Minggu, 05 Maret 2017
A Giant Neuron Has Been Found Wrapped Around the Entire Circumference of the Brain - ScienceAlert
For the first time, scientists have detected a giant neuron wrapped around the entire circumference of a mouse's brain, and it's so densely connected across both hemispheres, it could finally explain the origins of consciousness.
Using a new imaging technique, the team detected the giant neuron emanating from one of the best-connected regions in the brain, and say it could be coordinating signals from different areas to create conscious thought.
This recently discovered neuron is one of three that have been detected for the first time in a mammal's brain, and the new imaging technique could help us figure out if similar structures have gone undetected in our own brains for centuries.
At a recent meeting of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative in Maryland, a team from the Allen Institute for Brain Science described how all three neurons stretch across both hemispheres of the brain, but the largest one wraps around the organ's circumference like a "crown of thorns".
You can see them highlighted in the image at the top of the page.
Lead researcher Christof Koch told Sara Reardon at Nature that they've never seen neurons extend so far across both regions of the brain before.
Oddly enough, all three giant neurons happen to emanate from a part of the brain that's shown intriguing connections to human consciousness in the past - the claustrum, a thin sheet of grey matter that could be the most connected structure in the entire brain, based on volume.
This relatively small region is hidden between the inner surface of the neocortex in the centre of the brain, and communicates with almost all regions of cortex to achieve many higher cognitive functions such as language, long-term planning, and advanced sensory tasks such as seeing and hearing.
"Advanced brain-imaging techniques that look at the white matter fibres coursing to and from the claustrum reveal that it is a neural Grand Central Station," Koch wrote for Scientific American back in 2014. "Almost every region of the cortex sends fibres to the claustrum."
The claustrum is so densely connected to several crucial areas in the brain that Francis Crick of DNA double helix fame referred to it a "conductor of consciousness" in a 2005 paper co-written with Koch.
They suggested that it connects all of our external and internal perceptions together into a single unifying experience, like a conductor synchronises an orchestra, and strange medical cases in the past few years have only made their case stronger.
Back in 2014, a 54-year-old woman checked into the George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates in Washington, DC, for epilepsy treatment.
This involved gently probing various regions of her brain with electrodes to narrow down the potential source of her epileptic seizures, but when the team started stimulating the woman's claustrum, they found they could effectively 'switch' her consciousness off and on again.
Helen Thomson reported for New Scientist at the time:
"When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space, she didn't respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed.
As soon as the stimulation stopped, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of the event. The same thing happened every time the area was stimulated during two days of experiments."
According to Koch, who was not involved in the study, this kind of abrupt and specific 'stopping and starting' of consciousness had never been seen before.
Another experiment in 2015 examined the effects of claustrum lesions on the consciousness of 171 combat veterans with traumatic brain injuries.
They found that claustrum damage was associated with the duration, but not frequency, of loss of consciousness, suggesting that it could play an important role in the switching on and off of conscious thought, but another region could be involved in maintaining it.
And now Koch and his team have discovered extensive neurons in mouse brains emanating from this mysterious region.
In order to map neurons, researchers usually have to inject individual nerve cells with a dye, cut the brain into thin sections, and then trace the neuron's path by hand.
It's a surprisingly rudimentary technique for a neuroscientist to have to perform, and given that they have to destroy the brain in the process, it's not one that can be done regularly on human organs.
Koch and his team wanted to come up with a technique that was less invasive, and engineered mice that could have specific genes in their claustrum neurons activated by a specific drug.
"When the researchers fed the mice a small amount of the drug, only a handful of neurons received enough of it to switch on these genes," Reardon reports for Nature.
"That resulted in production of a green fluorescent protein that spread throughout the entire neuron. The team then took 10,000 cross-sectional images of the mouse brain, and used a computer program to create a 3D reconstruction of just three glowing cells."
We should keep in mind that just because these new giant neurons are connected to the claustrum doesn't mean that Koch's hypothesis about consciousness is correct - we're a long way from proving that yet.
It's also important to note that these neurons have only been detected in mice so far, and the research has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, so we need to wait for further confirmation before we can really delve into what this discovery could mean for humans.
But the discovery is an intriguing piece of the puzzle that could help up make sense of this crucial, but enigmatic region of the brain, and how it could relate to the human experience of conscious thought.
