Thursday, May 21, 2020

B U R E A U   O F   P U B L I C   S E C R E T S


PREGNANT PAUSE

— Remarks on the Corona Crisis —


We were already living in a general global crisis, but most people were only vaguely aware of it since it was manifested in a confusing array of particular crises — social, political, economic, environmental. Climate change is the most momentous of these crises, but it is so complicated and so gradual that it has been easy for most people to ignore it.
The corona crisis has been sudden, undeniable, and inescapable. It is also taking place in an unprecedented context.
If this crisis had taken place fifty or sixty years ago, we would have been totally at the mercy of the mass media, reading about it in newspapers or magazines or sitting in front of a radio or television passively absorbing whatever instructions and reassurances were broadcast by politicians or newscasters, with scarcely any opportunity to respond except perhaps to write a letter to the editor and hope that it got printed. Back then, governments could get away with things like the Gulf of Tonkin incident because it was months or years before the truth eventually got out.
The development of social media during the last two decades has of course dramatically changed this. Although the mass media remain powerful, their monopolistic impact has been weakened and circumvented as more and more people have engaged in the new interactive means of communication. These new means were soon put to radical uses, such as rapidly exposing political lies and scandals that previously would have remained hidden, and they eventually played a crucial role in triggering and coordinating the Arab Spring and Occupy movements of 2011. A decade later, they have become routine for a large portion of the global population.
As a result, this is the first time in history that such a momentous event has taken place with virtually everyone on earth aware of it at the same time. And it is playing out while much of humanity is obliged to stay at home, where they can hardly avoid reflecting on the situation and sharing their reflections with others.
Crises always tend to expose social contradictions, but in this case, with the intense worldwide focus on each new development, the revelations have been particularly glaring.
The first and perhaps most startling one has been the rapid turnabout of governmental policies. Since the usual “market solutions” are obviously incapable of solving this crisis, governments are now feeling obliged to resort to massive implementation of the kinds of solutions they previously scorned as “unrealistic” or “utopian.” When anybody, rich or poor, native or foreign, can spread a deadly disease, anything less than free healthcare for all is self-evidently idiotic. When millions of businesses are closed and tens of millions of people are thrown out of work and have no prospect of finding a new job, the usual unemployment benefits are obviously hopelessly inadequate and policies like universal basic income become not just possible, but virtually unavoidable. As an Irish satirical website put it: “With private hospitals being taken into public ownership, increased welfare supports for the vast majority of the nation and a ban on evictions and the implementation of a rent freeze, Irish people are still trying to comprehend how they woke up today to find themselves in an idyllic socialist republic.”
Needless to say, our situation is actually far from idyllic. Although Ireland and many other countries have indeed implemented these kinds of emergency measures, when we look closer we find that the usual suspects are still in charge, with their usual priorities. Particularly in the United States, where the first to be rescued were the banks and corporations, as several trillion dollars were pumped into the financial markets without the slightest public debate. Then, when it became apparent that a more general bailout was needed, the vast majority of that bailout money also went to those same huge companies; much of the smaller amount designated for small businesses was snapped up by large chains before most of the actual small businesses got a penny; and the allotment for ordinary working families and unemployed people was a one-time payment that would scarcely cover two weeks of typical expenses. To add a twist of the knife, governors in several states have come up with the clever idea of prematurely reopening certain businesses, thereby making those workers ineligible for unemployment benefits if they refuse to endanger their lives.
The point of such bailouts is that certain industries are supposedly so essential that they need to be “saved.” But the fossil fuel industries don’t need to be saved, they need to be phased out as soon as possible. And there’s no reason to save the airlines, for example, because if they go bankrupt they can then be bought for pennies on the dollar by someone else (preferably the government) and restarted with the same workers, with the losses being borne by the previous owners. Yet these immensely wealthy and grossly polluting industries and others like them are getting hundreds of billions of dollars of “crisis relief.” But when it comes to things that lower- and middle-class people depend on, suddenly the message is: “We need to tighten our belts and not increase the federal debt.” Thus, Trump continues to push for a payroll tax cut (which would sabotage Social Security and Medicare) and he has threatened to veto any bailout that gives any assistance to the U.S. Postal Service (though UPS and Fedex have already been given billions of dollars of taxpayer money). The Republicans have tried for decades to bankrupt and privatize the Post Office — most blatantly in their 2006 act requiring the Post Office to fund its employees’ retirement benefits 75 years in advance (something no other entity, public or private, has ever been obliged to do) — but Trump’s particular vehemence on this topic at this time is due to his desire to prevent the possibility of mail-in voting in the coming election.
It shouldn’t take a genius to realize that the people at the lower end of the scale should be prioritized. Not only do billion-dollar corporations not need any more money, if they get more money most of it does not “trickle down” but is salted away in offshore tax shelters or used for stock buybacks. Whereas if each lower- and middle-class person gets, say, $2000 a month for the duration of the crisis (which would cost the government much less than the current bailouts of the super-rich), virtually all of that money will immediately be spent for basic needs, which will help at least some small businesses to remain in business, which will enable more people to keep their jobs, and so on. Small businesses also need immediate assistance (especially if they have been temporarily forced to suspend operation during the crisis) or they are likely to go bankrupt, in which case large businesses and banks will buy them up at bargain rates, thereby exacerbating the already extreme gap between a few mega-corporations at the top and everybody else at the bottom.
