“The Perimeter system is very, very nice,” he says. “We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military.” He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.” Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

Chart source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won’t discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they’ve never heard of it. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. “I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that.” They weren’t.

The system remains so shrouded that Yarynich worries his continued openness puts him in danger. He might have a point: One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase. But Yarynich takes the risk. He believes the world needs to know about Dead Hand. Because, after all, it is still in place.

The system that Yarynich helped build came online in 1985, after some of the most dangerous years of the Cold War. Throughout the ’70s, the USSR had steadily narrowed the long US lead in nuclear firepower. At the same time, post-Vietnam, recession-era America seemed weak and confused. Then in strode Ronald Reagan, promising that the days of retreat were over. It was morning in America, he said, and twilight in the Soviet Union.

Part of the new president’s hard-line approach was to make the Soviets believe that the US was unafraid of nuclear war. Many of his advisers had long advocated modeling and actively planning for nuclear combat. These were the progeny of Herman Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War and Thinking About the Unthinkable. They believed that the side with the largest arsenal and an expressed readiness to use it would gain leverage during every crisis.

Illustration: Ryan Kelly

You either launch first or convince the enemy that you can strike back even if you’re dead.

The new administration began expanding the US nuclear arsenal and priming the silos. And it backed up the bombs with bluster. In his 1981 Senate confirmation hearings, Eugene Rostow, incoming head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, signaled that the US just might be crazy enough to use its weapons, declaring that Japan “not only survived but flourished after the nuclear attack” of 1945. Speaking of a possible US-Soviet exchange, he said, “Some estimates predict that there would be 10 million casualties on one side and 100 million on another. But that is not the whole of the population.”

Meanwhile, in ways both small and large, US behavior toward the Soviets took on a harsher edge. Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin lost his reserved parking pass at the State Department. US troops swooped into tiny Grenada to defeat communism in Operation Urgent Fury. US naval exercises pushed ever closer to Soviet waters.

The strategy worked. Moscow soon believed the new US leadership really was ready to fight a nuclear war. But the Soviets also became convinced that the US was now willing to start a nuclear war. “The policy of the Reagan administration has to be seen as adventurous and serving the goal of world domination,” Soviet marshal Nikolai Ogarkov told a gathering of the Warsaw Pact chiefs of staff in September 1982. “In 1941, too, there were many among us who warned against war and many who did not believe a war was coming,” Ogarkov said, referring to the German invasion of his country. “Thus, the situation is not only very serious but also very dangerous.”

A few months later, Reagan made one of the most provocative moves of the Cold War. He announced that the US was going to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to defend against Soviet warheads. He called it missile defense; critics mocked it as “Star Wars.”

To Moscow it was the Death Star—and it confirmed that the US was planning an attack. It would be impossible for the system to stop thousands of incoming Soviet missiles at once, so missile defense made sense only as a way of mopping up after an initial US strike. The US would first fire its thousands of weapons at Soviet cities and missile silos. Some Soviet weapons would survive for a retaliatory launch, but Reagan’s shield could block many of those. Thus, Star Wars would nullify the long-standing doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the principle that neither side would ever start a nuclear war since neither could survive a counterattack.

As we know now, Reagan was not planning a first strike. According to his private diaries and personal letters, he genuinely believed he was bringing about lasting peace. (He once told Gorbachev he might be a reincarnation of the human who invented the first shield.) The system, Reagan insisted, was purely defensive. But as the Soviets knew, if the Americans were mobilizing for attack, that’s exactly what you’d expect them to say. And according to Cold War logic, if you think the other side is about to launch, you should do one of two things: Either launch first or convince the enemy that you can strike back even if you’re dead.

Perimeter ensures the ability to strike back, but it’s no hair-trigger device. It was designed to lie semi-dormant until switched on by a high official in a crisis. Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions. Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil. If it seemed that one had, the system would check to see if any communication links to the war room of the Soviet General Staff remained. If they did, and if some amount of time—likely ranging from 15 minutes to an hour—passed without further indications of attack, the machine would assume officials were still living who could order the counterattack and shut down. But if the line to the General Staff went dead, then Perimeter would infer that apocalypse had arrived. It would immediately transfer launch authority to whoever was manning the system at that moment deep inside a protected bunker—bypassing layers and layers of normal command authority. At that point, the ability to destroy the world would fall to whoever was on duty: maybe a high minister sent in during the crisis, maybe a 25-year-old junior officer fresh out of military academy. And if that person decided to press the button … If/then. If/then. If/then. If/then.

