A person’s optimism in the future seems to be controlled by a small front part of the mid-brain, according to a study that used brain imaging.
That area deep behind the eyes activates when people think good thoughts about what might happen in the future. The more optimistic a person is, the brighter the area showed up in brain scans, the scientists reported in a small study published online Thursday in the journal Nature.
That same part of the brain, called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), seems to malfunction in people suffering depression, said the study co-authors, Elizabeth Phelps of New York University and Tali Sharot of University College London.
Interestingly enough, the investigators determined that humans are generally hard-wired for optimism…
Every time economists and Wall Street executives think they have acknowledged the full extent of the losses from the meltdown in real estate mortgages, more bad news turns up.
Merrill Lynch said yesterday that it would take a charge for mortgage-related securities on its books that is $3 billion more than the $5 billion it expected just two weeks ago. And a report from the National Association of Realtors showed that sales of existing homes in September fell twice as much as economists had expected, to their lowest level in nearly 10 years.
Stocks fell sharply early yesterday on the news, with the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index falling 1.8 percent before recovering in the afternoon. Investors also bid up Treasuries as they sought the safety of government-backed debt.
At this juncture, economists say the troubles in the mortgage market could, all told, cost financial firms and investors up to $400 billion.
What a mess. I expect we’ll be hearing from BushCO about our “strong economy” shortly.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted on Wednesday the United States had mishandled the case of a Canadian who was deported to Syria and tortured, but she stopped short of an apology.
In a rare public admission of U.S. fault, Rice sounded contrite when she responded to a lawmaker’s question about Maher Arar, who was arrested during a stopover in New York in 2002 and deported to Syria where he says he was tortured and imprisoned for a year.
“We do not think that this case was handled as it should have been,” Rice told the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee. “We do absolutely not wish to transfer anyone to any place in which they might be tortured.”
[…]
Rice did not apologize in the hearing and avoided directly answering a question from Massachusetts Democrat Rep. William Delahunt who asked if she knew Arar was tortured in Syria.
“You are aware of the fact that he was tortured?” Delahunt asked.
“I am aware of claims that were made,” she responded.
But when asked if the United States had received any diplomatic assurances from Syria that Arar would not be tortured, Rice said her memory of the events had faded and she would have to respond later to the question.
You know, if standard procedure was to obtain such assurances (and it should be standard procedure) – then there is no way to ‘forget’.
The response is utterly disingenuous.
The sad thing is that “forgetting” seems too be an acceptable excuse for everything. The media never calls these criminals on the things they willfully do and then pretend to have forgotten.
is promoting the idea that women who can provide for themselves are “Fembots”: LINK
WTF? If you’re not financially dependent on a man, and dying to be married and have babies, you’re a Fembot? And then, after calling these women emotionally unavailable, they try to say that Fembot is not a derogatory name?
“The hard-liners are upping the pressure on the State Department,” says Leverett. “They’re basically saying, ‘You’ve been trying to engage Iran for more than a year now and what do you have to show for it? They keep building more centrifuges, they’re sending this IED stuff over into Iraq that’s killing American soldiers, the human-rights internal political situation has gotten more repressive — what the hell do you have to show for this engagement strategy?’ “
But the engagement strategy was never serious and was designed to fail, they say. Over the last year, Rice has begun saying she would talk to “anybody, anywhere, anytime,” but not to the Iranians unless they stopped enriching uranium first. That’s not a serious approach to diplomacy, Mann says. Diplomacy is about talking to your enemies. That’s how wars are averted. You work up to the big things. And when U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had his much-publicized meeting with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad this spring, he didn’t even have permission from the White House to schedule a second meeting.
The most ominous new development is the Bush administration’s push to name the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization.
“The U.S. has designated any number of states over the years as state sponsors of terrorism,” says Leverett. “But here for the first time the U.S. is saying that part of a government is itself a terrorist organization.”
This is what Leverett and Mann fear will happen: The diplomatic effort in the United Nations will fail when it becomes clear that Russia’s and China’s geopolitical ambitions will not accommodate the inconvenience of energy sanctions against Iran. Without any meaningful incentive from the U.S. to be friendly, Iran will keep meddling in Iraq and installing nuclear centrifuges. This will trigger a response from the hard-liners in the White House, who feel that it is their moral duty to deal with Iran before the Democrats take over American foreign policy. “If you get all those elements coming together, say in the first half of ’08,” says Leverett, “what is this president going to do? I think there is a serious risk he would decide to order an attack on the Iranian nuclear installations and probably a wider target zone.”