The corona crisis has exposed many national governments as criminally negligent, but most of them have at least attempted to deal with it in a somewhat serious manner once they realized the urgency of the situation. This has unfortunately not been the case in the United States, where Trump first declared that the whole thing was just a hoax that would soon blow over and that the death count would be “close to zero,” and then, when after doing virtually nothing for more than a month he was finally forced to admit that it was actually a serious crisis, announced that thanks to his brilliant leadership “only” around 100,000 or 200,000 Americans will die. Months into the pandemic there is still no national stay-at-home order, no national testing plan, no national procurement and distribution of life-saving medical supplies, and Trump continues to downplay the crisis in a frantic effort to open things up soon enough to revive his reelection chances.
Since his dillydallying has already been responsible for tens of thousands of additional deaths, and since he is also presiding over an economic chaos not seen in America since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Democrats should normally have no trouble in defeating him in November. But as it did four years ago, the Democratic Party establishment has demonstrated once again that it would rather risk losing to Trump with a business-as-usual corporate tool than risk winning with Bernie Sanders. Sanders’s programs (Medicare for All, Green New Deal, etc.) were already popular with most voters, and they have become even more so as the corona crisis has made the need for them more obvious. The fact that such commonsensical reforms are seen as radical is just a reflection of how cluelessly reactionary American politics has become by comparison with most of the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, since it soon became clear to just about everyone that Trump hasn’t the dimmest idea of how to deal with the corona crisis except to showcase his amazing medical knowledge and brag about his TV ratings, everyone else has been left to deal with it on their own. Though some state and local governments have helped, it should be noted that many of the earliest, most extensive, and most creative responses have been carried out by ordinary people on their own initiative — young people doing shopping for older and more vulnerable neighbors, people making and donating the protective masks that the governments neglected to stockpile, health professionals offering safety tips, tech-savvy people helping others to set up virtual meetings, parents sharing activities for kids, others donating to food banks, or crowdfunding to support popular small businesses, or forming support networks for prisoners, immigrants, homeless people, etc.
The crisis has vividly demonstrated the interconnectedness of people and countries all over the world, but it has also revealed, for those who weren’t already aware of it, that vulnerability is not equally shared. As always, those at the bottom bear the brunt — people in prisons or immigrant detention centers or living in crowded slums, people who can’t practice social distancing and who may not even have facilities to effectively wash their hands. While many of us are able to stay at home with only mild inconvenience, others are unable to remain at home (if they even have a home) or to share so many things via social media (if they even have a computer or a smartphone) because they are forced to continue working at “essential jobs,” under dangerous conditions and often for minimum wage and no benefits, in order to provide food, utilities, deliveries, and other services for the people who are staying home. (See Ian Alan Paul’s provocative analysis of the “domesticated/connected” sector and the “mobile/disposable” sector in The Corona Reboot.)
The “mobile/disposable” workers are usually too isolated and too vulnerable to dare to struggle (especially if they are undocumented), but because most of their jobs are indeed essential, they now have a potentially powerful leverage and it is not surprising that they are starting to use it. As the dangers and stresses build up, their patience has given way, beginning with widespread wildcat strikes in Italy in March, then spreading to several other countries. In the United States protests and strikes have broken out among workers at Amazon, Instacart, Walmart, McDonald’s, Uber, Fedex, grocery workers, garbage workers, auto workers, nursing home workers, agricultural workers, meat packers, bus drivers, truck drivers, and many others; nurses and other healthcare workers have protested medical equipment shortages; workers at GE have demanded repurposing jet engine factories to make ventilators; homeless families have occupied vacant buildings; rent strikes have been launched in several cities; and prisoners and detained immigrants are hunger-striking to expose their particularly unsafe conditions. Needless to say, all these struggles should be supported, and frontline workers should be first in line in any bailout.
After months of staying at home, everyone is naturally anxious to resume some degree of social life as soon as possible. There are legitimate debates about just how soon and under what conditions it is safest to do this. What is not legitimate is to deliberately ignore or deny the dangers simply so that businesses can resume and politicians can get reelected. The most grossly illuminating revelation of the whole crisis has been seeing pundits and politicians openly declare that it’s an acceptable trade-off for millions of people to die if that’s what it takes to “save the economy.” This admission of the system’s real priorities may backfire. People have been told all their lives that this economy is inevitable and indispensable, and that if they just give it free rein it will ultimately work for them. If they start seeing it for what it actually is (a con game that enables a tiny number of people to control everyone else in the world through their possession and manipulation of magic pieces of paper), they may conclude that it needs to be replaced, not saved. “Once society discovers that it depends on the economy, the economy in fact depends on the society” (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle).