Once initiated, the counterattack would be controlled by so-called command missiles. Hidden in hardened silos designed to withstand the massive blast and electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear explosion, these missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike. At that point, the machines will have taken over the war. Soaring over the smoldering, radioactive ruins of the motherland, and with all ground communications destroyed, the command missiles would lead the destruction of the US.

The US did build versions of these technologies, deploying command missiles in what was called the Emergency Rocket Communications System. It also developed seismic and radiation sensors to monitor for nuclear tests or explosions the world over. But the US never combined it all into a system of zombie retaliation. It feared accidents and the one mistake that could end it all.

Instead, airborne American crews with the capacity and authority to launch retaliatory strikes were kept aloft throughout the Cold War. Their mission was similar to Perimeter’s, but the system relied more on people and less on machines.

And in keeping with the principles of Cold War game theory, the US told the Soviets all about it.

Great Moments in Nuclear Game Theory

The first mention of a doomsday machine, according to P. D. Smith, author of Doomsday Men, was on an NBC radio broadcast in February 1950, when the atomic scientist Leo Szilard described a hypothetical system of hydrogen bombs that could cover the world in radioactive dust and end all human life. “Who would want to kill everybody on earth?” he asked rhetorically. Someone who wanted to deter an attacker. If Moscow were on the brink of military defeat, for example, it could halt an invasion by declaring, “We will detonate our H-bombs.”

A decade and a half later, Stanley Kubrick’s satirical masterpiece Dr. Strangelove permanently embedded the idea in the public imagination. In the movie, a rogue US general sends his bomber wing to preemptively strike the USSR. The Soviet ambassador then reveals that his country has just deployed a device that will automatically respond to any nuclear attack by cloaking the planet in deadly “cobalt-thorium-G.”

“The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!” cries Dr. Strangelove. “Why didn’t you tell the world?” After all, such a device works as a deterrent only if the enemy is aware of its existence. In the movie, the Soviet ambassador can only lamely respond, “It was to be announced at the party congress on Monday.”

In real life, however, many Mondays and many party congresses passed after Perimeter was created. So why didn’t the Soviets tell the world, or at least the White House, about it? No evidence exists that top Reagan administration officials knew anything about a Soviet doomsday plan. George Shultz, secretary of state for most of Reagan’s presidency, told me that he had never heard of it.

In fact, the Soviet military didn’t even inform its own civilian arms negotiators. “I was never told about Perimeter,” says Yuli Kvitsinsky, lead Soviet negotiator at the time the device was created. And the brass still won’t talk about it today. In addition to Yarynich, a few other people confirmed the existence of the system to me—notably former Soviet space official Alexander Zheleznyakov and defense adviser Vitali Tsygichko—but most questions about it are still met with scowls and sharp nyets. At an interview in Moscow this February with Vladimir Dvorkin, another former official in the Strategic Rocket Forces, I was ushered out of the room almost as soon as I brought up the topic.

So why was the US not informed about Perimeter? Kremlinologists have long noted the Soviet military’s extreme penchant for secrecy, but surely that couldn’t fully explain what appears to be a self-defeating strategic error of extraordinary magnitude.

The silence can be attributed partly to fears that the US would figure out how to disable the system. But the principal reason is more complicated and surprising. According to both Yarynich and Zheleznyakov, Perimeter was never meant as a traditional doomsday machine. The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves.

By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, Zheleznyakov says, was “to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished.”

And Perimeter bought the Soviets time. After the US installed deadly accurate Pershing II missiles on German bases in December 1983, Kremlin military planners assumed they would have only 10 to 15 minutes from the moment radar picked up an attack until impact. Given the paranoia of the era, it is not unimaginable that a malfunctioning radar, a flock of geese that looked like an incoming warhead, or a misinterpreted American war exercise could have triggered a catastrophe. Indeed, all these events actually occurred at some point. If they had happened at the same time, Armageddon might have ensued.

Perimeter solved that problem. If Soviet radar picked up an ominous but ambiguous signal, the leaders could turn on Perimeter and wait. If it turned out to be geese, they could relax and Perimeter would stand down. Confirming actual detonations on Soviet soil is far easier than confirming distant launches. “That is why we have the system,” Yarynich says. “To avoid a tragic mistake. ”

The mistake that both Yarynich and his counterpart in the United States, Bruce Blair, want to avoid now is silence. It’s long past time for the world to come to grips with Perimeter, they argue. The system may no longer be a central element of Russian strategy—US-based Russian arms expert Pavel Podvig calls it now “just another cog in the machine”—but Dead Hand is still armed.