This would result in a dramatic increase in attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, attacks by proxy forces like Hezbollah, and an unknown reaction from the wobbly states of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where millions admire Iran’s resistance to the Great Satan. “As disastrous as Iraq has been,” says Mann, “an attack on Iran could engulf America in a war with the entire Muslim world.”
And let me just recommend that everyone watch the new Frontline about the Showdown with Iran.
in addition to the $88b requested for the new and improved bunker busters & their stealth transport system, our feckless chimperor has announced further unilateral sanctions against iran, the al-quds…aka: revolutionary guards…and three major iranian state-owned banks, among others:
US announces Iran sanctions
The US today branded Iran’s elite revolutionary guards as a supporter of terrorism as it imposed the toughest sanctions on Tehran since the Islamist revolution of 1979.
The al-Quds unit within the guards corps is accused of providing powerful bomb-making equipment to fighters in Iraq that has led to the deaths of US soldiers. The revolutionary guards as a whole, which have business interests ranging from newspapers to cars, were branded “proliferators of weapons of mass destruction” in reference to its alleged role in developing nuclear weapons.
Three major state-owned Iranian banks, which Washington claims help fund Tehran’s alleged support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, Shia militants in Iraq, and Hamas and Hizbullah, are also targeted.
The unprecedented sanctions, which also target the country’s defence ministry, will cut off more than 20 Iranian entities, including individuals and companies owned or controlled by the revolutionary guards.
.
.
Ms Rice said the US was “fully committed to a diplomatic solution with Iran” and had “no conflict” with the Iranian people.
.
.
Britain said it supported the US action. A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We are prepared to lead the way to a third resolution of sanctions, and at the same time support tougher European Union sanctions.”
KHARTOUM (AFP) – A Darfur rebel group has attacked a Sudanese oilfield and kidnapped a Canadian and an Iraqi worker, a leader of the group said on Thursday, vowing further attacks unless foreign oil companies pull out.
“We attacked Defra oilfield and kidnapped two foreign workers, one is Canadian and another is Iraqi,” said Abdelaziz el-Nur Ashr, field commander for the Justice and Equality Movement in Kordofan, a region to the east of Darfur.
The attack took place on Tuesday, he said, with Darfur peace talks due to begin in Libya on Saturday. The Islamist JEM has already said it will not attend the negotiations which it has derided as “a masquerade.”
The oilfield is run by the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC) a consortium involving China’s CNPC, India’s ONGC, Malaysia’s Petronas and Sudanese state-owned Sudapet.
Defra produces more than half of the around 500,000 barrels per day produced in Sudan, most of which is exported to China.
YANGON (Reuters) – Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was taken from her villa and de facto prison of the last four years to a state guesthouse where she has previously met foreign diplomats, her party and sources said.
There was no immediate word on the purpose of the trip, although the most likely explanation was to meet Aung Kyi, a senior member of the ruling military junta appointed as a go-between after last month’s crushed pro-democracy protests.
A security source said the 62-year-old Nobel laureate had returned to her lakeside villa, where she has spent most of the 12 of the last 18 years under house arrest, an hour later.
The barbed wire barricades that have sealed off the road outside her home since protests started in August against fuel price rises and decades of military rule remained in place, scuppering hopes Suu Kyi might be about to be released.
Aung Kyi, a trusted regime fixer, was appointed two weeks ago after Gambari flew in at the height of a crackdown on the biggest protests in two decades with a message from the Security Council telling the generals to talk to Suu Kyi about reform.
And to top that off, Rawstory reports the following:
Buried in the White House’s $196 billion emergency funding request for Iraq and Afghanistan is a line that has some analysts watching the prospect of an Iran strike concerned: $88 million to modify US jets so they can carry a newly developed 30,000-pound bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator.
According to ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, the one-line explanation for the request said it is in response to “an urgent operational need from theater commanders.”
What could be so urgent about more of the same, you ask?
Why, that would be the same but different…spelled I-R-A-N.
tries killing 2 birds (immigration and abortion) with one stone: CNN
Speaking before a gathering of Christian conservative voters, GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said legalized abortion in the United States was a holocaust.
“Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce,” the former Arkansas governor said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”
Shorter Mike Huckabee: “All the foreigners are coming here to take the jobs that should rightfully belong to aborted fetuses.” What an ass.
or: get used to the concept of “the long war”…coming soon…
the military-industrial complex has seen the light and it shines brightly on the road to even greater opportunities and riches. urban is the future…scary stuff, and applicable anywhere:
The Pentagon’s 100-Year War By Nick Turse
…”The cities are the problem,” he says. A retired marine infantry lieutenant colonel who worked on urban warfare issues at the Pentagon in the late 1990s, he now serves as director of the Joint Urban Operations Office at US Joint Forces Command. He sees the war in the streets of Iraq’s cities as the prototype for tomorrow’s battlespace. “This is the next fight,” he warns. “The future of warfare is what we see now.”