Article on the coronavirus crisis by Ken Knabb, with links to other articles, songs, memes, etc.


Global Capitalism: Corona and Capitalism: Overlapping Sicknesses [May 2020]


•Premiered May 13, 2020Global Capitalism: Live Economic Update Corona and Capitalism: Overlapping Sicknesses with Richard D. Wolff Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 7:30 PM Topics for the evening: - Why capitalist enterprises & governments failed to prepare for Corona - Private unemployment vs gov’t re-employment - Pandemic policies worsen inequality, instability of capitalism - How to do better than capitalism during Corona In connection with Wolff’s discussion of the main topic above, he will also cover the following issues: History lesson: Bubonic plague/feudalism dies – Corona virus/capitalism dies The pandemic and worker cooperative enterprises


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A special thank you to the following Patrons whose generous support makes this lecture series possible: dokidokidango - humberto najera - Laurence Shute - m - Mahmood Nooshi - Matthew Kleu - mountainous dreams - Sharon Hanson - Shropshire Morning Star supporters - Tyler Dilnot **Special message/appeal to internet viewers: please help sponsor GCLEU on Patreon at the $3 (or more) level. Your support helps cover the costs of producing and distributing these talks. 

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Get your copy of **Understanding Socialism by Richard Wolff out now!** http://bit.ly/2Y7S17T





Richard D. Wolff Lecture on Worker Coops: Theory and Practice of 21st Century Socialism