To Blair, who today runs a think tank in Washington called the World Security Institute, such dismissals are unacceptable. Though neither he nor anyone in the US has up-to-the-minute information on Perimeter, he sees the Russians’ refusal to retire it as yet another example of the insufficient reduction of forces on both sides. There is no reason, he says, to have thousands of armed missiles on something close to hair-trigger alert. Despite how far the world has come, there’s still plenty of opportunity for colossal mistakes. When I talked to him recently, he spoke both in sorrow and in anger: “The Cold War is over. But we act the same way that we used to.”

Yarynich, likewise, is committed to the principle that knowledge about nuclear command and control means safety. But he also believes that Perimeter can still serve a useful purpose. Yes, it was designed as a self-deterrent, and it filled that role well during the hottest days of the Cold War. But, he wonders, couldn’t it now also play the traditional role of a doomsday device? Couldn’t it deter future enemies if publicized?

The waters of international conflict never stay calm for long. A recent case in point was the heated exchange between the Bush administration and Russian president Vladimir Putin over Georgia. “It’s nonsense not to talk about Perimeter,” Yarynich says. If the existence of the device isn’t made public, he adds, “we have more risk in future crises. And crisis is inevitable.”

As Yarynich describes Perimeter with pride, I challenge him with the classic critique of such systems: What if they fail? What if something goes wrong? What if a computer virus, earthquake, reactor meltdown, and power outage conspire to convince the system that war has begun?

Yarynich sips his beer and dismisses my concerns. Even given an unthinkable series of accidents, he reminds me, there would still be at least one human hand to prevent Perimeter from ending the world. Prior to 1985, he says, the Soviets designed several automatic systems that could launch counterattacks without any human involvement whatsoever. But all these devices were rejected by the high command. Perimeter, he points out, was never a truly autonomous doomsday device. “If there are explosions and all communications are broken,” he says, “then the people in this facility can—I would like to underline can—launch.”

Yes, I agree, a human could decide in the end not to press the button. But that person is a soldier, isolated in an underground bunker, surrounded by evidence that the enemy has just destroyed his homeland and everyone he knows. Sensors have gone off; timers are ticking. There’s a checklist, and soldiers are trained to follow checklists.

Wouldn’t any officer just launch? I ask Yarynich what he would do if he were alone in the bunker. He shakes his head. “I cannot say if I would push the button.”

It might not actually be a button, he then explains. It could now be some kind of a key or other secure form of switch. He’s not absolutely sure. After all, he says, Dead Hand is continuously being upgraded.

Senior editor Nicholas Thompson (nicholas_thompson@wired.com) is the author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War.

The following lines are excerpts from Democracy Now´s interview made by Amy Goodman.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you see American empire in ten, twenty, thirty years?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Prediction in human affairs is very low—has very little success, too many complications. The United States, I think, will come out of the economic crisis, very likely, as the dominant superpower. There’s a lot of talk about China and India, and it’s real, they’re changing, but they’re just not in the same league. I mean, both China and India have enormous internal problems that the West doesn’t face.

You get kind of a picture of this by looking at the Human Development Index of the United Nations. The last time I looked, India was about 125th or something. And I think China was about eightieth. And China would be worse, I think, if it wasn’t such a closed society. In India, you sort of get better data, so you can see what’s happening. China is kind of closed. You don’t see what’s going on in the peasant areas, which are in turmoil, you know. They have environmental problems. They have huge—hundreds of millions of people are kind of like at the edge of starvation.

We don’t have—you know, we have problems, but not those problems. And even the industrial growth, which is there—you know, for part of the population, there’s been improvement. But when you take, say, India, where we know more, in the areas where high-tech industries developed—and it’s pretty impressive. I’ve visited some of the labs in Hyderabad. You know, it’s as good or better than MIT. But right nearby, the rate of peasant suicides is going up, very sharply, in fact. And it’s the same source. It’s the neoliberal policies, which privilege a certain sector of the population and a certain—and let the rest take care of themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, the rise of progressives in Latin America?

NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s important. I mean, Latin America, for the first time in 500 years, is moving towards a degree of independence and a kind of integration, which is a prerequisite for independence, and also at least is beginning to face some of its massive internal problems. I mean, Latin America has probably the worst inequality in the world. There’s a wealthy sector, small wealthy sector, which is extremely rich, but they have—their tradition is that they have no responsibility to the country, so they send their capital to Zurich. You know, they have their second homes in the Riviera, and their children study in Oxford or whatever. This is beginning to be faced in different ways, but it’s sort of happening all over the continent. And they are beginning to integrate. The United States obviously doesn’t like it. In fact, it’s barely reported most of the time.

So there was a very interesting case last September, when President Morales in Bolivia—Bolivia is, in my opinion at least, probably the most democratic country in the world. Nobody says that, but if you look at what happened in the last couple of years, there were huge, popular, mass organizations of the most repressed population in the hemisphere, the indigenous population, which for the first time ever has entered the political arena significantly and were able to elect a president from their own ranks and one who doesn’t give instructions to his army, but who’s following policies that were largely produced by the population. So he’s their representative, in a sense in which democracy is supposed to work.

And they know the issues. It’s not like our elections. They know the issues. They’re serious issues: control over resources, economic justice, cultural rights, and so on. You can say they’re right or wrong, but at least it’s functioning.

Now, the elites that have traditionally ruled the country, of course, don’t like it. And they’re threatening virtual secession. And, of course, the United States is backing them, as the media are. And it got to the point last summer, I suppose, where it led to real violence.

Well, there was a meeting of UNASUR, the Union of South American Republics—that’s all of South America—a meeting in Chile, Santiago, Chile. And it came out with a declaration, important declaration, in which it supported President Morales and opposed the—condemned the violence being led by the quasi-secessionist forces. And Morales responded, thanking them for their gesture of support, but also saying, correctly, that this is the first time in 500 years that South America is beginning to take its affairs in its own hands without the intervention of foreign powers, primarily the US. Well, that was so important that I don’t think it was even reported here. I mean, the meeting was known, so you see vague references to it. But it’s an indication of developments that are taking place in various ways.

See Full interview.

The plane slowed and leveled out about a mile aboveground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps, and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the tiled roof. It was early June 1998, and the evening wind was warm. If it kept cooperating, Blanchard would touch down directly above the room that held the Koechert Diamond Pearl. He steered his parachute toward his target.

From Wired Magazine by Joshuah Bearman

A couple of days earlier, Blanchard had appeared to be just another twentysomething on vacation with his wife and her wealthy father. The three of them were taking a six-month grand European tour: London, Rome, Barcelona, the French Riviera, Vienna. When they stopped at the Schloss Schönbrunn, the Austrian equivalent of Versailles, his father-in-law’s VIP status granted them a special preview peek at a highly prized piece from a private collection. And there it was: In a cavernous room, in an alarmed case, behind bulletproof glass, on a weight-sensitive pedestal — a delicate but dazzling 10-pointed star of diamonds fanned around one monstrous pearl. Five seconds after laying eyes on it, Blanchard knew he would try to take it.

The docent began to describe the history of the Koechert Diamond Pearl, better known as the Sisi Star — it was one of many similar pieces specially crafted for Empress Elisabeth to be worn in her magnificently long and lovely braids. Sisi, as she was affectionately known, was assassinated 100 years ago. Only two stars remain, and it has been 75 years since the public had a glimpse of…

Blanchard wasn’t listening. He was noting the motion sensors in the corner, the type of screws on the case, the large windows nearby. To hear Blanchard tell it, he has a savantlike ability to assess security flaws, like a criminal Rain Man who involuntarily sees risk probabilities at every turn. And the numbers came up good for the star. Blanchard knew he couldn’t fence the piece, which he did hear the guide say was worth $2 million. Still, he found the thing mesmerizing and the challenge irresistible.

He began to work immediately, videotaping every detail of the star’s chamber. (He even coyly shot the “No Cameras” sign near the jewel case.) He surreptitiously used a key to loosen the screws when the staff moved on to the next room, unlocked the windows, and determined that the motion sensors would allow him to move — albeit very slowly — inside the castle. He stopped at the souvenir shop and bought a replica of the Sisi Star to get a feel for its size. He also noted the armed guards stationed at every entrance and patrolling the halls.

But the roof was unguarded, and it so happened that one of the skills Blanchard had picked up in his already long criminal career was skydiving. He had also recently befriended a German pilot who was game for a mercenary sortie and would help Blanchard procure a parachute. Just one night after his visit to the star, Blanchard was making his descent to the roof.

