Neurological Correlates

Michael Lewis is one of the more entertaining chroniclers of Wall Street, since his pre-black Monday days in Liars Poker. Here is part of the 60 minutes interview where he posits that there was mass delusion on Wall Street that engendered a culture of entitlement and the entire financial crisis.

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Watch CBS News Videos Online

Large corporations who shall not be named have exactly the same culture of entitlement.  See the post:

Neuroeditorial: The Bonus Culture As A Folie-à-Deux -Zillion March 19th, 2009

How did we arrive at a corporate culture where financial middlemen feel entitled to a hefty percent of the GDP?  Everyone suspended reality and acted in a big folie-à-deux-zillion.

In the beginning, corporations became campuses, with massages and chefs and private jets to the Loire Valley for off-sites. Working schmoo employees could live a 6+ start lifestyle as if they could pay for it. This begat in SoCal a bunch of faux-Europeanish strip malls. (I won’t name the developer).  Faux pediments, faux marble, faux statuary, faux bell towers, faux bells ringing when it’s just a recording of bells; Faux retailers to make your life as if: as if you are in Italy; as if you are a world class athlete; as if you are a professional chef.

And so, the people of these faux cultures began to believe in the folly: plain vanilla finance people were rewarded as if they actually produced value, instead of off-loading risk; managers were given officer titles and responsibilities as if they actually had the job; people spent time on presentations as if the presentation were the end product. It’s a faux job, and a faux economy.

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Short version: Why do some men selectively attack only their wives/girlfriends?

Answer: If monogamy is substantially determined by biology, so is monogamous aggression.

Wait! Don’t say “stupid fringe blogger” and click off. There’s some biology. Really.

Intimate partner violence has always just struck me as so abnormal, so out-of-the-realm of what could be considered pro-evolutionary or pro-social, that the fact that its so abominably common and is largely ignored by society is just so out-there weird and awful, or weirdawful or wawful (new words), that this has to be some very basic biology going on.

This includes psychological aggression, like the kind just outlawed in France.  As Melvin Belli, the late King of Torts used to say, soft tissue damage is the toughest to prove, and so  psychological damage is dismissed, or even if believed, there are dismissive blame-the-victim brushings aside.

This does not always include homicidal psychopath-sociopaths, the kind that murder rather than divorce — that is using abuse as an instrumentality, rather than as a form of relationship behavior.  (See here,  Superbowl Sunday: Why Do Men Kill Their Wives?). There’s a typology toward these kinds of Romeos, apparently: white, middle to upper middle class,  probably what the shrinks would call narcissistic, and have an entitlement attitude toward the money. There may be some overlap, but not always.

Nor does this include family annihilators, who are more like workplace or school shooters. (See here, “Family Annihilators“: Whether mad or sad, it’s entitlement and control). Again, could overlap, but not always.

The whole thing is just.. . weird.  It is monogamy, but not for love; it is monogamous contempt. It is monogamous aggression.

Sexism and racism are based on power — a rationale that, although not justifiable, is at least internally consistent.  Relatedly, there are all sorts of  neural categorization arguments. People are involuntary racial/gender/stereotyper/profilers.  When you see an individual, you immediately put that individual down a pre-selected neural pathway. (See here, for instance, those appearing powerful are categorized as Republican, and those appearing warm are categorized as Democrat). Some batterers may be more or less sexist, but this is incidental; plus the fact that that there are plenty of same gender couples with abuse argues against having any particular world view one way or another.

This isn’t that: this is selective toward a particular individual, the mate.  No, more like some neural wires are crossed — and we previously wondered if  batterers were sort of synesthesiacs — having not color/letter autonomic association, but love/hate or mate/threat synesthesia. ( Wife batterers: A synesthesia subtype?) Cognitively, the rationale is internally inconsistent: if you detest and loathe someone so much, then why have them around so you can kick them, metaphorically or literally? Just as a matter of resource utilization, intimate partner violence is an opportunity cost: all that energy spent harming someone the batterer loathes could be spent on finding someone new.

Even vindictive stalking isn’t generalized sexism, it is aggressive hostility toward a specific person. (The “stalking post” has comments from a number of vindictive-type stalkers, and even they themselves don’t understand why they do what they do, although they seem to come up with ex post facto rationales based on power or getting even or something.)