The research was presented at the 15 February meeting of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative in Bethesda, Maryland.
Did the Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living in a Computer Simulation? - The New Yorker
The bizarre finale to Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony brought to mind the theory—far from a joke—that humanity is living in a computer simulation gone haywire.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY EDDY CHEN / ABC VIA GETTY
Last night’s Oscars bizarreness was not just bizarre but bizarre in a way that is typical of this entirely bizarre time. The rhythm of the yes-they-won-oh-my-God-no-they-didn’t event, with “La La Land” replaced by “Moonlight” as Best Picture, was weirdly like that of . . . Election Night. First, a more or less expected, if “safe,” result was on its way—although Hillary Clinton never got all the way to the stage, so to speak, the result did seem safely in hand at 7 P.M., according to the polling—and the expected and safe people were ready to deliver their touching but obviously polished pieces. Then the sudden confusion and visible near-panic of people running around in the background of the stage, with the same slightly horrified spirit that one felt on Election Night as shocking results began emerging from the exurban counties in Florida. Then, yes—can this be happening?—the revised and unexpected result.
In this case, obviously, the result was positive to all but the poor “La La Land” producers, with their earnest and spouse-approved speeches already delivered. “Moonlight” was no Donald Trump of cinema, and obviously a popular favorite. (Though there are those of us who found its beautifully photographed sentiments a bit, well, sentimental.) But the rhythm of the night was disconcertingly the same, and the sheer improbability of the happenstance scarily alike. Nothing like this has remotely happened before. This wasn’t just a minor kerfuffle. This was a major malfunction. Trump cannot be President; forgetting all the bounds of ideology, no one vaguely like him has ever existed in the long list of Presidents, good, bad, and indifferent; no one remotely as oafish or as crude or as obviously unfit. People don’t say “Grab ’em by the pussy” and get elected President. Can’t happen. In the same way, while there have been Oscar controversies before—tie votes and rejected trophies—never before has there been an occasion when the entirely wrong movie was given the award, the speeches delivered, and then another movie put in its place. That doesn’t happen. Ever.
And so both of these bizarre events put one in mind of a simple but arresting thesis: that we are living in the Matrix, and something has gone wrong with the controllers. This idea was, I’m told, put forward first and most forcibly by the N.Y.U. philosopher David Chalmers: what is happening lately, he says, is support for the hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation and that something has recently gone haywire within it. The people or machines or aliens who are supposed to be running our lives are having some kind of breakdown. There’s a glitch, and we are in it.
Once this insight is offered, it must be said, everything else begins to fall in order. The recent Super Bowl, for instance. The result, bizarre on the surface—with that unprecedented and impossible comeback complete with razzle-dazzle catches and completely blown coverages and defensive breakdowns—makes no sense at all in the “real” world. Doesn’t happen. But it is exactly what you expect to happen when a teen-ager and his middle-aged father exchange controllers in the EA Sports video-game version: the father stabs and pushes the buttons desperately while the kid makes one play after another, and twenty-five-point leads are erased in minutes, and in just that way—with ridiculous ease on the one side and chicken-with-its-head-cut-off panic infecting the other. What happened, then, one realizes with last-five-minutes-of-“The Twilight Zone” logic, is obvious: sometime in the third quarter, the omniscient alien or supercomputer that was “playing” the Patriots exchanged his controller with his teen-age offspring, or newer model, with the unbelievable result we saw.
There may be not merely a glitch in the Matrix. There may be a Loki, a prankster, suddenly running it. After all, the same kind of thing seemed to happen on Election Day: the program was all set, and then some mischievous overlord—whether alien or artificial intelligence doesn’t matter—said, “Well, what if he did win? How would they react?” “You can’t do that to them,” the wiser, older Architect said. “Oh, c’mon,” the kid said. “It’ll be funny. Let’s see what they do!” And then it happened. We seem to be living within a kind of adolescent rebellion on the part of the controllers of the video game we’re trapped in, who are doing this for their strange idea of fun.
The thesis that we are in a simulation is, as people who track such things know—my own college-age son has explained it to me—far from a joke, or a mere conceit. The argument, actually debated at length at the American Museum of Natural History just last year, is that the odds are overwhelming that ours is a simulated universe. The argument is elegant. Because the advance of intelligence seems like the one constant among living things—and since living things are far likelier than not to be spread around the universe—then one of the things that smart living things will do is make simulations of other universes in which to run experiments. (We’re not all that smart, and we’re already starting to do it, modelling large interacting economies and populations on our own, presumably “primitive” computers.)
