Emerson Crossjostle's blog

Hi, everyone. It's Sir Real.
I know it's been forever.
I hope you're all doing well.

...originally via Alice's old blog.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2009)

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.

In contrast to "every man for himself" interpretations of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.

They call it "survival of the kindest."

"Because of our very vulnerable offspring, the fundamental task for human survival and gene replication is to take care of others," said Keltner, co-director of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. "Human beings have survived as a species because we have evolved the capacities to care for those in need and to cooperate. As Darwin long ago surmised, sympathy is our strongest instinct."

Empathy in our genes

Keltner's team is looking into how the human capacity to care and cooperate is wired into particular regions of the brain and nervous system. One recent study found compelling evidence that many of us are genetically predisposed to be empathetic.

The study, led by UC Berkeley graduate student Laura Saslow and Sarina Rodrigues of Oregon State University, found that people with a particular variation of the oxytocin gene receptor are more adept at reading the emotional state of others, and get less stressed out under tense circumstances.

Informally known as the "cuddle hormone," oxytocin is secreted into the bloodstream and the brain, where it promotes social interaction, nurturing and romantic love, among other functions.

"The tendency to be more empathetic may be influenced by a single gene," Rodrigues said.

The more you give, the more respect you get

While studies show that bonding and making social connections can make for a healthier, more meaningful life, the larger question some UC Berkeley researchers are asking is, "How do these traits ensure our survival and raise our status among our peers?"

One answer, according to UC Berkeley social psychologist and sociologist Robb Willer is that the more generous we are, the more respect and influence we wield. In one recent study, Willer and his team gave participants each a modest amount of cash and directed them to play games of varying complexity that would benefit the "public good." The results, published in the journal American Sociological Review, showed that participants who acted more generously received more gifts, respect and cooperation from their peers and wielded more influence over them.

"The findings suggest that anyone who acts only in his or her narrow self-interest will be shunned, disrespected, even hated," Willer said. "But those who behave generously with others are held in high esteem by their peers and thus rise in status."

"Given how much is to be gained through generosity, social scientists increasingly wonder less why people are ever generous and more why they are ever selfish," he added.

Cultivating the greater good

Such results validate the findings of such "positive psychology" pioneers as Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose research in the early 1990s shifted away from mental illness and dysfunction, delving instead into the mysteries of human resilience and optimism.

While much of the positive psychology being studied around the nation is focused on personal fulfillment and happiness, UC Berkeley researchers have narrowed their investigation into how it contributes to the greater societal good.

One outcome is the campus's Greater Good Science Center, a West Coast magnet for research on gratitude, compassion, altruism, awe and positive parenting, whose benefactors include the Metanexus Institute, Tom and Ruth Ann Hornaday and the Quality of Life Foundation.

Christine Carter, executive director of the Greater Good Science Center, is creator of the "Science for Raising Happy Kids" Web site, whose goal, among other things, is to assist in and promote the rearing of "emotionally literate" children. Carter translates rigorous research into practical parenting advice. She says many parents are turning away from materialistic or competitive activities, and rethinking what will bring their families true happiness and well-being.

"I've found that parents who start consciously cultivating gratitude and generosity in their children quickly see how much happier and more resilient their children become," said Carter, author of "Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents" which will be in bookstores in February 2010. "What is often surprising to parents is how much happier they themselves also become."

The sympathetic touch

As for college-goers, UC Berkeley psychologist Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton has found that cross-racial and cross-ethnic friendships can improve the social and academic experience on campuses. In one set of findings, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, he found that the cortisol levels of both white and Latino students dropped as they got to know each over a series of one-on-one get-togethers. Cortisol is a hormone triggered by stress and anxiety.

Meanwhile, in their investigation of the neurobiological roots of positive emotions, Keltner and his team are zeroing in on the aforementioned oxytocin as well as the vagus nerve, a uniquely mammalian system that connects to all the body's organs and regulates heart rate and breathing.

Both the vagus nerve and oxytocin play a role in communicating and calming. In one UC Berkeley study, for example, two people separated by a barrier took turns trying to communicate emotions to one another by touching one other through a hole in the barrier. For the most part, participants were able to successfully communicate sympathy, love and gratitude and even assuage major anxiety.

Researchers were able to see from activity in the threat response region of the brain that many of the female participants grew anxious as they waited to be touched. However, as soon as they felt a sympathetic touch, the vagus nerve was activated and oxytocin was released, calming them immediately.

