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When Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:59:27 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: The 300 apes in Spanish zoos would not be freed, but better conditions would be mandated.

Meanwhile, even in democracies, the law accords diminished rights to many humans: children, prisoners, the insane, the senile. Teenagers may not vote, philosophers who slip into dementia may be lashed to their beds, courts can order surgery or force-feeding.

Spain’s Catholic bishops attacked the vote as undermining a divine will that placed humans above animals. One said such thinking led to abortion, euthanasia and ethnic cleansing.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

If you caught your son burning ants with a magnifying glass, would it bother you less than if you found him torturing a mouse with a soldering iron? How about a snake? How about his sister?

Does Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — the Guantánamo detainee who claims he personally beheaded the reporter Daniel Pearl — deserve the rights he denied Mr. Pearl? Which ones? A painless execution? Exemption from capital punishment? Decent prison conditions? Habeas corpus?

Such apparently unrelated questions arise in the aftermath of the vote of the environment committee of the Spanish Parliament last month to grant limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

The committee would bind Spain to the principles of the Great Ape Project, which points to apes’ human qualities, including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use languages, remember the past and plan the future.

Tags: human rights, animal rights, ethics

A Generation Under Stress

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:38:08 GMT

clipped by: einbar

Clip Source: static-p4.fotolia.com

Clip Source: www.independent.co.uk

Girls as young as 10 are suffering stress, anxiety and unhappiness as they struggle to cope with the pressures of growing up, according to research published today.

"Girls and young women are being forced to grow up at an unnatural pace in a society that we, as adults, have created and it's damaging their emotional well-being. We have a responsibility to put this right – we must tackle head-on the difficulties that the younger generation are facing."

Emotional well-being is being harmed by factors such as premature sexualisation and materialism, the study, A Generation Under Stress?,

When it comes to mental health, half said they know someone who has suffered depression, two-fifths know someone who has self-harmed, a third have a friend who has suffered an eating disorder and two in five know someone who has had panic attacks.

The research was carried out using an online survey of 350 girls and eight separate focus groups involving 54 girls.

How Your Brain Controls Time

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:27:58 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Warren Meck of Duke University argues that the brain measures long stretches of time by producing pulses. But the brain does not then count the pulses in the way a clock does. Instead, Meck suspects, it does something more elegant. It listens to the pulses as if they were music.

At Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany, scientists have been building a model of how memory may store time. When neurons produce a regular cycle of signals, some signals come a little sooner and some come a little later. The researchers propose that as neurons pass these signals along, they can add tiny advances, some bigger than others. With these tiny wobbles, the brain can compress memories of time from several seconds down to hundredths of a second—a small enough package to store for later retrieval.

As it stores time in memories, the brain may alter it in another way that is even more radical. It may record time so that our brains recall events in backward order. Scientists at MIT discovered re

Clip Source: discovermagazine.com

The three methods your mind uses to reverse, speed, and even slow the minutes.

For 40 years, psychologists thought that humans and animals kept time with a biological version of a stopwatch.

But the fact is that the biology of the brain just doesn’t work like the clocks we’re familiar with.

These days, new kinds of experiments using everything from computer simulations to brain scans to genetically engineered mice are helping unlock the nature of mental time.

And their results show that the brain does not use a single stopwatch. Instead, it has several ways to tell time, and none of them seems to work like a conventional clock.

Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that in order to perceive time in fractions of a second, our brains tell time as if they were observing ripples on a pond.

Clip Source: discovermagazine.com

It’s possible that we reverse time in our memories in order to focus our brains on goals.

Tags: brain, time, time perception

Facebook Never Forgets

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:43:17 GMT

clipped by: debbyski
clipper's remarks: "The Internet's anonymity, long memory and free-for-all gossip culture may yet prove a poisonous cocktail. But as our generation grows older and enters public life -- thankfully, we have some time -- we'll find ourselves in a political culture that increasingly views these "gotcha" moments in context and with an eye toward forgiveness. After all, the incriminating photo, the offensive blog post, that drunken 3 a.m. e-mail -- it could have been any of us."

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

Imagine if the current crop of public figures had grown up during the Facebook era. We might have photos of John McCain in Florida slurping body shots off his stripper girlfriend. Barack Obama rolling a joint on a beach in Hawaii. George W. Bush passed out at a Yale frat party, 40-ounce beer bottles duct-taped to his hands. Hillary Rodham Clinton at a Wellesley peace rally, locking lips with her husband's future secretary of Labor, Robert Reich.

It's one thing to hear that your elected representative had a wild time in college. It's entirely different to have pictorial proof. Would you still vote for someone after viewing a photograph of him passed out in his own vomit?

This isn't just a thought experiment. The next generation of political leaders is coming of age right now -- and it's unlikely that any one of them will escape digital documentation of their college-era foibles.

Humanistic Texts

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:51:36 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad
clipper's remarks: Much food for thought on site

Clip Source: www.humanistictexts.org

Through these excerpts we have the pleasure of encountering active, probing minds. We can read of humanistic ideas as they break through into history for the first time. Often, even the oldest ideas remain fresh and new.

