Twelfth Bough

"Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (R) holds an umbrella for former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger against the rain to see him off after a meeting in Beijing, capital of China, Oct. 12, 2009. Kissinger and his delegation came to Beijing for the inaugural China-U.S. Track Two High-Level Dialogue, which gathered dozens of retired eminent diplomats and officials from both countries. (Xinhua/Yao Dawei) Track Two diplomacy is a special type of diplomacy social engineering when supposedly "neutral" people, like former diplomats and members of think tanks, get together off-line and try to iron out problems affecting nation states. These people don't have the same constraints as public officials, so the thinking goes that they can speak freely and make better progress. Of course, people conducting track two diplomacy are also not ACCOUNTABLE to the public. So theoretically, if everyone was a former this-or-that in a track two diplomacy meeting, one might argue...

Interesting landmarks in China's neighborhood: Strait of Malacca SOURCE Paracel and Spratley Islands SOURCE Sulu Archipelago SOURCE Oil and Gas Deposits SOURCE "Rothschild, the more-than-200-year-old family-controlled banking dynasty, is making a big move in China, and Yu is leading the charge. It plans to add 15 merger advisers there by March, giving it 55 in all, more than any foreign investment bank, says Olivier Pecoux, co-chief executive officer of Rothschild. Today, the merger business in China is still relatively small. So far this year, China has accounted for about 9 percent of the $1.1 trillion in deals around the globe, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The potential, though, is enormous. China has $2.5 trillion in untapped foreign currency reserves and is mandating that state-owned companies expand abroad to secure natural resources such as oil and metals. "The economic balance of power has already chang...

"By studying people’s reactions to a range of artificially-generated faces, Oosterhof and Todorov were able to identify a set of features that seemed to engender trust. Working from those findings, they were able to create a continuum: faces with high inner eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones struck people as trustworthy, faces with low inner eyebrows and shallow cheekbones untrustworthy." ~~~~~~~ http://socialcapital.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/would-i-lie-to-you-engineering-trust-with-your-face/ http://thrivingtoo.typepad.com/thriving_too/2008/08/faces-you-can-t.html http://mindhacks.com/2008/08/19/judging-trustworthiness-in-the-face/ http://webscript.princeton.edu/~tlab/databases Very interesting research. In 2005, Todorov's lab garnered international headlines with a study published in Science demonstrating that quick facial judgments can accurately predict real-world election results. Taking what they have learned over time -- namely that, rightly ...

We received some excellent comments and links from the last post . Many thanks to our brilliant friends and blogmates. We want to unpack the ideas more fully. This particular piece of information might be the key to some mysteries? When the limbic system was stimulated the patients vigilance weakened, they lost capacity to think, often they began to undress or grope and when the stimulation stopped they did not remember it. SOURCE The limbic system affects behavior and memory. If the limbic system could be dialed up and down by some methods, people would experience a range of behavior and memory states? This would be very useful to the controllers, especially if done by secret methods, without people's consent? Is this possible on a wide scale? Well, look at what the limbic system regulates: Limbic system structures are involved in many of our emotions and motivations, particularly those that are related to survival. Such emotions include fear, anger, and emotion...