"Sympathy is indeed wired into our brains and bodies; and it spreads from one person to another through touch," Keltner said.

The same goes for smaller mammals. UC Berkeley psychologist Darlene Francis and Michael Meaney, a professor of biological psychiatry and neurology at McGill University, found that rat pups whose mothers licked, groomed and generally nurtured them showed reduced levels of stress hormones, including cortisol, and had generally more robust immune systems.

Overall, these and other findings at UC Berkeley challenge the assumption that nice guys finish last, and instead support the hypothesis that humans, if adequately nurtured and supported, tend to err on the side of compassion.

"This new science of altruism and the physiological underpinnings of compassion is finally catching up with Darwin's observations nearly 130 years ago, that sympathy is our strongest instinct," Keltner said.

---------------

Thanks. These days I'm attempting to overthrow the corporatocracy via humor on Twitter. So, if you ever want to replace a bad taste in your mouth with something worse, you'll find me there jabbering about throwing poo at limos en route to the Bohemian Grove, & mature stuff like that.

Love to everybody.

www.twitter.com/jedsglobalpr

Feels like yer high when you watch The Instant Classics play "Low"

Medicare Part E: Everybody

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/09-9

by Thom Hartmann

The President this morning admitted on national television that he lost control of the message with health care. It's time to reboot - and use a very, very, very simple message so all Americans can understand it.

Let's use Medicare, which nearly every American understands. Just create "Medicare Part E" where the "E" represents "everybody." Just let any citizen in the US buy into Medicare.

It would be so easy. No need to reinvent the wheel with this so-called "public option" that's a whole new program from the ground up. Medicare already exists. It works. Some people will like it, others won't - just like the Post Office versus FedEx analogy the President is so comfortable with.

Just pass a simple bill - it could probably be just a few lines, like when Medicare was expanded to include disabled people - that says that any American citizen can buy into the program at a rate to be set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which reflects the actual cost for us to buy into it.

Thus, Medicare Part E would be revenue neutral!

To make it available to people of low income, Congress could raise the rates slightly for all currently non-eligible people (like me - under 65) to cover the cost of below-200%-of-poverty people. Revenue neutral again.

This blows up all the rumors about death panels and grandma and everything else: everybody knows what Medicare is. Those who scorn it can go with United Healthcare and it's $100 million/year CEO. Those who like Medicare can buy into Part E. Simplicity itself.

Of course, we'd like a few fixes, like letting negotiate drug prices, and fill some of the other holes Republicans and AARP and the big insurance lobbyists have drilled into Medicare so people have to buy "supplemental" insurance, but that can wait for the second round. Let's get this done first.

Simple stuff. Medicare for anybody who wants it. Private health insurance for those who don't. Easy message. Even Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley can understand it. Sarah Palin can buy into it, or ignore it. No death panels, no granny plugs, nothing. Just a few sentences.

Replace the "you must be disabled or 65" with "here's what it'll cost if you want to buy in, and here's the sliding scale of subsidies we'll give you if you're poor, paid for by everybody else who's buying in." This creates Part E.

And if this fails - if the Congress can't get out from under their corporate overlords - at the very least pass the Kucinich amendment that will allow individual states to create their own single-payer systems, as was done in Canada a generation ago.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show.

www.thomhartmann.com.

...by Joe Flower, from TheHealthCareBlog.com

Health Care as a Complex Adaptive System

You want healthcare reform. I want healthcare reform. Grandma Jenkins wants healthcare reform.

What is healthcare reform? What kind of animal are we talking about? How would we recognize it if it came up and bit us? What are its markings, its behavior, its habits?

From observing the systems of other countries, from the results of local experiments and variations in the U.S. system, and from serious research over decades into outcomes and comparative effectiveness, we can actually outline what the marks of a better healthcare system would be.

But healthcare in the United States is a complex adaptive system.

If we want to capture it fully, we have to take one step back and revisit what we know about the nature of complex adaptive systems and how that knowledge might apply to reform of this system.

Healthcare is complex.

It has many inputs and outputs which operate independently upon one another in multiple overlapping feedback loops.

Device manufacturers, for instance, adjust their costs and prices to reimbursement levels, and reimbursement levels are set to prevailing price structures.

Preventive diabetes services, such as relatively inexpensive nutrition education, are under-compensated, and so are scarce; this leads to a need for more expensive services such as emergency treatment of diabetic shock and amputations.