Levy Economics Institute Conference Room Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, and the University of Paris I (Sorbonne). Wolff has published many books and articles, both scholarly and popular. Most recently, in 2012, he published Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Haymarket Books) and Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian, with Stephen Resnick (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT University Press). He writes regularly for Truthout.org and has been interviewed on The Charlie Rose Show, Up With Chris Hayes, Bill Maher’s Real Time, RT-TV, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, Al Jazeera English, Thom Hartman, National Public Radio, Alternative Radio, and many other radio and TV programs in the United States and abroad. The New York Times Magazine has named him “America’s most prominent Marxist economist.” Sponsored by: Economics Club; Economics Program; Hannah Arendt Center; Levy Economics Institute.
How Will COVID-19 Change the World? Historian Frank Snowden on Epidemics From the Black Death to Now


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Pandemics, like revolution, war and economic crises, are key determinants of historic change. We look at the history of epidemics, from Black Death to smallpox to COVID-19, and discuss how the coronavirus will reshape the world with leading medical historian Frank Snowden, author of “Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present.” He is a professor emeritus at Yale University who has been in Italy since the pandemic began, and himself survived a COVID-19 infection. #DemocracyNow Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on nearly 1,400 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-9AM ET: https://democracynow.org



Trump says mail voting means Republicans would lose every election. Is that true? No.

By REID J. EPSTEIN AND STEPHANIE SAUL
THE NEW YORK TIMES |
APR 10, 2020
| WASHINGTON

Mail-in ballots for the 2016 general election in Salt Lake City. As President Donald Trump rails against voting by mail, some members of his own political party, in Utah specifically, are embracing it to keep their voters safe during the coronavirus outbreak.(Rick Bowmer/AP)

President Donald Trump said that if the United States switched to all-mail voting, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

The GOP speaker of the House in Georgia said an all-mail election would be “extremely devastating to Republicans.”

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said universal mail voting would be “the end of our republic as we know it.”


Trump openly admitting if we made voting easier in America, Republicans wouldn't win elections

Trump: "The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again." pic.twitter.com/x5HmX6uogo— Lis Power (@LisPower1) March 30, 2020

Yet leading experts who have studied voting by mail say none of that is true.

As with false claims by Republicans about vote-by-mail fraud, there is no evidence to back up the argument from the right that all-mail elections favor Democrats. But Trump and some of his allies are warning that vote-by-mail poses an existential threat to their party, in hopes of galvanizing Republican opposition to a voting method that is widely seen as safer than in-person voting in the era of the coronavirus.

Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — now have all-mail elections, in which ballots are sent to every registered voter without their having to request one. Others, like Arizona and California, allow voters to add themselves to a permanent list of mail voters.

And there are also cases like Nebraska, which allows counties of less than 10,000 people to mail ballots to all voters (many of them Republicans) but forbids it in large urban areas (where many voters are Democrats). Texas allows no-excuse absentee voting for people 65 or older, another group that skews Republican.
None of these states have seen an appreciable shift favoring Democrats that officials and experts attribute to mail voting. Here are a few reasons....

What happens to partisan turnout after a switch to mail voting?

Not much that had not happened before.

The main argument by Trump and other Republicans is threefold: Voting by mail is easier than going to the polls, more people will vote if the process is easier and when larger numbers of people vote more will vote for Democrats.

But in the states and counties that have transitioned to all-mail voting, there has been little evidence of partisan advantage for either side because of mail voting, said Robert Stein, a Rice University professor who has helped put in place vote-by-mail systems.

Amelia Showalter, who was the data analytics director for former President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, found in deeply reported studies of all-mail elections in Colorado in 2014 and Utah in 2016 that there were very slight partisan advantages in each race.

The Colorado study found that Republicans outperformed their predicted turnout in 2014 by a slightly higher margin than did Democrats. The GOP’s candidate for Senate, Cory Gardner, ousted the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Mark Udall, and Republicans won 3 of the 4 other statewide races on the ballot.

Two years later, in Utah, Democrats gained an equally slight advantage in counties that had switched to all-mail voting.

Both states saw overall turnout increase — especially among those voters considered least likely to participate in the elections.

“That was a more noticeable effect among low-propensity voters,” Showalter said. “These are people who aren’t the die-hards who are going to vote in every election. They’re not going to vote in every partisan primary.”

