Prometheus 6

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON JAZZ: RESEARCHERS USE MRI TO STUDY SPONTANEITY, CREATIVITY
--Johns Hopkins researcher also trained as a jazz musician

A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow.

This keyboard was specially designed for a study to assess brain activity in jazz musicians during improvisation. Because fMRI uses powerful magnets, the researchers designed the unconventional keyboard with no iron-containing metal parts that the magnets could attract.

The joint research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and musician volunteers from the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, sheds light on the creative improvisation that artists and non-artists use in everyday life, the investigators say.

It appears, they conclude, that jazz musicians create their unique improvised riffs by turning off inhibition and turning up creativity.

In a report published Feb. 27 in Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE, the scientists from the University’s School of Medicine and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders describe their curiosity about the possible neurological underpinnings of the almost trance-like state jazz artists enter during spontaneous improvisation.

“When jazz musicians improvise, they often play with eyes closed in a distinctive, personal style that transcends traditional rules of melody and rhythm,” says Charles J. Limb, M.D., assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a trained jazz saxophonist himself. “It’s a remarkable frame of mind,” he adds, “during which, all of a sudden, the musician is generating music that has never been heard, thought, practiced or played before. What comes out is completely spontaneous.”

Because I may bail on ya for the rest of the day...haven't decided yet.

"You can't have one set of laws for police officers and another one for the rest of the world," Andrews said.

Sure you can...happpens all the time.

In recent weeks, officers have twice been photographed speeding past a camera and extending a middle finger, an act that police supervisors interpreted as a gesture of defiance. "There is no excuse for that kind of behavior," said Andrews, who was briefed on the incidents.

Montgomery's Finest Won't Pay Fines
By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 8, 2008; A01

Among the thousands of drivers who have been issued $40 fines after being nabbed by Montgomery County's new speed cameras are scores of county police officers. The difference is, many of the officers are refusing to pay.

The officers are following the advice of their union, which says the citations are issued not to the driver but to the vehicle's owner -- in this case, the county.

That view has rankled Police Chief J. Thomas Manger and County Council Member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville), who chairs the Public Safety Committee.

Hillary Clinton, Through a Lens Wrongly
By Deborah Tannen
Sunday, March 9, 2008; B03

This isn't about Hillary. Well, okay, it is.

But it isn't only about her. It's also about every woman who has ever been underestimated, failed to get credit for work she did or been denied opportunities to do work at which she would have excelled.

You were right the first time.

Show me one thing...just one...that she did and failed to get credit for. Show me an opportunity she was denied, or a time she's been underestimated.

Just one. Or stop fucking whining, you titty-baby. Mrs. Bill Clinton is not your standard woman that has faced all that.

Mississipi Goddam

A shocking poll that was just released, indicates that an overwhelming number of white Mississippians are loathe to vote for a black candidate. Unlike some other states, white males there are unambivalently intent upon pulling their levers for Monster. While this stark reality contradicts the “unlevel playing field” Monster bemoans at every opportunity; it certainly indicates that there is one. It just doesn’t have anything to do with her vagina. Her race, strangely enough, will garner her a very significant portion of the Mississippi vote.

In honor of the poll, my girl Names4Things pulled out a bunch of statistics and Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddam...but I found a more audible version...

Uribe came out firing, accusing Correa of ties to the FARC. He cited as evidence a letter culled from a computer that commandos recovered in the camp that belonged to Devia. Uribe said the letter showed that the FARC supported Correa during his 2006 presidential campaign.

Correa, a leftist, U.S.-trained economist, angrily rejected the allegations, accused Uribe of lying and explained that his government has battled against FARC units in Ecuador's northern jungles....

Tensions eased after Dominican President Leonel Fernández, the host of the summit, appealed for calm and said, "What all of us would like is for this meeting to end with a hug, a handshake, between the presidents of Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador."

With the hearty handshakes, the countries resumed normal diplomatic and commercial relations. Uribe also said that he would not file a complaint with the International Criminal Court accusing Chávez of aiding the FARC, as he had vowed earlier. 

Latin American Crisis Resolved
Colombia Apologizes At Regional Summit
By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 8, 2008; A09

BOGOTA, Colombia, March 7 -- The presidents of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela on Friday agreed to end a bitter standoff that had resulted in troop deployments, a downturn in trade and a rupture in diplomatic relations.

The crisis began after Colombia bombed a rebel camp last Saturday just inside Ecuador, killing 24 guerrillas, including Luis Edgar Devia, a top commander. The strike marked the first time the army had killed a member of the directorate of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a guerrilla group that has been fighting here for 44 years.