Since there will be only one “real” universe, and countless simulated ones, the odds that we are living in one of the simulations instead of the one actual reality are overwhelming. If intelligent life exists, then we are surely likely to be living in one of its Matrices. (Or Matrixes, depending on how you grammatize it.) As Clara Moskowitz, writing in Scientific American, no less, explains succinctly, “A popular argument for the simulation hypothesis came from University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum in 2003, when he suggested that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors. They would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, to the point where the vast majority of minds would actually be artificial ones within such simulations, rather than the original ancestral minds. So simple statistics suggest it is much more likely that we are among the simulated minds.”
The implicit dread logic is plain. If we are among the simulated minds, then we exist in order to be stimulated minds: we exist in order for the controllers to run experiments. Until recently, our simulation, the Matrix within which we were unknowingly imprisoned, seemed in reasonably sound hands. Terrible things did happen as the cold-blooded, unemotional machines that ran it experimented with the effects of traumatic events—wars, plagues, “Gilligan’s Island”—on hyper-emotionalized programs such as us. And yet the basic logic of the enfolding program seemed sound. Things pinned down did not suddenly drift toward the ceiling; cats did not go to Westminster; Donald Trump did not get elected President; the movie that won Best Picture was the movie that won Best Picture. Now everything has gone haywire, and anything can happen.
Whether we are at the mercy of an omniscient adolescent prankster or suddenly the subjects of a more harrowing experiment than any we have been subject to before (is our alien overlords’ funding threatened, thus forcing them to “show results” to the grant-giving institution that doubtless oversees all the simulations?), we can now expect nothing remotely normal to take place for a long time to come. They’re fiddling with our knobs, and nobody knows the end.
Or perhaps, let us pray, it’s just that someone forgot to plug in an important part of the machine, and, when they spot the problem, they’ll plug us back in to the usual psychological circuits. Let’s hope for a sudden mysterious surge of energy, and then normalcy again. But don’t count on it. Expect the worst. Oh, wait. It’s already happened.
Screech owls keep blind snakes as live-in housekeepers - Earth Touch
An owl inviting a snake to live in the nest with its babies may sound like the plot of a kids' movie, but nature is full of unlikely partnerships, and in Texas, screech owls do have a habit of bringing tiny blind snakes home with them.
Eastern screech owls can be found all over eastern North America. They're known for their small size – they're only 15-25cm (6-10 inches) tall – and for their noisy cries. But like all owls, they're expert hunters, flying on silent wings and snatching up prey under the cover of darkness.
During nesting season, the birds don't just hunt for themselves. When they capture prey, they kill it – often removing its head, you know, just to be sure – and bring it back to the tree hole where hungry owlets are waiting. But one animal seems to be safe from the screech owls' talons: the Texas blind snake. These captives are brought back to the nest alive.
This unusual behaviour was noticed by researchers back in the 1980s, while they were observing the owls hunting. "Reptilian prey often dangles from the bill of adult screech owls upon delivery to a nest, but … live blind snakes were coiled about the bills of the owls that carried them," they note in their study.
Texas blind snakes (or thread snakes) could easily be mistaken for worms. They're typically less than 30cm (12 inches) long and spend most of their time burrowing through soil. Despite their name, they aren't completely blind, but it's pretty close – the snakes use their tongues and noses to track down tiny bugs, which they vacuum up with their bizarre forward-and-backward swinging jaws.
Puzzled by the owls' snake-sparing behaviour, the scientists studied their nests for a period of time. They found that while some of the blind snakes did get eaten by the owl chicks, most ended up burrowing into the debris at the bottom of the nest, where they would continue to live for days, out of sight – and beak – of the birds.
But there was more. Close inspection revealed that nests with snakes in them had far fewer bugs. It turns out the reptilian roomies weren't just surviving in their new digs – they were also finding food: critters like ants, termites or larvae, some of which likely hitchhiked in from the outside world on the momma owl.
So was the presence of the snakes good for the growing chicks, the researchers wondered? It seemed possible that the reptiles were gobbling up potentially pesky bugs that might otherwise become parasites to the growing chicks, or contaminate their food.
