars have a 14 percent reduction in grey matter, that means that they are less likely to care about moral issues or are less likely to be able to process moral issues," Dr. Raine said.

The British novelist Jerome K. Jerome once wrote: "It is always the best policy to speak the truth -- unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar."

But, says Dr. Raine, the people in the liar group in this study aren't especially good. Often "they can't tell the truth from falsehood and contradict themselves in an interview," he said.

And, says Yang, they often lie for the fun of it. "They admit that they like lying," she said.

The researchers said the study doesn't account for all forms of lying -- such as to escape punishment or to be polite.

Yang said she and her colleagues believe that the abnormal brain structure causes the lying behavior, not the other way round, but she added the study still needs to be replicated by other investigators.

In the long run, she said, the structural differences might be useful for diagnostic purposes or to help police determine which suspects are likely to be lying. "But right now there are no practical applications," she said.

This study is the latest in a long line of inquiries aimed at ferreting out the roots of dishonesty. The philosopher Diogenes was reputed to wander the streets of Athens with a lamp, searching for an honest man.

In modern times, the polygraph has been promoted as an effective tool for identifying liars. But the lie-detector, as it is popularly known, simply measures heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, and galvanic skin response (or sweatiness).

Liars, the theory goes, will have physiological responses that will betray them and the polygraph will pick that up. But polygraphs can't differentiate between changes in heart rate brought on by the stress of taking the test from changes triggered by bald-faced lies.

A more high-tech approach uses functional magnetic resonance imaging. Scott Faro, Ph.D., of Temple University in Philadelphia, reported last year that fMRI can tell when a person is lying -- more areas of the brain become active.

Lying caused activity in the frontal lobes, as well as the hippocampus and middle temporal regions and the limbic areas, Dr. Faro said at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of America. During a truthful response, parts of the frontal lobe, temporal lobe and cingulate gyrus were active, he said.

Several limitations to the study pointed out by the authors include the small sample and relatively few women.

Primary source: British Journal of Psychiatry
Source reference:
Yang Y et al. Prefrontal white matter in pathological liars. British Journal of Psychiatry 2005. 187;320-325

The Neural Basis of Human Moral Cognition

Hopefully a little timely neuroscience will inject the rationalism required to stave off any ill-considered quackings about moral absolutism and moral relativism hereabouts.

Through the centuries, philosophical theories have adopted a deductive logico–verbal approach to morality that aims to identify universal principles that should guide human conduct. By contrast, a scientific approach to morality is emerging from the documentation of changes in moral behaviour in patients with brain dysfunction5, which provides inferences that concern the major dimensions of moral cognition. Moral cognitive neuroscience, therefore, aims to elucidate the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie moral behaviour. Here, morality is considered as the sets of customs and values that are embraced by a cultural group to guide social conduct, a view that does not assume the existence of absolute moral values.

THE NEURAL BASIS OF HUMAN MORAL COGNITION

Moral cognitive neuroscience is an emerging field of research that focuses on the neural basis of uniquely human forms of social cognition and behaviour. Recent functional imaging and clinical evidence indicates that a remarkably consistent network of brain regions is involved in moral cognition. These findings are fostering new interpretations of social behavioural impairments in patients with brain dysfunction, and require new approaches to enable us to understand the complex links between individuals and society. Here, we propose a cognitive neuroscience view of how cultural and context-dependent knowledge, semantic social knowledge and motivational states can be integrated to explain complex aspects of human moral cognition.

At a time of increasing awareness of the different value systems in multicultural societies and across nations, a deeper understanding of the cognitive and brain mechanisms that guide human behaviour is of general interest. Recent social cognitive neuroscience reviews have emphasized perceptual and emotional abilities that are shared by humans and other animals1-3. However, social neuroscience has largely avoided dealing directly with the complex aspects of human moral cognition, including MORAL EMOTIONS and MORAL VALUES. Here, we review current theoretical accounts of social cognition and put forth a framework designed to overcome the main limitations of earlier accounts. We argue that moral phenomena emerge from the integration of contextual social knowledge, represented as event knowledge in the prefrontal cortex (PFC); social semantic knowledge, stored in the anterior and posterior temporal cortex; and motivational and basic emotional states, which depend on cortical–limbic circuits. Our framework offers new interpretations for social behaviour patterns in healthy individuals and in patients with brain dysfunction, and makes testable predictions for neuropsychological dissociations in moral cognition.

Defining morality

'Moral' (derived from the Latin moralis) and 'ethical' (from the Greek êthikos) originally referred to the consensus of manners and customs within a social group, or to an inclination to behave in some ways but not in others4. Through the centuries, philosophical theories have adopted a deductive logico–verbal approach to morality that aims to identify universal principles that should guide human conduct. By contrast, a scientific approach to morality is emerging from the documentation of changes in moral behaviour in patients with brain dysfunction5, which provides inferences that concern the major dimensions of moral cognition. Moral cognitive neuroscience, therefore, aims to elucidate the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie moral behaviour. Here, morality is considered as the sets of customs and values that are embraced by a cultural group to guide social conduct, a view that does not assume the existence of absolute moral values. The implications of cognitive neuroscience for moral philosophy have been reviewed in detail elsewhere6-8 and are not addressed here.

The challenge

Morality is a product of evolutionary pressures that have shaped social cognitive and motivational mechanisms, which had already developed in human ancestors, into uniquely human forms of experience and behaviour9. Non-human primates have a vast repertoire of social behaviours that can be interpreted as genuine forerunners of human morality, such as caring for their peers and constantly striving for dominance10. As in humans, a sense of justice permeates their behaviour11. The evolution of the human PFC is intimately related to the emergence of human morality12-15. This has allowed motivational mechanisms to be integrated with an exceptional power to predict outcomes, and has characterized humans through their recent evolutionary steps in the cultural explosion of the Upper Paleolithic period16.

The challenge for moral cognitive neuroscience is that it requires extensive cross-field integration of neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology and anthropology, among other areas. In setting the goals of scientific exploration in this field, some central issues should be considered. How does the human moral mind emerge from the interaction of biological and cultural factors? How can the context-dependent nature of moral cognition be explained by neuroscience? How does moral cognition relate to emotion and motivation, and what are their neural substrates? Although moral cognitive neuroscience is still in its infancy, the available evidence already points to some promising solutions.

The neural basis of moral cognition

Moral behaviour impairment. Persistent antisocial behaviours have long been described17, yet their history in medicine is relatively recent. Impairment in 'moral sense' , or 'moral insanity', was first formally described as a "perversion of natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses"18, 19. Systematic evidence that specific brain regions might be crucial to moral behaviour was provided by early accounts of frontal lobe damage20, 21 and neurosurgical reports of war wounds (see, for example, Ref. 22) (Fig. 1).

Figure 1 | Brain regions implicated in moral cognition and behaviour in functional imaging and patient studies.

a | Cortical regions13, 99, 107 include the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC), the medial and lateral orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC and lOFC), the dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC; mostly the right hemisphere) and additional ventromedial sectors of the PFC (vmPFC), the anterior temporal lobes (aTL) and the superior temporal sulcus (STS) region. b | Subcortical structures13, 36, 48 include the amygdala, ventromedial hypothalamus, septal area and nuclei, basal forebrain (especially the ventral striatum/pallidum and extended amygdala), the walls of the third ventricle and rostral brainstem tegmentum. c | Brain regions that have not been consistently associated with moral cognition and behaviour in patient studies include the parietal and occipital lobes, large areas of the frontal and temporal lobes, the brain stem, basal ganglia and additional subcortical structures. Panel b modified, with permission, from Ref. 147 © (2005) University of Iowa's Virtual Hospital. Anatomical image adapted, with permission, from Ref. 148 © (1996) Appleton & Lange.

More recently, researchers have started to explicitly frame these observations within the sphere of moral cognition, strengthening the links between neuroscience, developmental neuropsychology and moral psychology. Eslinger and Damasio23 described moral behavioural deficits in a patient with damage to the ventromedial PFC acquired in adulthood, who was remarkably unimpaired in specific MORAL REASONING tasks. It was later shown that ventromedial PFC lesions acquired at an early age led to impairments in both moral reasoning and behaviour, indicating that moral development can be arrested by early PFC damage24, 25. These impairments in moral conduct resemble those observed in developmental PSYCHOPATHY26, 27 (Box 1). Less frequently28-31, lesions of the dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC; typically of the right hemisphere) also lead to changes in moral behaviour.

In addition to the PFC, other brain regions are crucial for moral cognition. Structural changes in the anterior temporal lobes — either acquired or developmental — can also impair moral behaviours28, 32. Dysfunction of neural circuits that involve the superior temporal sulcus (STS) region — a key area for social perception33 — is associated with the difficulty experienced by individuals with autism in attributing intentionality, which leads to reduced experience of pride and embarrassment1, 34. Lesions to limbic and paralimbic structures can impair basic motivational mechanisms, such as sexual drive, social attachment and aggressiveness, leading to extreme moral violations — for example, unprovoked physical assaults and paedophilia35, 36. Structural and functional imaging studies in psychopathic individuals have pointed to abnormalities in almost all these regions37-40.

Moral emotion and judgement. Recent studies have directly addressed the neural correlates of moral emotions and judgements. Patients with focal damage to the ventromedial PFC show deficient engagement of pride, embarrassment and regret41, 42. Functional imaging studies in healthy individuals have involved simple MORAL JUDGEMENTS43-45, moral dilemmas46, 47 and moral emotions48-52, using different tasks and stimulus presentation schemes. Overall, there is remarkable agreement between functional imaging and clinico-anatomical evidence about the brain areas involved in moral cognition. Activated regions include the anterior PFC (encompassing the frontopolar cortex, Brodmann's area (BA) 9/10), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC; especially its medial sector, BA 10/11/25), posterior STS (BA 21/39), anterior temporal lobes (BA 20/21/38), insula, precuneus (BA 7/31), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC, BA 24/32) and limbic regions. Notably, the wide range of modalities, stimuli and task requirements appear to have little effect on brain activation patterns (Fig. 2).

Figure 2 | Functional imaging studies of moral cognition.

Functional imaging studies of moral cognition have revealed consistent involvement of the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) and superior temporal sulcus (STS) region, as well as the anterior temporal lobes (aTL) and limbic structures. Panels a–e depict a transverse slice showing the activation of the aPFC (frontopolar cortex, Brodmann's areas 9/10) across different studies43, 45, 46, 48, 50. Panel f shows spatially overlapping activations in the PFC, STS region and aTL, derived from a conjunction analysis of two different studies: active moral judgements of written stimuli44 and passive viewing of pictures with moral content48. Samples of the pictorial149 and written stimuli used in these studies are shown. The remarkable overlap of brain regions involved in moral cognition, regardless of a wide variation in task requirements and stimulus modalities, contrasts with the large variability observed in brain imaging studies of 'less complex' basic emotions depicted in panel g (Ref. 150). A strong possible explanation is the effect of familiarity and situational context, which have not been controlled in functional imaging studies of basic emotions or moral cognition. The higher reproducibility of the activation patterns in studies of moral cognition might, therefore, have resulted from a smaller contextual variability related to the use of more well-defined social situations for moral judgements and moral emotions. By contrast, experimental designs of studies of basic emotion have put more effort into equating the sensory properties of stimuli (such as luminance, visual complexity and frequency) at the cost of more variability in social contexts (such as fear associated with a picture of a spider or with a crime scene). Panel a reproduced, with permission, from Ref. 43 © (2001) Associacao Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria. Panel b reproduced, with permission, from Ref. 46 (2001) American Association for the Advancement of Science. Panel c reproduced, with permission, from Ref. 48 © (2002) Society for Neuroscience. Panel d reproduced, with permission, from Ref. 45 © (2003) Lippincott Williams and Wilkins. Panel e reproduced, with permission, from Ref. 50 © (2004) Elsevier Science. Panel f (right-hand images) from Ref. 149. Panel g reproduced, with permission, from Ref. 150 © (2002) Elsevier Science.

Besides the consistent patterns of brain activation found across studies, there were also some differential findings. We found activation of the anterior PFC when a moral judgement condition was compared with non-emotional factual judgements43, but not when moral judgements were compared with a social–emotional condition, during which a more ventral region was activated44. Greene and colleagues used a moral judgement task that involved classic moral dilemmas (for example, should you kill an innocent person in order to save five other people?) and found similar activation of the anterior PFC46, 47. Decision difficulty was correlated with increased activity in the ACC. Heekeren and colleagues showed that the presence of bodily harm in moral violation scenarios leads to decreased reaction times and decreased activation of the anterior temporal lobe53. Evidence is emerging that partially dissociable PFC–temporal–limbic networks represent distinct moral emotions, including guilt, anger and embarrassment13, 49-52.

Current accounts

Some current cognitive neuroscience frameworks have direct implications for our understanding of the neural basis of moral cognition. The main characteristics and limitations of these accounts are briefly reviewed and discussed below, with an emphasis on their relevance to moral cognition (see also Table 1).

Table 1 | Characteristics and limitations of frameworks relevant to moral cognitive neuroscience

Conflict processing in moral judgement. On the basis of functional imaging studies46, 47, Greene and colleagues have focused on the role of cognitive control in moral judgement. Their hypothesis was derived in part from Miller and Cohen's theoretical account of PFC function54, which assumes that the PFC is specifically involved in 'controlled processing', such as in rapidly changing, ill-structured situations — characteristics that are also held by other models14. This proposal is supported by evidence for DLPFC and ACC activation in response to increases in attentional and conflict detection demands. Greene's hierarchical processing view assumes that cognitive control processes, afforded by the lateral PFC and ACC ('cognitive areas'), override emotional responses (which are attributed to the medial PFC, posterior cingulate cortex and STS) to produce UTILITARIAN responses to moral dilemmas — for example, smothering a crying baby to save more lives. By contrast, emotional areas would favour 'personal' moral judgements — for example, thinking that it is inappropriate to smother the baby. The theory posits mutually competitive roles of cognition and emotion in moral judgement.

Greene's functional imaging findings are in line with the cognitive control view and demonstrate reliable task-related effects in different types of moral judgement. However, the concepts of 'personal' and 'impersonal' violations, and of 'utilitarian' and 'non-utilitarian' choices need to be broken down into clear cognitive components. Furthermore, this account does not address the possibility that culturally shaped moral values and beliefs might lead to disparate 'utilitarian' conclusions. Finally, it is unclear how impairment of cognitive control and conflict monitoring would affect moral cognition55.

Somatic marker hypothesis. Damasio and colleagues observed that patients with ventromedial PFC damage can detect the implications of a social situation, but cannot make appropriate decisions in real life. They suggested that such patients would be unable to mark those implications with a signal that automatically distinguishes advantageous from pernicious actions56. The somatic marker model explains why patients with ventromedial PFC damage can still reason about social problems, provided the premises are cast verbally, but fail in natural settings. The IOWA GAMBLING TASK, which was preceded by similar gambling tasks57, was put forward as an experimental surrogate for decision-making in real life. Bechara and colleagues58 showed that normal individuals develop anticipatory galvanic skin responses whenever they contemplate a risky choice, and begin to choose advantageously before they are consciously aware of the best strategy. Patients with ventromedial PFC damage do not develop anticipatory autonomic responses and behave as if they are insensitive to future consequences, positive or negative, being primarily guided by immediate prospects that ultimately lead to a net financial loss.

The somatic marker hypothesis has been influential and is considered to be a possible mechanism that could underlie behavioural dysfunction in patients with PFC lesions. This framework is compatible with contextual effects (although these are not explicitly addressed), integrates cognition and emotion, makes testable predictions, and has been supported by neurophysiological and clinical data58-60. However, it does not explicitly address the role of different PFC subregions in moral cognition. The relationships between somatic markers and other cortical and limbic regions that have previously been linked to moral cognition13 are also obscure. Recent evidence from both patients with PFC lesions and healthy individuals has challenged the role of somatic markers in guiding decision making and social behaviours61-63.