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe had come under criticism from various Latin American governments for the incursion, but at a regional summit in the Dominican Republic on Friday he heartily shook hands with Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. All three of those nations had broken relations with Colombia over the incident.

Stephen Wayne, a political science professor at Georgetown who is studying the personalities of the presidential candidates, agrees McCain's temperament is of real concern. "The anger is there," Wayne said. If McCain is the one to answer the phone at 3 a.m., he said, "you worry about an initial emotive, less rational response."

Most recently, Wayne has been studying Clinton's personality. "I just gave a presentation on Hillary's temperament for the presidency. I came to the conclusion that it is not really a good presidential temperament, with one caveat -- if you compare it with McCain's."

It's 3 a.m. Who do you want answering the phone?
Not John McCain, say some military leaders: "I think his knee-jerk response factor is a little scary."
By Mark Benjamin

Bow to the Woman
Posted March 7, 2008 | 01:42 PM (EST)

Barack Obama: Bow to the woman, and take the vice presidency. Let our country heal. You will run in eight years and be unstoppable as a visionary world leader. You must pass through this filter first though: bow to the woman.

Over the last year, the number of officially unemployed has risen by 500,000, while the number of people outside the labor force — neither working nor looking for a job — has risen by 1.3 million.

Employment has risen by 100,000, but even that comes with a caveat: there are also 600,000 more people who are working part time because they could not find full-time work, according to the Labor Department.

“The decline in the unemployment rate,” said Joshua Shapiro, an economist at MFR, a research firm in New York, “should not be viewed as good news.” 

Meanwhile, Bush's economic team continues to promote the idea that what you don't know doesn't exist.

At the White House on Friday, Edward P. Lazear, the chairman of Mr. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, parried reporters’ questions about whether he now thought the economy would slip into a recession.

Instead, he said, “I’m still not saying that there is a recession.” 

End to the Good Times (Such as They Were)
By DAVID LEONHARDT

If history is a reliable guide, the recession of 2008 is now unavoidable.

The dismal jobs report released Friday showed overall employment to be lower than it was three months ago. Every time such a slump has occurred since the early 1970s, a recession has followed — or already been under way.

And if the good times have really ended, they were never that good to begin with. Most American households are still not earning as much annually as they did in 1999, once inflation is taken into account. Since the Census Bureau began keeping records in the 1960s, a prolonged expansion has never ended without household income having set a new record.

For months, policy makers and Wall Street economists have been predicting, and hoping, that the aggressive series of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve would keep the economy growing, despite the housing bust. But the possibility seemed to diminish almost by the hour on Friday.

Plus, anything that pisses off James Dobson is a good idea on its face.

For years, the state of California has allowed parents to home school as long as they file papers to create a private school, hire a tutor with credentials or if their child participates in an independent study program through a credentialed school. In evaluating the Long case, however, Judge Croskey found that state law forbade any homeschooling that was not taught by a credentialed teacher and that what California had been allowing was, in his judicial opinion, illegal. In 1953, another appellate court ruled against home schooling parents who didn't want to adhere to California's compulsory education laws, which require kids between six and 18 to attend a credentialed school...."We weren't trying to change the law on home schooling," says Leslie Heimov of the Children's Law Center which represents the Long children involved in the case. "The law is accurate — it hasn't changed since the 1950s."

Criminalizing Home Schoolers
By Kristin Kloberdanz/Modesto

Parents of the approximately 200,000 home schooled children in California are reeling from the possibility that they may have to shutter their classrooms — and go back to school themselves, if they want to continue teaching their own kids. On Feb. 28, Judge H. Walter Croskey of the Second District Court of Appeals in Los Angeles ruled that children ages six to 18 may be taught only by credentialed teachers in public or private schools — or at home by mom and dad but only if they have a teaching degree. Citing state law that goes back to the early 1950s, Croskey declared that "California courts have held that under provisions in the Education Code, parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children." Furthermore, the judge wrote, if instructors teach without credentials they will be subject to criminal action.

In a surprise announcement early Friday, the Federal Reserve said it would inject about $200 billion into the nation’s banking system this month — with more to come after that — by offering banks one-month loans at low rates and in return letting them pledge mortgage-backed bonds and even riskier assets as collateral.

Fed officials said Friday that they were not pumping money into the system in response to the poor jobs data but rather to the growing unwillingness or inability of investors to finance even routine business deals. Fed officials have long feared that anxiety about credit losses would create a “negative feedback loop,” or self-perpetuating spiral of rising unemployment, more home foreclosures and yet more credit losses.