For several weeks they watched, weighed and assessed the nestlings. In the end, they found that baby birds living with blind snake roommates tended to grow faster and had better chances of survival. The snakes being brought to the nest alive wasn't simply an accident – they were acting as tiny, unwitting parenting aides!
This is a remarkable case of symbiosis – a partnership between species. Some have called it mutualism, which describes a situation where two species benefit each other, but given the fact that the snakes are still sometimes eaten by the owlets (and don't survive well once the nest is vacated), this might really by a commensal relationship, where one species reaps a benefit and the other does its best to deal with the situation.
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Top header image: Alan McDonley/Flickr
Prince Jared Is Trying to Consolidate His White House Power - Vanity Fair
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was in flight somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, en route to a meeting of G20 leaders in Bonn, Germany, when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the White House earlier this month for what seemed to be a mutual attempt at a kumbaya moment. The convocation of Netanyahu and Donald Trump, two inscrutable world leaders, was widely anticipated for a number of reasons; not only did Trump’s fledgling administration appear keen on resetting its relationship with Israel and its leader, but they also seemed to be oscillating on their approach to facilitating peace in the region. Moreover, the two men, while notably different, shared a deep, and unusual bond. Trump, on the one hand, was a draft dodger, serially bankrupt real estate developer, who was enduring his first month of real governmental experience. Netanyahu, on the other, was a decorated war hero, who had worked at the staid and punctilious Boston Consulting Group, who became the leader of the Likud Party during the early days of the Clinton administration. But they did have one thing in common: Jared Kushner.
Upon his arrival, Netanyahu and his wife were greeted by Donald and Melania Trump before the two men walked onstage in the East Room of the White House. Framed by both an American and Israeli flag, with the room’s familiar gold drapes swaying behind them, the two prepared to address the media and top advisors. At one point, a reporter asked the president about the rise of anti-Semitic incidents across the country since he launched his campaign. Trump muttered a perplexing answer that was more of a boast about his victory in the electoral college than a reassurance to the Jewish community. Netanyahu, however, came to his new ally’s defense. “I’ve known President Trump for many years, and to allude to him, or to his people—his team, some of whom I’ve known for many years, too,” he said. “Can I reveal, Jared, how long we’ve known you?”
He was, of course, referring to Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, and an observant Orthodox Jew who is the heir to a prominent New Jersey real-estate billionaire who has spent part of his vast fortune supporting Democrats and Jewish charities. Decades ago, Kushner offered his childhood bedroom up to Netanyahu when the prime minister visited the U.S., according to The New York Times. All these years later, it seemed, Kushner and Netanyahu’s bond had endured. The two had recently shared dinner with Tillerson, before his overseas trip, a source familiar with the situation told me. And Kushner, who enjoys something of a sprawling, amorphous West Wing portfolio (he is nominally in charge of job creation, cutting governmental I.T. costs and brokering peace in the Middle East, among other issues), appears to have grown more comfortable in meetings with foreign officials, despite his lack of political or diplomatic experience. When Mexican foreign minister Luis Videgaray visited Washington earlier this month to discuss his country’s strained relationship with the Trump administration, he sat down with Tillerson and Kushner to hammer things out, a source familiar with the situation told me. When Tillerson was planning his trip to Mexico, Kushner joined him to present the details of his plans to Trump. (Tillerson would reportedly not learn of Trump’s walk-back of his commitment to a two-state solution for Middle East peace until the press conference at which Netanyahu invoked the president and Kushner.)
Kushner has wobbled somewhat as he has figured out his footing in the West Wing. In his first week, one source previously told me that he lost seven pounds and got “fucking furious” with his father-in-law after he blew up a meeting with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto. But Kushner has nevertheless held court as some of the country’s most powerful executives visited the White House, and, as one source pointed out to me last month, chaos tends to break out in the West Wing between sundown on Friday and sundown on Saturday, when Kushner observes Shabbat, and the administration tends to clean up the mess once he is back to work by Sunday. (These weekend kerfuffles have become less frequent. The Kushners have traveled with Trump to Palm Beach or stayed with him in D.C. over the last three weekends.)