He isn’t alone. “We think urban is the future,” says James Lasswell, a retired colonel who now heads the Office of Science and Technology at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. “Everything worth fighting for is in the urban environment.” And Wayne Michael Hall, a retired army brigadier general and the senior intelligence advisor in Schattle’s operation, has a similar assessment, “We will be fighting in urban terrain for the next hundred years.”
.
.
… [T]hey now assert that the feral, failed cities’ of the Third World – especially their slum outskirts – will be the distinctive battlespace of the 21st century.” Pentagon war-fighting doctrine, he notes, “is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor“.
.
.
…Speakers and conference-goers alike repeatedly lamented the way international law and similar hindrances stood in the way of unleashing chemical agents and emerging technologies…this was a reference to the scorned Chemical Weapons Convention, which has been binding for the last decade.
.
.
When it came to the “homeland,” conference participants were particularly focused on moving beyond weaponry aimed at individuals, like rubber bullets. Needed in the future, they generally agreed, were technologies that could target whole crowds at once — not just rioters but even those simply attending “demonstrations that could go violent.”
.
.
.
much more at tomdispatch
AP/Houston Chronicle
Interestingly enough, the investigators determined that humans are generally hard-wired for optimism…
it’s like a ‘gift’ that keeps ‘giving”: NYT
What a mess. I expect we’ll be hearing from BushCO about our “strong economy” shortly.
U.S. mishandled Arar case, admits Rice
“I can’t recall” and “things were mishandled”/”mistakes were made” seem to be the BushCo mantra, don’t they?
You know, if standard procedure was to obtain such assurances (and it should be standard procedure) – then there is no way to ‘forget’.
The response is utterly disingenuous.
The sad thing is that “forgetting” seems too be an acceptable excuse for everything. The media never calls these criminals on the things they willfully do and then pretend to have forgotten.
is promoting the idea that women who can provide for themselves are “Fembots”: LINK
WTF? If you’re not financially dependent on a man, and dying to be married and have babies, you’re a Fembot? And then, after calling these women emotionally unavailable, they try to say that Fembot is not a derogatory name?
from Esquire
And let me just recommend that everyone watch the new Frontline about the Showdown with Iran.
in addition to the $88b requested for the new and improved bunker busters & their stealth transport system, our feckless chimperor has announced further unilateral sanctions against iran, the al-quds…aka: revolutionary guards…and three major iranian state-owned banks, among others:
sure we are, CONdi…if anyone believes this, l still have that bridge for sale, and it’s big enough that your whole extended family can live under it.
lTMF’sA
Darfur rebel group kidnaps foreign oil workers
.
YANGON (Reuters) – Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was taken from her villa and de facto prison of the last four years to a state guesthouse where she has previously met foreign diplomats, her party and sources said.
There was no immediate word on the purpose of the trip, although the most likely explanation was to meet Aung Kyi, a senior member of the ruling military junta appointed as a go-between after last month’s crushed pro-democracy protests.
A security source said the 62-year-old Nobel laureate had returned to her lakeside villa, where she has spent most of the 12 of the last 18 years under house arrest, an hour later.
The barbed wire barricades that have sealed off the road outside her home since protests started in August against fuel price rises and decades of military rule remained in place, scuppering hopes Suu Kyi might be about to be released.
Aung Kyi, a trusted regime fixer, was appointed two weeks ago after Gambari flew in at the height of a crackdown on the biggest protests in two decades with a message from the Security Council telling the generals to talk to Suu Kyi about reform.
BBC News: Suu Kyi meets Burmese minister
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The LATimes editorial page has noticed that there’s a crazy man in the White House.
And to top that off, Rawstory reports the following:
What could be so urgent about more of the same, you ask?
Why, that would be the same but different…spelled I-R-A-N.
the LA Times has it right: Bush offers to bomb Kurds for the Turks.
I guess he thought it was the least he could do, after Congress condemned them for what they did to the Armenians.
why we need SCHIP, from a mother who knows.
tries killing 2 birds (immigration and abortion) with one stone: CNN
Shorter Mike Huckabee: “All the foreigners are coming here to take the jobs that should rightfully belong to aborted fetuses.” What an ass.
who knew?
It’s so much better to die from heat related causes, than from cold related causes.
or: get used to the concept of “the long war”…coming soon…
the military-industrial complex has seen the light and it shines brightly on the road to even greater opportunities and riches. urban is the future…scary stuff, and applicable anywhere:
recommended
coming soon to a city near you…
lTMF’sA