Even before the coronavirus emerged as a global threat, Democrats had generally favored ways to expand access to voting by mail, while Republicans frequently argued in favor of tightening voter identification and registration requirements, claiming without evidence that easing restrictions invited voter fraud.

This wasn’t always the case. Republicans in Florida and Arizona, states with large populations of retirees, who tend to skew Republican, have pushed for years to expand vote-by-mail.

Thad Kousser, chairman of the political science department at the University of California, San Diego, said that voting by mail in California was historically seen as especially helpful to older people and rural voters, who are more likely to be Republican. He called Trump’s statements a “gross exaggeration of any partisan effect we’re likely to see.”

“There are still Republicans elected in many of the areas that have voting by mail,” Kousser said. “Democrats and Republicans alike appreciate this option.”

So, what difference does universal vote-by-mail make?

Showalter’s studies of Colorado and Utah found that mailing ballots to all voters did tend to increase turnout. And Oregon and Washington, the states that pioneered all-mail elections, have long been among the highest-turnout states in presidential elections.

A 2013 study of voters in Washington by professors at Yale University and the University of California, San Diego, found that voting by mail increased turnout by 2% to 4%, with low-participating voters more likely to be influenced than others.

But it was impossible to tell whether those voters were Republicans or Democrats, according to one of the study’s authors, Gregory Huber, a professor of political science at Yale.
Whether the marginal nonvoter — the person induced to vote by the availability of vote-by-mail — is Democrat or Republican is less clear,” Huber said in an email, referring to voters who are ambivalent about the process and decide based on outside events.

Filling out a ballot at home also affords people more time to think about their vote. Research by Stein, the Rice University professor, found that voters spent about 3 1/2 minutes when they went to a voting booth, but took about two days to complete a ballot they had received at home.

“Vote-by-mail has a way of affecting voter turnout in a way that we don’t always think about,” he said. “It increases turnout and attention for races that you would expect people would not vote for, like county judges and people you’ve never heard of.”

Does vote-by-mail favor Democrats?

Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the evidence so far on which party benefits had been inconclusive, citing numbers from the 2016 North Carolina election showing that Republicans were more likely to vote by mail than Democrats.

Showalter found the biggest turnout difference in all-mail elections came among people who were the least likely to vote. These voters tend to pay the least attention to politics and are the most ideologically flexible.

In fact, all-mail voting makes some Democrats nervous. One reason is the finding in some studies that black and Latino voters — two key groups in the party’s base — are less likely to embrace mail voting than white voters.

Kousser pointed to a survey of California voters that revealed differences along racial and ethnic lines in voting by mail, with black and Latino voters about 5 percentage points less likely to favor it than white voters.

“Vote-by-mail is a little less popular as an option among Latino and African Americans than whites and Asian Americans,” Kousser said. “The NAACP has said they’re concerned about a shift to only vote-by-mail.”

As for the party’s younger voters, they tend to be more transient — less likely to have a current address on file with elections authorities.

“There is justified concern that Democratic-leaning voters may be disadvantaged through vote-by-mail systems,” said Brian Dunn, an Obama campaign alumnus who is a founder of Deliver My Vote, which encourages voters to sign up to receive mail ballots at home in states that allow it. “People like caregivers, gig-sector employees or those working multiple jobs may not update their address as they move, causing them to lose their ability to vote safely and easily.”


This concern emerged recently during deliberations by the Maryland Board of Elections over whether to conduct the state’s June 2 primary entirely by mail.


The board decided to keep a limited number of polling places open after Democratic legislative leaders, in a letter to Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, objected to an all-mail format, raising concerns about its potential impact on black voters.


“Most vote-by-mail states are overwhelmingly white,” the letter said, then cited a 2011 study sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts that found mandatory voting by mail reduced the chances that a person would vote, particularly among urban voters, who were 50% less likely to vote in an all-mail election.

Why are some Republicans eager to adopt vote-by-mail?


Despite Trump’s opposition, there is some Republican support for transitioning to mail elections.


