...drives the investigations into mirror neurons, just recently confirmed by the original Italian team et al, seems to be working out as a key feature in human socialization, per se.

Simply that we ...both gals and guys.. can intuit what another is thinking or feeling in part because we can almost actually feel that touch or experience that hurt.

Women just and generally do a bit better as reading the social mood and the participants in the given setting.

And if men do exercise some denial at any of this womanly solicitude...softness, leaking some onto their hard-won manly me, it is perhaps understandable that they recoil at finding it.

Which is something too with which one might empathize in a world still very much a Global Patriarchal Assumption system.

There are also firm patho-physiological correlates encountered consistently in the neuro-scientific experience.

In that, for example, both autism and genuine sociopathy primarily afflict the male.

The autistic simply CANNOT read the setting. He doesn't see faces as do most of us. The true sociopath has no empathic feel, for good OR ill, for his actions as they impinge upon others.

His Theory of Mind just doesn't work. Deficient 'read', as well, perhaps.

Were I female, I would rejoice in that capability which is widely seen as enhanced..hard-wired?..in comparison with a famously male...hard-nosedness.

And do what women have done since way before the mastodon...sort of smooth things over so folks don't hurt or get hurt...more'n necessary, or maybe sometimes even...at all. Sometimes.

...but I feel betrayed.

Canvassed, carried signs, got-out-the-vote, remitted my monthly pittance....

-even offered to freeby janitor the downtown Billings lav,

(the floor in the Men's was all sticky and... ) 'cause the Obama HQ apparently unfunded for such services-

But FISA was touchstone, deal-breaker and my favorite Constitutional Law Professor...betrayed us.

Go Glenn.

...the third's just around the corner to firm diagnosis.

1) Forgetfulness, a lot.

2) Anger[y], very

3) A genuine tell-tale cognitive mishap. All sort of possibilities.

Needs testing. ALL candidates for ANY high office do, maybe 'specially old people, but McCain's cryin' for it. And we haven't got any system in play to do it.

[Need one...standardized,lots of checks, fail-safes and monitors. Privacy for candidates be damned! They're total volunteers.]

Just do. And, of course, we won't.

-"..make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."

-"New York Times - 1 hour ago

By FELICITY BARRINGER Any major steps by the Bush administration to control air pollution or reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases came to a dead end on Friday..."

It will not be at all long before all such as this latter impedence will be seen as Crimes against the Climate..the air we all breathe, the whole world ...breathes and in which we are ALL bathed. For good and ill.

Betcha.

Which I if I remember right was going to shield

the entire Gulf coast.

And was to cost $30 billion..done, emplaced.

And that that translates into less than 3 months of Bush's

lousy adventure in manly done on the Middle East.

Just can't get by that - and then I think of bridges in Minnesota and...

Wouldn't it be nice to have vented kisoks...inside!, maybe with coffee for those cold winters for smokers who just haven't quite gotten through that horrid addiction.

I've heard about them but never ever seen.

We...Americans, at least...are very punitive when it comes to this worst of all addictions fed by American tobacco merchants-[of-death] and growers agri-subsidized right here in the good 'ol USA to grow that poison. And then we put the poor addictees out in cyclone fencing...I HAVE seen a lot of that.

A proud American industry right down to its toenails. And we've known since at least the Civil War that that tobacco roll was coffin-nails.

Sigh...

We shouldn't be shocked at all that Wall Street went completely overboard in its love affair with housing market manipulation. That's what happens when a market is left to its own devices, and government eschews its oversight responsibility. That's what always happens.

*Exactly right and well phrased.*

Too... if there is to be a nationalist and a privatist there is, might should be established, another group of us I'll call regulationist.

An entity established to see that both the marketeer's invariably bad behavior and the overseer's torpor or boughtness are both firmly in check and always left...balanced.

[All of that said...I'm still -personally- the sort of nasty who'd like to see lots of the gamer, schemer, scam & skimmer Wall Street/Financial 'Services' types go to work farms. Calluses are a thing existentially good. Revenge is fun and re-education has a nice ring.]

-He lost my monthly pittance with FISA. [I had held signs, canvassed, vote-got-out and stuff.]

-Still- He may well make us the best Pres in decades but us'ns don't forget. It was betrayal.

[All of that said, his sign is still in my front yard...but with a coupla question marks appended.

So a qualified sort of trust , nonetheless, persists. Oh well...]

Anita Bryant, that Harris creature from Florida...

I'm reminded of that awful Congeniality movie

(thank you IMDB)...Candace Bergen's character.

Or the meritocracy of good looks or the whole mean-girl cheer-leader schtick.

Or...

As far out as that character defect lies on the gaussian curve of character- defectives; it's not likely that sociopathy is that broadly operating.

BUT it's little brother, rather more often seen, is narcissism. Which sorta works. And it strikes me that the latter term is a very good descriptor for all these celebs, beautiful people types... the pundit-err-ific talking heads....Et al.