'"English, it turns out, is strongly biased toward being positive," said Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician at the University of Vermont. ..."a positivity bias is universal," both for very common words and less common ones and across sources as diverse as tweets, lyrics and British literature. Why is this? "It's not to say that everything is fine and happy," Dodds says. "It's just that language is social." In contrast to traditional economic theory, which suggests people are inherently and rationally selfish, a wave of new social science and neuroscience data shows something quite different: that we are a pro-social storytelling species. As language emerged and evolved over the last million years, positive words, it seems, have been more widely and deeply engrained into our communications than negative ones. "If you want to remain in a social contract with other people, you can't be a ...," well, Dodds here used a word that is rather too negative to be fit to print – which makes the point.'

'...the mind uses "sophisticated compression routines ... for efficiently packaging previous events as they are being sent to memory." -- ...memory invention was specifically triggered by observing a consequence that implied an earlier causal action had happened and had been seen. -- The researchers said their findings have obvious implications for crime scene witnesses. Imagine a witness sees a man wielding a gun, and imagine seconds later they also see a person nearby falling from a gunshot wound - these new results show how easily the mind of the witness could invent a memory of having seen the moment the trigger was actually pulled. "In some circumstances," the researchers said, "conceptual packaging can induce the perceiver to insert unseen information in order to fulfil structural requirements."'

'... judging by some of our industry’s public discourse, it would seem that large parts of ad- and marketingland are behaving as if they don’t know the difference between effects and effectiveness. Or as if they think they’re in the entertainment business. In which getting people to watch – and maybe ‘engage’ with – our content is the whole end purpose of the enterprise. If there’s one thing digital stuff is good at, it’s leaving behind it a vast trail of data. It gives us more and more things we can easily and immediately count – searches, views, visits, time on page, bounce rate, exit rate, time on site, linking, forwarding, following, referring, clicking, friending, liking, +ing, and so on. All these things are easy to monitor and count... Tens of thousands of this! Hundreds of thousands of that! But counting and analysis are very different things.'

'Moving in harmony can make people feel more connected to one another and, as a result, lead to positive collective action. -- Wiltermuth, an expert on group dynamics, says the findings are the first to indicate that synchronous activities may be used to influence leader-follower relations and are especially pertinent, as synchronized action like marching and chanting are still used in political and religious rallies to influence people throughout the world. Wiltermuth notes, "The findings suggest that synchrony cannot only be used for good, but also as a tool to promote evil."'

How many fingers, Winston?

'In the TED* framework, the Victim shifts into the role of Creator. The Persecutor takes on the role of Challenger, and the Rescuer assumes the new role of Coach. A Creator is someone who stops to think about what they want - what their long-term goal or vision is. Creators are outcome-oriented as opposed to problem-oriented. Problems will always occur, but instead of acting as a Persecutor, the problem now takes on the form of Challenger. A Challenger is a person or situation that forces you to clarify your goal. Instead of Rescuing someone, a Coach asks questions that are intended to help the individual to make informed choices.The key differentiation between a Rescuer and a Coach is that the Coach sees the individual as capable of making choices and of solving their own problems. A Coach asks questions that enable the individual to see the possibilities for positive action, to focus on what they do want instead of what they don't want. Coaches see victims as Creators in their own right and meet them as equals. This process interrupts the drama cycle and puts the former victim in the powerful position of Creator where they make informed choices and focus on outcomes instead of problems.'

Paraphrased -- Rescuers don't see themselves as Victims; they see themselves as the one with the answer. A Rescuer needs a Victim, they need a project. They need someone they can fix so that they can feel better. The Rescuer-in-Victim is the Martyr: "After all I've done for you. I've sacrificed my life for you. I've given you this and that and sacrificed all my needs – and this is the appreciation I get." And then they get a little resentful, and they move up to Persecutor, and the way a Rescuer persecutes is: "That's it, I'm not saving you anymore. I'm kicking you out of my life." But then, there's always something that hooks them back into Rescue, and it's usually one of two things: It's either pity or guilt. Rescuers do not see themselves as Victims, and they hate to think of themselves as Persecutors.

"When you're a baby, your parents are substitutes for your pre-frontal cortex..." -- "How does the other shape the self? Well, we internalize their perspective." -- 'We treat our self like we have a self. We learn what we are like. We learn what we ought to be like. Self-knowledge is not gained from introspection.'

'Why are borderlines attracted to broken men? To alcoholics? To rageful narcissists? Affect. "I never know what mood he'll be in." The range, the energy means you are connected. No abandonment is conceivable if the guy is beating you. "But he cheats on her as well!" He'll be back. Right? This is set up in childhood 100% of the time. The kid learns what works, learns what gets him the affect he needs. If the parents are loving all the time not much "work" is necessary. But if Dad is distant, or interested in chasing skirts (such daughters grow up trying to look like the kind of girl Dad is attracted to), or mom's always drunk, then "work" happens, and the kid starts to try new ways of getting the affect, and unfortunately the easiest way to get sucky parents to give you affect is to enrage them. That works awesomely. The best is when the parent beats you mercilessly, and then does a 180 and apologizes profusely, hugs you, buys you gifts, "oh, baby, I am so sorry I did that, Daddy was just upset..." Nothing in life will ever match up to that, except maybe a boyfriend who does that. Remember: the goal of this strategy is not happiness, it is avoiding abandonment.'