Social response reversal. The social RESPONSE-REVERSAL model, which was proposed by Blair and Cipolotti to explain social behavioural impairments in patients with OFC damage, was influenced by Rolls and coworkers' response-reversal paradigm. In their pioneering work, Rolls and colleagues showed that patients with OFC damage were impaired in EXTINCTION and response-reversal tasks64. These impairments were correlated with measures of socially inappropriate behaviours, which led to the hypothesis that the sociopathy of these patients results from a difficulty in modifying behavioural responses, especially when these are followed by negative outcomes. The response-reversal model has received extensive support from electrophysiological studies in animals65 as well as from human lesion and neuroimaging data66-68.

Blair and Cipolotti compared their findings from a patient with OFC damage (J.S.) with those from a patient with DLPFC damage and five prison inmates with psychopathy62. J.S. showed a drastic change in personality after OFC damage, becoming aggressive and callous towards other people. He was impaired in recognizing facial expressions of anger and disgust, but was unimpaired in response-reversal tasks. This led the authors to argue for a social response-reversal mechanism — an inhibitory system reliant on the proper functioning of the OFC that is normally activated by perception or expectation of others' anger69. Blair suggested that a different inhibitory mechanism — the 'violence inhibition mechanism' (VIM) — would be deficient in developmental psychopathy, leading to instrumental aggression70. The VIM underscores the role of the amygdala in aversive conditioning, and is believed to have a key role in moral socialization.

These accounts can be used to make specific predictions about the role of response reversals and aversive conditioning in patients with OFC and amygdala lesions. However, they cannot be easily extended to explain other types of impairment in moral behaviour that arise from damage to other brain regions, such as the temporal lobes and anterior PFC. In addition, these models were not designed to explain how social knowledge, on which reinforcement contingencies operate, is represented in the brain. Finally, although bilateral amygdala lesions lead to impaired perceptual judgement of facial emotions71, evidence for severe impairments in moral behaviour following isolated amygdala lesions acquired either in adulthood or early childhood is still lacking.

Sociopathy as a failure of 'theory of mind'. Disruptive antisocial behaviour is a hallmark of early frontotemporal dementia72. These profound changes in personality have been predominantly ascribed to degeneration of the right PFC73 or the temporal poles74, 75. Lough et al.76 used a battery of neuropsychological and social cognition tests to assess J.M., a 47-year-old man who presented with a decline in work performance and a gross deterioration in social behaviour. Imaging studies revealed bilateral atrophy of the OFC and anterior temporal lobes, including the amygdala. J.M. had a normal IQ and fared well on standard executive tests, but was otherwise severely impaired on THEORY OF MIND (ToM) tasks that require a degree of abstraction, with specific deficits on first- and SECOND-ORDER FALSE BELIEF TASKS, and on detection of faux pas. The authors proposed that the dissociation between the impairment in ToM mechanisms and normal executive performance underlies the personality changes observed in some cases of frontotemporal dementia. This account is therefore compatible with abnormal moral cognition — such as difficulties in the attribution and experience of pride and embarrassment — observed in autism and Asperger's syndrome, which are typically associated with ToM impairments34, 77. However, ToM abilities only account for some aspects of moral cognition, but not, for example, the role of social knowledge, contextual information and basic motivations. Noticeably, ToM is relatively intact in psychopathy, in line with its role in the deviousness of these individuals78.

Structured-event-complex framework. The structured-event-complex (SEC) framework15 supports claims that executive functions performed by the PFC are based on stored event sequence knowledge. SEC representations are long-term memories of event sequences that guide the perception and execution of goal-oriented activities, such as going to a concert or giving a dinner party79. A SEC representation includes situational knowledge abstracted across events (concert) and the temporal organization of events (making a reservation, dressing up, and so on). Activated SECs sequentially bind representations of objects, actions and spatial maps stored in posterior brain regions. The SEC framework predicts that different subdivisions of the PFC store different types of content or domains of event knowledge14, 80, 81. Clinical and neuroimaging evidence supports this prediction, showing that different PFC regions are involved in representing social and emotional SECs (ventromedial PFC)82, 83, novel or multi-tasking event sequences (anterior PFC)84, 85 or overlearned sequences (more posterior PFC regions)86, 87. The importance of the PFC for goal-oriented activities is also corroborated by recent functional imaging studies of future reward prediction88.

Although this framework has clear implications for moral cognition, these rely on the hypothesis that the PFC stores the situational and temporal context of social knowledge. The SEC framework does not predict how PFC regions interact with limbic areas and other cortical regions to give rise to a range of moral cognitive phenomena, such as moral values and moral emotions.

Moral sensitivity hypothesis. A final account is that of the moral sensitivity hypothesis13, 48. Using a task that engaged participants as observers, we showed that the viewing of pictures that depicted moral violations specifically activated the anterior PFC, medial OFC, STS region, brainstem and limbic structures. Scenes associated with BASIC EMOTIONS (disgust and fear) activated similar brainstem and limbic regions (including the amygdala), but not the medial OFC and STS. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that a network involving the anterior PFC, OFC, STS and limbic regions represents social–emotional events linked to 'moral sensitivity' — an automatic tagging of ordinary social events with moral values. This hypothesis was supported by the finding that the medial OFC, anterior PFC, STS and precuneus show increased coupling in a functional connectivity analysis48, and by the observation that a similar set of regions is involved in moral reasoning and social perception. Although we proposed that the OFC is more involved in automatic social–emotional associations and that the anterior PFC has a role in predicting future social outcomes, the role of the PFC in context-dependent social situations was not addressed. In addition, the moral sensitivity hypothesis makes no predictions about specific impairments in moral cognition following selective damage to the anterior temporal lobes, the STS region and PFC subregions.

Limitations of current frameworks

Some of the above frameworks point to clear-cut singular mechanisms. These mechanisms have the potential advantage of allowing more specific predictions to be made about the workings of particular brain regions, but they fall short of explaining key aspects of moral cognition. Some general limitations that apply to all of these frameworks are discussed below.

Ecological validity of experimental designs. Ecological validity is especially relevant for moral cognition studies, because moral cognition depends strongly on situational and cultural context6. The experimental constraints that are imposed by behavioural and functional imaging studies might have an important impact on performance on moral cognition tasks. Some people might feel uncomfortable disclosing their opinions about sensitive issues, providing socially desirable answers instead. On the other hand, different people might provide similar opinions, but rely on entirely different moral values. The fact that moral cognition operates to a large extent swiftly and implicitly in regular social life13 makes the ecological validity issue even more crucial. The making of moral judgements on extreme and unfamiliar situations, such as those posed by classic moral dilemmas89, offers interesting ways to probe philosophical points of view, but can hardly be taken as a proxy for everyday moral reasoning. In addition, personal beliefs and familiarity with the scenarios strongly affect behaviour and brain activation results90-94.

Brain processes and representations. Another important limitation of current accounts is the lack of specific predictions about the effects of PFC lesions on moral behaviour. PFC function has been described using two general views: the 'processing' approach, which holds that the cognitive function of the PFC can be described in terms of performance without specifying a representation, and the 'representational' approach, which seeks to establish what type of information is stored in the PFC14. The processing view tends to regard the PFC as a content-free repository of processing modules, such as conflict monitoring, selection and inhibitory control95, and predicts task-dependent rather than content-dependent dissociations resulting from brain lesions. Therefore, moral behaviour impairments following PFC damage would result from a release of limbic areas from PFC 'executive control'96. However, there is no convincing evidence that PFC damage leads to universal impairments in these processes, and it is hard to imagine how complex personality and emotional changes could emerge from dysfunction of these all-purpose processes97. The finding that performance on social reasoning tasks crucially depends on the content of the information being evaluated (for example, social versus non-social)90, 91, 94, 98, and evidence from functional imaging and brain lesion studies linking PFC subregions to content-specific dissociations in social reasoning99, ATTITUDES82, 83, beliefs92 and emotional signals100 indicate that a representational view can better explain the role of the PFC in moral cognition.

Culture and the brain. Finally, inferring cognitive and neural mechanisms from behaviours can be misleading101, especially when cultural and situational factors are involved. For instance, Westerners and East Asians differ in categorization strategies when making causal attributions and predictions102, and moral values and social preferences are shaped by cultural codification103-105. The PFC has a central role in the internalization of moral values and norms through the integration of cultural and contextual information during development24, 106, 107. Assessing the relationships between culturally shaped values and preferences in social interactions will therefore be a logical next step in designing experiments with which to study moral cognition (Box 2).

A new model: EFECs

The evidence discussed above strongly indicates that the neural mechanisms of moral cognition are not restricted to the PFC, limbic areas or any other brain region. We propose a new representational neural architecture, designed to circumvent the limitations of previous frameworks. In our view, moral cognitive phenomena emerge from the integration of content- and context-dependent representations in cortical–limbic networks.

The structure of the framework, its properties and its predictions rely on three main components (Fig. 3a): structured event knowledge, which corresponds to context-dependent representations of events and event sequences in the PFC; social perceptual and functional features, represented as context-independent knowledge in the anterior and posterior temporal cortex; and central motive and emotional states, which correspond to context-independent activation in limbic and paralimbic structures. These components were derived from clinical and imaging evidence, and their relevance to moral cognition and behaviour is reviewed below. Component representations interact and give rise to event–feature–emotion complexes (EFECs) through three putative BINDING mechanisms: sequential binding, which has been proposed to link SECs in the PFC108; temporal binding among anatomically highly connected regions, also involved in PERCEPTUAL GESTALTS in the posterior cortex109; and third-party binding of anatomically loosely connected regions by synchronized activity, which results in the formation of episodic memories108, 110.

Figure 3 | The event–feature–emotion complex framework.

a | The event–feature–emotion complex (EFEC) framework postulates that moral cognitive and behavioural phenomena arise from the binding of three main components: structured event knowledge (provided by context-dependent representations in prefrontal subregions), social perceptual and functional features (stored in the posterior and anterior sectors of the temporal cortex) and central motive or basic emotional states (such as aggressiveness, sadness, attachment or sexual arousal, represented in limbic and paralimbic regions). b | Emergent representations predicted by the EFEC model. Relevant types of moral cognition phenomenon that can be understood on the basis of the EFEC framework include moral emotions, moral values and long-term goals. The elements from the three main components of the EFEC framework interact to produce the moral emotion compassion. The prefrontal cortex provides contextual event representations (for example, the girl is an orphan and the odds of adoption are low), the superior temporal sulcus and anterior temporal cortex region contribute social perceptual (sad facial expression of a child) and functional (the concept of 'helplessness') features, and limbic/paralimbic regions underlie central motive states (feeling sadness, anxiety and attachment). These component representations give rise to a 'gestalt' experience by way of temporal synchronization109. c–f | Recent functional imaging studies show that these component representations are consistently activated by distinct moral emotions: compassion (Moll et al., unpublished observations) (c); embarrassment50 (d); indignation151 (e); and guilt49 (f). ACC, anterior cingulate cortex; aPFC, anterior prefrontal cortex; aTL, anterior temporal lobes; OFC, orbitofrontal cortex; STS, superior temporal sulcus. Anatomical image in panels a and b adapted, with permission, from Ref. 148 © (1996) Appleton & Lange. Panel d reproduced, with permission, from Ref. 50 © (2004) Elsevier Science. Panel e reproduced, with permission, from Ref. 151 © (2005) Lippincott Williams and Wilkins. Panel f reproduced, with permission, from Ref. 49 © (2000) Elsevier Science.

Structured event knowledge. Morality is a real-world business. It is about people navigating, interacting and making choices in an ever-changing world. Humans integrate extensive contextual elements when assessing the behaviour of others and when appreciating their own actions in a given situation. The importance of the PFC in structuring context-dependent social and non-social knowledge into SECs is described in terms of the SEC framework14. Distinct PFC regions have been postulated to be involved in representing event sequence knowledge. According to the SEC model, over-learned event sequences, such as routine tasks, are stored in medial and more posterior sectors of the PFC, whereas less predictable event sequences are represented in the DLPFC. The anterior sectors of the PFC are more important for storing long-term goals and multi-stage event complexes, such as those involved in making plans and thinking about the future23, 84, 111-113, and have been implicated in integrating separate cognitive operations to achieve a superordinate behavioural goal84, 114. Finally, the ventromedial sectors of the PFC are preferentially involved in representing social and emotional event knowledge, which is essential for the formation of attitudes and social stereotypes115-117.

Social perceptual and functional features. When you skim your favourite newspaper, gather at a conference or attend a family meeting, your brain deals with a massive number of perceptual signs of social significance. Our ability to manage this burden of information relies on complex patterns of featural and semantic knowledge118. The existence of context-independent featural representations is supported by a vast amount of neuropsychological and functional imaging evidence119, 120. Making implicit or explicit moral appraisals when engaged in the social world requires the ability to efficiently extract social perceptual and functional features from the environment. Social perceptual features are extracted from facial expression, gaze, prosody, body posture and gestures. The posterior STS is a key region for storing these representations33, 121. In support of this view, morphological abnormalities of the STS region have been implicated in the impaired social decoding observed in autism122.

Social functional features code for context-independent semantic properties that are extracted from different social situations. The importance of the anterior temporal cortex for semantic feature knowledge is underscored by supramodal semantic impairments in semantic dementia123. Patients with anterior temporal lobe resection show impairments in naming human actions124, which indicates that this region is involved in representing functional knowledge relevant to people. The severe behavioural changes that are associated with isolated anterior temporal atrophy in semantic dementia74, 75, and the finding of semantic impairments and abnormal activity in this brain region in psychopathic individuals39, 125 support this view.

Central motive states. Moral cognition depends on elaborated cortical mechanisms for representing and retrieving event knowledge, semantic information and perceptual features. However, morality would be reduced to a meaningless concept if it were stripped from its motivational and emotional aspects. Limbic and paralimbic regions126 monitor bodily homeostasis and underlie elementary emotional or motivational 'states'. The concept of 'central motive states'127 is an influential account of the basic mechanisms of motivation. Together with other limbic/paralimbic and brainstem structures (the amygdala, septal nuclei, ventral striatum, medial forebrain bundle, ventral tegmental area and paralimbic cortex), hypothalamic activity has a central role in 'undirected' emotionality, including sexual arousal, social attachment, hunger, aggression and extremes of pleasantness. Accordingly, these states can be potently elicited or suppressed by selective lesions, drugs and electrical stimulation of these regions, as well as by imbalances of neurotransmitters or neuromodulators13, 36, 126-129. Central motive states must be distinguished from basic emotions, such as fear and disgust. Basic emotions emerge by temporal binding of context representations (perceiving the feared object or situation) and the central motive state itself (undirected anxiety).

Several limbic nuclei exert a powerful influence over a wide range of behaviours through reciprocal connections with the PFC and other cortical regions126, 130. Our framework underscores a key role for central motive states in moral behaviour by way of integrated cortical–limbic networks. For example, cortical representations allow you to notice that someone is hurt, whereas central motive states elicit anxiety and attachment, which encourage you to help the suffering person. This integrative perspective contrasts with the commonly held view that 'rational' cognitive mechanisms control or compete with emotional ones.

Explaining complex moral phenomena

Although the EFEC framework can predict several possible emergent properties, we discuss three of the most relevant for moral cognition: moral emotions, moral values and long-term goals.

Whereas basic emotions spring from perceptions, imagination or recollections endowed with personal relevance, moral emotions are linked to the interest or welfare of other individuals or society as a whole131. Guilt, compassion, embarrassment, shame, pride, contempt and gratitude are prototypical examples of moral emotions; depending on the context, other emotions — such as disgust, awe and indignation or anger — may also qualify as moral emotions131, 132. As a general rule, moral emotions result from interactions among values, norms and contextual elements of social situations, and are elicited in response to violations or enforcement of social preferences and expectations104, 132. Although the contextual cues that link moral emotions to social norms are variable and shaped by culture103, these emotions evolved from prototypes found in other primates11 and can be characterized across cultures133.

