In the News (Time): “Loneliness kills. That’s the conclusion of a new study by Brigham Young University researchers who say they are sounding the alarm on what could be the next big public-health issue, on par with obesity and substance abuse.

“The subjective feeling of loneliness increases risk of death by 26%, according to the new study in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Social isolation — or lacking social connection — and living alone were found to be even more devastating to a person’s health than feeling lonely, respectively increasing mortality risk by 29% and 32%.

“The researchers emphasized the difference between the subjective, self-reported feeling of loneliness and the objective state of being socially isolated. Both are potentially damaging, the study found. People who say they are alone but feel happy are at increased risk of death, as are those who have many social connections but say they are lonely. People who are both objectively isolated and subjectively lonely may be at the greatest risk of death, says Julianne Holt-Lunstad, an author of the study, though she notes that more data would be needed to know with certainty.”

My Comment: This problem will be manifested increasingly as the world becomes more tied with external connections, but people become more and more lonely. There is a constant discrepancy between our negative and positive connections in the world, and the magnitude of this discrepancy brings about all the suffering in the world.
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In the News (from The Telegraph): “Computers can determine your personality better than friends, just by analysing the posts you have ‘liked’ on Facebook, a Cambridge University study has shown.

“Now researchers, by analysing self-reported personality scores for what are known as the ‘big five’ psychological traits – openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism- have created an algorithm which can accurately predict personalities simply based on Facebook interactions.

“And, surprisingly, it knows your character better than your close friends.

“The team found that their software was able to predict a study participant’s personality more accurately than a work colleague by analysing just 10 ‘Likes.’

“Given enough ‘Likes,’ the software matched people’s self-reported personality traits more closely than family members. …

“But the researchers share the concerns of those who fear a dystopian future in which our traits and habits become an ‘open book’ for computers to read.”

My Comment: Everything is simple in the human being because he is made of only one desire to be fulfilled (to fill himself, to enjoy). It is possible to create the image of this desire by several (test) “likes.” Then, all the other person’s actions could be accurately predicted.

Having created such an image we already know what the person’s responses will be when you address him. Now, you just need to write a program to control the person—because a completely controlled robot is in front of you!
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In the News (Infowars): “The new ranking system will instead use what it has determined to be ‘truth’ as its ranking tool. This Orwellian move opens the door for Google to homogenize thought and become the global arbiters of truth, with the ability to send content it declares as ‘untrue’ into the dustbin of obscurity.

“The term ranking refers to the position at which a particular site appears in the results of a search engine query. A site or a web page is said to have a high ranking when it appears at or near the top of the list of results provided by a search. Under Google’s current set up, the higher the number of incoming links to a website or page, the higher the ranking. The content is considered too, but much of it is about popularity.

“A recently published paper from Google outlines how it’s going to take care of that, by giving each website or page a ‘truth score’ determined by counting the number of ‘incorrect facts’ on its pages. A website having few ‘false facts’ will be considered trustworthy and will be able to rise in the rankings. The score computed for each page will be known as its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

“Google’s software will tap into its new Knowledge Vault, an automated data base currently being hailed as the largest store of knowledge in human history. The Knowledge Vault gathers and merges information from across the internet into a base of ‘facts’ about the world, and the people who live in it. These are facts the software agrees on and considers a proxy for truth, based on their being accepted as truth by the majority of people.

“Websites that contain information contradictory to what is in the Knowledge Vault, known as ‘untruths’ will be kicked down to the bottom of the ranking, where few eyeballs venture to go.”

My Comment: Everything is heading towards a person’s complete submission.. This is the call of egoism. If it were not for the purpose of creation bringing everyone to the likeness to the Creator through the realization of  the insignificance of our nature, then of course, Google’s management plan would succeed.
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Opinion (Paul Craig Roberts, American economist and columnist for Creators Syndicate): “According to the official economic fairy tale, the US economy has been in recovery since June 2009. This fairy tale supports America’s image as the safe haven, an image that keeps the dollar up, the stock market up, and interest rates down. It is an image that causes the massive numbers of unemployed Americans to blame themselves and not the mishandled economy. Industrial production, properly deflated, remains well below the pre-recession level.

“Economists it appears, have simply vanished from the earth. Or, if some are still present, they have lost their voices and do not speak.

“Consider ‘globalism.’ Every country has been convinced that globalism is imperative and that not to be part of the ‘global economy’ means economic death. In fact, to be part of the global economy means death.

“Understand the economic destruction that globalism has wreaked on the United States. Millions of middle class factory jobs and professional skill jobs such as software engineering and Information Technology have been taken away from the American middle class and given to people in Asia. In the short-run this drops labor costs and benefits the profits of the US corporations that offshore the jobs, but the consequence is to destroy the domestic consumer market as jobs that permit the formation of households are replaced with lowly paid part-time jobs that do not.