There is a mate retention strategy, too: Men who feel lame with their women use verbal abuse to bring the women down to their level as a mate retention strategy (Blogged here, with the pertinent question, “What do you do if you think your girl is going to run off with the pool guy? Insult her.”)

What’s the biology? Vasopressin has a lot to do with selective mating — that is, picking a particular mate, and being monogamous.  In various animals, such as animals in the desert or around brackish water, the salinity/peripheral blood tonicity regulates mating behavior, as well as the expression of vasopressin-related genes.  Puffer fish go from the the bay to the backwaters to mate; meadow voles living in salt marshes breed in the winter — when there’s less salinity than in the summer.

Our little  monogamous friends the prairie vole have particular vasopressin receptors.  They lurve to be with their mates. Yet, the little monogamous voles will attack — rather than try to mate with — a novel, temptress female.  The little monogamous male vole acts like “you’re not my girlfriend, let me bite you.”   The attack isn’t to the death, but the little monogamous voles don’t view the new female as a potential mate-substitute.  This kind of attack – not based on physical threat but based on the female being novel — seems similar to that of domestic violence. Sort of intruder aggression, or a Bush-Doctrine pre-emptive strike.

Here’s video from Dr. Young, who follows voles into the mating lab with a video camera, at Emery University — see 1:45 or so for the experiment when you have a new female on one side, and the mate on the other side, and you drop the male in the middle — the male attacks the new female and goes to snuggle with the mate:

Batterers have both behaviors: they selectively bond with their mates, and they treat their mates with similar intruder aggressive type behavior.   (There are all sorts of confounding factors, etc. this is a generalization).  Batterers claim that their mates have all sorts of loathsome characteristics, that they were merely defending themselves, and seem to be either lying or paranoid or maybe both.  (Here)

The social threat detector is selectively stuck, but just for their mates.  Here are random facts that are probably the dots to connect :

• The amygdala is active in social threat detection. (Neither here nor there: high functioning psychopaths have an amygdala that is selectively smaller in areas, blogged here). Amygdala central nucleus in part controls sodium intake, at least in rats. (Here’s an excellent review article on sodium appetite also called salt appetite.)
• Aldosterone, produced in the adrenal glands, relates to salt appetite, and upregulates HSD11B2 , an enzyme that relates to endogenous steroids as well as blood pressure (see here )
  
• Dietary salt , as well as vasopressin, is related to vasoconstriction/blood pressure  — and when you’re threatened, your blood starts pumping.  And, salt and water are in a yin and yang so, not surprisingly, brain water content is modulated with vasopressin receptor antagonists (here, e.g.).
• What lets brain water in and out of brain cells? Aquaporin-4, a type of water channel molecule.  Testosterone upregulates aquaporin-4 ( here cultured cells)  Plus, testosterone increase when mating means good quality paternal care — at least in mice (here).  (Whether testosterone is responsible for generalized aggression is questionable, from recent papers)
• It looks like letting water in and out of brain cells related to salt/steroids is part of threat response and calming down.
• If men fail to release testosterone and accumulate steroids in the brain when in the presence of a long term mate (e.g., bonded mate), could this be a form of selective roid rage?

So the biological algebra shows something is messed up here:

vasopressin + testosterone + steroids = salt + amygdala + high blood pressure and social threat

Vasopressin = salt in the blood = aquaporin 4 modulation = interfering with testosterone aquaporin 4 upregulation?

My guess is that the trail leading from voles and desert animals mating where/when there’s more water/less salt will have a dotted line to selective agression against one’s mate. The dotted line has vasopressin and its receptors (particularly relating to amygdalar saline regulation), aquaporin-4 upregulation by testosterone and vasopressin receptor activation.  Whether inducing dietary water or reducing dietary salt would make a batterer less likely to have that vasopressin “you’re not my mate so I’m going to attack you” response should be checked out.

For the male supremacists who get their undies in a bunch when talking about male perpetuated domestic violence who want to go into the “well women do it too” argument, see the stats after the jump and any comments derailing the biology argument will be deleted by fiat.

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March 7-13 is Groundwater Awareness Week.