'We find them everywhere in fantasy fiction: the "orphaned heroes," young men and women whose parents are dead, absent, or unknown, who turn out to be the heirs to the kingdom, the destined pullers of swords from stones, the keys to the riddles, the prophesies' answers, the bearers of powerful magic. For young readers, there is a distinct brand of pleasure in inhabiting the skin of the orphan hero, tasting both the joys and terrors of operating as a fully independent being without the protective cushion (or burden, depending on the child's circumstance) of parents standing between them and the wide, wide world beyond. For children with difficult childhoods, the appeal is obvious; such stories provide escape, a vision of life beyond the confines of a troubled home. But even children from healthy families welcome escape from time to time. In the guise of the orphan hero they can shed their usual roles (the eldest daughter, middle son, the baby of the family, etc.) and enter other realms in which they are solitary actors. Without adults to guide them (or, contrarily, to restrict them), orphan heroes are thrown back, time and time again, on their own resources. I do not think we outgrow our need for such stories, accounting for their continuing popularity among adult readers as well — for who among us does not feel orphaned in this vast, strange world sometimes? Through Harry Potter, Jane Eyre, and Cinderella we experience the orphan within ourselves.'

"Attachment is impossible under such circumstances."

'The crux of the matter here is that unlike the days of yore, where repressive regimes needed elaborate networks of secret police and informants to monitor communication, all they need now is control over the software and hardware we use. Our desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and all manner of devices play a role in virtually all of our communication. Think you're in the clear when communicating face-to-face? Think again. How did you arrange the meet-up? Over the phone? The web? And what do you have in your pocket or bag, always connected to the network? This is what Stallman has been warning us about all these years - and most of us, including myself, never really took him seriously. However, as the world changes, the importance of the ability to check what the code in your devices is doing - by someone else in case you lack the skills - becomes increasingly apparent. If we lose the ability to check what our own computers are doing, we're boned.'

'Increasingly, with the aid of the Internet, it seems obvious to us that what passes for "global tension" is in fact an elaborate stageplay. Just look at the 20th century. The wars that convulsed the world are nearly inexplicable. There is inescapable evidence now that Wall Street funded the Soviet Union. Someday history will show that the ChiComs were similarly encouraged by the West. This latest Greater Recession is similarly plotted. It doesn't take a "conspiracy theorist" to see it. One simply has to look at what's being erected around us. The structure of global governance is almost complete. The UN, IMF, World Bank, International Criminal Court, NATO and Interpol are all part of the New World Order. Should we deny these exist? So how do you get from here to ... there? Well, you do exactly what's BEING DONE. You dump the economies of the West to level them with the rest of the starving world. You do this through a combination of malicious treaties (NAFTA, CAFTA, etc) and via the ruinous mechanism of central banking. At the same time, you bring up the economies of the BRICs and gradually shift the business of globalist corporations from West to East. This, too, is being done.'

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. -- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

'As the US and Iranian governments escalate tensions in the already volatile Straits of Hormuz, and China and Russia begin openly questioning Washington's interference in their internal politics, the world remains on a knife-edge of military tension. Far from being a dispassionate observer of these developments, however, the media has in fact been central to increasing those tensions and preparing the public to expect a military confrontation. But as the online media rises to displace the traditional forms by which the public forms its understanding of the world, many are now beginning to see first hand how the media lies the public into war.' -- It is by our will alone we set their minds in motion.

'The people who read books like Chuas hoping to learn something start from a wrong motivation: they aren't looking to raise better kids, they are looking to be better parents. If you don't see how those are different, your kids do. "From 3 to 12, kids are mainly animals," he says. "Their humanity and social nature still aren't complete. So you have to use Pavlovian methods to educate them." This is where all the enlightened humanists in the audience are supposed to freak-out. Kids aren't animals, individuality is important, blah blah, but what's important is the word Pavlovian: his violence is not random, it is not surprising. I could be wrong, but it appears from these articles that Xiao doesn't beat his kids into Peking U out of anger, but out of a system. Not saying corporal punishment is the way to go, but I am 100% positive it isn't the beating itself that molded the kids, but the very clear rules and consequences, which requires an awesome level of energy, vigilance, and self-control on the parent's part, which is why most people who beat their kids only get high school dropouts. Parenting requires consistency.'

'For over ten years Gabor Mate has been the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and harm reduction facility in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. His patients are challenged by life-threatening drug addictions, mental illness, Hepatitis C or HIV, and in many cases all four. But if Dr. Mate's patients are at the end of the spectrum, there are many others among us who are also struggling with addictions. drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, compulsive work habits, sexual seeking or spending: what is amiss with our lives that we seek such destructive ways to comfort ourselves? And why is it so difficult to stop these habits, even as they threaten our health, jeopardize our relationships and corrode our spirits?'

'In the beginning, there were lulz, pranks and a culture of trolling just to get a rise out of anyone. But despite many original Anons best efforts, Anonymous has grown up to become the net’s immune system, striking back whenever the hive mind perceived that the institutions that run the world crossed the line into hypocrisy. The fall and winter of 2010 started a pattern that persists; when the use of power gets suspect, people join Anonymous. But this immune response changed Anonymous as well. The lulz had to make room for righteous indignation, and not even a pretend indignation. The voice of the hive mind, though still computer-generated, had changed its tone.'