Moral emotions require the integration of the three components of the model. For example, compassion requires the integration of context-independent social perceptual features (for instance, 'a sad facial expression of a child'), social functional features (abstract conceptual knowledge pointing to the features of 'helplessness' of an orphan child), and central motive states (sadness, anxiety and attachment) with specific contextual event representations (such as 'her parents died in an accident, and the chances of adoption at her age are low') (Fig. 3b).

Moral values (for example, being an honest citizen or a caring parent) and norms (such as paying taxes and not stealing) comprise several standards of conduct in society; they enforce social conformity and shape attitudes and expectations in social situations105, 134. Behaviours that deviate from or enforce these values elicit different moral judgements and emotions (for instance, pride when one upholds the values, or guilt when one fails to do so). Despite the intimate link between moral values, norms and attitudes with moral cognition, their neural representations are still poorly understood. Recent functional MRI (fMRI) studies have started to shed light on these aspects. Attitudes that relate to sensitive issues, such as war, murder and abortion, activate networks involving different PFC sectors, limbic and paralimbic regions and the anterior temporal cortex80, 135. In our view, the moral values and moral emotions involved in specific situations directly influence implicit and explicit moral appraisals.

Another key aspect of moral cognition is the representation of goals and the prediction of the utility of outcomes136 in social situations. Pursuing goals or foreseeing possible consequences of one's decisions in the social world requires the ability to estimate the likelihood of outcomes and their desirability. Functional integration of information in the anterior PFC (which represents long-term outcomes)88 and limbic structures (which code for the reward value of behavioural choices) is key to our ability to weigh the motivational relevance of different behavioural choices in social situations13. This view can be parsimoniously integrated with cognitive and neurobiological models of reward expectation and utility estimation65, 137-139, and contrasts with the interpretation that the PFC performs a 'cognitive role' in abstract moral reasoning by suppressing emotional responses47. Our view posits a central role for the human ability to represent and evaluate large sets of possible event outcomes, which are linked to motivational salience through cortical–limbic integration.

Model predictions

The EFEC framework allows us to generate new predictions about the patterns of moral behavioural changes that result from dysfunction of different brain regions that cannot be made using the other frameworks described above. In addition, it offers novel ways of interpreting functional imaging findings in healthy individuals. Some of these predictions are described below.

A general prediction is that different neural subdivisions store distinct knowledge or motivational states. The binding of particular neuronal groups in each of these areas could give rise to a particular moral cognitive representation (Fig. 3b).

A lesion of the anterior PFC would lead to selective impairments in moral evaluations that rely on predicting the long-term outcomes of one's own actions, such as the anticipation of guilt. We predict that patients with damage to this area would be guided more by short-term goals because their knowledge of long-term plans and goals, or their binding with motivational relevance is impaired. In our interpretation, the activation of this region during moral judgement results from representing possible outcomes and how they branch into the future; this offers a parsimonious explanation for anterior PFC activation in reflective moral reasoning ('moral calculus')13, and in 'utilitarian' moral judgements47.

Lesions of the DLPFC would lead to behavioural impairments in unfamiliar situations, in which reliance on external guidance and stimuli becomes an issue54, but would leave intact well-established social behaviours and attitudes. By contrast, lesions of the ventral sectors of the PFC would lead to severe social behavioural changes due to disruption of social–emotional contextual knowledge14, with early lesions having more drastic effects as they impair the learning of moral values107. Lesions of the ventromedial PFC would tend to impair adherence to well-established social norms and attitudes, which is consistent with the often ensuing personality changes. Lesions of the lateral OFC are expected to impair behaviours that rely on dynamically comparing non-matching social–emotional cues with stored representations, which is in agreement with the proposed role of this region in social response reversal62.

Damage to the posterior STS is predicted to disrupt the ability to recognize socially relevant perceptual features of faces, body posture and movements. This would lead to inadequate social behaviour under circumstances that depend on the perception of these signals, but would leave intact previously established social rules, attitudes and outcome knowledge, as well as their integration with emotional and motivational states. Therefore, acquired lesions in adulthood are predicted to have a relatively minor effect on general social knowledge. However, early developmental disorders that affect this region would impair the acquisition of general social knowledge, including social rules, attitudes and outcome knowledge, which depends on the perceptual integration of social situations.

Lesions of the anterior temporal lobe are expected to disrupt knowledge of social concepts and values that are more context-independent (such as 'honour' and 'greed'), but to leave intact highly context-dependent knowledge of sequences of social events (for example, 'going to a supermarket'). We predict that loss of this knowledge, as measured by semantic memory tasks, would impair implicit and explicit evaluation of one's own and others' social behaviours.

Dysfunction of limbic or paralimbic regions is predicted to cause exaggeration or attenuation of basic motivational and emotional states, thereby affecting moral behaviour. Lesions of the hypothalamus, septal nuclei, basal forebrain and neighbouring structures are predicted to produce gross distortions of the valence of moral values, attitudes and moral emotions. This is in line with the observation of unprovoked rage, lack of empathy and abnormal sexual behaviours following isolated damage to limbic and paralimbic regions35, 36, 128, 140. In the case of acquired lesions in adulthood, gross changes in the motivational relevance of behaviours would be observed, in spite of preserved knowledge of social rules. By contrast, early developmental disorders that affect these regions would cause aberrant social learning. Abnormal behaviours in these patients do not result from impaired inhibitory mechanisms, but from a lack of emotional empathy, or increased aggression or sexual drive, for example. These motivational states can be investigated with functional imaging and physiological methods (such as galvanic skin responses).

Conclusions and future directions

Moral cognitive neuroscience researchers have developed innovative paradigms for the scientific exploration of unique forms of human social behaviour. Recent studies are fostering new interpretations with regard to the neural bases of moral cognition. However, they are also generating new conundrums that require theoretical frameworks to be compatible with distinctive characteristics of the human moral condition.

We have reviewed clinical and experimental work and discussed the strengths and limitations of current theoretical accounts that are relevant to moral cognitive neuroscience. We have proposed a new comprehensive model — the event–feature–emotion complex framework — which integrates cultural and context-dependent knowledge, semantic social knowledge and basic motivational states. This framework allows us to generate testable predictions for neuropsychological dissociations associated with selective brain dysfunction, and can be used as a guideline for designing future experiments.

Moral cognitive neuroscience can improve assessment, prediction and treatment of behavioural disorders. Understanding the neural basis of moral cognition will help to shape environmental, psychological and medical intervention aimed at promoting prosocial behaviours and social welfare. Future studies will be needed to explore the neural basis of how different individuals and social groups make use of strategies and heuristics to solve moral conflicts. The implications of this new knowledge for how societies conduct business, regulate social behaviour and plan for their futures remain to be seen.

Boxes


Box 1 | Psychopathy and the neural organization of morality



The concepts of antisocial personality disorder ('sociopathy') and psychopathy (a severe form of sociopathy) originated from the need to diagnose individuals who show a pattern of behaviours that goes against the common good and repeatedly involves harm to others. Although social norms vary among cultures and even among intracultural niches, sociopathy and psychopathy cannot be reduced to 'cultural artefacts'141 for the simple fact that their core manifestations are stable and easily recognizable, both historically and cross-culturally. The neurobiological validity of sociopathy and psychopathy is supported by increasing scientific evidence that the brains of affected individuals differ from those of socially adjusted people: imaging studies in psychopaths have revealed reduction of grey matter in the prefrontal cortex and abnormal brain activation in limbic regions, as well as in the prefrontal and temporal lobes38, 39.

Box 2 | Culture, moral values and neuroeconomics




Humans often show altruistic inclinations, relying on moral values and preferences, such as equality and fairness, as well as to self-interested motivation142. Economic games provide an interesting way to experimentally investigate social cooperation. In the Ultimatum Game, a proposer makes an offer to a responder on how to split an amount of money. If the responder accepts, the money is split as proposed. However, if the responder rejects, both players end up with nothing. Recent functional imaging studies in the new area of NEUROECONOMICS show that the brain areas activated during these interactions include limbic/paralimbic regions (the hypothalamus and ventral striatum), the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) and the superior temporal sulcus (STS)143, which overlap with the regions involved in moral cognition (panel a). Activation of the insula, a paralimbic structure, predicted rejection of unfair offers144, and activity in the aPFC and striatum reflected decisions to punish violators of the norm145. An interesting aspect of these experimental designs is that they make it possible to measure brain activation during real-time interactions among two or more individuals. Prec, precuneus.

Behavioural studies clearly underscore the role of culturally shaped preferences and values in social and economic interactions. For example, behaviour in experimental games might reflect differences in social cooperativeness, such as proneness to engage in collective efforts. In a study conducted in Tanzania, the more individualistic Pimbwe group made low offers in the Ultimatum Game, whereas the highly cooperative Sukuma group consistently made generous offers146. Such cultural differences are illustrated by the variability of proposals in the Ultimatum Game among different social groups (panel b), although the underlying cognitive and motivational mechanisms and their relationships to social norms and values are still largely unknown105. Future studies could address the distinct roles of PFC subregions, limbic areas and the temporal cortex in representing culturally shaped moral values and norms. Panel a reproduced, with permission, from Ref. 143 © (2004) Elsevier Science. Panel b modified, with permission, from Ref. 146 © (2005) Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society.

Jorge Moll1, Roland Zahn1, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza2, Frank Krueger1 & Jordan Grafman1 about the authors

1 Jorge Moll, Roland Zahn, Frank Krueger and Jordan Grafman are at The Cognitive Neuroscience Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Building 10; Room 5C205; MSC 1440, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-1440, USA.
2 Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza is at the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Unit, LABS-D'Or Hospital Network, R. Pinheiro Guimaraes 22, 3rd floor, Rio de Janeiro 22281-080, Brazil.

correspondence to: Jordan Grafman grafmanj@ninds.nih.gov

Links

FURTHER INFORMATION
Cognitive Neuroscience Section, NINDS, NIH | Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience Unit, LABS-D'Or Hospital Network

References
1.
Blakemore, S. -J., Winston, J. & Frith, U. Social cognitive neuroscience: where are we heading? Trends Cogn. Sci. 8, 216−222 (2004). | Article | PubMed | ISI |

2.
Wood, J. N. Social cognition and the prefrontal cortex. Behav. Cogn. Neurosci. Rev. 2, 97−114 (2003). | Article | PubMed |

3.
Adolphs, R. Cognitive neuroscience of human social behaviour. Nature Rev. Neurosci. 4, 165−178 (2003). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

4.
MacIntyre, A. After Virtue (Duckworth, London, 1985).

5.
Tranel, D. 'Acquired sociopathy': the development of sociopathic behavior following focal brain damage. Prog. Exp. Pers. Psychopathol. Res. 285−311 (1994). | PubMed | ChemPort |

6.
Casebeer, W. D. Moral cognition and its neural constituents. Nature Rev. Neurosci. 4, 840−846 (2003). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

7.
Greene, J. From neural 'is' to moral 'ought': what are the moral implications of neuroscientific moral psychology? Nature Rev. Neurosci. 4, 846−849 (2003). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

8.
Casebeer, W. D. Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectionism, and Moral Cognition (MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 2003).

9.
Schulkin, J. Roots of Social Sensitivity and Neural Function (MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 2000).

10.
Hauser, M. D., Chen, M. K., Chen, F. & Chuang, E. Give unto others: genetically unrelated cotton-top tamarin monkeys preferentially give food to those who altruistically give food back. Proc. Biol. Sci. 270, 2363−2370 (2003). | PubMed | ISI |

11.
de Waal, F. B. M. Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 2001).

12.
Allman, J., Hakeem, A. & Watson, K. Two phylogenetic specializations in the human brain. Neuroscientist 8, 335−346 (2002). | PubMed | ISI |

13.
Moll, J., de Oliveira-Souza, R. & Eslinger, P. J. Morals and the human brain: a working model. Neuroreport 14, 299−305 (2003). | Article | PubMed | ISI |

14.
Wood, J. N. & Grafman, J. Human prefrontal cortex: processing and representational perspectives. Nature Rev. Neurosci. 4, 139−147 (2003). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

15.
Grafman, J. Similarities and distinctions among current models of prefrontal cortical functions. Ann. NY Acad. Sci. 769, 337−368 (1995). | PubMed | ChemPort |

16.
Mithen, S. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science (Thames and Hudson, London, 1996).

17.
Altschuler, E. L., Haroun, A., Ho, B. & Weimer, A. Did Samson have antisocial personality disorder? Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 58, 202−203 (2001). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

18.
Augstein, H. F. J C Prichard's concept of moral insanity — a medical theory of the corruption of human nature. Med. Hist. 40, 311−343 (1996). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

19.
Prichard, J. C. in The Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine (eds Forbes, J., Tweedie, A. & Conolly, J.) 10−32; 847−875 (Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, London, 1833−1835).

20.
Welt, L. Ueber charackterveranderungen des menschen. Dtsch Arch. Klin. Med. 42, 339−390 (1888).

21.
Macmillan, M. An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage (MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 2000).

22.
Grafman, J. et al. Frontal lobe injuries, violence, and aggression: a report of the Vietnam Head Injury Study. Neurology 46, 1231−1238 (1996). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

23.
Eslinger, P. J. & Damasio, A. R. Severe disturbance of higher cognition after bilateral frontal lobe ablation: patient EVR. Neurology 35, 1731−1741 (1985). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

24.
Anderson, S. W., Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D. & Damasio, A. R. Impairment of social and moral behavior related to early damage in human prefrontal cortex. Nature Neurosci. 2, 1032−1037 (1999). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

25.
Eslinger, P. J., Grattan, L. M., Damasio, H. & Damasio, A. R. Developmental consequences of childhood frontal lobe damage. Arch. Neurol. 49, 764−769 (1992). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

26.
Cleckley, H. The Mask of Sanity (CV Mosby, St Louis, Missouri, USA, 1964).

27.
Hare, R. D. Psychopathy: Theory and Research (John Wiley, New York, USA, 1970).

28.
Miller, B. L., Chang, L., Mena, I., Boone, K. & Lesser, I. M. Progressive right frontotemporal degeneration: clinical, neuropsychological and SPECT characteristics. Dementia 4, 204−213 (1993). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

29.
Perry, R. J. et al. Hemispheric dominance for emotions, empathy and social behaviour: evidence from right and left handers with frontotemporal dementia. Neurocase 7, 145−160 (2001). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

30.
Tranel, D., Bechara, A. & Denburg, N. L. Asymmetric functional roles of right and left ventromedial prefrontal cortices in social conduct, decision-making, and emotional processing. Cortex 38, 589−612 (2002). | PubMed | ISI |

31.
Eslinger, P. J. Adolescent neuropsychological development after early right prefrontal cortex damage. Dev. Neuropsychol. 18, 297−329 (2000). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

32.
Kruesi, M. J., Casanova, M. F., Mannheim, G. & Johnson-Bilder, A. Reduced temporal lobe volume in early onset conduct disorder. Psychiatry Res. 132, 1−11 (2004). | PubMed | ISI |

33.
Allison, T., Puce, A. & McCarthy, G. Social perception from visual cues: role of the STS region. Trends Cogn. Sci. 4, 267−278 (2000). | Article | PubMed | ISI |

34.
Frith, C. D. & Frith, U. Interacting minds — a biological basis. Science 286, 1692−1695 (1999). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

35.
Burns, J. M. & Swerdlow, R. H. Right orbitofrontal tumor with pedophilia symptom and constructional apraxia sign. Arch. Neurol. 60, 437−440 (2003). | Article | PubMed | ISI |

36.
Weissenberger, A. A. et al. Aggression and psychiatric comorbidity in children with hypothalamic hamartomas and their unaffected siblings. J. Am. Acad. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry 40, 696−703 (2001). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

37.
Muller, J. L. et al. Abnormalities in emotion processing within cortical and subcortical regions in criminal psychopaths: evidence from a functional magnetic resonance imaging study using pictures with emotional content. Biol. Psychiatry 54, 152−162 (2003). | PubMed | ISI |

38.
Soderstrom, H. et al. Reduced frontotemporal perfusion in psychopathic personality. Psychiatry Res 114, 81−94 (2002). | PubMed | ISI |

39.
Kiehl, K. A. et al. Limbic abnormalities in affective processing by criminal psychopaths as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Biol. Psychiatry 50, 677−684 (2001). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

40.
Raine, A., Lencz, T., Bihrle, S., LaCasse, L. & Colletti, P. Reduced prefrontal gray matter volume and reduced autonomic activity in antisocial personality disorder. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 57, 119−127; discussion 128−129 (2000).