If we only knew what was in our groundwater — the EPA decided to fail to enforce its mandates as against most industrial wastewater producers, and therefore, mostly, we have no clue whatsoever what is in the water.  (N.b., the landing page directs citizens to test their own water. Thanks EPA.)  Make no mistake: this was a political decision, and the scientists at the EPA were probably put in untenable positions of either speaking up and getting fired, or else going along until a better political climate for enforcement. Plus, apparently the environmental laws were vague (according the Supreme Court) and so a bunch of corporate polluters weaseled out of being under EPA jurisdiction.

1. Previous posts:

Senator Blanche Lincoln: Promoter of Obesity and Polluting the Water in the Cherokee Nation?

Healthcare reform: Appoint an obesity Czar. Exhibit A: CDC’s Wrongheaded Anti-Obesity Strategy Will Result In Spending Outrageous Amounts of Money With No Reduction in Childhood Obesity

. . . Things Time Mag Ignores in Reporting on Obesity in the Southern USA

Does environmental arsenic contamination cause obesity by disrupting thyroid hormone mediated gene regulation?

2. Senate Agriculture Committee chair, Senator Blanche Lincoln (website).

Blanche Lincoln As Ag Chair? Say It Ain’t So

Tyson’s Dirty Water Bail-Out

3.  Fed anti-obesity recommendations dealing with behavioral modifications and ignoring potential environmental causes:

Recommended Community Strategies and Measurements to Prevent Obesity in the United States

Childhood Obesity page (HHS)

4. Arsenic in chicken feed and ground water:

R. L. Wershaw, J. R. Garbarino, and M. R. Burkhardt, “Roxarsone in Natural Water Systems,” from Proceedings Effects of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) on Hydrologic Resources and the Environment, USGS, Fort Collins Colorado 1999

Roxarsone,  4-Hydroxy -3-nitrobenzenearsonic acid

Comparison of arsenic content in pelletized poultry house waste and biosolids
fertilizer.

Arsenic in Poultry Litter

Popular press articles about chicken feed, arsenic and water:

Animal Feed and the Food Supply: Chicken and Arsenic

A Deadly Ingredient in a Chicken Dinner
Why do our chicken, our water and our air contain arsenic?

5. NYT article about lack of enforcement of EPA water pollution laws:

NYT Toxic Waters

6. Arsenic as an endocrine disrupter:

Endocrine Society paper on Endocrine Disrupters (Originally published as: Diamanti-Kandarakis E et al. 2009 Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals: An Endocrine Society Scientific Statement. Endocrine Reviews 30(4):293-342)

National Institute of Environmental Health – Endocrine Disruptor Page

Arsenic disrupts thyroid hormone gene regulation, Davey et al.,  “Arsenic as an Endocrine Disruptor: Arsenic Disrupts Retinoic Acid Receptor–and Thyroid Hormone Receptor–Mediated Gene Regulation and Thyroid Hormone–Mediated Amphibian Tail Metamorphosis, “ Environ Health Perspect. 116: 165–172 (2008). doi: 10.1289/ehp.10131;

Arsenic exposure is correlated with Type 2 diabetes, Navas-Acien et al., “Arsenic Exposure and Prevalence of Type 2 Diabetes in US Adults,”  JAMA 300: 814-822 (2008) PMID: 18714061

7. Related post

Soil contaminants and the use of sewerage sludge for agricultural crop fertilizers

8. Neither here nor there

National Resources Defense Counsel – Water Page

Video of making a PET liquid container using blow molding machine Plastics News video 10/30

Two data points, years apart:

1. In 2005-2006, Citibank analysts pointed out that the top 1% of the wealthy drives something like 99.999999% of the economy

Citigroup Mar 5 2006 Plutonomy Report Part 2

This was originally attributed not to theft and agency capture, as we now know, but rather to a particular quality of that top 1%: dopamine:
Citigroup Oct 16, 2005 Plutonomy Report Part 1

Of course, we all know this is drek.  The top 1% gets that way because they have the levers to move money to make bets and then make the bets pan out, and a little siphon on the side to get their percent. (OK, not everyone, but the financial services/real estate industry that constitutes something like 90% of that top 1%. The rest are the ones who actually succeeded by merit, and there are some who were actually smart, and not just lucky.)

2.  Psychologist and Nobel Laureate Dr. Daniel Kaneman says millions of dollars won’t buy you happiness, but a job that pays $60,000 a year might help.  Happiness levels increase up to the $60K mark, but “above that it’s a flat line,” he said. (Via CNN).

