'The public is disenchanted with psychotherapy. This negative attitude has been exacerbated by the predominance of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which is spuriously touted by its frequently fiscally motivated supporters as superior to other kinds of psychotherapy in both efficacy and brevity. Psychotherapists in training – psychiatric residents, clinical psychology, counseling and social work interns too are taught the same misleading party line. The sad result has been a gradual mechanization, dehumanization and reductionistic de-souling of psychotherapy. An estimated ninety percent of psychiatrists no longer practice psychotherapy much at all, relying heavily instead on pharmacotherapy. Ironically, the aforementioned mounting crisis within the psychotherapy world parallels a growing crisis in public mental health. The truth is, most psychotherapy patients need far more than what pharmaceutical intervention and/or cognitive restructuring – the two most popular "evidence-based" modalities today – can provide. As does every person seeking meaning and peace of mind. They need and deserve support and accompaniment through their painful, frightening, perilous spiritual or existential crises, their "dark night of the soul." They need a psychologically meaningful method to confront their metaphorical devils and demons, their repressed anger or rage, and the existential reality of evil. The fundamental task of a secular spiritual psychotherapy is to redeem (rather than cast out or exorcise) our emotional devils. It is inevitably both a psychological and spiritual venture. Bravely voicing our inner "demons" – symbolizing those unconscious tendencies we most fear, flee from, and hence, are obsessed or haunted by – transmutes them into helpful spiritual allies. During this alchemical process, the esoteric secret that many artists and spiritual savants share is revealed: That same demon so righteously run from and rejected paradoxically becomes the redemptive source of vitality, creativity, and authentic spirituality.'

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

'...the point of the government's policy on psychiatry is to treat all patients as having exclusively organic diseases and not socially generated problems; and medications, regardless of cost, are absolutely necessary to maintain this narrative.' -- If you feel you are not properly sedated, call 348-844 immediately. Failure to do so may result in prosecution for criminal drug evasion.

'Google CEO Eric Schmidt lays out the next stage in his company's ambitious plan to replace human agency with automated data processing, freeing us all from the nuisance of thinking: "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," he elaborates. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." ...a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn't know you wanted to know. "The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically," Mr. Schmidt says.' -- Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses.

"...there have been improvements [in the techniques of terrorism.] [Pavlov] found among other things that conditioning techniques applied to animals or humans in a state either of psychological or physical stress sank ... very deeply into the mind-body of the creature, and were extremely difficult to get rid of. ...[new] methods ... are a real refinement on the older methods of terror because they combine methods of terror with methods of acceptance that the person who is subjected to a form of terroristic stress but for the purpose of inducing a kind of voluntary acceptance of the psychological state in which he has been driven and the state of affairs in which he finds himself. -- If there are 20% of the people who really can be suggested into believing almost anything, then we have to take extremely careful steps into prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme positions then organize them into very dangerous private armies which may overthrow the government."

2/3, 3/3: "This is where this new epoch is going, where we understand the true power of consciousness and the mind. What the control system has spent so much time doing is to hold us in a closed-mind, closed-vibrational state so that we cannot access that natural power we have, which is the true-self, to resist all this stuff that's being thrown at us. Because of this epoch change that's going on, we're now seeing a very clear forking in the road. There's a clear parting of the ways between those two groups of people in world: that which is staying closed and that which is demonstrably opening its mind."

'In a 2008 paper titled, “Fluoride and the Future: Population Level Cognitive Enhancement, Savulescu writes: “Fluoridation is the tip of the enhancement iceberg. Science is progressing fast to develop safe and effective cognitive enhancers, drugs which will improve our mental abilities. For years, people have used crude enhancers, usually to promote wakefulness, like nicotine, caffeine and amphetamines. A new generation of more effective enhancers is emerging modafenil, ritalin, Adderral and ampakines and the piracetam family of memory improvers.” But once highly safe and effective cognitive enhancers are developed – as they almost surely will be – the question will arise whether they should be added to the water, like fluoride, or our cereals, like folate. It seems likely that widespread population level cognitive enhancement will be irresistible. ...should we try to engineer better, happier people?”' -- What's wrong? I just feel that I need something stronger.

'#Step one: Facebook is going to make the whole Internet a community space. #Step two: Facebook is going to be your identity card for the Internet. #Step three: Facebook will aggregate this data into a new type of search. #Step four: Facebook will be your virtual wallet. #Step five: Facebook will push this into the real world, and become your id card for reality. -- But I left out the part where people create Facebook identity skimmers and stand in front of the movie theater; where your history of likes gets analyzed by a third party and turned into direct marketing spam; where there’s a data breach and your credits get taken; where you lose a job because you once liked the wrong kind of site; where companies start paying people to form fake social graphs (“friend me and get free stuff!”) in order to push astroturfing influence into social recommendations; where Facebook bans you because you got rowdy, and now you have no virtual identity. Welcome to a crazy new world.'

"21 billion hours of gameplay a week can save the world." As always, good insights and numbers and enthusiasm, but honestly, I think these "Super-Empowered Hopeful Individuals" are going to kick her out of her own party. "WE have to make the real world work more like a game." "Gamers are a human resource that WE can use to do real world work." -- Who's WE, exactly? I'll tell you what WILL change the world: more people designing their own 'games'; more people being systems aware so that paternalistic nudgings – of the WE kind – can't so easily manipulate people into chasing after incentives that aren't their own. How's that for an "EPIC WIN"?