'The trickster isn’t the good guy or the bad guy, it’s the character that exposes contradictions, initiates change and moves the plot forward. One minute, the loving and heroic trickster is saving civilization. A few minutes later the same trickster is cruel, kicking your ass and eating babies as a snack. The conversation about Anonymous points to this trickster nature, veering between praise and fear, with the media at a loss for even how to describe them. We’ve tried hacker group, notorious hacker group, hacktivists, the Internet Hate Machine, pimply-faced, basement-dwelling teenagers, an activist organization, a movement, a collective, a vigilante group, online terrorists, and any number of other fantastical and colorful terms. None of them have ever really fit. Anonymous has constantly forced us to reach for the thesaurus — revealing that as a whole, we in the media have no idea what Anonymous really is or what it means.'

'Fabric-store manager Bonnie Reedner told reporters Monday that her 18-year-old son, Pfc. Matthew Reedner, is "over there, fighting in Iraq, or something." "I guess he's stationed in Baghdad or Basra—some place beginning with a B," Reedner said. "I don't really know. I should check the return address on one of his letters. I think there's another one over on the microwave with the unopened mail." Though Reedner said she hopes for her son's safe return, she admitted she should probably pick up a newspaper one of these days to get an idea of when that might be.'

'"It's not that the upper classes are coldhearted," said UC Berkeley social psychologist Jennifer Stellar, lead author of the study published online on Dec. 12 in the journal, Emotion. "They may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of suffering because they haven't had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives." Stellar and her colleagues' findings challenge previous studies that have characterized lower-class people as being more prone to anxiety and hostility in the face of adversity. "These latest results indicate that there's a culture of compassion and cooperation among lower-class individuals that may be born out of threats to their wellbeing," Stellar said.'

'How does addiction change the brain? According to Dr. Gabor Mate, it's a difficult struggle for hard core drug addicts to kick their habit because their brains are impaired. In a new book, he looks at the common roots of addictive behaviours and what can be done about them. It's called "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction".' -- "Drugs are not addictive to a person not predisposed to become addicted. Predisposition is set according to early stress. ...most substance abusers were themselves abused as children. Early experiences powerfully shape the brain, plus they create the lifelong emotional pain that the drug then comes along to soothe. The trauma is passed on from one generation to the next because the parenting styles are inherited – not genetically – but biologically, and behaviorally, and psychologically, from one generation to the next. If we want people to make the choice to give up their addiction, we first of all have to de-stress them. When people's cortisol levels are high they're much more likely to use the drug to try to soothe their stresses. We're talking about people who were emotionally traumatized and have a deep sense of shame about their very existence."

'#Stage 1: Lust: Testosterone and Oestrogen #Stage 2: Attraction: Adrenaline, Cortisol, Dopamine, and Serotonin #Stage 3: Attachment: Oxytocin and Vasopressin -- And finally … how to fall in love: Find a complete stranger. Reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour. Then, stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for four minutes.'

'Early relationships alter our brains before we learn to speak. As you learn together with your earliest caregivers how to regulate your emotions, your brain will be making lots of new pathways that are necessary for you to learn to become comfortable with your emotions and manage them for yourself. Your earliest bonds also serve as a model for all subsequent relationships, teaching you to form nourishing, enriching, and mutually beneficial relationships throughout your life. The bulk of these neural connections happen before you are two years old. In other words, much of the wiring up that determines how you respond emotionally and conduct relationships, happened pre-verbally. The logic, reason and language part of your brain develops so slowly that most of the patterns for how you feel are formed before you can reason with yourself and others.'

"The reason why people don't notice us ... is because they're busy thinking about everyone noticing them. Everybody is busy thinking about other people thinking about them, and as a result they're not thinking about the other people."

'The political divide between the champions of the public sector and the private sector misses the point; the key divide is between those who support the monopolistic tendencies of both capitalism and government, and those who support the competitive effects of markets. As Adam Smith, who championed the market but not capitalism, put it: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The market is where these conspiracies get exposed. To win in it, you don’t lobby, you innovate. Wherever free markets have been even tentatively tried, from Ancient Greece to modern Hong Kong, they have produced not just rising living standards, but net moves towards peace, tolerance, freedom and equality. Capitalism represents the interests of the rich, whereas the market represents the interests of the poor. Let’s hear it for the market as the antidote to capitalism.'

'"I suspect Satoshi is a small team at a financial institution," whitehat hacker Dan Kaminsky says. "I just get that feeling. He's a quant who may have worked with some of his friends." But Garzik, the developer, says that the most dedicated bitcoiners have stopped trying to hunt down Nakamoto. "We really don't care," he says. It's not the individuals behind the code who matter, but the code itself. And while people have stolen and cheated and abandoned the bitcoiners, the code has remained true.' -- And a whole new reality was set into motion

"Culture is about a large group of people having a set of shared, chronically accessible, constructs."

'The authors present a way that fear and other facial expressions might have evolved and then come to signal a person's feelings to the people around him. ...fear helps respond to threat, and the squinched-up nose and mouth of disgust make it harder for you to inhale anything poisonous drifting on the breeze. The outthrust chest of pride increases both testosterone production and lung capacity so you're ready to take on anyone. Then, as social living became more important to the evolutionary success of certain species -- most notably humans -- the expressions evolved to serve a social role as well; so a happy face, for example, communicates a lack of threat and an ashamed face communicates your desire to appease.'