All dynamic systems adapt continually.

The various players (pharmaceutical companies, providers, health plans, consumers, employers, regulators, politicians) optimize their positions as much as they can with the resources they have access to (mostly money, but also other proxies for money, power, and positional security, such as votes, public sentiment, access to media, and systemic inertia).

This is normal. This is how systems work.

This is also why our healthcare system, in almost universal judgment, is so dysfunctional.

It has been optimized to the convenience and profit of the players with the greatest resources.

All systems are in some sense self-righting:

If the pikes eat up all the trout, then the pikes die off; without many pikes around, the trout proliferate until the pikes make a comeback, gorging on the trout.

But in this case, the healthcare system is dragging down the economy with its expense, and causing enormous personal economic misfortune, bankruptcy, misery, and death in the population.

Waiting for it to right itself (or expecting that it will do so before causing ever-widening suffering and destruction) is a mug’s game.

Healthcare as a game

The healthcare industry in the United States is, in game theory terms:

• Both competitive and cooperative

• Multi-player

• Non-zero-sum - you don’t have to make others lose in order to “win”

• Infinite - with no end point, it is more like the stock market than football or chess

This infinite game has been a reasonably stable system, with each player performing his expected part (though often grumbling that he is not well served) because it has been, in game-theory terms, a near-perfect Nash equilibrium, a kind of strategic gridlock in which no player could benefit from any unilateral change in strategy and, in fact, would usually be punished for it.

A doctor who decided unilaterally to spend more time with each patient, a pharmaceutical company which unilaterally lowered its prices, even a hospital which managed to reduce its re-admit rate, or a hospital CEO who decided to forego a shiny new edifice and focused instead on re-engineering processes – all would be punished economically and professionally for doing what we, their ultimate customers, would like them to do.

However, the system is now showing symptoms of increasing instability, as various players perceive that they are doing so poorly at the game that a change in strategy might, in fact, benefit them.

This includes doctors who opt out of the insurance payment system or set up “concierge” practices or open urgent-care centers; patients who go to foreign countries for care, buy pharmaceuticals over the Internet, or opt out of the medical system entirely because they can’t afford it; and hospitals like Geisinger who set up their own insurance system, hire doctors, bundle products, and give warranties.

Players that show little interest in major new strategies, such as pharmaceutical companies, health plans, and device manufacturers, are signaling that they feel that they are “winning” at the game as currently played – or at least that they feel that they are doing better than they would under any other strategy that they can see.

Players attempting to quit the game or change the rules are signs that the game is breaking down.

The local optimization of players in a Nash equilibrium does not mean that the current strategic gridlock is actually the best for all concerned.

There might well be some different configuration in which all parties are better off.

But they can’t get there from here without some interruption of the system from outside, some influx of new energy (like, for instance, new funding), some new players (like, say, a government-sponsored “safety net” insurance program), some shift in the resources of the existing players (like consumers or employers being given greater information and power to choose).

What seeing health care as a system means

In practical, everyday terms, this point of view – seeing healthcare as a complex adaptive system capable of analysis in terms of game theory - renders some useful observations and rules of thumb for evaluating any possible healthcare reform.

They include:

1. You get what you pay for (and the inverse, if you don’t pay for it, you don’t get it).

Stick a scoop into the healthcare soup, and you’ll find dozens of examples, but here’s one:

Give pay-for-performance (PFP) bonuses for specific measures (number of diabetes patients getting eye exams, for instance) and that measure will improve.

Other measures will not improve and may, in fact, decline as resources are shifted to improving the specified measures.

The assumption that PFP bonuses will cause a general increase in quality has proven generally unfounded.

2. The Law of Unintended Consequences reigns supreme: To the closest approximation, all the most important consequences of any given scheme will be the unintended ones.

Example: Charging customers co-pays.

Intended consequence: Cut casual over-utilization, recreational surgeries, whine-on-demand hypochondriacal office visits.

Actual consequence: Cut all minor utilization including preventive checkups, pap smears, mammograms and so forth, thereby actually increasing major utilizations for the big things that the checkups didn’t catch; also cause some people to forego truly necessary treatment (chemotherapy, cardiac catheterization) and simply die rather than impoverish their families.

3. Controlling specific costs and utilizations becomes a game of Whack-A-Mole.

Example: Control length of stay and other in-patient cost structures, and suddenly you get lots of drive-through surgeries (“You want fries with that hip?”), until those come under control as well.