As the Trump administration moves into its second month in operation, it appears that the president is keen to rely less on the traditional levers of bureaucracy in Washington—agencies, cabinet secretaries and governmental departments—in favor of a management style somewhere between his own family business and a royal court. Rather than allow power to be spread diffusely across the so-called permanent state, he appears to want it gathered within a few hands in the White House. In the meantime, Kushner appears to be consolidating his power based on his connection to the president.
He is not the first to do so. Previous presidential advisers, such as Valerie Jarrett, have siphoned the traditional powers claimed by Cabinet members and other White House staffers by flexing their muscles in the West Wing. Hillary Clinton tested the bounds of her role as First Lady with her health-care initiative in her husband’s first term. But Kushner, whether due to his own confidence in his staying power, or his father-in-law’s instinctual distrust for bureaucrats outside his inner circle, has carved out a hybrid role for himself that appears virtually boundless. He has commissioned C.E.O.s from Dow Chemical, Walmart, General Motors, and IBM to help fill some of the 500,000 vacant government jobs with public-private partnerships to create job-training programs that will serve as pipelines for those roles, a source familiar with the situation told me.
Along with his slate of economic and innovation-focused initiatives, Kushner also has a foreign-policy role to play. It is a demanding job for a 36-year-old with no previous government experience. One person close to the Trumps told me that when Kushner and his wife, Ivanka, sat down for a casual lunch in the White House soon after the inauguration, the president looked his son-in-law in the eye and mused that he had a lot on his plate, pointing to his commitments on jobs, I.T., and the Middle East. Still, Kushner has yet to lose his faith, even as other members of the president’s inner circle fall in and out of favor. It was Kushner and his wife who kept President Trump company as he scarfed down a well-done steak slathered in ketchup in their own branded hotel this past weekend while Tillerson and his wife ate separately, across the room, outside of the security perimeter, according to an Independent Journal Review reporter who booked a table at the restaurant to observe.
Indeed, The Washington Post reported last weekend that Kushner was acting as “almost a shadow secretary of state,” hovering over the shoulder of Tillerson, who spent a decade as chairman and chief executive at ExxonMobil, the world’s sixth most valuable company. The source familiar with the situation told me that Kushner, who took over his father’s real-estate company when he was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison, has stood eye-to-eye with Tillerson and James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a retired general and current Defense secretary, and they have, in turn, sought out Kushner’s counsel before they have gone to the president with ideas or concerns. (Neither the State Department nor Mattis immediately responded to a request for comment.)
“They seek him out. If they’re about to go talk to the president, they ask him if they can stop by his office to talk about things,” this person told me. “They know Donald is going to ask him about what they come to him with anyway.”
Kushner’s maneuvers seem premised on the widely assumed idea that most of Trump’s top aides and advisers are merely passing through his enigmatic orbit. That has been clear during Trump’s first month in the White House, as a veritable scoreboard of who’s up and who’s down has been closely monitored and widely mocked. As leaks pour out of the West Wing about Kellyanne Conway getting benched from television appearances and Stephen Miller being praised for his interviews, Steve Bannon architecting the so-called Muslim ban, and Sean Spicer angering his boss with his liberal tailoring (and even a leak about leaks), Kushner consistently seems to be steady in place, whether the team comes out on top or crashes and burns.
On the economic front, Kushner is positioning himself for some layups. As one longtime friend told me earlier this month, he is focusing on reducing I.T. spending among government employees. He wooed Gary Cohn and Dina Powell over from their cushy perches at Goldman Sachs to serve alongside him in the West Wing on these economic issues, according to the source familiar with the situation. He got Dow Chemical C.E.O. Andrew Liveris, IBM’s Ginni Rometty, Pepsi’s Indra Nooyi, and GM’s Mary Barra to meet with him and agree to work on job-training initiatives to help fill hundreds of thousands of government positions that currently sit empty, the same source said.
And then there is the foreign-policy responsibilities that he has taken on, as a millennial New Jersey-native who has spent the entirety of his professional life until now running a real estate firm and a weekly newspaper, The New York Observer, about the goings-on in New York culture and society. The source familiar with the situation told me that Kushner is not jockeying for power or trying to be a shadow secretary of state. Foreign leaders began communicating with Kushner more than six months ago when it became clear that his father-in-law would be the nominee, and the relationships he’s built with dozens of them have carried over into the White House, the source said. Part of the reason they come to him is the familiarity, and another part is that they know Kushner will be close to the Oval as long as Trump is still there.
