As conceived by Guardianoid.

From Nature Neuroscience:

How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality

Abstract

Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait that influences domains ranging from personal relationships to politics and finance. How people maintain unrealistic optimism, despite frequently encountering information that challenges those biased beliefs, is unknown. We examined this question and found a marked asymmetry in belief updating. Participants updated their beliefs more in response to information that was better than expected than to information that was worse. This selectivity was mediated by a relative failure to code for errors that should reduce optimism. Distinct regions of the prefrontal cortex tracked estimation errors when those called for positive update, both in individuals who scored high and low on trait optimism. However, highly optimistic individuals exhibited reduced tracking of estimation errors that called for negative update in right inferior prefrontal gyrus. These findings indicate that optimism is tied to a selective update failure and diminished neural coding of undesirable information regarding the future.

“Parallel Party Structure” to Be Formed,” said the headline on BNP Ideas website.  It wasn’t what most of us were expecting.  The pre-meeting articles at BNP Ideas talked about setting up not only a new party but a think-tank.  Party policy was written about.  Given the entrenched position of Griffin in the BNP and the huge financial and legal problems his party faces, there seemed no likelihood that tonight we would be looking at the status quo.  But here we are.

Or nearly.  BNP Ideas has this to say:

A parallel party structure, tasked with building up supporters, a database, a leadership core and making overtures to other nationalists and parties along with creating all the essential elements required to run a party, is to be formed in terms of a majority decision taken at today’s BNP Ideas conference in Leicestershire.

... Mr Brons said he felt the time was not appropriate for the creation of a new party, and that it was better to rather create a parallel structure which could step in to pick up the pieces should the BNP’s current infrastructure collapse, or, if a certain minimum of signed up supporters (Mr Brons said 1,500 would be a suitable figure) was obtained, in which case a new party might become viable.

Less than that, Mr Brons said, and a new party would “nose dive” which would give the Griffin-controlled BNP an undeserved victory.

... Finally, the meeting was asked to vote on three specific proposals: to stay in the BNP and seek to replace Nick Griffin by legal internal means; to create a new party; and to create a parallel structure.

A handful of people voted for a new party, but the vast majority of those present voted to create the parallel structure. The organisation will take into consideration all of the proposals made by delegates, and further announcements will be made on this website in due course.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the “real” economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

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ASIAN COGNITIVE ELITES SOLVE THE UK HOUSING CRISIS WITH THE MUMBAI MODEL

Southall from space.  But not much space.

There has been some press coverage at last of the ingenius and rather profitable solution to the housing crisis conceived by our dusky-skinned, cognitively elite fellow countrymen.  What was that you said?  Did the Subcogs conceive the housing crisis or the solution to it?  Ah ... erm ... both.  I did not make a grammatical error, you see.

THEY are the slumdogs of Southall – a mass of immigrants living in ramshackle garden “sheds” and garages which brazenly flout planning laws.

Staring down from jets landing at nearby Heathrow, travellers could be forgiven for thinking they were arriving over Mumbai’s shanty towns — made famous by the hit movie Slumdog Millionaire — rather than a west London suburb.

Hidden from view from the street in garden after garden, the so-called “sheds with beds” have been jerry-built by rogue landlords cashing in on new arrivals.

Some sheds are homely bungalows with flat-screen TVs, power showers and central heating. Others are filthy potential death traps, with poor wiring and sanitation and plagued by rats and cockroaches.

Give it time and no one will know that’s not normal…

Exotic West London.  Sorry, Mumbai.

NO THREATS, NO INCITEMENT BUT JAILTIME JUST THE SAME

Glasgow is an uncompromising place, and its football fans have a long tradition of uncompromising hostility across the sectarian line that divides Rangers and Celtic.  But even there the thaumaturgists of the politically correct courts are visiting the Pax Judaica upon the warring factions.

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Never let it be said that Richard Williamson was cowed into submission by his January 2009 encounter with Jewish power.  The SSPX’s most politically adventurous bishop is back, via a circular to his email list, with a fresh perspective on the papal perspective on our Elder Brothers in Faith:

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by I Bismuth

STAR Date 6530993002.362083825051397 (See Footnote)

As I crossed Richmond Lock Footbridge I saw a smart suit loitering on the silly side of the railing. Its wearer, youngish, male and pale, was frowning at the river, and one by one was nodding out the seconds, a jumper on his final countdown.

“Good afternoon,” I said as I reached the launch pad. “It’s not a bad day, is it?”

The countdown aborted, he looked over his shoulder.

“No, it’s not a bad day—as last days go.”

“But the forecast for tomorrow is not so good,” I said.

Perhaps this was not the most tactful observation I could make.

“Of course,” he went on, ignoring it, “I have no right to assert it’s not a bad day as last days go. What do I know about last days? I have no personal experience of them. Like everyone else’s last day, this is my first.”

He sighed at the river, preparing to start again from ten.

“May I ask you a personal question before you go?” I said.

“You are not a man who makes a religion of minding his own business, are you?”

“I just want to know why you decided to drown yourself.”

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We are unions, students, teachers, veterans, first responders, families, the unemployed and underemployed.  We are all races, sexes and creeds.  We are the majority.  We are the 99 percent.  And we will no longer be silent.

This is a claim on the OccupyWallStreet website.  Here’s another:

Our nation, our species and our world are in crisis. The US has an important role to play in the solution, but we can no longer afford to let corporate greed and corrupt politics set the policies if our nation.

We, the people of the United States of America, considering the crisis at hand, now reassert our sovereign control of our land.

For now, the Occupy focus is on activist organisation.  A cynic would expect that the end of the road is approaching for the anti-capitalists and anarchists who have got it this far.  Already, the unions are moving in.  As a breed, so to speak, progressive but still mostly mainstream journalists are waiting to pronounce the defining words.  But it is too early to say how the ideological platform will develop and around what it will coalesce, besides opposition to economic oligarchy.

If as a movement Occupy retains its radicalism, and is not drawn into the system, and does not decline into a constructive engagement with the Democratic party as the Tea Party movement has through its engagement with the GOP, then there is an historic possibility open to it.  It could, through the agency of its more radical intellectuals, formulate and evangelise a revolutionary alternative to neoliberalism in a post-market age.

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