Aerial approaches are a tricky business, though, and Blanchard almost overshot the castle, slowing himself just enough by skidding along a pitched gable. Sliding down the tiles, arms and legs flailing for a grip, Blanchard managed to save himself from falling four stories by grabbing a railing at the roof’s edge. For a moment, he lay motionless. Then he took a deep breath, unhooked the chute, retrieved a rope from his pack, wrapped it around a marble column, and lowered himself down the side of the building.

Carefully, Blanchard entered through the window he had unlocked the previous day. He knew there was a chance of encountering guards. But the Schloss Schönbrunn was a big place, with more than 1,000 rooms. He liked the odds. If he heard guards, he figured, he would disappear behind the massive curtains.

The nearby rooms were silent as Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. Of course, he had that covered, too: He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.

Within minutes, the Sisi Star was in Blanchard’s pocket and he was rappelling down a back wall to the garden, taking the rope with him as he slipped from the grounds. When the star was dramatically unveiled to the public the next day, Blanchard returned to watch visitors gasp at the sheer beauty of a cheap replica. And when his parachute was later found in a trash bin, no one connected it to the star, because no one yet knew it was missing. It was two weeks before anyone realized that the jewelry had disappeared.

Later, the Sisi Star rode inside the respirator of some scuba gear back to his home base in Canada, where Blanchard would assemble what prosecutors later called, for lack of a better term, the Blanchard Criminal Organization. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of surveillance and electronics, Blanchard became a criminal mastermind. The star was the heist that transformed him from a successful and experienced thief into a criminal virtuoso.

“Cunning, clever, conniving, and creative,” as one prosecutor would call him, Blanchard eluded the police for years. But eventually he made a mistake. And that mistake would take two officers from the modest police force of Winnipeg, Canada, on a wild ride of high tech capers across Africa, Canada, and Europe. Says Mitch McCormick, one of those Winnipeg investigators, “We had never seen anything like it.”

Researchers at the Department of Health and Human Services are attributing the spike in cannabis consumption to a number of troubling factors, including Gary- related underemployment, decreased motivation, and prolonged exposure to Josh.

From The Onion Magazine

“This is very distressing, to say the least,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who blamed the increase on a lack of programs designed to educate Gary about the dangers of marijuana. “As a nation, it is vital that we learn how to talk to Gary about drugs—and how to listen to what he’s trying to tell us.”

“We’ve failed to recognize warning signs such as boredom and a growing need to just chill out,” Sebelius added. “But we intend to use every resource at our disposal to meet our goal of cutting marijuana use among Gary by half over the next 10 years.”

A recent survey conducted by HHS suggests that the drug’s recent popularity with Gary might be linked to his girlfriend Laura working longer hours lately, to his recent acquisition of a quarter ounce of weed, or to his growing belief that it is socially acceptable to be stoned as fuck all day long.

According to federal records, daily Gary marijuana use began at age 15 and rose steadily over the next two years, only to plummet dramatically in 2001 when Gary’s mother discovered the remains of a joint in an Altoids container on his dresser.

Despite the momentary decline, usage began creeping back up to previous levels almost immediately, with intake peaking in 2005 following the purchase of a sweet 3-foot glass bong.

“Our efforts to keep marijuana out of the hands of Gary have clearly been insufficient,” said Benjamin Whitmore, a researcher with the National Institute on Drug Abuse who recently found evidence that Gary can easily obtain pot from that one guy who always scores the super dank shit with all the crystals. “He already smoked his half of the bag he split with Kevin, and now he’s dipping into the rest of it. We’re looking at a full-blown, Gary-wide crisis here.”

Whitmore’s study indicates that constantly being fried can have a variety of negative effects on Gary, including a sharp uptick in the viewing of crappy movies and a noted decrease in Pop-Tart reserves.

In addition, being so fucking stoned all the time can affect job productivity, with Gary often delivering pizzas to the wrong house, or just showing up in customers’ living rooms without thinking to bring their orders.

One local marijuana expert confirmed that the drug has become a regular routine—and even a lifestyle—for Gary.

“Dude, he’s been smoking up like crazy,” roommate Chip Nichols said while carefully breaking apart a bud on the sleeve of Herbie Hancock’s 1974 record Thrust. “It’s awesome. First thing each day he wakes and bakes, and then an hour later he’s yelling that we’ve got to pack another bowl. He usually stops home between pizza deliveries to pull a couple tubes before driving back to work.”

Continued Nichols, “Dude, he’s been smoking up like crazy.”