41.
Beer, J. S., Heerey, E. A., Keltner, D., Scabini, D. & Knight, R. T. The regulatory function of self-conscious emotion: insights from patients with orbitofrontal damage. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 85, 594−604 (2003). | Article | PubMed | ISI |

42.
Camille, N. et al. The involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex in the experience of regret. Science 304, 1167−1170 (2004). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

43.
Moll, J., Eslinger, P. J. & Oliveira-Souza, R. Frontopolar and anterior temporal cortex activation in a moral judgment task: preliminary functional MRI results in normal subjects. Arq. Neuropsiquiatr. 59, 657−664 (2001). | PubMed | ChemPort |

44.
Moll, J., de Oliveira-Souza, R., Bramati, I. E. & Grafman, J. Functional networks in emotional moral and nonmoral social judgments. Neuroimage 16, 696−703 (2002). | Article | PubMed | ISI |

45.
Heekeren, H. R., Wartenburger, I., Schmidt, H., Schwintowski, H. P. & Villringer, A. An fMRI study of simple ethical decision-making. Neuroreport 14, 1215−1219 (2003). | PubMed | ISI |

46.
Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M. & Cohen, J. D. An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science 293, 2105−2108 (2001). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

47.
Greene, J. D., Nystrom, L. E., Engell, A. D., Darley, J. M. & Cohen, J. D. The neural bases of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment. Neuron 44, 389−400 (2004). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

48.
Moll, J. et al. The neural correlates of moral sensitivity: a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation of basic and moral emotions. J. Neurosci. 22, 2730−2736 (2002). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

49.
Shin, L. M. et al. Activation of anterior paralimbic structures during guilt-related script-driven imagery. Biol. Psychiatry 48, 43−50 (2000). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

50.
Takahashi, H. et al. Brain activation associated with evaluative processes of guilt and embarrassment: an fMRI study. Neuroimage 23, 967−974 (2004). | Article | PubMed | ISI |

51.
Berthoz, S., Armony, J. L., Blair, R. J. & Dolan, R. J. An fMRI study of intentional and unintentional (embarrassing) violations of social norms. Brain 125, 1696−1708 (2002). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |

52.
Dougherty, D. D. et al. Anger in healthy men: a PET study using script-driven imagery. Biol. Psychiatry 46, 466−472 (1999). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

53.
Heekeren, H. R. et al. Influence of bodily harm on neural correlates of semantic and moral decision-making. Neuroimage 24, 887−897 (2005). | Article | PubMed | ISI |

54.
Miller, E. K. & Cohen, J. D. An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 24, 167−202 (2001). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

55.
Fellows, L. K. & Farah, M. J. Is anterior cingulate cortex necessary for cognitive control? Brain 128, 788−796 (2005). | Article | PubMed | ISI |

56.
Damasio, A. R., Tranel, D. & Damasio, H. Individuals with sociopathic behavior caused by frontal damage fail to respond autonomically to social stimuli. Behav. Brain Res. 41, 81−94 (1990). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

57.
Newman, J. P., Patterson, C. M. & Kosson, D. S. Response perseveration in psychopaths. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 96, 145−148 (1987). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

58.
Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D. & Damasio, A. R. Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy. Science 275, 1293−1295 (1997). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

59.
Bechara, A., Tranel, D. & Damasio, H. Characterization of the decision-making deficit of patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions. Brain 123, 2189−2202 (2000). | Article | PubMed | ISI |

60.
Zahn, T. P., Grafman, J. & Tranel, D. Frontal lobe lesions and electrodermal activity: effects of significance. Neuropsychologia 37, 1227−1241 (1999). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

61.
Maia, T. V. & McClelland, J. L. A reexamination of the evidence for the somatic marker hypothesis: what participants really know in the Iowa gambling task. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 101, 16075−16080 (2004). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |

62.
Blair, R. J. & Cipolotti, L. Impaired social response reversal. A case of 'acquired sociopathy'. Brain 123, 1122−1141 (2000). | Article | PubMed | ISI |

63.
Fellows, L. K. & Farah, M. J. Different underlying impairments in decision-making following ventromedial and dorsolateral frontal lobe damage in humans. Cereb. Cortex 15, 58−63 (2005). | PubMed | ISI |

64.
Rolls, E. T., Hornak, J., Wade, D. & McGrath, J. Emotion-related learning in patients with social and emotional changes associated with frontal lobe damage. J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatry 57, 1518−1524 (1994). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

65.
Rolls, E. T. The orbitofrontal cortex and reward. Cereb. Cortex 10, 284−294 (2000). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

66.
Kringelbach, M. L. & Rolls, E. T. Neural correlates of rapid reversal learning in a simple model of human social interaction. Neuroimage 20, 1371−1383 (2003). | Article | PubMed | ISI |

67.
O'Doherty, J., Kringelbach, M. L., Rolls, E. T., Hornak, J. & Andrews, C. Abstract reward and punishment representations in the human orbitofrontal cortex. Nature Neurosci. 4, 95−102 (2001). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |

68.
Hornak, J. et al. Reward-related reversal learning after surgical excisions in orbito-frontal or dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in humans. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 16, 463−478 (2004). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

69.
Blair, R. J. Neurocognitive models of aggression, the antisocial personality disorders, and psychopathy. J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatry 71, 727−731 (2001). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

70.
Blair, R. J. The roles of orbital frontal cortex in the modulation of antisocial behavior. Brain Cogn. 55, 198−208 (2004). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

71.
Adolphs, R., Tranel, D. & Damasio, A. R. The human amygdala in social judgment. Nature 393, 470−474 (1998). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

72.
Miller, B. L., Darby, A., Benson, D. F., Cummings, J. L. & Miller, M. H. Aggressive, socially disruptive and antisocial behaviour associated with fronto-temporal dementia. Br. J. Psychiatry 170, 150−154 (1997). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

73.
Rankin, K. P. et al. Right and left medial orbitofrontal volumes show an opposite relationship to agreeableness in FTD. Dement. Geriatr. Cogn. Disord. 17, 328−332 (2004). | Article | PubMed | ISI |

74.
Mendez, M. F., Chow, T., Ringman, J., Twitchell, G. & Hinkin, C. H. Pedophilia and temporal lobe disturbances. J. Neuropsychiatry Clin. Neurosci. 12, 71−76 (2000). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

75.
Bozeat, S., Gregory, C. A., Ralph, M. A. & Hodges, J. R. Which neuropsychiatric and behavioural features distinguish frontal and temporal variants of frontotemporal dementia from Alzheimer's disease? J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatry 69, 178−186 (2000). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

76.
Lough, S., Gregory, C. & Hodges, J. R. Dissociation of social cognition and executive function in frontal variant frontotemporal dementia. Neu

Roberts and the Racialization of Justice

The National Black United Front is sponsoring the deliverable from a roundtable think tank at the Federal Correctional Institution in Memphis Tennessee.

John Roberts confirmation hearing places the issue of the racialization of justice in America in the context of his philosophical and ideological predispositions relevant to the administration of justice pursuant to interpretation of laws. The 14th Amendment's guaranty of equal protection under the law as so eloquently opined in Brown v. Board of Education is again ripe for review as a frame of reference when addressing racial disparity in the criminal justice system. Perhaps not deliberate, the effect is the same: institutionalized racism to the extent that Blacks and Hispanics are prosecuted more and recieve more severe sentences upon conviction for the same crime as, say, a non Black or non Hispanic. This fact is codified, documented, and bona fide as a reliable statistic with far-reaching implications.

A pdf of the document is available here for download. Download file

Crossroads

To be conscious at this moment means to accept that everything you have ever been taught in church and school is a farce, and that maintaining the American way of life will prove anti-thetical to every moral value you pretend to hold dear.

Never during our media saturated recollection has America's history so openly centered on subjugation to greed, fear, and monstrousness. In direct and overt contradiction of all the many just-so-stories which exist to reinforce our allegedly Christian identity, we are faced with the increasingly open expression of anti-Christian soullessness.

but do we dare call it what it is?

History has shown us everything we need to know about its scope, approach, and methods;

"In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes."

Mein Kampf 1925

Not only should we all recognize its approach, we should all of us have taken the lesson concerning precisely where it's headed. Come on people! It's not rocket science. Pay attention to what it says, and from time to time it'll even slip up and tell you point blank, and in no uncertain terms, exactly what it is....,

Will Had a Lot More to Say

And some of it relates to "acting black," but what I dug most was the whole worship thing - and there's a lot to that which we may wish to revisit at another time...

Large Smelly Object in Punchbowl NOT a Baby Ruth Bar

Looks like John Conyers may be getting a little much-needed air support for his efforts to point out that the large smelly object in the neocon punchbowl is not a nutty, chewy, baby ruth bar after all...,

A simmering controversy over whether American media have ignored a secret British memo about how President Bush built his case for war with Iraq bubbled over into the White House on Tuesday.

At a late afternoon news conference, Reuters correspondent Steve Holland asked Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair about a memo that's been widely written about and discussed in Europe but less so in the USA.

It was the most attention paid by the media in the USA so far to the "Downing Street memo," first reported on May 1 by The Sunday Times of London. The memo is said by some of the president's sharpest critics, such as Democratic Rep. John Conyers (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, to be strong evidence that Bush decided to go to war and then looked for evidence to support his decision.

The Sunday Times said the memo is the minutes of a meeting that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had with some of his top intelligence and foreign policy aides on July 23, 2002, at 10 Downing Street, the prime minister's official residence. The story said the memo indicates that Blair was told by the head of Britain's MI6 intelligence service that in 2002, the Bush administration was selectively choosing evidence that supported its case for going to war and ignoring anything to the contrary. The war began in March 2003.

"Intelligence and facts were being fixed" by the Bush administration "around" a policy that saw military action "as inevitable," the newspaper quoted from the memo.

"There's nothing farther from the truth," Bush told reporters as Blair stood at his side. "Both of us didn't want to use our military," Bush said in response to a question about the memo. "It was our last option."

Blair added, "The facts were not being 'fixed' in any shape or form at all."

Bush said that at the time the memo was written, no decision had been made about going to war. He pointed out that it was written two months before he went to the United Nations and asked for a Security Council resolution calling on Saddam Hussein to give up his weapons of mass destruction or face "serious consequences."

The Sunday Times' May 1 memo story, which broke just four days before Britain's national elections, caused a sensation in Europe. American media reacted more cautiously. The New York Times wrote about the memo May 2, but didn't mention until its 15th paragraph that the memo stated U.S. officials had "fixed" intelligence and facts.

Knight Ridder Newspapers distributed a story May 6 that said the memo "claims President Bush ... was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy." The Los Angeles Times wrote about the memo May 12, The Washington Post followed on May 15 and The New York Times revisited the news on May 20.

None of the stories appeared on the newspapers' front pages. Several other major media outlets, including the evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC, had not said a word about the document before Tuesday. Today marks USA TODAY's first mention.

Some activists who opposed Bush's decision to attack Iraq have been peppering editors with letters and e-mails to push the media into more aggressive coverage. Last week, a group known as Democrats.com offered $1,000 to anyone who can get Bush to answer "yes or no" to this question: Did he or his administration "fix the intelligence" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to terrorism?

"We want what the Michael Jackson, Paris Hilton and Star Wars stories have gotten: endless repetition until people have heard about it," says David Swanson, one of Democrats.com's organizers.

Robin Niblett of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, says it would be easy for Americans to misunderstand the reference to intelligence being "fixed around" Iraq policy. " 'Fixed around' in British English means 'bolted on' rather than altered to fit the policy," he says.

Ombudsmen at both The New York Times and The Washington Post have been critical of their newspapers for not covering the story more aggressively.

USA TODAY chose not to publish anything about the memo before today for several reasons, says Jim Cox, the newspaper's senior assignment editor for foreign news. "We could not obtain the memo or a copy of it from a reliable source," Cox says. "There was no explicit confirmation of its authenticity from (Blair's office). And it was disclosed four days before the British elections, raising concerns about the timing."

'Downing Street memo' gets fresh attention By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY
Wed Jun 8, 6:58 AM ET

Conyers Quiet Fortitude

The office of Representative John Conyers (D-MI) believes it has surpassed its stated goal of 100,000 signatures requesting an investigation into the Downing Street Memo, minutes of a British Prime Minister's meeting on July 23, 2002.

Neocons, say it out loud with me now, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

"Stop Snitching" and Economic Boycotts

I've made reference to a DVD titled "Stop Snitching".

"Dawson Family and Snitching"

"Stop Snitching"

Some things are just so out of bounds, that very little has to be said.

When people/companies decide to take advantage of something like the "Stop Snitching" DVD, an appropriate response must be made.

In shopping malls around the city, young people are buying T-shirts with statements that would make any parent, police officer or community leader cringe: "Criminal minded." "Let's get blown." "Ready to Die."

But one in particular has some city officials particularly stunned: A T-shirt that warns boldly across the front, "Stop Snitchin."

Coming on the heels of the Stop Snitching DVD that began circulating in Baltimore last year, the T-shirts are disheartening to those who say they aggravate an already chronic problem of witness intimidation. While shops that sell the shirts say the tees are not connected to the DVD, city officials say the message remains the same - and it's a damaging one.

...

But those who buy such T-shirts - and those who make or sell them - say the shirts are just fashion.

"I don't take it to heart," said Larry Smith, of Essex, who recently bought a "Stop Snitchin" T-shirt from Changes, a jeans and urban wear store in Eastpoint Mall. "I just like the shirt. It's just a figure of speech."

The shirts, some of which simply say "Stop Snitchin," and others that are more graphically embellished with shotgun targets or other images, sell for about $19 to $28.

This is obscene and that's being nice about it.

I shop at that store when giving gifts to younger family members. I have purchased a few items for myself as well.

No longer.

Not only that, but I've made it clear to my offspring that Changes is off limits. If something comes from that store, and I find out about it, My Wrath Will Be Felt.

[ Update ] The contact info.

Changes Enterprises, LTD

Andrew Goetz, President & CEO

409 Ensor St

Baltimore, MD 21202

info@changesenterprises.com

Equal in Christ But Not in the World

I had an interesting converstion with relatives when I went to Virginia. I knew they were conservative, but didn't know how conservative they were, believing that slavery throughout history was the same (and supported by the Bible), that the poor are poor as a result of a combination of lack of personal effort and historical karma, and that whites loom over blacks because of the same historical karma. This last part I gathered from a conversation we were having while staying at a time-share that was built on a historical virginia plantation. My relatives believed that the people that owned the plantation historically must have done something right to get that plantation. Blacks who were enslaved must have done something wrong. Our contemporary problems stem from a lack of personal morality, and a lack of racial morality.

Hm.

So I am writing a paper examining black attitudes about homosexuality, and I run across this citation:

"Equal in Christ, but not in the world: white conservative Protestants and explanations of black-white inequality"

Author: Emerson, Michael O.; Smith, Christian; Sikkink, David

Journal: Social Forces

Abstract:
In an effort to advance understanding of Americans' explanations for racial inequality, and the implications that these explanations have for reducing black-white socioeconomic inequality, the writers examine the role of religion. They suggest that the rationale for racial inequality is shaped by the cultural tools of a religious subculture. They investigate white conservative Protestants, and they identify religious tools that they term "accountable freewill individualism," "anti-structuralism," and "relationalism." Based on these, they hypothesize that white conservative Protestants explain inequality in more individualistic and less structural terms than do other white Americans; and that they will emphasize perceived dysfunctional social relations among African-Americans in their explanations. Data from the 1996 General Social Survey and qualitative data from 117 in-depth interviews clearly support the hypotheses. The writers state that religion seems to have an independent effect on explanations of racial inequality.
.....