See that? Your job doesn't motivate this government...corporate credit does. 

Sharp Drop in Jobs Adds to Grim Picture of U.S. Economy
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON — The worst fears of consumers, investors and Washington officials were confirmed on Friday, as deepening paralysis on Wall Street collided with stark new evidence of falling employment and a likely recession.

In a report that was far worse than most analysts had expected, the Labor Department estimated that the nation lost 63,000 jobs in February. It was the second consecutive monthly decline, and the third straight drop for private-sector jobs.

Even before the bad news on jobs emerged, the Federal Reserve was already racing to ease the latest crisis in the credit markets, where seemingly rock-solid companies have been caught short because the markets are devaluing the collateral they had posted to back billions of dollars in loans. Much of that collateral consists of mortgages.

“For us, guns and hunting was a way of life,” said Mr. Helms, the manager of Marstiller’s Gun Shop here. “A lot of places seem to be losing that, and we need to bring it back.”

Why? 

The goal is to reverse a 20 percent drop in hunting permits purchased over the last decade, which has caused a loss of more than $1.5 million in state revenue over that period.

Okay, THAT makes sense. 

In that effort, Michigan, Nebraska, South Carolina and Utah have enacted laws since 2004 lowering or removing minimum age requirements for hunters, while Louisiana, Montana and Georgia have amended their constitutions to protect the right to hunt and fish. Eight states are considering similar amendments.

Foolish. Hunting and the family farm are as doomed as all the other Mesozoic activities.

To Revive Hunting, States Turn to the Classroom
By IAN URBINA

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — When David Helms was in seventh grade, he would take his .22-caliber rifle to school, put a box of ammunition in his locker and, like virtually all the other boys, lean his rifle against a wall in the principal’s office so he could start hunting squirrels and deer as soon as classes let out.

Now, when he takes his 8-year-old grandson hunting on weekends, Mr. Helms, 55, searches the boy’s pockets before sending him back to school to ensure that there are no forgotten ammunition shells. But most of his grandson’s peers never have to worry about that, Mr. Helms said, because they would sooner play video games than join them outdoors.

Hunting is on the decline across the nation as participation has fallen over the last three decades, and states have begun trying to bolster this rural tradition by attracting new and younger people to the sport.

The truth isn't negative, even if the liar gets hurt.

Obama Camp Sees Fine Line in Hitting Back
By JEFF ZELENY

CASPER, Wyo. — Since opening his presidential bid 14 months ago, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has answered many questions about his candidacy.

Can he turn inspiration into votes? Yes. Can he raise money? Yes. Can his organization compete with the political muscle of one of the best-known families in Democratic politics? Yes.

But after his defeats this week at the hands of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, there is frustration and anger among his supporters, advisers and contributors about the Clinton campaign’s attacks on him — and still-unresolved tension about how far he can go in striking back without sacrificing his claim to be practicing a new brand of politics.

Via Jack and Jill Politics, who has predigested the article and come up with this very accurate summary:

So let's just review. Hillary has claimed she is vastly more prepared to lead America in a foreign crisis than Barack Obama, whose only legitimate claim is a speech. When asked, she cites four incidents. Three of these are unsubstantiated, which is my fancy, college-educated way of saying "bullshit." The one remaining claim that may be valid is actually a speech? A speech that inspired people? You've got to be kidding me.

Clinton's experience claim under scrutiny
Hillary Clinton may have influenced foreign policy, but evidence is scant she played pivotal role
By Mike Dorning and Christi Parsons, WASHINGTON BUREAU Tribune correspondents Jim Tankersley and Rick Pearson contributed to this report
March 7, 2008

WASHINGTON

Surrounded by military leaders in a Cabinet-style setting, Hillary Clinton on Thursday said she has "crossed the threshold" of foreign policy experience to serve as commander in chief.

Supporters of rival Barack Obama fired back immediately, arguing that the former first lady's trips abroad hardly constituted a practice run for managing global crises.

"She was never asked to do the heavy lifting" when meeting with foreign leaders, said Susan Rice, who was an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration and is now advising Obama. "She wasn't asked to move the mountain or deliver a harsh message or a veiled threat. It was all gentle prodding or constructive reinforcement. And it would not have been appropriate for her to do the heavy lifting."

via Crooked Timber, whose discussion is quite interesting.

WHITE Is white working class Britain becoming invisible?

The white working class in Britain is put under the spotlight in a season of unflinching programmes examining why some sections of this community feel increasingly marginalised today.