“People are coming to them because they know at the end of the day, they’ve been they’ve been there for 20 years before and they’ll be there for 20 years after. The world is not stupid,” the source said. “Foreign policy isn’t about the books you’ve read. This is real life. It’s about who speaks to the president.”
This has, at times, left the people whose official jobs are to deal with foreign leaders out of the loop. Trump rejected Tillerson’s choice of a deputy, Elliott Abrams, reportedly for disparaging the president during the campaign. As The Washington Post points out, Tillerson has made only one public speech as secretary of state and has not held any news conferences, nor has the State Department held any daily briefings, which have been a tradition since the 1950s. (State has said these will resume soon.) Many of the policy, hiring, and scheduling decisions have been made by the White House, the Post reported, leaving Tillerson without clear talking points or chance for a voice, which is why he has remained mostly quiet.
But the source close to the situation said that Kushner, Tillerson, Mattis, and John Kelly are all working together as a team, and instead of seeing Kushner as a rival secretary of state, they view him as a honest broker between the president, foreign leaders, and Cabinet secretaries. So when Tillerson was preparing for his trip to Mexico last week, according to this source, the triumvirate of Kushner, Tillerson, and Kelly planned and executed the trip together. It was the three of them who briefed President Trump on the trip. Kushner also met with Vice President Mike Pence ahead of his trip to Germany and Brussels last week, as he did with Mattis, with whom the source said “he talks constantly.”
While Kushner has managed to navigate the issue of nepotism in the West Wing, Ivanka Trump has had a harder time. In some ways, she is pushing through the sort of advocacy for women and children she’s said for months she wanted to do in Washington. Last week, she set up a meeting at the White House to discuss human trafficking and traveled to Baltimore to convene a meeting with small-business owners. She’s laid out a plan for Congress that would give income tax credits to help families pay for childcare and she sat in on a number of White House meetings in which leaders discussed opportunities for women in business. She was credited with helping Kushner convince her father to abandon a potential LGBTQ executive order, and as sources told me earlier this month, she has expressed her reluctance with the so-called Muslim ban to her father. She publicly commented about the rise in anti-Semitic attacks before her father did—in fact, he commented on them only hours after she did, with Ivanka, who converted to Judaism before marrying Kushner, by his side. A source close to Ivanka told me that while President Trump had wanted to comment on the threats on his own, Ivanka did support him making public remarks.
But when it came to the administration rolling back the transgender bathroom protections, Ivanka Trump stayed mum. She said nothing when millions of women across the country and outside of her father’s new front door marched in support of their rights. She has not publicly discussed much of anything. It is not the role of a First Daughter who holds no official role in the White House, to do anything, let alone speak out about policy. And given her relationship with her father, it is unlikely that she would ever publicly come down on something he supports. But Ivanka Trump has made it clear that she does not merely want to be a First Daughter. She has posted photos from a number of these White House meetings, from behind the desk in the Oval Office, from the steps of the Supreme Court, to show that she participated. At times, she is a vocal advocate and close adviser; and at others, she silently pulls the “I’m just a First Daughter” card. “She’s running this like a businesswoman, holding meetings, but she hasn’t gotten her hands dirty,” one source told me. “The reality is that she’s in line behind everyone else trying to get her father’s ear and keep his approval.”
While her husband seems to be enjoying rarified air, he, too, isn’t immune to the brush-off from his father-in-law, this source said. “Trump yells at him in front of people all the time,” the source close to the family told me. “He’s in line, too.”
George W. Bush Paints Love Letters to the Men and Women He Sent to War: 'I Think About Their Troubles and Their Joys' - PEOPLE.com
Painting started as a post-presidency pastime. But with the release this week of George W. Bush‘s first art book, the 43rd president of the United States can call his meticulous and dogged study of portraiture a labor of love.
“It consumed me,” Bush tells PEOPLE of his just-published Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors, a collection of paintings honoring the military men and women who have served the country since the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001.
As the former president’s one-time chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, writes in the foreword, the volume is “a message of love—from a commander in chief to his troops.”
Joe Pugliese
Speaking with PEOPLE in the spotless attic that serves as his Dallas home studio, TV room and office, Bush said he worked for a year—mostly at night—to paint more than 100 of the wounded vets he’s befriended since he left the White House in 2009. “I was thinking of their stories, their troubles, their joys,” he says of his subjects.
