Edge at Eno's in London - Simon Baron-Cohen on Testosterone On My Mind and In My Brain

"This is a hormone that has fascinated me. It's a small molecule that seems to be doing remarkable things. The variation we see in this hormone comes from a number of different sources. One of those sources is genes; many different genes can influence how much testosterone each of us produces, and I just wanted to share with you my fascination with this hormone, because it's helping us take the science of sex differences one step further, to try to understand not whether there are sex differences, but what are the roots of those sex differences? Where are they springing from? And along the way we’re also hoping that this is going to teach us something about those neuro-developmental conditions like autism, like delayed language development, which seem to disproportionately affect boys more than girls, and potentially help us understand the causes of those conditions."  

Introduction by John Brockman  

"I thoroughly enjoyed the evening last week," emailed Brian Eno. "A lot of interesting people got connected together and everyone told me they enjoyed themselves."  He was referring the first-ever London Edge Reality Club meeting, featuring a presentation by Cambridge research psychologist Simon-Baron Cohen which Eno hosted at his studio in Notting Hill before an assembled group that included artists, curators, museum directors, writers, playwrights, scientists in fields such as biology, math, psychology, zoology, the editors and correspondents of Nature, The Economist, Wired, The Guardian.  

Baron-Cohen held forth before this diverse group on his latest research on the properties and effects of the hormone testosterone, while showing its relevance to his earlier research in sex differences and autism.

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RFK assassination witness tells CNN: There was a second shooter

As a federal court prepares to rule on a challenge to Sirhan Sirhan's conviction in the Robert F. Kennedy assassination, a long overlooked witness to the murder is telling her story: She heard two guns firing during the 1968 shooting and authorities altered her account of the crime.

Nina Rhodes-Hughes wants the world to know that, despite what history says, Sirhan was not the only gunman firing shots when Kennedy was murdered a few feet away from her at a Los Angeles hotel.

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[ Via Real History Blog ]

Deny the British empire's crimes? No, we ignore them

George Monbiot writes:

There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain's colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.

The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the rightwing press. But it draws its power from a remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard our past.

Last week's revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects, and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations, is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press.

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See also:

My critics ignored evidence of torture in Mau Mau detention camps

Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes

CIA Human Behavior Control Studies Reported in New York Times

The Central Intelligence Agency conducted a 14-year program to find ways to "control human behavior" through the use of chemical, biological and radiological material, according to agency documents made public today by John Marks, a freelance journalist.  

Mr. Marks, an associate of the Center for National Security Studies, asserted at a news conference that Adm. Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence, in a letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week, "seriously distorted" what the C.I.A. research programs involved.  

Mr. Marks said that, based on documents about the program he had received under the Freedom of Information Act, he had concluded that Admiral Turner "seems to be practicing what used to be called 'a modified limited hangout'" when he called the agency's activity "a program of experimentation with drugs."  

"To be sure, drugs were part of it," he said, "but so were such other techniques as electric shock, radiation, ultrasonics, psychosurgery, psychology, and incapacitating agents, all of which were referred to in documents I have received."  

The documents made public today and the disclosure by the C.I.A. last week that it had found another cache of previously undiscovered records suggested broader experimentation on unwitting humans by the intelligence agency or its paid researchers than had been publicly known before. Mr. Marks said he had obtained or read about 1,000 C.I.A. documents, many of which were never turned over to the Senate intelligence committee for its 1975 investigation of agency activities.

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Interrogators Speak Out: America Is Morally Bipolar

From the HuffPost by Matthew Alexander:

And so we embark on another round where those who endorse torture, the men who have never done an interrogation, say it works and the anti-torture advocates, like me, who have successfully interrogated numerous detainees, say it doesn't and/or it isn't worth the long term consequences.

Well, count me in another group that says I don't care if it works 100 percent of the time. Chemical weapons work 100 percent of the time and we don't use those, even though (as the torture advocates assert), they would save lives. Flamethrowers are another weapon that work very effectively and could save lives, especially when clearing houses with suicide bombers, but we don't use those either. Not because it wouldn't save lives, but because these weapons cause unnecessary human suffering and the international community, led by the U.S., decided that they weren't worth the moral cost.

The sad truth is that America is morally bipolar. The country that I signed up to defend with my life has become an endorser of torture, an evader of accountability, and a place where the rule of law is arbitrary, especially for government elites who craft torture programs. The accountability we preach to other countries that is so important for a just society is absent in our own when it comes to torture.

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Ex-CIA officer defends interrogation tactics

The man who helped lead the so-called enhanced interrogation programme in US prisons overseas has defended the policies.

Jose Rodriguez, former director of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, writes in a new book that techniques such as sleep deprivation and waterboarding are justified.

Al Jazeera's Patty Culhane reports from Washington, DC.