My relatives are beautiful, and powerful in their own way. They are proud and loving parents, and proud and loving grandparents. But their religious attitudes place them on the wrong side of the road. Unfortunate.

Alan Keyes, Politics, Values, and Kinship

OK, this is something that I don't really understand:

Maya Keyes loves her father and mother. She put off college and moved from the family home in Darnestown to Chicago to be with her dad on a grand adventure. Even though she disagrees with him on "almost everything" political, she worked hard for his quixotic and losing campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Now Maya Keyes -- liberal, lesbian and a little lost -- finds herself out on her own. She says her parents -- conservative commentator and perennial candidate Alan Keyes and his wife, Jocelyn -- threw her out of their house, refused to pay her college tuition and stopped speaking to her.

Maya, 19, says her parents cut her off because of who she is -- "a liberal queer." Tomorrow, she will take her private dispute with her dad into the open. She is scheduled to make her debut as a political animal, speaking at a rally in Annapolis sponsored by Equality Maryland, the state's gay rights lobby.

I can't see kicking your kid out of the house because of political differences.

I can't see kicking your kid out of the house because your child has said they are gay.

I can see kicking your kid out of the house if your kid is not living up to your moral standards and is doing so in the home. For example, being caught having sex in your home.

But even then, not speaking to my child would not be an issue. "Love the sinner, hate the sin" is something I often heard while I was being raised. Also, it seems that when you close the door of communication, you close the chance of affecting a positive change.

IF this is being reported accurately, it's a sad state of affairs.

A parent isn't obligated to pay for their kid's college tuition nor are they obligated to house their kid past the age of 18. But it's RIGHT to do so if your child is being productive.

Not speaking to your child because he is a sinner in your eyes, is wrong.

If this is being reported accurately, someone of moral authority needs to publically say this to Alan Keyes.

This is foul.

Whither Blacks?

I found this little graphic about black income. Yes that's right black annual household income for the year 2004 in thousands. In this demographic profile good or bad? I'm not going to identify the source of this graphic other than to say what I already said. What are we to make of this fact? What might these people be doing right or wrong? What political orientation might we assume or prescribe? What does this say about America? About black America? What are your reactions to this? Does it matter? Why? Why not?

More on Iris Chang

Around the time ODB passed, I noted the passing of Iris Chang. Her work The Rape of Nanking opened the eyes of the North (she'd say the West) to the atrocities committed in Asia during WW II. Today in Salon a former friend writes a eulogy in How Iris Chang Became a Verb.

Sticking Up For Alan Keyes

I hate to do this, because in general, I consider the man to be off the deep end and an opportunist of the bad kind. But I have to do this.

Sigh

Alan Keyes has staked his claim as a man of faith. His faith states that homosexuality is a sin. So, why should he be blasted for stating in straight forward terms, that those who practice homosexuality are immoral?

And since he believes his faith tells him that abortion is murder, and his faith states that murder is a sin, why is it wrong for him to say that the "leader" of his faith would not vote for a man who goes against the teachings of the faith?

Okay, now I have to go take a long shower.

The Dark Side of Positive Images

J at Silver Rights scribes on a bit about author Thulani Davis who recalls her grandparents and their lives as slaves in Virginia. She finds it curious that blacks and whites have vastly different memories of that peculiar time.

Southern history is still too often viewed through a lens of white privilege. I do not know when Thulani Davis' book will be completed. But, in the interim, I encourage anyone interested in the complex reality of real Southern families to read the articles she is currently publishing based on research into her families -- both black and white.

I immediately thought of talent shows and image awards and 'American Idol' and 'The Apprentice' in this very context. While surely African Americans' great triumph has been to cull beauty and strength from the devastations of oppression, that very beauty and strength can be used to paint a rosy picture which is not wholly true. In reviewing black reticence to 'air dirty laundry', perhaps it should not be so taboo.

Nothing is going to reveal the nature of black culture like a clash between its elements. When jazz purists go after hiphop, when Baptist diss Methodists, when Brooklyn meets Decatur the results are often very illuminating, not only for the parties involved, but neutral observers. Of course this kind of conflict flies in the face of unity and is often suppressed out of fear of 'divide and conquer' strategies of the Man. But reality shows that racism doesn't hurt all blackfolks equally, nor is it our biggest problem.

We're all better off when we openly discuss our triumphs and failures. Each one teach one is not all stories about princesses and castles, but stories about dragons and dungeons as well. Suppressing the foul stories gives license to the rose colored stories. So watch out for that. Your success is going to be used against you.

The Passion of Christ

A number of interwoven conversations has got me thinking about Christianity. Of course there's the furor over gay marriage. And one of my boys (heavy Christian) planned to do a photoshoot of foster children only to have second thoughts after he realized that one of the kids had been adopted by a gay couple. And then there's the recent hubbub about Gibson's The Passion.

My wife is Christian. Many of my best friends are Christian.

As soon as Gibson picked Jim Caviezel to be Jesus I knew I wouldn't even invest in The Passion on the hollywood stock exchange. Gibson's passion for the truth didn't quite extend that far did it? I wonder who Mad Max would've chosen?

On gay marriage, the solution is a complicated one. I believe that Christianity as a faith is in the process of dying a slow death, because it is a faith. As such, it's almost like those in gay and lesbian communities the country over, want to integrate into a burning house. But on the other hand, in as much as I think Christianity can be resurrected by reason combined with love, I can only imagine a few other groups as able to save Christianity from itself.

For my boy the cameraman there is no debate. And from my standpoint he's right--there IS no debate. Jesus is love. End of Story. I can't imagine a situation in which a loving spirit would want to separate a child from loving, caring, respectful parents. But what do I know? I know the reason Easter changes every year. Which means I know a bit more than most Christians.

Real African Americans

Glenn finagles a dumb complaint about 'real' African-Americans.

Let me break it down to for you. If you are born somewhere on the continent of Africa and migrate to America, then you do so as a

• slave
  
• illegal immigrant
  
• legal immigrant
  

Two of these answers mean that you are associated by the US government as a former citizen of an African nation. And while it's true that a goodly percentage of Americans cannot locate America itself on a globe, those of us with a rudimentary understanding of geography should make a small effort to recognize that country as well. Africa, in the American imagination, suffers a great deal of ignorance. People here can name more animals than states. That is unacceptable for political discussion, period.

So while the good professor attempts to make a point about the term 'African American' he does so with an article which is a crushing indictment of this very ignorance. The soldier in question who hails from Kenya is so tightly identified with his country of origin that fellow soldiers don't remember his real name, only 'Kenya'. Kenya is a nation, and that's the point.

We African Americans identify with the dark continental myth. It's overreach, but the term serves its demographic purpose well, if not specifically. But the term is ours. We invented it, like 'black' and we resent its misappropriation. We cannot prove which African nation from which we originated, our contemporaries can. Do us all a favor and respect that.

Volokh also give a bloodless legal rendering of a related controversy. The disrespect in the matter is clear.

Rebuilding black families

I hung out with my fraternity brothers last night at the Northland Skating Rink in Detroit. First time I've been there in approximately 20 years at least. I never learned to skate backward much less two-step with a partner, but I loved being there and talking to people I haven't seen in bleems. Whereas before I would've caught most of the people I wanted to see at the club, now I'm finding that I'm increasingly turning to the playdate as a way to catch up when I'm back in the city. I've pretty much got a gang of kids (the Spence motto? "This is a gang...and I'm in it.") and while I've got a class inflected bias against Jack and Jill I'm all for getting my kids together with folks of like mind, whatever the level of attainment.

I didn't get much sleep last night for a number of reasons, but while browsing I found this. I appeared on C-Span this week and among the well wishers was Lawrence Ross and Stephen Carter. Prof. Carter's wife Enola Aird started the Motherhood Project. Her question is a central one, not just for black families but for Americans in general. What would our society look like if mothers were truly valued?

Indecency vs Injustice

I've stumbled across a polite discussion on decorum. If I had a better grounding in the classics, I'm sure that I could find some period piece, one excoriating the dictates of excruciating manners which aptly applies here. I'm impressed.

It's rather stunning to me that such a detailed analysis of racism takes place in an environment in which racism is so patently weak. And I think it goes to the question of the not only the bizarre directions of anti-racism (which I think is failing) but also to the inability for us to recognize the challenges of civil society. As these outrages in microcosm keep finding their way to us on a regular basis, what are we to think?

As I was learning and coming to the evaluate the finer points of developing an anti-racist ethos I dealt with a seeming contradiction. That was that as a member of the upper middle class of blackfolks and whitefolks I was more sensitive to racism than my downscale peers. A racist comment against a black judge for example, is both more egregious in its audacity and less painful in its effect than the same slur directed at a black janitor. For what we understand about the racist stereotypes against blacks, intelligence and probity said to be lacking. Since a judge, by the very nature of the work they do demonstrates such qualities regularly, we must conclude that it must certainly be a more insidious racist who would slander a judge.

It was this sensitivity that made me wrong-headed at the time. I used to brag about such sensitivity ("I'm sensitive like a mighty telescope") Yet the idea that being able to pick out the weakest singals of racism as if they were trace evidence of the big bang, attractive as it might seem, may not be particularly useful. In fact it can be counterproductive if it drowns out the noise of complaint for more consequential racist actions. This what I hear in such polite conversations.

It is a simple fact that racism is stupid and wrong. It is stupid because it is so amply evident that it is wrong, so anyone who argues from a racist position does so in contravention of the science and sociology of generations. Although there are many intelligent people who believe racist ideas, there are very few criminal masterminds using subtle strains of racism in their conspiracies. So the point of raising the charge in such situations is a questionable one. Is it racist? Yes. Racism which is subtle is costly nonetheless, but decorum is not politics. Consequently, the response to an egregious breach of manners in a business meeting should vary greatly from that of dealing with a racist police department. What is required in such situations is a good shushing, or a literal slap on the wrist (with a metal ruler, as we suffered to our benefit in Catholic School). What is not required are the trappings of politics including grand public announcements, new rules of conduct, or heaven forbid policy and speech codes.

It is the failure of the extra-sensitive to recognize that they are demanding decorum and not justice. Such offenses as the use of racial epithets either directly or indirectly are not injustices, they are lapses of tact and restraint. People who speak ugly might be racist plotters, or they might not be. So the line of inquiry one should pursue if one is indeed sensitive should determine whether or not said scofflaw is masterminding a racist conspiracy, or if they are another ordinary Joe with skidmarks on his underwear.

What certainly needn't be done is a great loudmouthing or self-congratulation as if the outing of someone who said 'nigger' is the fulfillment of MLK's prophecy. For my part, I'll suspend the Bubble Boy Awards until the world has read this essay.

Malcolm & Ariannas Taxes

I've been bouncing a lot of P6's stuff in my head. His site was really cooking in early September (and still is). Reviewing the following quote of his I've arrived at something of an ethical dilemma:

There's also a difference in the way we deal with rules and laws. A common statement among Black folks is that as soon as we learn the rules, the rules change. I think it's more subtle than that. The problem is that there's a split in how they are interpreted by Blacks and whites (another subtle thought!). For white folks, the rule for applying rules is: That which is not forbidden is allowed. For Black folks, the rule for applying rules is: That which is not allowed is forbidden. White folks are punished for breaking the law; Black folks are punished for failure to follow the law. When law tells white folks what they can't do, it tells Black folks what we can do. When law tells white folks what they can do, it tells Blacks what we must do.

I think that Malcolm would probably be a Republican if he were alive today (boy I'd love to see him slapping Diane Feinstein around, but I digress). I think so because I know he would be pro-gun, pro-life, anti-government, pro-business. But on that last score I thought about the following. If Malcolm were a pro-business and presumeably anti-tax, would he do what Arianna does? That is to say if he were rich would he use tax attorneys to get him the best breaks on his taxes possible?

This is probably not a fair issue to place at the feet of those two. Huffington for her part says that it's the illegal shoving of huge deductions through already fat loopholes that is the problem, not necessarily that loopholes exist. If her miniscule tax bill were illegal, then she'd have more explaining to do than she does. And now that I think about it, I don't think Malcolm would have any problem whatsoever keeping every dime from the feds, and the state.

Still the question of black ethics stands in light of bogarding against the presumptions P6 raises about the allowable under the law. Nobody from Arianna's team is going to open a tax advisement center in the 'hood. Legal aid in the black community hasn't meant tax shelters, although I can tell you about a whole lot of blackfolks in A.L. Williams. (Heh, it became Primerica, there's a lot of blackfolks there too). My point, which I will try to emphasize more and more now that it's becoming clearer to me as it survives lines of questioning like this, is that I strongly believe that the properly interpreted impetus of black nationalism would be for blackfolks to take every advantage America offers.

Black consciousness outlived its usefulness as a consuming ideology when it failed to accomodate the religious, ethnic and class diversity of an increasingly liberated African America. Plus it had some fairly large problems with sexism. But it did overcome the Duboisian dilemma of dual consciousness. It did give the Negro a way out of his guilt trip, it did show a way around a lot of problems Carter Woodson so eloquently exposed. Black nationalist politics launched hundreds of independent organizations which retained autonomy through the integrative movements of the 70s and provided great environments for doing well. (Although too many people today probably believe it was all Affirmative Action (hmm.)).

That black nationalism and consciousness was foremost in the minds of the individuals who launched organizations like the National Association of Black Accountants and the National Black MBA Association should be self-evident. What is not so self-evident is where the line between integration and segregation is blurred. I'll simply assert that it is the in the interest of a revised black nationalism to employ mass markets for the purposes of a black elite. Furthermore it is in the long-term interests of African Americans that these black elites reach a certain level of success, whether or not they conflict directly with the class interests of ordinary blackfolks. If blacks don't sell out successfully, African Americans will only marry into wealth.

There are a number of significant questions that arise from this suggestion that need to be handled at length. I think the most important is whether or not there need be a meaning or a message embedded in the success of African American elites. I am likely to elide this question on egalitarian grounds but advocate gently that there already is a meaning which is simply a fulfillment of a dual destiny. The first is the generic destiny of the American Dream and concurrent proving true of meritocracy and equality. The second is the historically specific aspirations of African Americans in their many social and political movements of race raising. I want to avoid any suggestion that there is embedded essential meaning to the success of a race - that a Black President of the US is not a materially different kind of President in any way other than as the fulfillment of these dreams which are not in conflict with each other.

But the ways and means of black success will be different and in that way grown differently than any other because of the existentials of blackness. But these are not permanent distinctions and could not be described or predicted by those who advanced Black Nationalist aims. The Black President or elites should be like other American elites and subject to the same forces. They will only own themselves and their own unique history.

So at the top of the American mountain, the view will be the same. Malcolm's intellectual progeny will use the system like Arianna does, hopefully with better results.

Why Blacks & Whites Don't Dialog

I've spent a lot of time on the Internet as a race man, but I think I've probably spent more time as the fly in the buttermilk as it were. I've proven to myself and to others the value of sustaining black & white dialog on racial issues. I'd like to point out a few things that I've recently been thinking about.

From the black side there is a very powerful disincentive, or taboo against, confiding in whitefolks about the presence of racism. I think the notable exception to this is when Jews start the conversation in a particular way. If a nominally white person outs himself as a Jew, unprompted to a black person and talks about racism, I think a strong bridge is built.

It's one of those things I beleive blackfolks are immediately responsive to on a gut level. Socially, we look out for each other. This is part of the essence of what I call the Kwaku network - blacks telling other blacks about offenses done to blacks. Right now as we speak, there's a little duststorm of outrage rising over the selling at Urban Outfitters of a product called Ghettopoly. Some of this stuff rises to the NAACP (which ought to be a lot less black and a lot more PoC) but it doesn't go to your next door neighbor who is white.