'Anderson and colleagues suggest that this association between early childhood experiences and teen obesity has origins in the brain. The limbic system in the brain controls responses to stress as well as the sleep/wake cycle, hunger and thirst, and a variety of metabolic processes, mostly through the regulation of hormones. "Sensitive parenting increases the likelihood that a child will have a secure pattern of attachment and develop a healthy response to stress," Anderson said. "A well-regulated stress response could in turn influence how well children sleep and whether they eat in response to emotional distress -- just two factors that affect the likelihood for obesity." Obesity may be one manifestation of dysregulation in the functioning of the stress response system.'

'It became evident that traumatic life experiences during childhood and adolescence were far more common in an obese population than was comfortably recognized. We slowly discovered that major weight loss is often sexually or physically threatening and that obesity, whatever its health risks, is protective emotionally. Ultimately, we saw that certain of our more intractable public health problems such as obesity are often also unconsciously attempted solutions to problems dating back to the earliest years but hidden by time, by shame, by secrecy, and by social taboos against exploring certain areas of life experience. -- Putting it plainly in regard to obesity, we have seen that obesity is not the core problem. Obesity is the marker for the problem and sometimes is a solution. This is a profoundly important realization because none of us expects to cure a problem by treating its symptom. -- The general principles underlying the unconscious, compulsive use of food as a psychoactive agent are common to any of the addictions. Whether we are talking about the next mouthful, the next drink, the next cigarette, the next sexual partner, or the next dose of whatever psychoactive chemical we might buy on the street, the concept is equally applicable: It’s hard to get enough of something that almost works.'

"The most destructive thing that we've allowed to have an expectation of each other is that we will instantly respond to each other ... and almost without thinking." "If you need to be constantly responding, you can only answer in little bits that really show no thought." -- "The kid comes out of the school, is desperately trying to make eye contact with the parent, and the parent is sitting there glued to the phone..." "This generation has grown up seeing technology as the competition. I don't think they're going to raise their children this way."

The world's attention is increasingly focused on Syria and Iran as the region continues to move toward military confrontation. Less noticed, however, is that the pieces are being put into place for a truly global conflict, with military buildup taking place in every region and threatening to draw in all of the world's major powers.' -- Here comes everybody: http://i.imgur.com/P0I97.jpg

'If production gives to the producer the right to exclusive possession and enjoyment, there can rightfully be no exclusive possession and enjoyment of anything not the production of labor; for the right to the produce of labor cannot be enjoyed without the right to the free use of the opportunities offered by nature. To admit the right of property in gifts of nature is to deny the right of property in the produce of labor. When nonproducers can claim a portion of the wealth created by producers, the right of the producers to the fruits of their labor is to that extent denied. Taxation, like slavery, is wrong because it seizes the fruits of someone else's labor without their permission. It makes no difference whether the tax collector is a government or a land holder; taxation is still wrong. Any institution that places any portion of the product of labor and/or capital into the hands of nonproducers is the moral equivalent of taxation. Public taxation is immoral and private taxation, recognized as such or not, is equally corrupt. Natural resources are not the fruits of human effort; capital is. Capital is not essential for human life; natural resources are. Natural resources are fixed in supply; capital is not. Capital holdings do not penalize or hamper the private producti on of wealth; natural resource holdings do. The just ownership of capital is demonstrable by tracing its origin in production; ownership of natural resources is demonstrable only by the say-so of the current government.'

'Land monopoly is not the only monopoly, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies -- it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly. Unearned increments in land are not the only form of unearned or undeserved profit, but they are the principal form of unearned increment, and they are derived from processes which are not merely not beneficial, but positively detrimental to the general public. Land, which is a necessity of human existence, which is the original source of all wealth, which is strictly limited in extent, which is fixed in geographical position -- land, I say, differs from all other forms of property, and the immemorial customs of nearly every modern state have placed the tenure, transfer, and obligations of land in a wholly different category from other classes of property. Nothing is more amusing than to watch the efforts of land monopolists to claim that other forms of property and increment are similar in all respects to land and the unearned increment on land.'

'In the few cases (if any) where a deed to land did not involve any confiscation from anyone during its history, the claim of ownership still does not rest on any clear and consistent legal principle. For example, suppose the legal principle is "first discoverer gets the land." But how much land can a person or government claim? Did the first person to enter North America have the right to claim the whole continent? Or suppose the legal principle is "to claim land, mix your labor with it, such as by cultivating it, or fencing it." That principle might enable someone to own the top few inches of soil, and the fence itself. But how would it enable someone to own a mineral deposit twenty feet below the surface, or air space twenty feet above? Also, how much mixing of labor is required?'

"For the past thirty years, Clifton Meador has been haunted by the possibility that he may – unwittingly – have condemned Sam Lande to an early grave, simply by believing he was dying, that the transmission of that belief to his patient was more deadly than the cancer itself." -- "...Dan Moerman is convinced that what doctors say and do makes them powerful placebos in themselves."

"Presumably, the more you pay, the more effective it is." "That has been established for a long time in psychotherapy."

'Mere belief that recovery is coming can by itself bring the recovery about. People rely on a variety of sources of information for foretelling the future. It is clear that the placebo’s message – to the effect that 'this treatment will soon make you better' – can be conveyed by any or all of them: learned associations, explicit instruction, rational argument, magical reasoning, trust in authority, and, of particular importance, subtle social cues of the kind called ‘bedside manner’ (so that, for example, the same placebo pill may work consistently better when administered by one doctor than another). But, by whatever route the message comes, the patient must have the right mind-set to receive it. ...the health management system has needed to take account, so far as possible, of any intelligence available to the sick person about what the future holds. People have learned – their culture has taught them – that nothing is a better predictor of how things will turn out when they are sick (whether the pain will ease, whether the infection will abate, whether they will be nursed back to health) than the presence of doctors, medicines, and so on. ...the very prospect of medical attention – the patient’s belief in it – works its magic for the simple reason, stemming from the general rule above, that for most of human history, once a sick person has had cause to think that he will soon be safe and well, he has had just the excuse he needs to bring on his own recovery as fast as possible.'