Thus, if we were to draw a graph of the income distribution proposed by these two data points, it would be bimodal:

As an aside, if you read the Citi memos, the 2005-2006 advice was to invest in luxury brands. The TED sponsors contain loads of brands for this upper 1% crowd.  Not sure what that means, unless Dr. K is trying to say “hey, don’t worry about the great unwashed, they’re poor but they’re happy.”

Harry Markopolos, the Madoff whistleblower, has written a book, “No One Would Listen.”  (Put up in the Amazon widget in the sidebar).

What makes someone a whistleblower?

Mr. Markopolos’ congressional testimony will go down in history – (e.g., here’s a clip, about 5 minutes, with the noted Harvard Law grad from the Disneyland District, Rep. Alan Grayson)

This C-Span testimony (yes,  political theater), riveted the country because here’s “some guy”  who was staring down the entire financial services industry and regulators.   Make no mistake, Markopolos = Hero

But:  Two things on altruism and one thing on his complaints about the health care industry.

First, on altruism:  What is it that makes people whistleblowers at such great self-expense?

1. Mr. Markopolos was originally utilitarian, starting the Madoff investigation, as a fund manager, to prove to his boss Madoff’s returns were unreproducible. But later, he gathered steam despite personal and professional sacrifice.This may be in part similarly utilitarian, after all,  freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose, when you’re ratting out Wall Street, to paraphrase a song . What is it when self interest reaches the threshold so that altruism breaks through?

2. Mr. Markopolos, in bringing down Madoff, helped the drug cartels and mobsters. This much is admitted (it’s in the C-Span testimony at: 01:48:23, 02:22:09 , and 02:22:09, just type “Russian” in the search box). Mr. Markopolos admitted that he feared the mob, and took the position, “hey, by bringing down Madoff, I’m helping you, don’t kill me. .. “) So, is being altruistic even incidentally on behalf of the drug cartels and mafiosi still real altruism? Real life is never that clear.

3. Here’s where I differ from Mr. Markopolos. From Huffpo:

Markopolos reveals the multitude of other cases he’s working on, some of which involve health care fraud (he says the health care industry “makes Wall Street look honest”):

Truthfully, my career aspiration is to prove that a drug with more than a billion dollars in annual sales is actually killing Americans and citizens across the globe, that in the clinical trials the dangers of this drug were revealed, and that the executives knew about the dangers and went ahead and marketed it anyway. I’ve been working on this case for a few years now without much success, but I hope someday I’ll be able to find a key witness and get this case filed with the Department of Justice.

Now, the executive suites in pharma are as dysfunctional as they come, make no mistake. They make the Real Housewives look like prudence personified.  But, most of the $BB drugs out there were conceived before the current executive suites were in power. The current exec. suites are just riding the gravy train, trying to not make any decisions that could get themselves fired.

But  the trouble with complaining about biopharma companies is that in the US the science is really good.  The thing is, especially with biologicals, the mode of action is pretty well figured out, maybe not totally, but there’s a rationale. This isn’t just some miracle dust that no one know how things work. The drug binds the receptor, or inhibits a pathway or something like that.

Usually the drug isn’t toxic or poisonous, but rather the label is too broad or off-base. Even Vioxx, imo, was a good drug for those who needed it, it just should have been prescribed more narrowly.  That, again, imo, was because the management layer had misguided compensation and a culture of being punished for bearing bad news. Even off-label promotion may be hugely criminal, but, most off-label uses are not only fine, but actually needed by patients. A drug company that takes a short cut getting a limited approval — so they don’t run out of money — and then gets the drug out in the clinic — should be permitted to do post-marketing surveillance, doctor or even patient reporting for off-label uses.

Again, executive suite, insurance company reimbursements in cahoots, boards of directors, Mr. Markopolos, sic’ em. For the drugs, let the plaintiffs’ lawyers take care of this, they have the machinery in place.

I’d like to see Mr. Markopolos bring to the DoJ enough stuff to sue the Federal Reserve + investment banks for RICO. Does the Fed have immunity? Or, call credit default swaps illegal gaming, get with the Native Americans and sue for unfair competition. (Is there a law that exempts credit default swaps from being gambling?) Ech, could go on forever about that.