Political parties debate the way forward for immigration, debate rages in the media and the popularity of the far-right continues to rise in some sections of society. Against this backdrop, the White season explores the complex mix of feelings that lead some white working class people to say they feel under siege, that their very sense of self is being brought into question.

Martin said Bush is "using the same legal reasoning" as he did with warrantless eavesdropping.

Bush says feds can open mail without warrant
By James Gordon Meek
New York Daily News

WASHINGTON — President Bush quietly has claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant.

Bush asserted the new authority Dec. 20 after signing legislation that overhauls some postal regulations. He then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open mail under emergency conditions, contrary to existing law and contradicting the bill he had just signed, according to experts who have reviewed it.

A White House spokeswoman disputed claims that the move gives Bush any new powers, saying the Constitution allows such searches.

Still, the move, one year after The New York Times' disclosure of a secret program that allowed warrantless monitoring of Americans' phone calls and e-mail, caught Capitol Hill by surprise.

During February, the national unemployment rate eased to 4.8 percent from 4.9 percent in January, but that was because fewer people were in the labor force. The department said the number of people in the workforce fell by 450,000 in February....

One bright spot was that the government added 38,000 jobs in February on top of 4,000 new-hires in January.

Okay...the economy dropped 63,000 jobs, even though the government added 38,000 jobs. That means the private sector lost over 1000,000 jobs.

U.S. Payrolls Unexpectedly Fall for Second Straight Month
By REUTERS

Filed at 8:31 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON, March 7 (Reuters) - U.S. employers cut payrolls for a second straight month during February, slashing 63,000 jobs for the biggest monthly job decline in nearly five years as the labor market weakened steadily, a government report on Friday showed.

The Labor Department said last month's cut in jobs followed an upwardly revised loss of 22,000 jobs in January instead of 17,000 reported a month ago. In addition, it said that only 41,000 jobs were created in December, half the 82,000 originally reported.

The back-to-back January and February job losses were the first consecutive monthly declines since May and June of 2003.

Here's an idea for an Obama ad: a montage of Clinton's Sybillish personalities that have surfaced during the campaign with a solemn voiceover at the end saying, "Does anyone want this nut answering the phone?"

How is it that she became the one who's perceived as more equipped to answer that 3 a.m. call than the unflappable Obama? He, with the ice in his veins, who doesn't panic when he's losing or get too giddy when he's winning, who's as comfortable in his own skin as she's uncomfortable in hers. There have been times in this campaign when she seemed so unhinged that I worried she'd actually kill herself if she lost. Every day, she reminds me more and more of Adele H., who also had an obsession that drove her insane.

In the archives here there's a discussion of a truly foolish post left of the front of a group site, unfortunately misconfigured such that no one could read the comments kicking the foolish suggestion in said foolish post directly to the curb.

(Don't worry, I will not relink it.)

When I read If Hillary Gets To Claim Michigan And Florida, Denver Will Burn the other day, knowing the comments would be public I decided to wait until Baratunde cleaned up the thought he was expressing. Which he did...after cross posting to DKos.

Woo wee. Rikyrah asked me to post that piece over to Daily Kos, and I did it knowing the reaction folks would have. Predictably, most of the comments reacted to my "call for violence," and I've learned in the past that metaphors don't work well in the dkos diary environment.

Mr. Harper, a Conservative and a strong supporter of Nafta, at first rejected suggestions that Mr. Brodie or anyone on his staff was involved in leaking the memorandum. But berated by opposition members in Parliament calling the leaks an improper attempt to influence another country’s vote, he has conceded that “the way the leak was executed was blatantly unfair to Senator Obama and his campaign” and ordered an investigation into how The A.P. obtained the diplomatic cable....

According to the news agency, he also told a group of CTV employees that the campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York had contacted the Canadian government and told it “not to worry” about her promise to reopen the trade agreement. Canada’s economy is heavily dependent on trade and most of its exports go to the United States, making Nafta a delicate issue.

The news agency suggests that CTV picked up on Mr. Brodie’s remarks and began reporting the story. It apparently found, however, that in fact it was the Obama campaign that had offered the reassurances to Canadian diplomats.

In an e-mail message, Robert Hurst, the president of CTV News, said, “We do not discuss how we gather the news.”

Trade Pact Controversy in Democratic Race Reaches Into Canadian Parliament
By IAN AUSTEN

OTTAWA — Canada is in a tizzy.

The political storm surrounding the North American Free Trade Agreement that might have helped to trip up Senator Barack Obama in the Ohio Democratic primary on Tuesday has died down — at least for now — in the United States. But the controversy is raging in Canada, particularly in Parliament.