Try to control pharmaceutical costs by refusing to reimburse for over-the-counter drugs, and suddenly there is a prescription version of ibuprofen, same stuff just twice as strong so that it can be reimbursed.

This is the adaptive part of a complex adaptive system.

The system perceives proscriptive regulation as damage and routes around it.

4. Systemic decisions reflect the needs and desires of the individual decision-makers, not the system as a whole, or even the sectors within the system.

If you want to understand hospitals’ strategic plans, for instance, you have to ask yourself how hospital CEOs make a living, what enhances their career prospects and what gives them more prestige and job security.

The same is true of pharmaceutical company executives, doctors, health plan executives, consumers, legislators – anyone making a decision.

Those needs and desires may line up with the needs of their sector, or with the needs of their customers or payers or constituents, or they may not.

If they don’t, the needs of their sector or their community or their customers or constituents become just about perfectly irrelevant.

5. Don’t expect anyone to "do the right thing." They just won’t. It is close enough to the real case to say that they can’t, if they are punished for doing so.

So don’t design any part of the system on the assumption that the various actors will do the right thing.

Sure, in every profession there are people who swim upstream of the flood of incentives and do what is right by the people they ultimately serve, even to their own detriment.

These people are heroes of healthcare.

But heroes are rare, and their appearance is unpredictable.

Any part of a system designed for heroes to step forward and sacrifice themselves will fail.

In aggregate, expect the decision-makers in any sector to act in their own personal best interest.

This lesson has stood out vividly in the current financial crisis: Deregulators felt that bankers and other financiers would regulate their own behavior and do what would be prudent for their institution, their sector, and their customers. Instead, they fairly uniformly did what brought them the biggest salaries, stock options, and bonuses.

However obvious it is to an outsider what "the right thing" should be in another person’s situation, it is not at all obvious to that person.

The surgeons doing the thousands of unhelpful spinal fusion surgeries, the doctors ordering the hundreds of thousands of unnecessary images, the health plans cutting off chemotherapy to people whom they have managed to re-define as ineligible – we can come up with lots of psychological and sociological characterizations of their motives.

But the simplest explanatory principal is Upton Sinclair’s dictum: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

There are probably many other rules of thumb that we could list here, but we could start with these.

>With a systems point of view in mind, we can turn to possible healthcare reforms and ask:

What would be the markers of a healthcare system that would truly work?

http://www.imaginewhatif.com/2009/05/health-care-as-a-complex-adaptive-s...

ALSO: Obama, Game Theory, Health Care Reform & the Lunatic Fringe

ALSO: Health Care Reform & the Nuisance of the War Dogs, er,... Blue Dogs

ALSO: Moral Sensibilities & a Market Failure Door Wide Open

Additional News Crossjostling: (below)

Poll: Canadians 'Flat Out Reject' American-Style Health System

Letting the Banking Rats Out of the Bag

What the New World Order Isn't

http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/What-the-New-World-Order-I-by-John-Li...

Ever since the concept of secret governments made it to main stream society, the idea that a few fat cats in smoke-filled back rooms sucking on big Cuban cigars and plotting the overthrow and destruction of the world has become one of the past time fantasies of urban families with too much free time and nothing to do with it. Conniving Communists and Socialists share the spotlight with the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Fords, and the Jewish/Catholic/Islamofascist/Freemason/KnightsTemplar/PriorydeSion/Oil cabal of the late 20th Century.

The Reptilian aliens from the third planet orbiting the star Sirius are behind the masks of all the last presidents, the Mayan calendar has condemned us to a final countdown to December 21, 2012, and the US isn't really a country after all. And then there's the Queen of England.

People sit around ruminating on the latest droppings from the grapevine, quoting their favorite end-of-world shock jock like Alex Jones, David Icke or Fintan Dunne and pontificating on the next shoe to drop. We're told that the Bilderberg Group is plotting our destruction, the Bohemian Grove pays tributes to birds at our expense, and the banksters have taken all of our money, left us with mountains of debt, and are now looking for ways to get us to sign our soul away on the next home loan at the latest, low introductory rate. To that end, the Kontora loan company in Latvia, run by Viktor Mirosiichenko, has already started the process. But a word of caution, his rates aren't low.