“When manufacturing jobs are offshored, the US plants are closed, and the tax base of state and local governments declines. When the governments have trouble servicing their accumulated debt, the tendency is not to meet their pension obligations. This reduces retiree incomes, incomes already reduced by zero or negative interest rates.

“If households cannot form, the demand for housing, home appliances and furnishings declines. College graduates return home to live with their parents.

“Part-time jobs hurt the ability to save. People are only able to purchase cars because they can get 100 percent financing, and more in order to pay off an existing car loan that exceeds the vehicle’s trade-in value, in a six-year loan.

“This unraveling of consumer demand, the basis for our economy, was entirely obvious at the very beginning. Yet junk economists or hired corporate mouthpieces promised Americans a ‘New Economy’ that would provide them with better, higher paying, cleaner jobs to take the place of the jobs moved abroad. As I have pointed out for more than a decade, there is no sign of these jobs anywhere in the economy.

“Globalism, like neoliberal economics, is an instrument of economic imperialism. Labor is exploited, while peoples, cultures, and environments are destroyed. Yet the propaganda is so powerful that people partake of their own destruction.”

My Comment: Egoism is invincible! The Book of Zohar says  that we are being prepared for the poison on the end of the blade that the angel of death brings to the mouth, and the unfortunate human being has no other option but to open his mouth and swallow the drop of poison.

After all, he feels pleasure in it and only afterward—death! Only by the influence of the Upper Light can we bring about its correction. This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah explains to us.
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In the News (Scientific American): “A person’s experience as a child or teenager can have a profound impact on their future children’s lives, new work is showing. Rachel Yehuda, a researcher in the growing field of epigenetics and the intergenerational effects of trauma, and her colleagues have long studied mass trauma survivors and their offspring. Their latest results reveal that descendants of people who survived the Holocaust have different stress hormone profiles than their peers, perhaps predisposing them to anxiety disorders.

“Yehuda’s team at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y., and others had previously established that survivors of the Holocaust have altered levels of circulating stress hormones compared with other Jewish adults of the same age. Survivors have lower levels of cortisol, a hormone that helps the body return to normal after trauma; those who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have even lower levels.

“This finding echoes the results of many other human epigenetic studies that show that the effects of certain experiences during childhood and adolescence are especially enduring in individuals and sometimes even across generations.

“With low levels of cortisol and high levels of the enzyme that breaks it down, many descendants of Holocaust survivors would be ill adapted to survive starvation themselves. In fact, that stress hormone profile might make them more susceptible to PTSD; previous studies have indeed suggested that the offspring of Holocaust survivors are more vulnerable to the effects of stress and are more likely to experience symptoms of PTSD. These descendants may also be at risk for age-related metabolic syndromes, including obesity, hypertension and insulin resistance, particularly in an environment of plenty.”

My Comment: If you take into account the 20 centuries of systematic oppression, then it is not clear how these people can still experience joy, bring up children, and love humor.
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In the News (from Psychologies): “Happiness for us is habitually measured by capital. We accumulate in the form of things, earn it and receive as a gift. This measurable happiness can be shown to others and evaluated.

“But the more we focus on the things that bring us pleasure, the faster the feeling fades and loses its value. One of the major paradoxes of the science of happiness is a condition where a person gives and at the same time feels maximum satisfaction.

“Studies show that by regularly exercising kindness towards people, our view of the source of happiness changes. We find it within ourselves. This sense of power, the ability to influence the world around us and thus bring it to good pushes us to do good again and again.”

My Comment: This is true and simple: give, then find the source of happiness in yourself!
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Opinion (Robert B. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies): “How would you like to live in an economy where robots do everything that can be predictably programmed in advance, and almost all profits go to the robots’ owners?

“Meanwhile, human beings do the work that’s unpredictable – odd jobs, on-call projects, fetching and fixing, driving and delivering, tiny tasks needed at any and all hours – and patch together barely enough to live on.

“Brace yourself. This is the economy we’re now barreling toward. …

“New software technologies are allowing almost any job to be divided up into discrete tasks that can be parceled out to workers when they’re needed, with pay determined by demand for that particular job at that particular moment.

“Customers and workers are matched online. Workers are rated on quality and reliability. The big money goes to the corporations that own the software. The scraps go to the on-demand workers.

“Consider Amazon’s ‘Mechanical Turk.’ Amazon calls it ‘a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence.’

“In reality, it’s an Internet job board offering minimal pay for mindlessly-boring bite-sized chores. Computers can’t do them because they require some minimal judgment, so human beings do them for peanuts — say, writing a product description, for $3; or choosing the best of several photographs, for 30 cents; or deciphering handwriting, for 50 cents. Amazon takes a healthy cut of every transaction.

“This is the logical culmination of a process that began thirty years ago when corporations began turning over full-time jobs to temporary workers, independent contractors, free-lancers, and consultants.

“It was a way to shift risks and uncertainties onto the workers – work that might entail more hours than planned for, or was more stressful than expected.