There is a perception that people are going to be more white than people, 'when push comes to shove'. I don't think so, but our social intercourse has not matured in the mainstream these 50 years of integration, to the level at which black/other intimacy is generally tight enough to share these revelations. Whitefolks don't ever give up the front and fantasy that they could be 'the man' (and all I can think about is what happened to Ray Romano - how he became a superstar on his mediocre talent. Look at a picture of him today. He looks physically different. He's not a vulnerable human being any longer, he's an icon of the nominally white American dream). Whitefolks don't ever admit their trash backgrounds and humble themselves around blackfolks. Blackfolks don't ever let their guard down and simply trust whitefolks in a carefree and easy way. And of course blacks are constantly reminded of how many people just don't get it. The risk, I think for most blackfolks is too great. I don't excuse it. It's something that we must get over and I know a lot of people are trying...now I'm hearing Mike's voice take over in my head about the kind of civility that we have to show each other,*constantly*. I think it's a little bit more than that on a personal level, it is a refusal to retreat. It's demonstrating somehow that an individual is never going to withdraw into their racial safety zone and ignore the 'others'. Is there too much racial injustice in America for each of us to make that promise? Perhaps. Is the ethos of colorblindness wrecking havoc with this potential intimacy? Absolutely. Is 'diversity & multiculturalism' a sort of retrenchment into the personal politics of difference? I think so.

So there are many barriers to overcome that mitigate against the potential for a sustained interracial conversation which settles terms and can focus political energy. But if I may use a jewish analogy, blackfolks want a divine kingdom on earth. We want the laws and the powers to defeat our enemies. We developed ourselves on our own and we want to be left alone. We don't believe this intimacy and friendship is the way to go. It's tedious, it's slow, and every friend is not a fellow warrior. Who knows that better than blacks who are not 100% African blooded but still disconnected from a certain half of their family? This is why the jewish provocation works, we understand the point of view of a jewish warrior. It's not so much a friendship as an alliance, and we don't have to keep investing in intimacy to know that the battle will still be engaged. I percieve that's where the friendship thing goes between blacks and whites. The whole drama over a racial incident and the black & white person look at each other with their mouths open "I thought you were my friend" says the white person. "I guess all I am to you is a friend" says the black. That's why blackfolks consistently say they'd rather deal with a redneck bigot, because at least he's honest and they always know where he's coming from.

Competing With 'Them'

"When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored." --Eric Hoffer

I recently joined the AfroFuturists. I've always been an honorary member because I've been making black noise on the internet basically since PPP was invented. Today, however, I'm getting correspondance in real time. The following question (among many) was posed:

Would black children be more motivated if they didn't always feel like they could never compete with "them"?

This gets to the heart of a number of important issues. I have several angles on it.

The first is that children in America don't need to be externally 'motivated' per se. They simply need to understand their class expectations / generational imperatives and rise to them. Once children rectify their identity with their class, it doesn't matter where they go, that pretty much defines the direction they are headed. This is the difference between achievement and excellence. Only a very few people excel. Most of us achieve.

I think kids will be what their personalities lead them to be. If they are competitive, generally speaking, and their class expectations are to be a basketball player, chances are that they don't need any special motivation to learn how to dribble. They'll take it upon themselves, and the next thing you know, they'll be dribbling. If they are not competitive, then they'll sit on the sidelines. People do what they want to do.

Secondly, one of the most tiring and futile exercises is comparing simply black with simply white. On any day of the week you'll be able to find a poor black person and a rich white person. Comparing the two is meaningless and constantly done. What is not often done is comparing families, and of course that's because it's difficult to do. But a start could be talking about some of the following factors.

Generations of college attendance
Generations of home ownership
Numbers of business owners

Let's leave it at that. If you look at an extended family and start tallying up such factors, it's going to tell you a lot about what kind of expectations are in the home and what children can easily see as their destiny.

So I'm combatting the myth that you can 'motivate' someone into American success. I say that American success is organically grown, and that concentration on the exceptional individual is a big problem in the thinking of those who believe in motivation. I am saying that there is something fundamentally wrong with telling a young girl that she can be 'an Oprah'. The fact of the matter is Oprah herself can't even raise a daughter to be 'an Oprah'. Bill Cosby's children are not movie stars, but I have a very good idea what they are like.

Tangentially, I think this is key to understanding something about the phenomenon of the underachieving black children of Shaker Heights as studied by Dr. Ogbu. I seriously doubt you'll find those families have 2 and 3 generations of college or home ownership. My nickel says their parents were exceptional and just moved to Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights which were not black neighborhoods two generations ago. But if you go to the Old School upper middle class black neighborhoods, you'll find a much more consistent level of success.

None of this should come as any surprise. Old money and family traditions work for blacks the same way they work for whites. Why anyone should believe any different smacks to me of the same old idiotic white liberal structuralism and paternalism which overruns conversations of this type. Too bad blackfolks believe it.

While I'm on this tangent I should note, apropos what Dr. Spence is saying below that I find symmetry in my assertions and his criticism of 'positive images'. What are positive images supposed to do other than motivate? We get into that entire game of self-esteem, which is so often just an artifact of conformity.

Thirdly, to interject a bit of scholarship. Andrew Hacker in his book 'Money' said that most Americans, no matter what their socioeconomic status believed that they would be very satisfied if their salaries were increased an average of about 20%. That much more would make the difference for them. In this context I take it to be a confirmation of my achievement vs excellence idea, but most importantly that the overwhelming majority of blackfolks are always going to be able to find whitefolks with 20% more. It's not a huge amount on any absolute scale, but it is the material difference between what people get and their satisfaction.

So long as the gap between black and white is viewed in purely in terms of race and money, minor differences will continue to be a source of continuing dissatisfaction. There is always more 'them' out there just beyond the reach of blackfolks. No amount of motivation is going to close the gap. So long as 'they' are subjectively 'white' the target will shift and will keep shifting until some African nation becomes the planet's superpower.

Therefore efforts should be directed at reconciling people to familial progress in the context of class, that area in which they have some direct knowledge of their status quo and achievement relative to it.

Matters of uplift through motivation, positive images and beating 'the man' are ultimately useless, because they 1) cannot be reliably replicated generation over generation 2) they have diminishing returns as socioeconomic status increases and 3) there will always be somebody (nominally whites) at points beyond the increment of satisfaction.

Understand that I believe we are begging improper questions in the matter of racial uplift. There should be no reason for 10 million black families to be upset at the socioeconomic stalling or regression of several dozen black families in Ohio. There is no status for the race, there are only averages which are not really useful. Who can depend on this or that University study or position paper by the NAACP to help us deal with the problems of our outlook on life. If we have families, then they can tell us if we are doing well or poorly, and this is a close and immediate benchmark. If the race is to achieve or fail it will come from the families in aggregate, not from the race as a whole and then allocated among the families. So our benchmarks must come from families.

Finally, let me throw in a twist. If blacks cannot find satisfaction in improving the lot of their extended families and are searching for external motivation in order to compete with 'them', what are they doing but 'acting white'? In this way of thinking there is no other context for black progress except that which can be identified as white and superior - a presumed constant threat yet a moving target. But black families will never be white by this definition. There is no escape from this foolish cycle. Clarence Thomas' sister will never be a judge and that's no surprise. Barry Bonds' father was a baseball player and that's no surprise either. Clarence Thomas has an issue with 'the race', Barry Bonds does not.

Blacks need to do right by their own standards in line with their family, religious and class traditions. Otherwise they will be endlessly frustrated by setting standards which will estrange them from organic support networks of family and community. 'They' will always be out there as will excellence. When the family achieves consistently, excellence becomes a simpler achievement through inheritance of a well organized legacy.

Absolute Color & The State

John raises a debating point:

There have already been lots of debates � among California candidates to replace Gray Davis, among Democratic candidates to replace George Bush � and there will be lots more to come. I have a very simple question that, so far as I know, has never been asked and that I wish someone would ask at one of these events:

Do you believe that every American has a right to be treated without regard to race, creed, or national origin? Please limit your answer to one word: "yes" or "no."

I wonder how many candidates who clearly believe the answer to this question is �no� would have the courage to say, simply, �no.�

The answer is yes. It is an individual choice.

A similar question would be "Do you believe that every American has a right to be treated without regard to party affiliation?"

The answer is similarly yes. However a person who chooses to identify with a party or a race also reserves the right to define what it means to them to so identify and determine guidelines as to what that affiliation means.

Your fallacy suggests that by doing so all parties are invested into a zero-sum system of conflict. This is nothing more or less than reinscribing fixed and negative values into race, which intelligent people know to be fluid.
You beg the question because your interpretation of the current (permanent?) state of political affairs is that race means exactly the same thing to the State of California, ie the people of California in 2003 as it did in hmm let's say the year of the Bakke Decision. WRONG.

Put simply, if I cannot be black, then you cannot be white. But then again aren't you saying that you are exactly the same white as what the Klan means? Or do you somehow have the magical power to redefine what white is to you?

If you do, then you have the power to redefine what the State means by white and black and brown as well. So long as citizens wish to be represented politically as a color, isn't it the state's responsibility to respond? Or is the state bound in all cases never to give color, despite the fact of the people's self-identification, a moment's consideration?

Back to School - Back to Africa

Abiola finds a gem of a story on the lengths to which parents will go to educate their kids. I would advise seriously against it as it only exacerbates the domestic problem, but I understand. My youngest brother was a member of the ABC program. We sent him from California to Minnesota for highschool. My youngest sister was similarly bussed 60 miles a day round trip in elementary school. So our family understands the downsides of this kind of separation, as well as the upside of avoiding the domestic nightmare of ghetto ed.

I have long been an opponent of vouchers based on my understanding of two fundamental rules.

#1. Vouchers are inflationary. (increases demand)

I think the first rule is underscored by the thing that Abiola mentions, the high amounts of money spent per pupil in American public schools is not increasing the amount of valuable education that is being put into kids' heads.

The classic argument about capitalism says if you put three people on an island with an equal amount of money, after a month one of them will be rich. Some people are just better skilled at using money to their advantage. These people are already buying the best education they can for their kids. Putting more money into the system only accelerates this process.

#2. Vouchers don't fix supply.

No new schools are created by voucher money. The same schools which are considered better without it will now be inundated by new applications.

The bad schools will empty. The good schools will fill. Will the good schools expand? Will these expanded good schools be as good?

The idea that vouchers encourage is to make everyone see the city's public and private schools as a whole. The implications of this must be followed up. You still have a finite number of students and a finite number of teachers & facilities. The problem is a poor distribution of the good resources and teachers along racial, class and geographic lines. Voucher proponents readily acknowledge this, but they haven't followed through to logical conclusions. It is not singularly the money of parents that created this skewed distribution. So redistribution of money won't solve the problem, not that vouchers even approach the difference in skew. Remember, everybody gets vouchers, not just poor urban ethnics.

Additionally, paying teachers higher salaries don't make them better teachers. Public school districts have yet to demonstrate to me that they are capable of hiring better qualified (read more & advanced degrees from higher quality colleges) to impart valuable knowledge on kids. This is a business solution to a non-business problem. If highschools were modeled more closely to those institutions of higher learning we know are the best, we would be closer to solving the problem.

I have a number of ideas that I think ought to be considered.

One.
Principals should not be teachers who got burned out on teaching and decide to go for the higher salary instead. They should be administrators who intend to be the best managers possible.

Two.
Highschools should be campuses. They should be open long before and long after school hours. Their libraries and athletic facilities should be open into the evenings and after dark. There should be more jobs available to provide community services through highschool facilities. Auditoriums should host regular events. Day care centers should be located on or near campus. Today's teens should have to think twice about a choice of going to the mall or to campus on the weekend.

Three.
Bus teachers, not kids. The burden of educating children falls to parents but also to teachers. This is rather obvious, but why is it that teachers aren't rotated through schools? Is it because local schools are run so very differently? If so, re-emphasize Point One. Is it because commuting is arduous? Not quite so arduous on adults who drive their own cars as on children who ride busses.

Four.
Decentralize. Schools are unmanageable because districts are too large to act in time. Everyone acknowledges this.

Going back to Africa for a bit of Old School education for the kids is an appealing idea. For a globalist like myself, I like it just as much as going to India for dentistry, as many of my Desi friends do. But as a citizen and a parent, I can't have it. Our problem isn't money, it's structural.

Cynicism in the Colored Middle Class

I wonder what kind of sense it makes to be a total cynic today, because that is what the candidacy of Arnold Schwartzenegger makes me think about.

The Old School, of which I inherit, consists of men such as my father and my uncle. As black men they have startlingly frank reasons to have no trust whatsoever in government. I am starting to believe that a real conservative must have this kind of distrust deep deep down. For to allow oneself be represented in governement by someone of only average intelligence is to suggest, in a nation of brilliant people that a crippled government is best.

I think that perhaps I have given a bit too much credence to the idea that African Americans vote for more government. While it makes perfect sense to me that we the black people deserve our equal share of pork as well as government services - those we have always been denied, I have not balanced it with the distrust I know to be present. The overwhelming history of American government has been cruel to and dismissive of African American political ambition. What we have done is to survive without it. We have ganged up against gangs because police could not be trusted. We have had 'mayors' of blocks because the real mayor would never walk our streets. We have managed all sorts of alternative remedies to what has ailed us, some functional, some dysfunctional, all black-owned, inspired and operated. This is what has sustained two societies, separate and unequal for generations.

Crippled government can be reformed, but a wrecked political process is what really concerns me. These days blackfolks are Democrats out of habit, not because the pork or services are being effectively delivered. Black progress has come through the greater acceptance of the sweat we have always put forth in our working lives; our salaries are being equalized, our degrees are being recognized. While it remains the case that the background noise of racism retards our efforts and degrades our results, many of us have grown new ways to work the systems of America and that black middle-class is permanent if apart. But the political aspirations of that black middle-class generate little heat in the hearts of the Democratic or Republican parties. It is no wonder to me that we are sitting out many elections.

There will always be a class of blackfolks who missed out on Affirmative Actions of the 70s and 80s. There have always been too many African Americans for any of the Civil Rights concessions to raise. Many punk pundits enjoy righteous indignation at the failure of blacks in spite of the 'trillions' spent by the liberals they love to hate. We rise on our own steam with a little help from our friends. But there are few friends remaining. If the black middle-class does not heel to the ideological barking of neo-conservatives, they are hounded from the halls of the Republican party. If the black middle-class does not suck up to the radical mau-mauing of longhair liberals, they are called traitors to the Struggle and their race. But those unfortunate blackfolks who suffer the indignities of a polarized economy and hypersegregation always have the attention of the left and right. Single black mothers below the poverty line, young black men in jail, abandoned black elders disabled with disease, desparate struggling black immigrants all serve a useful if symbolic purpose in the schemes of mainstream politics. The left of the Democratic Party will always have their concerns at heart, as they should. But the left of the Democratic Party is in disarray and has been effectively destroyed by the Clinton Era. While most folks take it for granted that sizeable portion of the black electorate will continue to support , they misinterpret that it is the black middle-class that will continually do so.

The sunshine period of racial integration is fading. It may not be called racial or ethnic, but what is labeled 'cultural' is becoming a black and white excuse for political retrenchment. In the wake of the death of the accomodative politics of integration, the parties are falling back on old myths. The myth of black political unity still stands in spite of the fact of black economic difference. The nobility inherent in the selfless determination of race-raising by the talented tenth is seriously challenged by the practicality of political reality. Blacks in the middle-class get very little by voting for the Democratic Left, not only because the Left doesn't deliver (whether or not it's ideas and programs are actually effective), but because the Democratic Left is not in tune with the class interests of non-dysfunctional blackfolks. Blacks in the middle-class get very little by voting for the Republican Right despite their ability to deliver because the Republican Right demonstrates no ability in accurately representing their unique interests or in considering their legitimate criticisms. The only black Americans either party accurately represents are those at the margins of society. This overstates their importance to the nation at large and alienates greater numbers of the black middle-class, the people who actually would vote the most.