'Evolution, according to Nicholas Humphrey, has selected an internal health management system that uses cost benefit analysis upon whether the deployment of a self-treatment aids biological fitness, and so should be activated. The welfare of social animals (including humans) depends upon other individuals (social buffering). The actuarial assessments of the costs and benefits of deploying a self-treatment therefore will depend upon the presence, or not, of other individuals. The presence of helpful others will effect, for example, the risk of predators when incapacitated, and—in those case in which animals do this (such as humans)—the provision of food, and care during sickness. All humans societies use external medications, and some individuals exist that are considered to have special healing knowledge about illnesses and their treatments. Humans are also usually supportive to those in their group. The availability of these things will effect the cost benefits of the body deploying its own biological ones.'

'Now, when people are cured by placebo medicine, they are in reality curing themselves. But why should this have become an available option late in human evolution, when it wasn't in the past. I realized it must be the result of a trick that has been played by human culture. The trick is to persuade sick people that they have a "license" to get better, because they're in the hands of supposed specialists who know what's best for them and can offer practical help and reinforcements. And the reason this works is that it reassures people—subconsciously that the costs of self-cure will be affordable and that it's safe to let down their guard. -- [Placebo] works for a reason, because it gives people a safety signal. It gives them the belief that they are in a secure environment in which they can now release their healing resources, they can afford to let down their guard. -- Placebos work because they suggest to people that the picture is rosier than it really is. Just like the artificial summer light cycle for the hamster, placebos give people fake information that it's safe to cure them. Whereupon they do just that.'

'Like many other researchers, we assume that the therapeutic relationship is an important component of the placebo effect. But many people — including doctors — think that the therapeutic relationship entirely accounts for the placebo effect. Our data show that this is not true. If the placebo effect was entirely due to the therapeutic relationship — the time, attention, warmth, and enthusiasm communicated by the doctor — then our placebo pill would not have produced any effect beyond that seen in our “no-treatment” control condition, because the no-treatment control patients received the same level of therapeutic relationship as that received by patients in the placebo pill condition. That tells us two things – one, that giving patients the placebo pill improved their condition, and two, that the difference in improvement was due to getting the pill. It was not due to the therapeutic relationship. -- We need to recognize and understand that patients are active agents in their treatment, not passive. The placebo effect does not come from the pill. It comes from the patient.' -- Made belief

'"Surgeons are wary of people who are convinced that they will die," said Herbert Benson, a Harvard professor and the president Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston. "There are examples of studies done on people undergoing surgery who almost want to die to re-contact a loved one. Close to 100 percent of people under those circumstances die."'

'You cannot learn to swim in ideas until you actually enter the meme pool. Then you realize you're not alone. You just see dead people. Your frame of social reference is the hidden river of dead authors communicating with each other across centuries of time, carrying on a conversation that is strangely detached from the regular world. Light readers cannot hear this conversation. You start to feel a bit like a medium once you can hear this conversation, because every individual book is situated in this conversation for you, where it basically stands alone for a light reader. It's like you can see the background where others can only see the foreground. You aspire to join the dead people while still alive. You start to write. You write a book. The circle is complete. You are now a civilizational ghost. Even if you don't write a book and remain forever a listener, you are still part of a group disconnected from the rest of humanity, but connected across time in ways the non-heavy-reading living will never be.'

'This program is a proof of concept that SOPA will not help prevent piracy. The program, implemented as a Firefox extension, simply contacts offshore domain name resolution services to obtain the IP address for any desired website, and accesses those websites directly via IP. Similar offshore resolution services will eventually maintain their own cache of websites, without blacklisting, in order to meet the demand created by SOPA.' -- A challenger appears.

'Trust is built when no one is looking, when you think you have the option of cutting corners and when you find a loophole. Trustiness is what happens when you use trust as a PR tool. The difference should be obvious. Trust experienced is remarkable, trustiness once discovered leaves a bad taste for even your most valued customers. The perverse irony is this: the more you work on your trustiness, the harder you fall once people discover that they were tricked.'

'If one believes that land can be owned like any resource, then men can be owned and that makes slavery acceptable. On the same principle it would even be acceptable to own all the oxygen on the planet if some means could be found to enclose it by extracting it all. We in the Campaign are realistic and accept that we are where we are and have to move forward. Nobody here is suggesting that land titles should be taken away from their owners or that land should be nationalised. But the old injustice continues as land value is something that is continuously sustained and re-created by the presence and activities of the community today. There is an ongoing theft as this value is privately appropriated. Our case is that the stealing of this ongoing wealth stream should stop, through collection of the rental value of and its use as the main source of public revenue. This would make it possible to get rid of that other institutional theft, the taxation of human labour and its products.'

'Bearing in mind that the State is the organization of the political means - that its primary intention is to enable the economic exploitation of one class by another - we see that it has always acted on the principle already cited, that expropriation must precede exploitation. There is no other way to make the political means effective. The first postulate of fundamental economics is that man is a land-animal, deriving his subsistence wholly from the land. His entire wealth is produced by the application of labour and capital to land; no form of wealth known to man can be produced in any other way. Hence, if his free access to land be shut off by legal predmption, he can apply his labour and capital only with the land-holder’s consent, and on the landholder’s terms; in other words, it is at this point, and this point only, that exploitation becomes practicable. Therefore the first concern of the State must be invariably, as we find it invariably is, with its policy of land-tenure.'