“These are men and women who I’ve gotten to know and really like. We just share a bond that is hard for people to understand,” Bush says in the interview for the issue of PEOPLE on newsstands Friday.
It’s a bond to which Bush has dedicated his “retirement.”
Between spoiling his granddaughters and indulging his inner Rembrandt, the former president, 70, works—and plays—with wounded warriors to make sure they get the health care and employment assistance they need for successful transition to civilian life. At the George W. Bush Presidential Center on the Southern Methodist University campus not far from his Dallas home, Bush’s policy team works on health care and employment programs for post-9/11 veterans, who, Bush says, too often struggle with the invisible wounds of war—like post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury—and the adjustment to civilian life.
Peter Zambouros
The former president himself is hands-on in this work. Fortified by twin knee replacements, stents in his heart and back surgery, Bush invites wounded vets to join him for golf, mountain biking and pool parties at his home.
“A lot of these vets get stigmatized and they say, ‘I don’t want anybody to know I’m struggling.’ You can’t help a person who is not willing to be helped,” Bush tells PEOPLE. “My message is that it’s courageous to talk about your injuries—those you can see and those you can’t see.”
In the former president’s signature style, that message is often delivered with a chuckle—and a splash.
“For my 70th birthday, I wanted one gift—for veterans to come down [to the ranch] and ride and we had a really fun time,” he says.
“We threw our bikes on his front lawn, we walked around his house, took our shirts, shoes and socks off and jumped in the pool,” recalls former Army Special Forces Green Beret Michael Rodriguez. “Just like some kids rolling up to the friend’s house who had a pool.”
Adds Bush, “I feel like a teenager sometimes on those bikes. And then I feel like an old man when I finish riding!”
For Rodriguez, 43, the bond with Bush, more than fun and games, has been life-changing.
Through nine deployments over 21 years, Rodriguez sustained at least a dozen concussions that left him with double vision, severe headaches, light sensitivity and dizziness. He was medically retired in 2010 after being additionally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury, and hid his symptoms behind dark sunglasses that he wore 24/7. “I was ashamed,” Rodriguez says.
That all changed when the soldier got to know his former commander in chief.
© 2016 Paul Morse
In 2014, Rodriguez invited his father Manuel, a Vietnam veteran, to the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, for the final day of Bush’s annual three-day, 100-km mountain-bike ride with wounded warriors that included Rodriguez.
His voice breaking with tears, Rodriguez recalls:
“Around the president, people are always jockeying to talk to him. My dad was not like that. My father is very reserved. He was standing in the back. It was a big crowd. I will never ever forget it: The president stopped his bike, got off, and he walked through people to say hi to my dad. He said, ‘That was bull crap, the way you guys were treated. I just wanted to welcome you home, man.’ My dad brags about that to this day. And for me to see that moment he had with President Bush welcoming him home from Vietnam, that emotional connection, I was like, ‘Man, I want that.’ I wasn’t even having a connection with my dad because I had the f—ing sunglasses on.
That afternoon, on the bus leaving the ranch, Rodriguez took his glasses of for the first time in four years—to say a few words to his father. “I had to put them back on, because the sun was killing me. But after that, I started the research that led to prosthetic lenses so I could get rid of the glasses.
“President Bush made me realize what I was missing and motivated me to get it back—that connection with my dad, my family. With people.”
In Portraits, Bush painted Rodriquez with the prosthetic lenses—one blue-green to correct double-vision; the other tinted dark brown to help with light sensitivity—that allowed Rodriguez to shelve the sunglass and his son Jacob, now 10, to memorably exclaim, “Daddy! I can see your eyes!”
Courtesy George W. Bush
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Bush, who calls Rodriguez “Rod,” says: “He’s a warrior. On the other hand he’s got this sweet soul to him. He’s struggling but he’s getting a lot better and that’s why I wrote the book to talk about people like Rod.
“These veterans are a tremendous national asset. Thing about Rodriguez, this is a guy who has been all over the world, he understands team work, discipline, taking risk. If given the proper help, he’s going to continue to contribute to the country. Rod will be the first to tell you, in order to get help, you have to ask for it and that’s one of the real problems we have.”
—with TIERNEY MCAFEE
For much more of our interview with Laura and George W. Bush, including exclusive at-home photos, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE on newsstands Friday.