So I find myself in the midst of this dilemma beginning to echo the most cynical positions of the prior generation. Yet I have no problem with good government. In fact I am probably a prime Goo Goo candidate myself. Like the Republicans, I have no tolerance for waste, fraud and abuse. Like the Democrats, I believe that a safety net is crucial for the stability of society. But unlike either party, I understand the politics of emergence - of the creation a larger middle-class and what a reformed government should be doing. Where they take the middle-class for granted and promise tax rebates and ideological purity, the black middle-class in particular needs to hear their own tales told. And we are not hearing them, and we are staying away from the polls, cynically.

The biggest joke of all is the assumption by both parties that Hispanics will fall in line with what outdated visions of crossover dreams blacks have already abandoned. They can't even get class distinctions correct for African Americans who have always been more political than Latinos (not counting Chicanos), so what makes them think they can appeal to people they don't even distinguish as anything more than 'spanish speaking'? Aside from a few hundred college students across the nation and the odd persecuted physicist, Asians aren't even in the conversation.

I don't expect a compartmentalized message for each ethnic group in the rainbow from the parties, but I do expect more than 'outreach'. I expect that the middle-classes that have been formed in the past 30 years be respected according to the ways and means of their achievement, and that they not be subsumed into minority politics as usual and their votes and support taken for granted.

What we are getting instead is a political circus which believes we will vote for any idiot the party's wealthy benefactors decide fund and put behind a podium. We may be becoming cynical but that is precisely because we are not stupid.

Integration. Who Needs It?

"I'm not a diner until you let me dine. Then I become a diner." -- Malcolm X

Let us begin with the ghetto.

Glenn Loury accurately characterizes our race problem today as fundamentally the problem of the aliented black communities across our nation, how to think about them and what to do about their conditions.

Nevertheless, as anyone even vaguely aware of the social conditions in contemporary America knows, we still face a "problem of the color line." The dream that race might some day become an insignificant category in our civic life now seems naively utopian. In cities across the country, and in rural areas of the Old South, the situation of the black underclass and, increasingly, of the black lower working classes is bad and getting worse. No well-informed person denies this, though there is debate over what can and should be done about it. Nor do serious people deny that the crime, drug addiction, family breakdown, unemployment, poor school performance, welfare dependency, and general decay in these communities constitute a blight on our society virtually unrivaled in scale and severity by anything to be found elsewhere in the industrial West.

What is sometimes denied, but what must be recognized is that this is, indeed, a race problem. The plight of the underclass is not rightly seen as another (albeit severe) instance of economic inequality, American style. These black ghetto dwellers are a people apart, susceptible to stereotyping, stigmatized for their cultural styles, isolated socially, experiencing an internalized sense of helplessness and despair, with limited access to communal networks of mutual assistance. Their purported criminality, sexual profligacy, and intellectual inadequacy are the frequent objects of public derision. In a word, they suffer a pariah status. It should not require enormous powers of perception to see how this degradation relates to the shameful history of black-white race relations in this country.

If one accepts the premise of the Brown decision that we cannot be two societies, separate and unequal, then the value of racial integration should be plain. But let us be clarify even further. Racial integration as a solution to the legacy of Jim Crow is primarily an act of social (economic, educational, political) advancement. It is not about 'diversity'. There is, at this late date, little blackfolks can gain by the way of simply living in close proximity to whitfolks as people. I believe that the converse is also true. Rather it is access to mainstream jobs, goods and services that is of primary import. How can anyone who has been shunned like the black underclass and lower working classes rightfully be considered Americans without that access? It is from this perspective that I find fault with David Brooks recent article.

One of the reasons I like David Brooks is because he is a student of demographics. Call it political / social geography, but there is an art and science of thinking about facts about where people live and why. One of the reasons I dislike David Brooks is because he is so focused on the chatting classes. In his latest piece, 'People Like Us', he suggests that our problems with racial and cultural segregation are largely ones of personal choice and human nature manifested into neighborhoods. No way.

Edge Cities, Upscale Demography & Social Mobility
My first interest in the subject of demography was piqued by the book, 'The Nine Nations of North America' by Joel Garreau. He later wrote an update to his treatise entitled 'Edge City'. I found that volume to be truly remarkable. But within it are some deep clues that will help us understand some structural reasons why what Brooks is talking about doesn't ring true for me.

Garreau uncovers a great deal in his book about edge cities, those new and densely populated areas that seem to have sprung from nowhere in the 70s to become the key areas in America's largest cities. They are places like Tyson's Corners VA and The Perimeter just north of Atlanta. These became the hubs when downtowns were emptying out. Why? The primary reason is economic. The collected push and pull of interests between real estate developers, midsized business lessees, shopping mall tenants, urban planners, zoning laws, large relocating corporations and their relocating employees came together to create those office parks and their surrounding subdivisions at the freeway interchanges all over America.

Along with Garreau, I also paid special interest to the marketing angle of all this which is zipcode demography. Michael J. Weiss wrote 'The Clustering of America'. You want a demographic profile of your community? It's all right here at Claritas' website.

(Disclosure: Except for the accumulated wealth, my family demographic profile is almost exactly like this. In that, I presume that I am typical of such upper middle class whitefolk except for the astounding lack of wealth I have inherited, typical of most blackfolk of all classes.)

One of the salient facts that remain in my head from reading Garreau and Weiss is that a good 60% of Americans are live, work and die within a 50 mile radius of their birthplace. In Southern California, notably Orange County and the San Fernando Valley, there are no houses that are older than 60 years. Here we have entire cities built after the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. But most of America was not, and most of America doesn't move. One of the secrets of American success is mobility. The contrast between the Mobile People to those who live and die in locked down communities is the divide that makes all the diffence in evaluating Brooks' conclusions. When you go beyond talking about consumer preferences and begin to talk about race, the subject begins to outweigh Brooks' light touch.

Brooks' liberal use of the word 'we' suggests that most American's share Bobo values and are, or ought to rightly be Mobile People. He begins about as far away from the ghetto as possible.

Human beings are capable of drawing amazingly subtle social distinctions and then shaping their lives around them. In the Washington, D.C., area Democratic lawyers tend to live in suburban Maryland, and Republican lawyers tend to live in suburban Virginia. If you asked a Democratic lawyer to move from her $750,000 house in Bethesda, Maryland, to a $750,000 house in Great Falls, Virginia, she'd look at you as if you had just asked her to buy a pickup truck with a gun rack and to shove chewing tobacco in her kid's mouth. In Manhattan the owner of a $3 million SoHo loft would feel out of place moving into a $3 million Fifth Avenue apartment. A West Hollywood interior decorator would feel dislocated if you asked him to move to Orange County. In Georgia a barista from Athens would probably not fit in serving coffee in Americus.

There aren't so many Americans, as Brooks would have us believe, that can get up and move anytime we like. Everyone doesn't have equity enough to trade up houses in the old tradition. Even in these days when mortgage rates are at their lowest in a generation, most Americans don't move around much and certainly African American mobility is much more limited. African Americans own fewer homes, have less fungible equity and are incrementally more hobbled my mortgages that whites in the mainstream. I think it goes without saying that home ownership is a fundamental building bloock of healthy communities.

Remarkably, not until 1970 did the black home ownership rate reach the level of the white rate at the turn of the century (46 percent). The slight declines in both the black and white rates between 1920 and 1940 were followed by sharp rises from 1940 to 1960 (24.2 points for whites and 18.6 for blacks) and continuing increases until 1980 when the rates leveled off. Although the white level of ownership was always higher than the black level, the size of the gap varied over time. The gap jumped by 5.5 points between 1940 and 1960 and then collapsed from 1960 to 1980, falling 7.8 points.

Black Money, Black Housing
So when Brooks begins to talk about the top third of African American society he completely ignores their economic handicap of accumulated wealth. All he sees are income distributions. It might be pleasant to talk about one third of black America and suggest racism is not determining where they live:

When we use the word "diversity" today we usually mean racial integration. But even here our good intentions seem to have run into the brick wall of human nature. Over the past generation reformers have tried heroically, and in many cases successfully, to end housing discrimination. But recent patterns aren't encouraging: according to an analysis of the 2000 census data, the 1990s saw only a slight increase in the racial integration of neighborhoods in the United States. The number of middle-class and upper-middle-class African-American families is rising, but for whatever reasons�racism, psychological comfort�these families tend to congregate in predominantly black neighborhoods.

These predominantly black neighborhoods are precisely those which are not the new Edge Cities. The black middle class and the upper middle class are not on par in equity, so despite the fact that they may earn as much as their mainstream counterparts, that's only half the equation when it comes to homebuying.

Brooks ignores the most stunning fact of America itself, that it was built on the dreams of migrants and strangers seeking liberty and economic advantage. The Great Migration of 20s was not about blackfolks looking to self-segregate themselves into the Southside of Chicago and in Harlem. They went where the jobs and money was hoping against the odds that they would have the liberty to pursue them. The impulse remains the same, people go where they can find enough economic advantage to be stable. Nobody wants to live in a ghetto. It defies all logic to suggest that people who must suffer those deprivations do so willingly. Major supermarket chains have only come to the conclusion in the wake of grandiose political promises (and tax abatements) post-LA Riots that relatively poor black and latino would support them. It had to be proven!

The question of integration remains before us, but in order to deal with that issue, you have to face several things which are difficult. The first is that race is at the heart of the reasons blacks remain separate. Whether it is the racism inherent in the top third of black America's lack of assets, or that which contributes to the social pariah status of the bottom two thirds. There isn't much to inherit from the ghetto except the drive to want to get out and obtain what Americans have. You simply must accept that blackfolks are economically motivated just like anyone else, their failure is not a failure of desire.

I'm convinced that it will be many a season before anything approaching residential integration will survive mainstream political debate. Affirmative Action remains propped up by the twisted logic of Diversity and California is set to pass a law that would blind that state to such black & white distinctions as we have described here. Proponents would presumeably have us all identify ourselves by the zodiacs marketers like Claritas dream up for the benefit of the industries of consumption and disposable income. Yet the fact of our society's racial segregation is real for the majority of Americas who lack mobility and choice in housing. Whether they are white and live in Southy or black and live in Roxbury, the immobile are trapped where they live - separate and unequal.

This brings us back to all those urban planners, zoning laws, real estate developers and corporate relocations. Brooks would have us believe that there should be no political considerations brought to bear on the free market economies of housing. It should be all about how people vote with their feet, not with their minds, and hey if it's human nature to cluster into our own little cliques what's the problem? The problem is that the ghetto is not quite America, and those people trapped there are not quite Americans. The Mobile People are clustering according to their interests, everybody else is moving the only places they can afford most of which are just about as racially segregated as they ever were.

The fate of integration as a question of social policy, zoning laws and quality of life issues does lie in the hands of Bobos and Mobiles. We're the ones, after all, that write the public opinion pieces. Our conversations drive the political agenda. But Brooks lets us off the hook with typical libertarian irresponsibility. Racial integration whose benefits are so clear requires us to be more than simply personally unselfish. It is not a question of personal choice, but of political responsibility which means we need to employ political pressure to change neighborhoods.

If you live in a coastal, socially liberal neighborhood, maybe you should take out a subscription to The Door, the evangelical humor magazine; or maybe you should visit Branson, Missouri. Maybe you should stop in at a megachurch. Sure, it would be superficial familiarity, but it beats the iron curtains that now separate the nation's various cultural zones.

I have written that one of the fundamental reasons that African Americans are so passionate about their culture and politics is because we have been forced to forge brotherhood with each other. We didn't ask to be herded into neighborhoods because of the color of our skin, but we made them work, and we grew to understand each other in ways too numerous and complex to mention. We began as negroes stuck in same ghettoes with other negroes, but we came to understand our duty to each other as human beings and emerged with black pride, and in so doing changed America for the better. Isn't that what America is all about, or is it all about the Benjamins, and maximized personal choice?

Most of us didn't volunteer to be Americans, but we are stuck in this national community. We need to recognize and implement our duty to each other by developing particular solutions to particular problems. The American mainstream works, let's get everybody in to it. Racial integration is what our nation needs because we still have ghettos.

Perchlorate

This mighty molecule is getting a lot of press lately. Lawyers are salivating and Google ads are beginning to proliferate. The EPA is collecting studies and asking for a review by the National Academy of Sciences. The stakes are very large. Bob Krieger says much of the alarm is 'alarmist'. He says, essentially, that microgram levels of the contaminant passing through the human body are scarcely enough to raise the attention of toxicologists. So are we talking about micrograms?

Larry Ladd has some useful information:

In 2002 the US EPA submitted a proposed reference dose of 1 part-per-billion (ppb) for perchlorate in drinking water. This was based on perceived changes in infant rat brain structure at a dose equivalent to 300 ppb for a 150 pound human adult or as low as 45 ppb for a bottle-fed infant. Increased skin irritability in mice ears, suggesting some sort of immune system effect, was found at a dose about four times higher.

Recent research at Texas Tech suggest that tadpoles exposed to as little as 5 ppb perchlorate are more likely to not properly develop fore-legs. Amphibian metamorphisis is notoriously sensitive to thyroid hormone disruption. Regulators are waiting for additional research to confirm these surprising results. The majority of reviewers in an external peer review this year seemed to think a reference dose in the 3 to 10 ppb range was justified by the evidence, and a minority of the reviewers thought the standard should allow higher concentrations.

Current standards in various states reflect this range:

• A Superfund site in Massachusetts currently requires well shutdown at 1.5 ppb perchlorate, but wells are voluntarily being shutdown and replaced at 0.4 ppb.
• Superfund sites in California require shutdown at 4 ppb; state regulators in California and Texas also recommend public notification and regulatory investigation of perchlorate in any drinking water source containing 4 ppb.
• Arizona has a 14 ppb standard, while Nevada and New York enforce 18 ppb standards.

For further information, contact the scientists conducting the government investigation of environmental perchlorate at http://www.clu-in.org/studio/perchlorate_060402/

Some folks here in California are now afraid of lettuce. In that story we have 'detectable levels'.

A bit more sensible is this document. It's interesting to note that going in, potential lawsuit respondants are listed front and center.

What seems reasonable to me is for someone to quickly demonstrate how tapwater can be reduced to the 4ppm standard and make such methods readily available. While I was impressed by Krieger's audio presentation and his comparison of how perclorate is transient in the body like iodide, this kind of information is not linked. It may be that uptake of perchlorate into the thyroid can be blocked as radioactive iodine is with potassium iodide. And while everybody doesn't know that, there are clearly commercially available prophylactics. Making such alternatives available, if they can be shown viable is vastly preferable to the screaming litigation that looks almost inevitable from here.

We'll keep an eye open.

Death and Taxes

This morning on the radio it was announced that one of the local hospitals under the jurisdiction of the County of Los Angeles, is going to have to shut down barring a judges injunction. The County Health Department is going broke.

State Republicans have decided within the week, to begin borrowing money to make up for the state's budget shortfalls. The state will borrow as much as 11 billion dollars just to cover two month's cash flow.

Supporting $10 billion in borrowing represents a major concession by his party, said Assemblyman John Campbell, R-Irvine, who is vice-chairman of the lower house's budget committee. The number is what the deficit is expected to be June 30.

"We don't like to do this. We think this is actually a bad idea ... but it's better than tax increases and so we offer it as a compromise," Campbell said.

We have now reached the point at which the tax rebate in every pot policy, blindly aped by Republicans since the days of Proposition 13, has gone beyond selfish to foolish. Democrats too have been petrified of raising taxes. The California Legislature has resorted to all sorts of strange fees and and as usual, politicians make themselves appear to be respectable by standing opposed to them.

There have already been fourteen cases of SARS reported in California, so I am waiting, with some trepidation, for SARS to make an impact in Los Angeles County. There will be a run on N95 masks as the hospitals are quarantined and run out of beds. Our politicians have a multivolume cookbook filled with recipies for disaster. This one seems poised to move to the front burner.