'16-33 Million Americans are currently taking sedatives of some kind; I guess it takes the edge away from a broken financial system. The majority of these people will wake up and wonder why things have changed around them. The financial system is just an accounting system; it is the top level of a many layered society based ultimately on the physical world. Our prospects are a function not of the monetary system but instead have basis in the physical world multiplied by our ability to apply technology. "Bad news" may cause a lot of people to wake up as they find the goods we expect may simply not be there for us. We need to help build values to see if we can effect change.' -- Soma? Has got electrolytes?

"Dear Mr Orwell, The nightmare of 1984 is destined to modulate into the nightmare of A Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Yours sincerely, Aldous Huxley."

"We live in a bubble of fake bullshit." -- Ergo we must build an even bigger bubble of authentic bullshit.

'Today’s pop music is filled with symbols and messages aimed to shape and mold today’s youth. Apart from the occult symbolism discussed in other articles, other parts of the elite’s agenda are communicated through music videos. Two of those parts are transhumanism and the introduction of a police state. f the news scares people into accepting measures diminishing their personal freedoms and ushering in a “new era”, the music business accomplishes the same job by making it seem sexy, cool and trendy. This angle is mainly aimed at the younger crowd, which is much more susceptible to “take in” the industry’s message. We’ll look at the way those agendas are part of the acts of Rihanna, Beyonce, Daddy Yankee and the Black Eyed Peas.'

The broader principle being: change the 'conditions' (create "games") to change the incentives (re-enable 'happiness'). -- 'McGonigal: "Games support happiness ... by giving us more satisfying work or concrete tasks that we can accomplish... Studies have shown that playing a short game — having something concrete that you can accomplish — actually gives you the motivation, energy and optimism to go back and tackle real work. ...because when you’re trying to do real-world work it’s frustrating; we don’t see the results of our actions right away. So games give us that sense of blissful productivity... Neurochemically we’re kind of fired up ... to take on challenges... Games take us immediately out of a state of paralysis or alienation or depression and they switch on the positive ways of thinking. They trigger the brain to a state in which it’s possible to do good work. It’s possible to aspire to tough goals."' -- Neo Taylorism? A Brave New 'Chunking' World? Who Games The Game Makers?

If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine Lady GaGa sitting on your face – forever.

'In hopes of identifying good credit customers, some financial institutions are tapping into the information you and your friends reveal online. The idea is that the friends you keep and data you disclose may help them make more accurate business decisions. -- ...profiles provide banks with insight into your behavior patterns - what you like and dislike, want and don't want, do well and do poorly. Creditors can see if people in your network have accounts with them, and are free to look at how they are handling those accounts. The presumption is that if those in your network are responsible cardholders, there is a better chance you will be too. So, if a bank is on the fence about whether to extend you credit, you may become eligible if those in your network are good credit customers. -- Having a robust online social network can also expedite loan acceptance. If you're connected to a lot of people who are great credit risks, it can speed you through the process.' -- Brave New World

'The public has been duped into believing thrilling falsehoods rather than unexciting truths. Huxley explains how the propagandists have stolen our freedom: "In their anti-rational propaganda the enemies of freedom systematically pervert the resources of lang­uage in order to wheedle or stampede their victims into thinking, feeling and acting as they, the mind-manipulators, want them to think, feel and act. An education for freedom (and for the love and intelli­gence which are at once the conditions and the results of freedom) must be, among other things, an educa­tion in the proper uses of language." -- "Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? Does a majority of the population think it worthwhile to take a good deal of trouble, in order to halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift toward totalitarian control of everything?"'

'The idea, one that is generally accepted in social psychology, is that word choice can reveal a person’s mood. This is true in ordinary writing, these experts say, and even more so in writing like Facebook updates or the tweets of Twitter users, which ostensibly are attempts to describe what you are doing right now and how you feel. The Facebook happiness index could be the first step in reorienting the nation’s sense of self-worth. “We have tracked the economic health of the nation for a long time. The reason we track those things is that the government is full of economists, not psychologists. I could imagine it would allow us to look at a group of people, get a sense of what their concerns are, how insecure they feel. It could be an advertiser’s dream. Yes, it is creepy from a government perspective, but it is even creepier from an advertising perspective.”' -- Creepy and extremely dumb. Measure actual behaviours not claims on behaviours. "I'm happy." "I'm sad." You're confused.

'Converging technology, transhumanism, and our future in the making. The cutting edge group known as transhumanists see a beautiful future brought about by artificial intelligence, life extension, and cybernetics. What one must realize before getting carried away with such utopian dreams is that transhumanism was born out of the elitist pseudo-science eugenics. This documentary provides vital information on the history of eugenics and its new cutting edge transformation.' -- Transhumanism is a eugenics cult. Well, yeah. The idea is to man-u-facture better slaves. This is what humans lust to do to each other. 'Twas ever thus.

1984 vs Brave New World: 'What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.' -- It's both.