And, Mr. Markopolos, here’s the real secret. Come closer to the screen, I’ll whisper it:

Drugs are more valuable to a company’s stock when they’re in the pipeline. Everyone sells on launch.

This blog has covered whistle blowers, like

Book review: David Einhorn’s “Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story”

Workplace bullying outed: Paul, Hastings is out-lawyered by the lawyer they just fired

(See a list at:  Roundup: Neurological Correlates posts on politics, economics and culture, links all in one place)

Good morning. This post is about quadrophobia or fear of the number four.

It is first worthwhile to define some terms: Quadrophobia is not Quadrophenia.

Quadrophenia was an album by the Who from the 1970s. With reference to music, the term quadrophenia was born of the term schizophrenia, broadly referring to a personality pathology, this one, an individual having four distinct personalities (viz., quadro), one for each band member. (We have not put up the music because we don’t really like it. So sue us.)

Quadrophobia is the avoidance of the number four (“4″). This is what companies do to round up their earnings numbers when they are being observed by analysts. The significance of such “earnings management”  is that if the company meets the numbers, the executive suite gets their bonus. Hence, in a report from the noted Professor Grundfest and colleagues, quadrophobia was more frequent in companies that have analyst coverage, and drops off when the analyst coverage drops:

*  *  *

Because reported earnings per share in the United States are rounded to the nearest cent, earnings of 13.4 cents are  rounded down to 13 cents while earnings of 13.5 cents are rounded up to 14 cents. The amount of accounting discretion required to increase rounded EPS by one cent, all other factors equal, is at a local minimum when the …first digit to the right of the decimal in EPS calculations is a four. Accordingly, if managers of publicly traded …firms want to increase their reported earnings by one cent, for whatever reason, then the number four should be signfi…cantly underrepresented in the fi…rst post-decimal digit of EPS data. We call this pattern “quadrophobia.” [FN1]

Quadrophobia thus constitutes a speci…fic form of earnings management that, in the abstract, re‡jects the exercise of accounting judgment over a quantitatively small number. Quadrophobia can be practiced either in isolation or in conjunction with other techniques that can increase reported EPS by one cent or more. The accounting judgments that lead to quadrophobia can, depending on context and intent, either be entirely legal, or they can constitute a violation of the federal securities laws. Further, even if the techniques used to generate quadrophobia are, in and of themselves, entirely legal, they can be correlated with other forms of accounting conduct that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fi…nds problematic.. . .

And, when reading SEC or antitrust law prof  papers, you learn the good stuff is in the footnotes, so from footnote 1:

Equivalent reasoning suggests that the number …five should be overrepresented in the fi…rst post-decimal digit of positive EPS reported in cents; a pattern we call “quintophilia.” When dealing with negative EPS data, however, fi…rms have an incentive to avoid the number …five in the fi …rst post-decimal digit, because rounding would then increase negative reported earnings. By the same logic, …firms with negative earnings have an incentive to over-represent the number four in the first post-decimal digit. Firms with negative EPS should therefore display “quintophobia” and “quadrophilia.” . . .

Grundfest, Joseph A. and Malenko, Nadya, Quadrophobia: Strategic Rounding of EPS Data (October 14, 2009). Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University Working Paper No. 65; Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper No. 388. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1474668

We’ve lived in one place long enough. One of the annoying things about not moving is that the number of people you get to know accumulates, but then, when you run into them around town, you have no idea where you know them from.

Didn’t you work in payroll?

Weren’t you in my fencing class?

Were we married in the ‘9o’s?

We should avoid a local Trader Joe’s – because it has a small geographic footprint, so you’re mixed in closely with other people in your similar demographic and there is always some individual we met at some outing we don’t recall who in good faith asks questions about stuff we haven’t worked on since like 2004,  like, “hey, what ever happened to setting up a fund to build ocean wave energy generation tied to off-shore ocean oil derricks?” or some such wherein we’re forced to smile politely instead of responding, “Well, it was mismanaged into the ground and then the principals got into a snit and there was a big law suit and the funding source had a stroke and is now mostly paralyzed and so it was a total utter expensive failure and human tragedy. How’s the family?”

We  stay home a lot.