Hitchens on Chalabi

Hitchens posts a defense of Chalabi in today's Slate.

In news stories as well as in opinion columns, it is repeatedly stated that Chalabi hasn't been in the country for many years�or since 1958. This contradicts my own memory and that of several other better-qualified witnesses. They recall him in northern Iraq many times and for long periods in the 1990s, helping to organize opposition conferences and to broker an agreement between the opposing Kurdish factions. He frequently risked his life in this enterprise; indeed it was for criticizing the CIA's own ham-fisted efforts in Kurdistan at the time that he incurred the lasting hatred of the agency. And since his activity on Iraqi soil was reported on several occasions in such journals of record as the New York Times, it must be something more than objectivity (or, dare I hint, something less) that informs the current animus.

Yasser Arafat hasn't been in Jerusalem for some considerable time, after all, and before his disastrous return to Gaza, he hadn't been on Palestinian soil for decades. The Dalai Lama hasn't been in Tibet since the 1950s. Perhaps these leaders should be criticized more for being out of touch. But the fact remains that they are not. More important, both Arafat and His Holiness consider themselves to be axiomatic and self-evident leaders while Chalabi does not. But the fact remains that his forces provided invaluable help and intelligence in the recent campaign, and it is to the Iraqi National Congress that several senior Baathists have recently chosen to surrender. If this does not demand praise, surely it merits a little recognition?

Considering this and the previous post, there must be some future in hyphenated Americans who are invited to represent their home countries to the United States, no matter how distant.

Not such a waste?

This UPI report from 2000 quotes conservatives deriding a Clintonian measure. The concept was to train Iraqi opposition in the art of political compromise. Given the current situation in Iraq, where presumably the USA does not want a theocracy to rise from the current flux, perhaps encouraging the deal-making aspect of the process of democratic governance wasn't such waste of money as the critics thought.

The latest example is a workshop proposed by the Conflict Management Group, a nonprofit offshoot of Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School... "To identify, diagnose, and enhance the ability of the Iraqi opposition parties, and the individuals within the parties, to discuss, design, and facilitate intra- and inter-organization dialogue, cooperation, and problem solving."

Translation: Pull Iraqi resistance fighters out of the field, bring them to Harvard, and teach them how to get along.

It's a bit late to pull them out of the field now.

Post-National Religion

The Archbishop of Canterbury gives us a great deal to think about.

The idea that's being increasingly canvassed is that we are witnessing the end of the nation state, and that the nation state is being replaced in the economically developed world by what some call the 'market state'. This new form of political administration has in some ways crept up on us, and we need to do some hard thinking about how it has happened and what changes are involved for the whole idea of being a citizen - not to mention the whole idea of being a politician too. And if the analysis I want to offer is right, and these changes are indeed irreversible, we need to look at what kind of vacuum is left in our social imagination as a result.

I see that Stephenson's meme is finally taking hold in centers of authority. The Archbishop is my kind of clergyman in more than one way and I�m pleased to see that he gets it. He gets it in a rather unique way, but that depends on his reading of this Bobbitt fellow, whom I don't know. In either case I�m with him on the primary merits of his case, which is my reading of the current asymmetric war on terror. The nation state (and for my denser ideological colleagues) the nanny state, is on its way out the door. As market forces take over and they decentralize power and globalize standards via the disintermediary forces of global telecom and pervasive computing. This leaves a significant gap in the social forces and traditions long associated with government as exemplified by the great society. Who fills that gap? Religion. But not the kind of bible-thumping idiocy involved in creating the republican's big tent. I'm talking about smart religion.

So the problem of the market state looks rather like this. By pushing politics towards a consumerist model, with the state as the guarantor of �purchasing power�, it raises short-term expectations. By raising short-term expectations, it invites instability, reactive administration, rule by opinion poll and pressure. To facilitate some of its goals and to avoid chaos, government inevitably relies more on centralised managerial authority. So there will be a dangerous tension between excessive government and the paralysis that can result from trying to respond adequately to consumer demand. To put it in another way, government and culture drift apart: government abandons the attempt to give shape to society.

But check this out, and I think this is the key which shows that certain sects of Christianity may be ahead of the curve with respect to dealing with the decentralized world. That is because this market state preserves

..a vision that has nothing to say about shared humanity and the hard labour of creating and keeping going a shared world of values. Being provocative again, I�d want to say that a proper use of tradition makes us more not less critical and independent in society. The great revolt against traditional authority in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a necessary moment, because tradition was understood as the way in which the past dominated the present - or at least how some people�s version of the past seeks to limit what�s possible now.

And finally, without an explicit nod to GWBush�s state legitimation of Christian charity under the guise of 'faith-based initiatives', our archbishop remarks

The market state is much in love with partnership as a model of public action, and the possibilities of partnership with religious communities are many. To point to the importance of religious communities as, for example, partners in statutory education is not to license unbridled superstition and indoctrination but to invite - to challenge � religious communities to find a way of bringing their beliefs into practical contact with public questions, to identify exactly what difference faith commitments make to the educational process.

Lovely.

Man On The Street

One of the reasons the story about antiquities has gone so far and lasted so long is because it is the one story that upper middle class Americans can relate to. Everything else is looting and shooting. We have no idea what the tone is in Iraq because all we hear are stories about the Iraqi on the street. But what of the Iraqi off the street? What about the Iraqi government functionary who hates his job but shrugs his shoulders? What kind of middle class functions in Iraq?

It has been said that the wealth of oil in Iraq will lead it further from democracy. The argument is that digging wealth out of the ground and selling it on the open market requires a lot less middle class give and take. People don't have to discipline themselves and comport themselves in professional ways. You want oil? You get oil. You don't care about my attitude. Iraq may be destined to remain incompatible with Service Economy.

The cruel irony of religious freedom is that once Americans rebuild the civil infrastructure of that nation, Iraqis will be free to thank Allah for it. I heard a quote from a soldier just north of Basra in the early going, which said something to the effect that he'd only been there a week and he already hated those ingrates. It is a sentiment we are bound to hear again and again. And yet I doubt that there will be much sting in our colonial whip. Our troops are, much to the consternation of many loopy conservatives, politically correct, diverse and otherwise respectful sorts of warriors, crankiness aside. We are not calling them godless monkeys.

For all the talk of peace at any cost, I have yet to see any real rapproachment with the Iraqi people as equals and as brothers. I want to see this from any quarter and I hope to see it soon. Then again, I expected that American pacifists would put their dollars into charitable relief organizations. Instead, it seemed that they put together a political coalition with ANSWER, a strange and often repulsive bedfellow. I will be looking forward to hearing from the bleating anthropologists and archaologists and other museum buffs of their upcoming foreign exchange programs, and scholarships for Iraqi students. Those who have called for and gotten the resignation of Martin Sullivan needn't be proud. I am of the opinion that everything worth knowing:

Among the priceless treasures missing are the 5,000-year-old Vase of Uruk and the Harp of Ur. The bronze Statue of Basitki from the Akkadian kingdom is also gone, somehow hauled out of the museum despite its huge weight.

would have been stolen one way or another. Further it is unclear to me what the average Iraqi cares about such treasures. They are certainly not Islamic. They very well may have been destroyed with the same abandon as the great totems of Afghanistan were by the Taliban. All we know is that it was an inside job.

Until such time as we can be convinced that Shiapundit is a CIA plant, I trust those words.

Warring in the USA

I wrote the following piece over two years ago. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to ponder its application to current events.

PSYCHO-CULTURAL BACKGROUND
11.11.2000

INTRODUCTION

I am baffled by the 2000 Presidential election. I don�t understand what has happened, nor do I understand my own actions in this election. I do not understand how politics works in this millennial and chaotic world and so I do not know how to be politically active.

I should also say, however, that after voting this time I felt more civic pride than I ever have. I attribute that to the fact that I participated in this election more than I have in previous elections. I participated in demonstrations and argued in online forums. I intend to do that again. But I want to have a better idea of what I�m doing.

WHAT HAPPENED?

When I say �I am baffled by the 2000 Presidential election� I don�t mean that:

Of the many accounts being advanced, I can�t find one I like.

Rather, I mean:

I don�t like the terms in which any of these accounts are being constructed.

I want an account constructed in terms of a self-organizing system psycho-cultural system of individuals whose thoughts and decisions are subject to multiple interacting forces, some rational, some not.

That sentence, admittedly, uses more than a little jargon. But it is a starting point.

THE CENTRAL PHENOMENON

The central phenomenon of this election seems to be this: when the country went to the polls the voters divided themselves into two big piles and a handful of considerably smaller piles. The astonishing fact is that the two big piles are the almost the same size. My intuition is that, in some sense, this deadlock was intended by the system. The explanatory problem is is to produce such an accounting without invoking some mysterious social organism. I don�t know how to do that.

All the activity that�s now taking place in an effort to pull a decision from the election is secondary to that central phenomenon. But that I do not necessarily mean that this activity has no significant consequence. It does. But that doesn�t change the fact that, for all practical purpose, the Bush/Republican forces and the Gore/Democrat forces came out even. That�s what I want to understand.

[As intuition is not knowledge, I do not actually know that deadlock was intended. But I believe that, by exploring that intuition, I will learn something. Whether or not this particular idea survives the exploration is beside the point.]

THE NATIONAL PSYCHE & THE FALL OF THE EVIL EMPIRE

Everything is connected to everything else and the causal forces meeting in the historical present stretch back into the past without end. Figuring out where to start is not easy. My sense is that we need to focus our attention on the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in the late 1980s. That left the nation without a national scapegoat, thus radically altering the nation�s psycho-cultural landscape. We no longer had Ronald Reagan�s Evil Empire to kick around.

As some of you may know, my thinking on these matters has been strongly influenced by an essay Talcott Parsons published in 1947 on �Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World�. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.

For the most part I have used Parsons, and others as well, in arguing about the nature of racism in the USA. While Africans were brought to this country for economic reasons it seems to me that during, say, the 19th century African Americans increasingly assumed a dual psychological role in the white psyche. On the one hand, they were a source of entertainment. On the other, they were convenient scapegoats, as became evident with the lynchings that emerged during Reconstruction and continued well into the last century. That is to say, African America served as a geographically internal target for the ethnic and nationalist antipathy Parsons discussed.

Thus we have the thesis in Klinker and Smith, The Unsteady March (U. Chicago, 1999). They argue that African Americans have been able to move forward on civil rights only during periods where the nation faced an external threat - the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the major wars of the first half of the 20th century. When the external danger had subsided, gains were lost. From my point of view, they�re arguing that, when external danger looms large and demands attention, the citizenry can focus aggression there and so ease up on the internal colony. Beyond this, of course, it becomes necessary to recruit from the colony to fight the external enemy, both physically and propagandistically - be kind to your black citizens when you fight the Nazis, etc.

Vietnam was the last major war of the Cold War period. As it receded into the past, a political backlash set in and affirmative action came under attack. That�s the situation we faced when the Soviet Empire collapsed. With the major external threat suddenly collapsed, there was a crisis of aggression - I�m reminded of the phrase �conservation of aggression� coined by Robert Wright. The fall of the Evil Empire deprived a great many people of an object for aggressive impulses. What then, happened to that aggression?

It got directed elsewhere. My sense is that the political rhetoric on a number of issues heated up in the wake of the fall: gun control, abortion, the arts, gays, affirmative action, violence in the media. A number of these issues come under the rubric of the so-called �culture wars�. Each of these issues was already on the political agenda, and had been there for some time.

Sexy music had been inspiring pulpit denunciations and legislative action since the early decades of the 20th century. Movies have been problematic since the beginning and the NAACP put itself on the political map by organizing protests against �Birth of a Nation.� But, it seems to me, that the scope of politicized cultural contest broadened.

Perhaps the most interesting redirection, however, was into the so-called War on Drugs. Political concern about drug use is not, of course, new. It goes back to Prohibition - which, was, of course, intimately linked with that objectionably sexy music - and got redirected by and in reaction to the counter-cultural 60s and 70s. However, it is my impression that the current effort ramped up in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

This war on drugs has had substantial material consequences: increased law enforcement and court activity, a considerable increase in the prison population and, of course, in the prison industry. Our prisons now have a relatively large population of non-violent offenders who are disproportionately black, taken off the voting rolls as felons, and available for labor in various prison-based enterprises. I do not know whether or not the increase in the economic �weight� of the prison sector is roughly equal to the losses suffered by the defense sector. I would, of course, like to know.

Regardless of how those numbers work out, my basic point is simply that the end of the Cold War changed the psycho-cultural system in a major way. Psycho-cultural aggression had to be redirected and much of it was redirected at targets within the country, rather than externally. That redirection is the central political phenomenon of the 90s and is responsible for much of the ugliness and programmatic futility of current politics.

CLINTON AS SCAPEGOAT

By the end of the decade much of that aggression became directed at President William Jefferson Clinton. In psycho-cultural terms, he was the first draft-dodging, pot-smoking, funky-butt saxophonist, and baby boomer to have been elected to the Presidency. He was also intelligent, personable, charismatic, a superb politician, and a centrist.

And he quickly became deadlocked. I have no desire to recount the Clinton Presidency, but I cannot avoid the final act, the Lewinsky scandal. That consumed a considerable portion of the national political energy during his second term and resulted in an impeachment process in the course of which Toni Morrison and others suggested that he was, at least symbolically, a black President - this, of course, links back to the cultural psychodynamics we looked at above. In this impeachment process the people�s representatives seemed to be acting against the will of the people they represented, at least as that will was revealed in opinion polls. That, in itself, requires some analysis. But not here and now.

The impeachment effort failed and Clinton has ended his term with a prosperous economy and considerable popular approval for his presidency, if not for his person. It seems that the people were able to make a distinction their representatives were not. They ended up separating Clinton's private life, of which they disapproved, from his public, of which they seemed to approve. In any event, they could see no purpose in punishing the public man for the private sin. That I count as a significant, though as yet untested, outcome. That also requires some analysis. But not here and now.

It seems to me, however, that--to paraphrase von Clauswitz--the current election is a continuation of the Clinton scandal by other means. That is to say, the Clinton scandal brought about a certain configuration of political forces. These forces are not quickly mobilized and/or redirected -- which is one reason why the post-Cold War era has been so politically unproductive. That configuration is the one that cradled this election.

And with that, I will leave things for now and return to the Big Picture.

PSYCHO-CULTURAL POLITICS

The psycho-cultural problem engendered by the end of the Cold War has had a major effect on politics by �releasing� a great deal of anxiety from Cold War targets. Dealing with this �free-floating� anxiety is a major social task, one currently stressing our political mechanisms. However, as far as I know, such forces are invisible to mainstream political thinking. If you can�t see the forces, you can�t analyze them, and you certainly can�t base political strategy and action on an analysis you don�t even know you need.

So, we have a political system driven to deadlock by forces that are not acknowledged. How can we change that? What kind of political actions follow from this kind of analysis? To the extent that I am correct, this badly directed collective aggression will distort all attempts at substantive political action.

It seems to me that the political problem we face is not at all politics as usual. For a decade or two people have been talking about a realignment of positions in which the old distinctions between the political left and right become less and less useful. And, while one can certainly see the centrist urge as an example of this, I think that something deeper is going on. Realignment is a matter of positions in the rational realm. What�s going on is a revision in the boundary between the rational and the....what?

At the same time we�re in a technological explosion, with communications and information technology being one of the major foci of activity. The biological sciences are the other focus. These are inspiring high-tech visions of the future, both utopian and distopian. Libertarian thought seems to be on the rise, seeking to free individuals and industry from government forces. This thinking seems blind to the fact that the high-tech boom is grounded on research sponsored by Big Government decades ago, when it was justified by Cold War thinking. And, as my friend Abbe Moshowitz has been exploring, large multi-national corporations are increasing their scope of activities, often at the expense of governmental authority and revenue.

The nature and scope of governmental and political action is being revised. That is what we need to think about.