'"Not only did we make it absolutely clear that these pills had no active ingredient and were made from inert substances, but we actually had 'placebo' printed on the bottle," says Kaptchuk. "We told the patients that they didn't have to even believe in the placebo effect. Just take the pills." For a three-week period, the patients were monitored. By the end of the trial, nearly twice as many patients treated with the placebo reported adequate symptom relief as compared to the control group (59 percent vs. 35 percent). ..."these findings suggest that rather than mere positive thinking, there may be significant benefit to the very performance of medical ritual."' -- The relationship is the therapy

'...these stress tests and new rules will choke off the one aspect of fiat money that actually is positive (within the larger negative context). Not only will people have to deal with the monetary inflation that has already been created, they'll have to deal with it within the parameters of a monetary drought. Having caused a rapidly developing depression, the elites behind the world's damnable central banking system are now busily engineering a situation where further capital will not be available (without punitive interest rates) to any but the biggest corporations. How clever it is, eh? If you want to set up global governance, the first thing you want to do is gain control over money and its issuance. You do this by setting up a global network of central banks. Having created central banking and the mechanism for printing-money-from nothing, you now print a great deal of it. In doing so you set off a series of great booms and busts that culminate in the greatest boom and bust of all – leading (as it did in the 1930s) to what should be labeled a depression. Now, once the depression (or "great recession) is underway, you begin to run from bank to bank like a busy bee. You are, in fact, busily engaged in creating a credit squeeze. Having bankrupted middle classes around the world, you are determined to ensure that they will not be able to get their hands on further funds!'

'The news of the North Korea's leader death has put the 24-million population on the verge of insanity, hyped up by unceasing TV broadcast of mass mourning throughout the country. ­North Korea's national flag is flying at half-mast today on every flagpole in the country.' -- I see dead people.

'In this episode I talk about the concepts of Exchange, Division of Labor and The Law of Association!'

'Babies as young as eight months old prefer it when people who commit or condone antisocial acts are mistreated, a new study led by a University of British Columbia psychologist finds. “We find that, by eight months, babies have developed nuanced views of reciprocity and can conduct these complex social evaluations much earlier than previously thought,” says lead author Prof. Kiley Hamlin, UBC Dept of Psychology, who co-authored the study with colleagues from Yale University and Temple University. “This study helps to answer questions that have puzzled evolutionary psychologists for decades,” says Hamlin. “Namely, how have we survived as intensely social creatures if our sociability makes us vulnerable to being cheated and exploited? These findings suggest that, from as early as eight months, we are watching for people who might put us in danger and prefer to see antisocial behavior regulated.'

How violence happens, using the hand model of the brain: http://youtu.be/DD-lfP1FBFk

'Biology stands on the brink of a shift in the understanding of inheritance. The discovery of epigenetics hidden influences upon the genes could affect every aspect of our lives. At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea that genes have a 'memory'. Epigenetics adds a whole new layer to genes beyond the DNA. It proposes a control system of 'switches' that turn genes on or off and suggests that things people experience, like nutrition and stress, can control these switches and cause heritable effects in humans.'

'BACKGROUND: Traumatic experiences in early life are risk factors for the development of behavioral and emotional disorders. Such disorders can persist through adulthood and have often been reported to be transmitted across generations. METHODS: To investigate the transgenerational effect of early stress, mice were exposed to chronic and unpredictable maternal separation from postnatal day 1 to 14. RESULTS: We show that chronic and unpredictable maternal separation induces depressive-like behaviors and alters the behavioral response to aversive environments in the separated animals when adult. Most of the behavioral alterations are further expressed by the offspring of males subjected to maternal separation, despite the fact that these males are reared normally. Chronic and unpredictable maternal separation also alters the profile of DNA methylation in the promoter of several candidate genes in the germline of the separated males. Comparable changes in DNA methylation are also present in the brain of the offspring and are associated with altered gene expression.'

'For the Avoidant, external disruptions of the autoregulatory state are experienced – to a greater or lesser degree – as a shock to the nervous system. First there is the sensory intrusion aurally, visually, or tactically by an approaching person which may be experienced as startling, followed by a social demand to state shift from an autoregulatory‐timeless (dissociative) mode to an interactive‐realtime mode. One is more energy‐conserving and the other more energy‐expending. For the distancing group, both are experientially non‐reciprocal, meaning neither state involves expected rewards from another person. In autoregulation, no other person is required or wanted. However, during the initial shift to interactive‐realtime mode the other person is viewed as demanding with no expected reward or reciprocity. -- To make this clearer, picture a mother‐baby relationship that is dismissive‐avoidant (mother‐ baby, respectively). The avoidant baby has reoriented away from interactive play with the mother to solitary play with toys. Mother’s departures are less upsetting and her returns are less exciting. Her approach, however, is also less appreciated due to a chronic lack of attuned, reciprocal play. The mother’s approach may be met with anger because it is not experienced so much as a reunion as it is an unwanted invasion of his time and space. If the baby could talk he might say, “I’m busy here, what do you want?”'

"Cover the window, please. These mountains give me no ideas."