The excerpts aim to be of sufficient length to convey an author's way of thinking. To facilitate further exploration of any particular line of thought, references to more extensive texts are given. Extracts from individual authors can be accessed alphabetically from the list above. A listing of authors by date of birth can be reached by clicking on Timeline; this provides a list of the time periods covered, with brief biographies of the authors in each time period. An index and a search function can be reached by clicking on Search. For more information about this site, click on

Dedicated to the memory of Finuala Pay (1972-1995)

Blooming enormous: Queen Victoria's knickers

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:38:48 GMT

clipped by: CrazyRedHead

Clip Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

They are knickers fit for a queen or - given their size - maybe two.

Able to accommodate a 50in -plus waist, they belonged to Queen Victoria.

Doubtless she would not be amused to have her undergarments - or her vital statistics - discussed in public.

Quite apart from the primness of the age in which she lived, Britain's longest- reigning monarch could be a little sensitive about her appearance.

At less than 5ft tall, the tendency towards plumpness she inherited from her German forebears was pronounced.

The knickers appear very plain, save for a tiny embroidered crown and the initials 'VR'.

The items being sold by Mr Hanson, a regular on BBC1's Bargain Hunt antiques show, once belonged to the family of one of Victoria's servants and also include a chemise and a nightdress.

The knickers are expected to fetch £500 and the chemise and nightdress £300 each at a sale in Mackworth, Derby, on July 30.

Tags: uk, england, royalty, underwear, auction

When can empathy move us to action?

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:41:31 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: And so cognitive empathy alone is not enough. We also need what Ekman calls "emotional empathy"—when you physically feel what other people feel, as though their emotions were contagious. This emotional contagion depends in large part on cells in the brain called mirror neurons, which fire when we sense another's emotional state, creating an echo of that state inside our own minds. Emotional empathy attunes us to another person's inner emotional world, a plus for a wide range of professions, from sales to nursing—not to mention for any parent or lover.

Clip Source: www.sharpbrains.com

We often emphasize the importance of keeping cool in a crisis. But sometimes coolness can give way to detachment and apathy.

We saw a perfect example of this in the response to Hurricane Katrina, whose devastation was amplified enormously by the lackadaisical response from the agencies charged with managing the emergency. As we all witnessed, leaders at the highest levels were weirdly detached, despite the abundant evidence on our TV screens that they needed to snap to action. The victims' pain was exacerbated by such indifference to their suffering. So as we prepare for the next Katrina-like disaster, what can the science of social intelligence—especially research into empathy—teach policy makers and first responders about the best way to handle themselves during such a crisis?

The differences between these forms of empathy highlight the challenges we face in responding to other people's pain. But they also make clear how the right approach can move us to compassionate action.

Tags: empathy, action

sex curses from the past?

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:15:19 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: It seems, that the human of ancient resembles
the nowadays, a bit unfortunate

Clip Source: afp.google.com

NICOSIA (AFP) — An unexpected sexual curse has been uncovered by archaeologists at Cyprus's old city kingdom of Amathus, on the island's south coast near Limassol, according to a newspaper on Friday.

"A curse is inscribed in Greek on a lead tablet and part of it reads: 'May your penis hurt when you make love'," Pierre Aubert, head of Athens Archaeological School in Greece told the English language Cyprus Weekly.

The ancient city of Amathus was founded by the Phoenicians at around 1500 BC and derived its wealth from grain and copper mines. The city, a regional capital under the Romans, still flourished in the 7th century AD but was abandoned by the 12 century.

Boy 14 Forced into Oral Sex on another Prisoner!!!

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:46:51 GMT

clipped by: righthand
clipper's remarks: Mazin Younis, of the Iraqi League, who has travelled in Basra collecting witness statements of allegations of abuse, says he now has "more than 80" cases involving allegations against British troops.

"Every single time I uncover a personal story of torture and humiliation in Iraq, I think to myself that I have seen the worst there is," Mr Younis added. "Then I hear the next story.

"Hassan shook with emotion and humiliation as he described to me the treatment he suffered at the hands of British soldiers five years ago. It had taken constant prompting and repeated reminders about the importance of detail before Hassan felt brave enough to describe how he was forced to engage in oral sex with his friend Tariq while their British captors laughed raucously and took photographs."

Clip Source: www.independent.co.uk

British soldiers accused of sickening sex assault on Iraqi boy, 14

Just days after the MoD has to pay out millions to the father of a man UK soldiers beat to death, fresh claims of abuse emerge

British soldiers forced a boy of 14 to carry out an act of oral sex on a fellow male prisoner in Iraq

Hassan, says he was rounded up with a friend while trying to steal milk cartons from a food distribution centre. He was whipped, beaten and forced to strip naked.

"They made us sit on each other's laps," he said. "They were enjoying humiliating and abusing us, I wished I was dead at this moment. Then they made me sit with Tariq... where I was forced to put Tariq's penis in my mouth. The other two were made to do the same."

Court action is ongoing over a series of allegations surrounding the British base Camp Breadbasket and incidents that took place there in May 2003

There have been allegations of simulated sexual abuse of Iraqis by British troops, but this

be the first example of actual sexual abuse

Tags: iraq, youth, sex, crimes, uk, soldiers, prisoners