Everywhere we look we are bombarded with doomsday scenarios. We are being told that Obama's from Mars, we have no money left in our banks, and our grandchildren who haven't even been born yet are doomed to a life of serfdom that would make the African slaves of the 1800s hopping mad. An imminent war with just about anyone is next and the end of planet Earth is right around the corner. I mean, why bother? We are broke, destitute, with no hope, and condemned for the rest of our days, which seem to be only a few more down the road anyway. For those who are too wimpish about committing suicide with a pile driver or a bazooka, might I suggest leaping from Pulpit Rock in the land of my ancestors, Norway? The view is breathtaking and, well, what a way to go, eh?

But for those foolish enough to stick it out, here's how I assess this doomed orb of ours in which it doesn't seem to matter whom you believe, we are all basically screwed.

First off, there's nothing "new" about the New World Order. They didn't dream this up last week at Starbucks. This same stuff has been going on for centuries. Deal with it.

Let's look at the ones in the news, the banksters, to start. In 2006, if anyone went to the Congress of the United States and proposed a loan of $10 billion, they would have been scrutinized to death, grilled by the Finance Committee until they retired, and ridiculed out of Washington. When Lee Iacocca requested a loan for $1.2 billion in 1979 to save Chrysler and over 100,000 jobs, the cries of foul play and manipulation lasted for years. The idea of such large sums of money being loaned out to any company was ludicrous. But by the end of 2007, loaning $700 billion became just another day at the Capitol, and, well if the first $350 billion weren't accounted for, the next $350 billion would be, uh, hopefully.

In two short years, the US has gone from being way indebted with its foreign trade deficit and foolish spending practices which include illegal wars, to unimaginably in debt to the entire world and possibly even a few other planets. Common news stories now yawningly throw out the latest sum total, $9 trillion, no wait, $10 trillion, er I mean, $umpteen trillion. So that means we're doomed, right? We surely can't survive such a burden. The game's over.

Perhaps, but let me remind everyone that the ones calling the shots here, those who are demanding the loans, divvying up the take, and leaving no fingerprints, are the same ones who already had all the money to begin with. Where was all the money before? In the banks. Where's the money now? In the same banks. Who owned the money before? The rich, fat cats. Who owns the money now? The rich, fat cats. Looks like a zero sum game to me. So why the cat and mouse game? We'll get to that later.

But as a demonstration of what I mean, I present Orange County, California, which declared bankruptcy in 1994. Apparently, the County Assessor, one Bob Citron (whose name in French means "Lemon," go figure) finally admitted that he had been bluffing about his knowledge of the stock market and had lost all the county's money to Merrill Lynch. The county could no longer pay its bills and declared bankruptcy.

That's the end of the county, right? No more Orange County. Disappeared from the map forever, right? Gone. Zilcho. All services shut down, all employees out of work, all county activities ceased, everything eliminated. All jails opened to the public, the Sheriff's Department vacated, all food stamp programs, health and welfare assistance programs, county infrastructure programs, trash removal, sewer and other maintenance programs, indeed, every single county run program ceased to exist, right?

Wrong.

Almost nothing at all!! Not even one day was the county services entirely shut down.. Not even one hour. I think they were asked to forego one Wendy's lunch meal, that's it.

That's what a county-wide bankruptcy actually means. Now they say that California is going bankrupt!!! I think this is the third time. Boy, I can't wait for the fireworks to begin on that. There are hundreds of thousands of people employed by the state of California. I can't wait to see them filling the bread lines. NOT!!

I'm sorry to disappoint the doomsayers, but as of this article, I have yet to see one American president standing in some Salvation Army soup kitchen queue saying, "And just yesterday, I was the leader of the free world." In fact, I've yet to see one apply for unemployment. That'll be the day.

Millions, billions, trillions, even quadrillions, it's all monopoly money. That's what the pundits have been saying, right? And they are absolutely right. It's monopoly money. The problem is, we all use monopoly money and the banksters know it. So they get to make as much as they want, and spend it anyway they want. But I can guarantee you this, there's no multi-trillionaire out there who will work all their life to get to be a trillionaire and then say, "Oh screw it, let's just make the dollar worthless and start over." That won't happen in our lifetime, and that's a guarantee.

Okay, but we still have the problem of Nibiru. The Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012. That's gotta mean we're dead on December 22, right? Planet X, Nibiru, comets from the depths of hell, ancient civilizations, the Mayan calendar and some obscure Jack-in-the-box decoder ring all point to imminent collapse, right? Sorry. ...

Greetings, Sederville.