'"Natural selection is a way of sorting among a range of genetic alternatives, and finding the best one. Social learning is a way of sifting among a range of alternative options or ideas, and choosing the best one of those." Pagel argues that our evolution as "social learners" has likely had the effect, as it's played out through hundreds of millennia, of encouraging the development of copying skills, perhaps over the development of originality. "We like to think we're a highly inventive, innovative species," he explains. "But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves ... And so, we may have had strong selection in our past to be followers, to be copiers, rather than innovators." What that also means is that as the scope of our potential copying broadens, through advances in communication and networking, we have ever less incentive to be creative. We become ever more adept at cutting and pasting.'

"Climate change is going on and the key aspects of the extreme events of the last 18 months were predicted by us at Weather Action using solar activity. Carbon Dioxide has zero effect." -- 'Piers Corbyn, the founder of the Weather Action Foundation, hopes Canada withdrawal will lead to the collapse of "useless" Kyoto protocol.'

'A new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows that infants with low concentrations of the stress-related hormone cortisol in their saliva develop fewer allergies than other infants. The incidence of allergies in children has increased over the past few decades, especially in the West. In Sweden, 30 to 40 percent of children have some kind of allergy. A combination of environmental and lifestyle factors during pregnancy and early infancy are thought to be responsible for the sharp rise in allergic diseases.'

'This is a tape of a Counseling Session between Carl Rogers and Gloria. Carl Rogers uses Person Centred approach. Humanistic style of counseling.'

'Dominant Social Theme: Inflate! And everything will work out. -- The BIS, whatever it is, is all for printing lots of money. And the BIS is no small-time trade group. It is perhaps the most powerful (and least known) global business body in the world. Its mysteries are manifold. Its workings are well-hidden. Of course, somebody actually set up the Bank for International Settlements in the late 1930s. And since then someone has set up or helped set up about 200 central banks around the world, many of them reporting directly to the BIS. But who? And how did it happen? Dunno. Who speaks to the head of a state, asking him or her to set up a central bank? Dunno. Do you? Why is that Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq have central banks when they didn't before, or not the kind they do now? Did you read about it? Meh ... this ruinous financial system is not a plant or a tree. It did not grow spontaneously. It did not grow naturally. And we would submit to you that those who created it know what they're doing. The key as always is to pretend that one does NOT know. The key is to create cognitive dissonance. Out of chaos ... order. It is quite clear. Follow what IS rather than what you are being TOLD. The BIS wants to inflate. It ENDORSES inflation. The proximate cause is the unraveling of the current financial system. But it is "their" system. They made it.'

"Essentially what the relationship is an interactive mechanism for generating very high levels of positive affect. And the positive affect is ... enjoyment/joy and interest/excitement."

"In theory, the market should have done away with Edible Arrangements long ago," said American Economic Association president Orley Ashenfelter, who added that one of the crucial assumptions of capitalism is the idea that businesses producing undesired goods or services will fail. "That's how it's supposed to work. Yet somehow, despite offering no product of any worth whatsoever, this company not only makes payroll every week, but also generates strong profits." "It's mind-boggling," Ashenfelter continued. "I honestly have never even heard the name Edible Arrangements mentioned in conversation before. Seriously, has anyone?"'

"Differentiated parts become linked together." - "Health is defined by integration."

'Let’s explore what could be ahead for public libraries and how we could collectively transform them into “factories” — not factories that make things, but factories that help make people who want to learn and make things. Will libraries go away? Will they become hackerspaces, TechShops, tool-lending libraries, and Fab Labs, or have these new, almost-public spaces displaced a new role for libraries? For many of us, books themselves are tools. In the sense that books are tools of knowledge, the library is a repository for tools, so will we add “real tools” for the 21st century?'

'I’m not a Shakespeare scholar. Or an actor. I read them as part of a Nashville Shakespeare Festival program called “Shakespeare Allowed!” which invites a group of strangers to gather at a giant square table in the downtown library and read one speech or line at a time, round-robin-style, regardless of gender or acting ability. ...as we worked through the canon, I found myself discovering that the whole point of the project — to simply read the plays aloud — got me halfway to understanding the text. It was amazing how that text seeped into me without my even knowing it. While reading “King Lear,” Lear’s final death speech (“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!”) fell to me, and I had no idea I was even understanding it until I got to those five “nevers. ” Shakespeare didn’t give me just one to say, he gave me five. Five. Five grieving nevers, spoken by a heartbroken, dying king. To my surprise, I was in such a state of tears I almost had to pass the rest of the speech to the person next to me. After that, I was known as “the guy who cried.”'

'In his paper about online trust, Coye Cheshire points how automated trust systems undermine trust itself by incentivizing cooperation because of the fear of punishment rather than actual trust among people. Cheshire argues that: "strong forms of online security and assurance can supplant, rather than enhance, trust." Leading to what he calls the trust paradox: "assurance structures designed to make interpersonal trust possible in uncertain environments undermine the need for trust in the first place." In many scenarios, automation is quite useful, but with social interactions, removing friction can have a harmful effect on the social bonds established through friction itself. In other cases, as Shauna points out, ”social networking sites are good for relationships so tenuous they couldn’t really bear any friction at all.”'