Nichols said that pot-smoking among Gary had steadily dropped off in 2009, reaching an all-time low early this February, a circumstance possibly connected to Laura’s increasingly vocal disapproval of his habit and to Gary’s dealer getting busted.

Despite her criticism of federal policies that have failed to reverse the trend in Gary, Secretary Sebelius said the nation should be heartened by new reports that marijuana use has completely ceased among Chicago resident Erica, who recently got really high and totally freaked out while watching Starship Troopers.

Father Gabriele Amorth said people who are possessed by Satan vomit shards of glass and pieces of iron.

By Nick Squires in Rome from The Telegraph

He added that the assault on Pope Benedict XVI on Christmas Eve by a mentally unstable woman and the sex abuse scandals which have engulfed the Church in the US, Ireland, Germany and other countries, were proof that the Anti-Christ was waging a war against the Holy See.

“The Devil resides in the Vatican and you can see the consequences,” said Father Amorth, 85, who has been the Holy See’s chief exorcist for 25 years.

“He can remain hidden, or speak in different languages, or even appear to be sympathetic. At times he makes fun of me. But I’m a man who is happy in his work.”

While there was “resistance and mistrust” towards the concept of exorcism among some Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI has no such doubts, Father Amorth said. “His Holiness believes wholeheartedly in the practice of exorcism. He has encouraged and praised our work,” he added.

The evil influence of Satan was evident in the highest ranks of the Catholic hierarchy, with “cardinals who do not believe in Jesus and bishops who are linked to the demon,” Father Amorth said.

In a rare insight into the world of exorcism, the Italian priest told La Repubblica newspaper that the 1973 film The Exorcist gave a “substantially exact” impression of what it was like to be possessed by the Devil.

People possessed by evil sometimes had to be physically restrained by half a dozen people while they were exorcised. They would scream, utter blasphemies and spit out sharp objects, he said.

“From their mouths, anything can come out – pieces of iron as long as a finger, but also rose petals,” said Father Amorth, who claims to have performed 70,000 exorcisms. “When the possessed dribble and slobber, and need cleaning up, I do that too. Seeing people vomit doesn’t bother me. The exorcist has one principal duty – to free human beings from the fear of the Devil.”

The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II by a Turkish gunman in 1981 and recent revelations of “violence and paedophilia” committed by Catholic priests against children in their care was also the work of the Devil, said Father Amorth, who has written a book about his vocation, Memoirs of an Exorcist, which was published recently.

Father Amorth, who is the president of the Association of Exorcists and fought as a partisan during the war, has previously claimed that both Hitler and Stalin were possessed by the Devil.

In an interview with Vatican Radio in 2006, he said: “Of course the Devil exists and he can not only possess a single person but also groups and entire populations.

“I am convinced that the Nazis were all possessed. All you have to do is think about what Hitler and Stalin did.”

He also condemned the Harry Potter books, saying they were dangerous because they dabbled in the occult and failed to draw a clear distinction between “the Satanic art” of black magic and benevolent white magic.

All over Africa this evening, students will sit outside their homes and read textbooks under street lights. They do this because they have no electricity at home. In the West we know it costs very little to light a home: 1p an hour for a 100W bulb. Most poor people in Africa are not starving. They could afford some light. Africans do not lack electricity because they are poor — indeed power is so important for employment and education that it is more accurate to say they are poor because they don’t have electricity. What is going on?

By Paul Romer

The problem is that the rules that govern many developing countries don’t work. In Britain good laws, and the institutions that uphold them, have developed over hundreds of years. These ensure that power companies charge reasonable prices and provide reliable service. They also ensure that, in exchange, we pay. In Africa that doesn’t happen. It is to get round this problem that last week at Davos, at the World Economic Forum, and tomorrow night at a speech to the Policy Exchange think tank in London, I am proposing a strategy to get round the broken rules that hold people back: charter cities.

Instead of trying to change the rules in poor nations, I think we should ask how poor people can move somewhere with better rules. My idea is to build dozens, perhaps hundreds, of cities, each run by a new partnership between a rich country and a poor country. The poor country would give up some land for the city, while a developed country like Britain or Canada could contribute a credible judicial system that anchors the rule of law. Citizens from the poorer country (and perhaps elsewhere around the world) would then be free to live and work in the city that emerges. There are large swathes of uninhabited land on the coast of sub-Saharan Africa. Most is too dry for agriculture, but with desalinated and recycled water a city can pop up in the driest location.