In Ohio, the state’s top Republican officials, Gov. Mike DeWine and Frank LaRose, the secretary of state, recorded a video this week promoting the state’s first all-mail elections later this month.


“I reject this notion that I think comes from days gone by, when people say it’s not good for Republicans when there’s high turnout,” LaRose said Thursday. “The highest turnout presidential election we ever had was 2016. The highest turnout gubernatorial election we ever had was 2018.”




Kim Wyman, the Republican secretary of state in Washington, pushed for mail elections as a local official. She said she did not believe that voting by mail helped either party in her state.


“There would be those who say, ‘You haven’t elected a Republican governor since 1980 in Washington,’ and our state certainly leans blue in terms of outcome,” Wyman said. “But I think if you do a deeper drive, we’re a purple state. I think a lot of those elections were won and lost with very small margins.”


“When you look at states that are vote by mail, you have a mix of blue and red and states,” she said. “Utah is pretty red.”


Michael Meyers, a Republican whose data firm, TargetPoint Consulting, has guided GOP presidential campaigns since 2004, said Republican data and voter contact programs were superior to what Democrats had, meaning all-mail elections could be advantageous for conservatives.


“Every time we do something that scares Republicans, that makes voting easier to do, we tend to freak out about it and then figure out a way to level the playing field,” Meyers said. “In some respect I think there is some advantage to it. While I am concerned about voter fraud and security, on straight mechanics, it doesn’t scare me that much.”


c.2020 The New York Times Company




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Scientists discover oldest link between Native Americans, ancient Siberians

Siberia's Lake Baikal region has been populated by modern humans since the Upper Paleolithic. Ancient populations left behind an extensive archaeological record. This photo shows the 1976 excavation of the Ust'-Kyakhta-3 site located on Russia's Selenga River. Photo by A. P. Okladnikov


May 20 (UPI) -- Using genomic analysis, scientists have traced the oldest link between the earliest Native American populations and the people of Siberia's Lake Baikal region.

Modern humans have populated the lands surrounding Lake Baikal since the Upper Paleolithic. Previous studies of the region's population dynamics suggest the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age was marked by genetic turnovers and admixture events, but the timing of the human migrations and cultural interactions that characterized this place and time in human history aren't well understood.

New genomic analysis of ancient remains in Siberia -- detailed this week in the journal Cell -- have offered scientists fresh insights into the movements of human populations across Eurasia and into the Americas at the end of the Stone Age.

"Previous studies observed the genetic differences between individuals from different time periods, but didn't investigate the differences by dating the admixture events," lead study author He Yu, postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, told UPI in an email. "Our study reports a 14,000-year-old individual, which actually fills in a large blank of ancient genomes in this region, between 23,000 and approximately 8,000 years ago."

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Yu and his colleagues were able to stitch together a genome from DNA recovered from the tooth of the 14,000-year-old individual, revealing ancient links between the people of the Lake Baikal region and early Native American populations.

"The deep connection observed in this study is sharing of the same admixed ancestry between Upper Paleolithic Siberian and First Americans," Yu said. "We are not suggesting interbreeding between Native American and Siberian, or any back flow of Native American ancestry into Siberia. But we are suggesting that, the First American ancestry was formed in Siberia and also existed there, in a large range of time and space, so we can detect it in ancient Siberian individuals."

Armed with DNA from several Lake Baikal fossils, scientists deployed a variety of sophisticated genomic analysis methods to establish relationships between different ancient populations in the Eurasia and the Americas.

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"For genetic background analysis, we first compared the new individuals with published data to see how they were related with known populations, then zoomed in to their differences with closely related populations," Yu said.

Two of the individuals from southern Siberia showed strong genetic similarities to populations from northeastern Asia, groups previously linked with the ancestry of the earliest Native Americans. The findings suggest the genetic heritage of the earliest Native Americans was already widespread across Siberia by the early Bronze Age.