'Sometimes a rose is a rose and a setback is a setback. It may be what we have here. For 50 years, the elite that wants to rule the world lied and dissembled to the British people about the EU. Step by step a union was built like a gilded cage around the British Isles – and around Europe as well. It begs common sense to maintain that this was built up so painfully and with such determined malevolence with the idea of its destruction in mind. No, the preferred plan, as is obvious and evident, is to build up "unions" of countries around the world – and then to build global governance on top of it. There can be NO doubt of this. There are now "unions" – and planned currency unions – around the world. Are we to believe it is all "coincidence"? We find them in South America, Africa, Asia, even the Middle East. Lift the blanket and you will find unions scurrying about like bed bugs. It's a big project, to be sure! One of those projects that is so big it's almost impossible to wrap your mind around it. But take a step back and the parameters become achingly familiar and shockingly – brutally – simple. Build up nation-states, convert them to regions and roll them up!'

"In an absence of principles all that guides you is immediate self-interest. That's the drugs, that's the sex, that's the divorce. Massive growth of the State. The National Debt. Without principles there's nothing to apologize for."

'If you are in the middle class, you are expected to own certain things, do certain things and do so at quality levels that exceed the quality purchased by the poor class (if they purchase that category of things at all) but don’t hit luxury levels. You are also expected to not buy certain things that are either above or beneath you, or do certain things for yourself. For the middle class, there are things that are beneath your station and things that are above your station. For the rich and poor, things are much more one-sided. ...imitation and uniformity in consumption define the middle class. In countries where the middle class is burgeoning instead of dying, especially in Asia, the growth of the class is tracked via measurement of ownership rates of certain typical goods at typical quality levels. By contrast, there is much more variety in how the poor are poor, and how the rich are rich. When a middle class goes into decline, you get a large segment of the population engaging in a desperate scramble to keep up appearances, while switching from collective-norm-based to individual-risk-based financial thinking.'

'Here is how Cameron "rules." He goes and talks to the Queen. And then the Queen calls the top powers of London's City and asks what she should do. And they tell her. And she tells Cameron. And Cameron tells other trusted individuals. And then the UK mainstream media pretends that the policies being prescribed and followed are the product of a democratic government when they are not. This is all done on a larger scale as well. All of the great banking families' enablers and associates get their marching orders from the top ... somehow. They fall in line, implementing the strategies throughout the West. The result is that somehow major governmental decisions throughout Western "democracies" end up favoring policies that inevitably extend one-world government. -- Let the system, in all its wretchedness and excess ... COLLAPSE! It is not worth saving. It is a system run by the elites and for the elites. You, dear reader, are just an afterthought. It has nothing much to do with free markets, this obscene system. It is mercantilist, administered by an unelected power elite that got its start in the City of London and has spread around the world. This is the "vampire" that is much written about. It has nothing much to do with Goldman Sachs, however. Or not at its root. It is a central banking phenomenon.'

"A century ago a free market meant an economy free of rentiers, free of unearned income, free of landlords, and free of bankers."

'In the first functional MRI brain scan study to investigate the impact of physical abuse and domestic violence on children, scientists at UCL in collaboration with the Anna Freud Centre, found that exposure to family violence was associated with increased brain activity in two specific brain areas (the anterior insula and the amygdala) when children viewed pictures of angry faces. Previous fMRI studies that scanned the brains of soldiers exposed to violent combat situations have shown the same pattern of heightened activation in these two areas of the brain, which are associated with threat detection. The authors suggest that both maltreated children and soldiers may have adapted to be ‘hyper-aware’ of danger in their environment. Dr McCrory said: “Even though we know that maltreatment represents one of the most potent environmental risk factors associated with anxiety and depression, relatively little is known how such adversity ‘gets under the skin’ and increases a child’s later vulnerability.”' -- Repetition Compulsion

'We Geolibertarians distinguish ourselves from right-wing, "royal" libertarians by our profound respect for the principle that one has private property in the fruits of one's labor. This includes the fruits of mental labor and the results of reinvestment of legitimate private property (capital) in future production. We remain consistent in that respect by recognizing, as did the classic liberals, that land and raw natural resources are not the fruits of labor, but a common heritage to be accessed on terms that are equal under the law for everyone. The statist system of land tenure empowers non-producing landlords to extract the fruits of tenants' labor. We also consider ourselves "green" in our respect for the earth as our common heritage. However, we clearly distinguish between land as common property and land as state property. Unlike left-wing or "watermelon" greens, we advocate governance of land in harmony with free market principles, and deny the right of statist bureaucracies to meddle in the affairs of individual land holders. We see ourselves as embracing the best attributes of the Green and Libertarian parties. Geolibertarians also believe in free trade, with no state support for monopoly privileges of any kind. We therefore oppose money monopolies, information monopolies, a host of lesser monopolies, and most of all, monopoly of the power to govern, as embodied by statist political systems.'

'The idea is that a technocracy of the elite can present candidates who are the most "competent" at administration. The corollary to this, of course, is that one must accept EVERY FACET of the CURRENT system to accept that one is voting purely for competence. In other words, if people do not like the current corporatist/authoritarian/totalitarian/militarized state that is being constructed around them, they're simply plumb out of luck. That's because the candidates on this "best of all worlds" won't be running on how to CHANGE what's going on – only on how to administer it BETTER. The idea, of course, is to ensure that any discussion of the FAILURES of government ends up providing an anodyne – that is a solution that INCLUDES MORE government. In other words, government is a terrible problem and the only solution is to increase it and make it better and more responsive – and larger and larger. The absurd end result of such a point of view is an all-encompassing government stretching around the world with ever-vaster resources. The additional resources will be needed to police government itself. In other words, as the corruption grows, so the resources of government must grow.' -- Pied pipers are piping.