To some this sounds like colonialism, but the developed partner country need not rule directly: residents of the city can administer the rules, so long as the well established judiciary retains the final say, just as the Privy Council still does for some members of the Commonwealth.

To others, this sounds like a feasible way to scale up the benefits from migration. Like migration, this approach would give poor people a chance to choose the rules they want to live and work under. All residents in new charter cities would be there by choice. A recent global Gallup survey found that 700m people want to move permanently to another country that offers safety and economic opportunity, so the odds are the charter cities would be popular.

How would they be paid for? With clear legal protections, private investors will build the buildings and infrastructure, including the power plants and grid. Access to the sea is the only real necessity — as long as a charter city can ship goods back and forth on container ships, it can thrive even if its neighbours turn hostile or unstable. And any administrative costs can be recouped from a special tax on the huge rise in land values that happens as a large well-run city develops.

For the West, the creation of charter cities could make its aid budgets much more efficient. The British experience in Hong Kong — arguably the world’s first “charter city” — shows that enforcing rules costs partners very little but can have a huge effect. Hong Kong helped to make reform in the rest of China possible, meaning the British intervention might be said to have done more to reduce world poverty than all the world’s official aid programmes of the 20th century combined — and at a fraction of the cost.

The idea can solve more pressing concerns, too. Take Haiti. The world’s fortunate citizens provide aid when such disasters strike. But what of the long term? Here aid doesn’t help as much. But if nations in the region around Haiti created just two charter cities, they could, in time, rehouse the island’s entire population. Senegal has raised the possibility that Haitians could live on a patch of its land. With the right governance structure, other countries might step forward as well. This is the best option for giving Haitians a real choice.

Roughly 3 billion people from the world’s working poor will move from villages to cities over the next few decades. The choice is not whether the world will urbanise — it’s doing so, fast — but where and under which rules. Cities are so valuable that people will choose slums over rural poverty if that is their only choice. But charter cities would give them another option. For this new global urban population, these new cities can provide safety, affordable housing, education and jobs. Even electricity at home. Building such cities and freeing people from the bad rules which bind them is the opportunity of the century.

Paul Romer is an economist at Stanford University and an expert in the field of economic growth. A longer version of this article appears in the February edition of Prospect magazine

Rats in laboratory tests learned to gamble based on a system of punishments and rewards, strategizing like human gamblers. And when researchers tweaked the animals’ brain chemistry to mimic that of humans with a gambling addiction, the mice began taking risks like pathological gamblers, according to a study published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

To create this animal model of gambling addiction, researchers created a system in which options that could bring greater rewards also could yield stronger punishment. In this case, however, instead of gambling for money, the rats aimed to get as many sugar pellets as possible. The rodents were placed in specially built boxes whose walls incorporated four “response holes.” Each opening was associated with a possibility of earning treats – from one up to four, depending on the aperture chosen. When an animal poked its snout into a hole, the movement would break an infra-red light across the opening, signaling a computer with a “probabilistic” reward-punishment schedule to assign a pellet win or a “timeout” loss. Playing against the clock, the rats had only 30 minutes to accumulate as many sugar pellets as they could [The Canadian Press].

The rats quickly caught on that by choosing the openings that offered the greatest number of pellets, they also risked the longest time-outs during which they could not play the game. The test was based on an evaluation for decision-making in humans called the Iowa Gambling Test. In that game, there are some “bad” decks of cards that offer high rewards and punishments, and other “good” decks that offer lesser rewards and punishments.

The animals learned that the best way to maximize the number of pellets was to play conservatively, and they began choosing openings that offered fewer pellets but lesser punishments, instead of risking long time-outs for a jackpot of pellets. But when the researchers lowered the rats’ levels of serotonin, a chemical associated with impulse control and depleted in addictive gamblers, the rats’ decision-making skills were impaired. They began taking bigger risks, just like human pathological gamblers. “They weren’t as good at telling what was the best option anymore,” said [co-author] Catharine Winstanley [CBC].

Scientists hope that the correlations between human and rat brain chemistry and gambling behavior put forth by the research will offer clues for treatment of gambling addictions and other impulse control disorders. Says Winstanley: “This coincides with data we’ve seen from pathological gamblers, who have been shown to have lower levels of serotonin in their brains…. This also ties in neatly with clinical findings in humans” [BBC].

The Cannabis Cafe in Portland, Oregon, is the first to give certified medical marijuana users a place to obtain the drug and smoke it, as long as they are out of public view, despite a federal ban.