So, the news out of  University College London is practical: Face recognition is inherited, according to scientists who tested this ability in twins presumably in London. (Which automatically makes us think of the only twins from London we know of, the  Kray twins).  No matter, now we could both have an excuse for failure to remember someone and generate some sympathy for having a heritable disability, which we are not above doing but probably couldn’t pull off without a pained look of guilt and/or stupidity.

There are more dramatic excuses for failing to recognize someone:  delusional misidentification syndrome, Fregoli syndrome, and Capgras syndrome, and it’s incomplete version,  prosopagnosia. Prosopagnosia is probably the best known — it’s failure to recognize faces at all. The other syndromes are where people and other people or items actually cognitively and emotionally merge in an individuals’ mind.  Fregoli syndrome is where you think a group of people are actually a single person in different disguises (something we  accused Bob Dylan of, see the blog post); Capgras is where you think someone you know is really an imposter (e.g., “Your a fake mother! Where’s my real one!”). (We think we may have had a cat with this disorder once. ) The entire thing is reminiscent of synesthesia, as there seems to be clearly some connections crossed.

Delusions don’t work well for us, for social excuses. The trouble with accusing someone of being someone they’re not is that if they really have done something accusation-worthy, you’re stuck with who you said they were, and the real person weasels out of liability.

So we did the tests to see if we actually have face blindness, and here’s the score – we’re above average:

Out of 72 faces, you correctly identified 62. In other words, you got 86% correct. On our previous version of this test, the average person with normal face recognition was able to recognize about 80% of the faces. If you correctly identified less than 65% of the faces, this may indicate face recognition difficulties.  For more information about face blindness and other face recognition difficulties, please go to www.faceblind.org.

N.b., some of the faces in the faceblind test actually look like hairless versions of Reggie and Ronnie.

The full paper open access: Wilmer JB, Germine L, Chabris CF, Chatterjee G, Williams M, Loken E, Nakayama
K, Duchaine B. Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 Feb 22.

Everyone we know who has bucked the system or been a whistleblower has been subject to a retaliatory smear. This post is about smear campaigns and how the label of  “conspiracy theory” is just another defamatory tool in the power-grab tool kit of those who can’t play fair.

Normally, we don’t discuss too much in the way of personal information, mostly because we don’t want to be sued, and also because it would be supremely boring for anyone else, but we do draw the line at abuse. This is because we feel strongly that the internets are good to end all sorts of abusive practices by exposing them. Even our miniscule, petty situations.  Vanishingly insignificant compared to real human existence, but it bugs us. So we discuss our stalker (who has now subsided, sort of), our ex-addict relatives and friends, and workplace dysfunction. Here’s another one: We wuz stiffed on some pay.

Pardon the indulgence yet again for complaining about white collar shenanigans (it’s been, what, 2 years?),  we find business ethics , well, stink. Being stiffed  — or rather extending credit involuntarily — seems to us to be rather an act of relational aggression.  (Yes, sour grapes here).  We won’t discuss the details or identifying remarks, except to say that the stiff-er kept us on doing work, accepted the work, used our name and reputation to enhance their business, etc. and then when we said, “Pay please?” they said “Maybe Q210″  We have our theories why, and none of them relate to money, or even the work, but rather a fair amount of wiring relating to Social Dominance Orientation. In retrospect, that is almost always the case.

This is what workplace bullies do:  The pre-emptive smear campaign.  Actually, we’re almost blasé about being smeared yet again.  Sort of like having a sex tape. Who cares?  (We don’t have a sex tape, but we do have several deposition tapes and have been threatened with being YouTubed by several of our professional colleagues for reasons we can’t fathom. We’d make a sex tape just for convenience of having some pre-packaged smear material, but John and Rielle would be better and the knee-jerk response to them is “ew.”) Be that as it may, we’ve been on the who’s-hot-who’s-not list so many times we’ve lost count. It goes with the territory, we suppose. At this point, it’s seems like sport. Nevertheless, we’ve got to do the whole professional  thing just to be seen, and let everyone know we wuz stiffed. We really would rather not go to those glad-handing luncheons.  Plus we have a cold. Then, we see our old colleagues who are never smeared because they never do anything, yet they always say, “Swivelchair, this is actionable, you should sue” but all they want is a ring side seat for a good fight.  The reader may surmise the smear thing  fails to impress any more and is frankly annoying.  Next time the potential smear-ers get handed a list of people who don’t like us, and saving them the trouble of trying to make stuff up.