Scientists also surveyed the ancient Siberian genomes for evidence of disease. Their efforts revealed the presence of Yersinia pestis, the plague-causing pathogen, in two individuals. DNA analysis showed the infected individuals hailed from northeast Asia, but the bacteria's genetic signatures suggest the pathogen came from western Eurasian steppe -- further evidence of widespread movement and complex contact among Eurasian populations.

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"Early Bronze Age is the era of population mobility and communication, and such phenomenon has been observed in many other regions, especially western Eurasia," Yu said. "Our study is the first to report such long-range mobility in southern Siberia."

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Scientists use ultrasonic mind control on monkeys

Scientists estimate ultrasonic brain manipulation could eventually be used to study and treat decision-making disorders like addiction in humans. Photo by QuinceMedia/Pixabay

May 20 (UPI) -- Scientists have for the first time directed the decision making of monkeys using remote, ultrasonic brain stimulation.

For the study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, researchers had a pair of macaque monkeys participate in a visual test designed to investigate basic decision making.

The monkeys were made to look at a target at the center of a screen before being presented with a second and third target to the left and right sides of the screen, one following the other.

Typically, macaques and other monkeys glance at the target that appears first, but researchers were able to alter the tendency by directing low-intensity ultrasound waves at the frontal eye fields of the two monkeys, the brain region that controls eye movement.

"Brief, low-intensity ultrasound pulses delivered non-invasively into specific brain regions of macaque monkeys influenced their decisions regarding which target to choose," researchers wrote . "The effects were substantial, leading to around a 2:1 bias in choices compared to the default balanced proportion."

Each of the ultrasonic pulses lasted 300 milliseconds and was applied just before the first secondary target appeared on the sides of the screen. The pulses cause brain tissue to vibrate and neurons to fire, altering the neuronal sequences in the targeted brain region.

When researchers directed ultrasonic waves on the monkey's motor cortex, which doesn't control the eye movements or decision making of monkeys, the visual choices of the two monkeys were unaffected.

Though a lot more testing of the technology and its potential is necessary, scientists estimate ultrasonic brain manipulation could eventually be used to study and treat decision-making disorders like addiction in humans.

"There are ... tantalizing opportunities to apply ultrasonic neuromodulation to non-invasively modulate choice behavior in humans, with first applications aimed at determining the set of circuits involved in a given disorder in a given individual," researchers wrote.
STATE SANCTIONED DEATH SQUAD
Colombia civil war survivors outraged by appointment of warlord's son


The son of former warlord Rodrigo Tovar, shown here under arrest in Bogota, Colombia May 13, 2008, was named to lead a program to compensate victims of the country's long civil war Tovar was part of. Photo by Colombia National Police/EPA
May 21 (UPI) -- The Colombian government this week named the son of one of the country's most notorious warlords to run a program meant for victims of its long-running civil war.

Survivors and victims' rights groups expressed outrage with the selection of Jorge Rodrigo Tovar to operate the program run out of the interior ministry created to compensate victims. Tovar's father, Rodrigo Tovar, known as Jorge 40, has been accused of nearly 400 massacres.

Tovar, leader of the Northern Bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), was blamed for the torture and dismemberment of 60 peasant farmers in 2000 among other crimes. He was extradited to the United States in 2008 and is serving a 16-year sentence for drug trafficking.

"It's not just because he's Jorge 40's son," Colombia Sen. Antonio Sanguino said. "He's always thought of his father as a hero. Totally unacceptable. And now the Duque administration is rewarding him by appointing him director of victims at the interior ministry. How would the victims of the AUC's Northern Bloc feel?"

DEATH SQUAD
The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, is a government-supported paramilitary militia that helped fight leftist rebels like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, of FARC.


Survivors have blamed those paramilitary groups with contributing to the 260,000 who have died over the country's 52-year civil war while displacing more than 7 million.

The younger Tovar, 30, who is an attorney, said he will not leave his post.
"Everything that is going on fills me with the promise to show that I do good work and that the work can speak for me," Tovar told a local magazine.

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