The cafe was formerly a speakeasy and adult erotic club, Rumpspankers. Technically it is private, but is open to any Oregon members of Norml – a group pushing for marijuana legalisation – who hold a medical marijuana card. It has no drinks licence.

“This club represents personal freedom, finally, for our members,” said Madeline Martinez, Oregon’s executive director of Norml. Members pay $25 a month. They do not buy marijuana, but get it free over the counter from “budtenders”.

There are about 21,000 patients registered to use marijuana for medical purposes in Oregon.

If you read that and thought, “Wait a second, is this a potentially beneficial effect of cocaine on your brain that they’re trying to spin as a danger?” then yes you are right. Potentially. There is a well established connection between number of dendritic spines and intelligence as measured by IQ (retarded children have long misshapen dendrites which are unevenly dispersed), but it really has to do with what pathways that extra dendritic power is being used to reinforce. In the case of “bad drugs,” the article just arbitrarily assumes that it would be “the desire for more drugs.”

I have always thought what you do on drugs is as important as the drugs themselves, eg people who take LSD and teach themselves to type in a day versus people who stare at a wall in silence, reenforcing the “the stare at a wall in silence” pathway in their limbic system. This is something i think might contribute to permanently “acid burned” people–these are usually the people who are/were least likely to stimulate themselves intellectually while under the influence of a psychedelic. I have no direct evidence for this obviously. Right now it’s just a thought that makes me feel better about using 2C-D to study astronomy for months.

It is something, however, I’ve done a bit of research on, mostly in the vein of John Lilly’s “metaprogramming the human biocomputer” or “ketaprogramming” or what not, using NMDA antagonists to enhance neural plasticity. Initially I wanted to sell a line of ketamine-based ADHD treatment tapes but they went the way of my heroin-scented bodyspray and beef-flavored valium schemes.

The Lilly book unfortunately doesn’t mention ketamine a single time, but it does mention LSD. Here’s where it ties in to what we were talking about:

“Certain chemical substances have programmatic and/or metaprogrammatic effects, i.e., they change the operations of the computer, some at the programmatic level and some at the metaprogrammatic level. Some substances which are of interest at the metaprogrammatic level are those that allow reprogramming, and those that allow and facilitate modifications of the metaprograms….

“For example, the term “reprogramming substances” may be appropriate for compounds like lysergic acid diethylamide. For substances like ethyl alcohol the term “metaprogram-attenuating substances” may be useful.”

But this G9a business contradicts Lilly a bit. Although the study only examines cocaine I have no doubt that EVERY psychoactive substance produces structural changes in the brain (beyond the obvious cascade of neurotransmitters and blocking or unblocking of various pores and channels). So alcohol may not be so much a “metaprogram-attenuating substance” as much as a substance which writes a shitty metaprogram. if you look at a neuroscience textbook printed before the early 90s it will say that eurons cannot regenerate. It was not until recently that neuroscientists realized neurogenesis occurs in adults, and even more recently that it is a common effect of SSRI antidepressants which are thought to exert some of their therapeutic effect by inducing neurogenesis in the hippocampus.

BUT THEN LISTEN TO THIS:

“Caffeine was added to rat neurons in vitro. The dendritic spines taken from the hippocampus grew by 33% and new spines formed. After an hour or two, however, these cells returned to their original shape.”

Sound familiar? It’s a bit different in that they are observing the hippocampus and not the NAcc as in the cocaine study, but the basic premise is the same. Now think about the behavioral difference in cocaine users versus caffeine users and what the intend to purpose of their respective drugs is: Caffeine is used to anxiously go to work and take a shit, whereas cocaine is used to engage in impulsive/sexual/self-destructive behavior. The question becomes: Does the behavior make the drug or does the drug make the behavior? It’s a combination of the two.

I think all of this comes back to an interesting problem: It’s like the movie Lawnmower Man, when we think of a “smart drug” we think of a pill that effortlessly and instantaneously raises our intelligence, but I think the real key is to understand that you must COOPERATE with the drug. Once you understand this, then a wealth of potent “smart drugs” already exist, eg 2C-D, amphetamines, and (tentatively) ketamine. A “smart drug” allows us to alter our everyday (sober) patterns of learning and concentration for the better by reinforcing activity on these desirable pathways.

Whew, anyway now you’ve got me on an adderal rant! (It’s good though, it’s strengthening my rant pathway.)

HAMILTON MORRIS from Vice Magazine