Did Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s top political assistant set in motion the events that ultimately led to criticism that Mr. Obama was only posturing when he promised to reopen the Nafta trade pact? Who leaked a memorandum from the Canadian Consulate in Chicago that summarized the conversation with an adviser to Mr. Obama? And did the Canadian government commit the ultimate sin of interfering in an election of a foreign ally?

They use that word a lot in translations of Mahayana Buddhist texts...Gotama sent Manjusri to check on the health of Vimalakirti, and numberless hoardes followed because they knew when the Mahasattvas met they would expound the Holy Dharma. It's like, we not just going to talk, we're going deep.

Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.

Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.

Time Out of Mind
By STEFAN KLEIN

Berlin

IN 1784, Benjamin Franklin composed a satire, “Essay on Daylight Saving,” proposing a law that would oblige Parisians to get up an hour earlier in summer. By putting the daylight to better use, he reasoned, they’d save a good deal of money — 96 million livres tournois — that might otherwise go to buying candles. Now this switch to daylight saving time (which occurs early Sunday in the United States) is an annual ritual in Western countries.

Even more influential has been something else Franklin said about time in the same year: time is money. He meant this only as a gentle reminder not to “sit idle” for half the day. He might be dismayed if he could see how literally, and self-destructively, we take his metaphor today. Our society is obsessed as never before with making every single minute count. People even apply the language of banking: We speak of “having” and “saving” and “investing” and “wasting” it.

But the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal — or very little.

In The Anxiety Election, Mr. Krugman makes an effective case that in the upcoming election, once again "It's the economy, stupid!"

Democrats won the 2006 election largely thanks to public disgust with the Iraq war. But polls — and Hillary Clinton’s big victory in Ohio — suggest that if the Democrats want to win this year, they have to focus on economic anxiety.

Some people reject that idea. They believe that this election should be another referendum on the war, and, perhaps even more important, about the way America was misled into that war. That belief is one reason many progressives fervently support Barack Obama, an early war opponent, even though his domestic platform is somewhat to the right of Mrs. Clinton’s.

As an early war opponent myself, I understand their feelings. But should and ought don’t win elections. And polls show that the economy has overtaken Iraq as the public’s biggest concern.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Bill Clinton thinks it's going to be a national security election.

Since the financial markets entered crisis mode in August and the housing market downturn contracted, leaders of the Federal Reserve have been looking for evidence that ordinary businesses were being affected -- not just home builders and Wall Street banks.

The beige book offered that evidence in spades.

Economic Downturn Expands Countrywide
Fed Report Signals Weakness in Variety of Industries
By Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 6, 2008; D01

The economic downturn, which started in the handful of states where the housing market was in the worst shape, is spreading to almost every corner of the country and to a wide variety of industries, according to a Federal Reserve report released yesterday.

The trouble is showing up in such disparate ways as weaker demand for staffing services in New England, lower trucking volume in Ohio and surrounding states, and a resistance to spending money on capital projects by financial institutions on the West Coast.

That assessment is based on the "beige book," a compilation of anecdotes from businesses around the country gathered by the Fed's 12 regional banks. The previous report, in the middle of January, found signs of weakness in certain states and industries but described a U.S. economy that was generally holding up.

Even Republicans can't trust Republicans. That's why you have to keep these suckers out of the national treasury.

GOP Campaign Arm Missing Cash
FBI Investigating Treasurer Fired Over Lack of Auditing
By Paul Kane and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 7, 2008; A04

Authorities investigating possible fraud by a longtime GOP operative have determined that the House Republican campaign committee has lost a substantial sum of money, and several GOP lawmakers believe funds were pilfered from their campaign accounts as well, law enforcement and Capitol Hill sources said yesterday.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, the House Republicans' campaign arm, lost a "significant amount of money," said a law enforcement official who also confirmed that the FBI has begun investigating the committee's longtime treasurer, Christopher J. Ward.

Auxiliary Police See Parking Permit Cut as an Insult
By AL BAKER

One strategy the city has settled on to bring down the number of free parking permits is to take them away from auxiliary police officers. And that has drawn howls of protest from those unpaid and unarmed officers, who saw the placards as a rare perk in an often thankless — and always voluntary — job.

“You are asking someone to volunteer, and then you are not giving them a place to park?” said Glenn J. Kearney, the president of the New York State Association of Auxiliary Police. “They certainly should not have to put a quarter in the meter every hour. That would be completely unfair.”

He added: “Not only are you telling me you are not giving me anything, but now you are turning around and taking away my ability to park my car when I come to give you free service. I have to be able to park. That is common sense.”