Nevertheless, we’ve marveled at this behavior before, and believe it should be discussed if anything because it is so prevalent.  We blame McKinsey’s “rank and yank” from the ’90s as legitimizing the whole thing. All that did was remove anyone who could possibly be a whistleblower to stop the corporate shenanigans that ended up where we are now. Here is a previous post, “Workplace bullying outed: Paul, Hastings is out-lawyered by the lawyer they just fired.”   We did beef to our tax accountant who said, “Swivelchair, why was your pay so low this year?’ And we said, “Tax Accountant, we wuz robbed” and Tax Accountant then went into detail about their own woes pertaining to setting up their own shop –similarly involving a personality smear campaign that no one would believe given 2 seconds thought.

This is small potatoes.  (Who can write that word and not think of Dan Quayle, lately of Cerberus Capital, the biggest welfare recipient ever? We digress).  The bigger potato[e] is the label conspiracy theorist used as a smear. Wanna discredit someone who is on to you but doesn’t have all the facts? Call them a conspiracy theorist.  Exhibit A, New York Times Sez Neurological Correlates Sustains Crazy Goldman Sachs Conspiracy Theory. (See here for updates).

Here is the text-book explanation of why  “conspiracy theory” is a label used as a smear, via  Washington’s Blog.  We note, as an aside, that the blog sites libertarian philosophy in this post and we are by no means libertarian,  or any other -arian. (Librarian? Sagitarian? Oops we are vegetarian from time to time). In fact, when we went through our Federalist Society phase some time ago, at a luncheon in a posh club in downtown LA (the kind of club that focuses on who to keep out, although lately they’ll take anyone whose check doesn’t bounce) we once we sat between a Federal Judge who was a vegetarian and, on the other side, a former libertarian Presidential Candidate, on expense account paid for by shareholders of a particular petroleum-related industry. The Libertarian was pleased that his child received taxpayer subsidized in-state tuition at Large State University.  We restrained ourselves. So Libertarians strike us as a bunch of blowhards, frankly. Nevertheless, Libertarians,  being outsiders and all,  are pretty good at cutting to the chase.

The point is this: If the existing status quo uses murky shenanigans to slurp up money from the public, the public trust is violated and social unrest may result.  One can use a “conspiracy theory” as a sword, to deflect attention (“it’s the [liberals, conservatives, etc.] who are ruining everything. . .”) or one can use “conspiracy theory” as a shield to smear those who have caught on to the shenanigans. From the blog:

. . .Far from being a paranoid or a determinist, the conspiracy analyst is a praxeologist; that is, he believes that people act purposively, that they make conscious choices to employ means in order to arrive at goals. Hence, if a steel tariff is passed, he assumes that the steel industry lobbied for it; if a public works project is created, he hypothesizes that it was promoted by an alliance of construction firms and unions who enjoyed public works contracts, and bureaucrats who expanded their jobs and incomes. It is the opponents of “conspiracy” analysis who profess to believe that all events — at least in government —are random and unplanned, and that therefore people do not engage in purposive choice and planning.

Very quick post.

Chatroulette is simply a way to talk to strangers on the internet. You click and you talk to a random person. (The name sounds a little like betting on black or red kittens, but it’s meant, apparently to convey taking a chance in chatting with someone.)

Yoo hoo, academicians? Isn’t this the perfect testing ground? Can you get a verbal informed consent via video or chat transcript? Or by sending people to another site to click and then coming back?

Possible publications:

Sociability/vasopressin receptor allele “People who go on the internet to talk to strangers via Chatroulette more generous and trusting in neuroeconomic games, with confounding factor that they may be drunk.”

Eye gaze study: “Contagious yawning near zero for those who view others wearing sunglasses on video via Chatroulette, with confounding factor that loud music is playing in background.”

Anyway, we think it could be interesting.
Update: Apparently Chatroulette is favored by flashers, according to reports. Flashing is about power. See previous posts on exhibitionism, “Exhibitionism: What’s Up With Flashers, So To Speak?”

And Happy Valentines Day or Bah Humbug Valentines Day, whatever! Or Happy Presidents’ Day or Bah Humbu. . whatever, the greeting card corporatocracies have made things too confusing.