“And a way to circumvent labor laws that set minimal standards for wages, hours, and working conditions. And that enabled employees to join together to bargain for better pay and benefits.

“The new on-demand work shifts risks entirely onto workers, and eliminates minimal standards completely.

“In effect, on-demand work is a reversion to the piece work of the nineteenth century – when workers had no power and no legal rights, took all the risks, and worked all hours for almost nothing.

“Amazon’s Mechanical Turks work for pennies, literally. Minimum wage? Time-and-a half for overtime? Amazon says it just connects buyers and sellers so it’s not responsible.

“Defenders of on-demand work emphasize its flexibility. Workers can put in whatever time they want, work around their schedules, fill in the downtime in their calendars. …

“An opportunity to make some extra bucks can seem mighty attractive in an economy whose median wage has been stagnant for thirty years and almost all of whose economic gains have been going to the top. …

“On this measure, the share-the-scraps economy is hurtling us backwards.”

My Comment: I have to repeat again that without connecting people through integral education, they will pointlessly and endlessly exploit each other until they return to the Stone Age. In store for us are sufferings that will show us a way out of this dead end where egoism drives us. But this is the path of suffering.

The path of Light is also possible—drawing the force of correction by our unity in integral education. As soon as we begin to implement it, we will immediately discover its remarkable properties in all aspects of our lives.
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In the News (from University of Colorado Boulder): “Living in bigger, denser settlements allowed the inhabitants of ancient cities to be more productive, just as is true for modern urbanites, according to a new study by scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Santa Fe Institute.

“As modern cities grow, they obey certain rules. As the population increases, for example, the settled area becomes denser instead of sprawling outward. This allows people to live closer together, use infrastructure more intensively, interact more frequently, and as a result, produce more per person.

In a paper published last year, the research team—led by Scott Ortman, an assistant professor in CU-Boulder’s Department of Anthropology—found that this set of rules, known as urban scaling, appears to apply to ancient cities as well as modern ones. In that study, the researchers analyzed how artifacts were scattered and how houses were distributed to show that ancient cities also became denser as the population grew.

“Now, the researchers have expanded this work to show that inhabitants of ancient settlements also became more productive as the size and density of their settlements grew, just as in modern cities.”

My Comment: Humanity in its development goes through just two stages:

1. Egoistic: the unconscious selfish—the still, vegetative, and animate levels—then the conscious egoistic (the realization of evil).
2. Altruistic: ascent to it and development of it up to the point of the disappearance of our (apparent) world.

So far, we have not changed our nature from 1 to 2, so that no matter what we build, our lives are focused on the satisfaction of our animal (physical) needs, and there is no big difference in the forms of life at different times.
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Opinion (Sergey A. Karaganov, Russian political scientist, head of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy): “Having won the Cold War, Europe is gradually losing the world. It is entering the next stage of international relations not united and weak, standing before confrontation or worse, a major war.

“A great slogan about the ‘universal European home’ brings about a sarcastic smile. Is there a chance not to lose the world?

“Europe is not the centre of the world. This is a political entity, which only a part of the global system, where everyone is interrelated and is subject to mutual influence. Given the current lack of confidence, the prospect of existence of a single space seems illusory. In addition, the political influence of the United States is aimed at deepening the split of the EU.

“The last 25 years were wasted. Without a new ideas and a great goal, which will unite the nations of Europe, there will be separation according to the old and new boundaries.”

My Comment: This is predetermined by the plan of nature (the Creator) to bring people to unity by the path of suffering or awareness of the necessity.
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In the News (The Economist):  “’VIRTUE,’ according to George Bernard Shaw, ‘is insufficient temptation.’ But new research on the consumption patterns of the environmentally minded suggests that virtue and self-indulgence often go hand-in-hand.

“A recent paper by Uma Karmarkar of Harvard Business School and Bryan Bollinger of Duke Fuqua School of Business finds that shoppers who bring their own bags when they buy groceries like to reward themselves for it. For two years the authors tracked transactions at a supermarket in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, shoppers who brought their own bags bought more green products than those who used the store’s bags. …

“A study from 2011 on water-conservation in Massachusetts shows how. In the experiment, some 150 apartments were divided into two groups. Half received water-saving tips and weekly estimates of their usage; the other half served as a control.

“The households that were urged to use less water did so: their consumption fell by an average of 6% compared with the control group. The hitch was that their electricity consumption rose by 5.6%. The moral licensing was so strong, in other words, that it more or less outweighed the original act of virtue.

“Moral licensing does not seem to occur when virtuous conduct is obligatory. In one study, participants imagined themselves doing community service. Then they were asked to pick between two rewards: an indulgent one (a pair of designer jeans) and a practical one (a vacuum cleaner). If they were told to imagine that they had been sentenced to community service for a driving violation, they were much less likely to choose the jeans than if they pictured themselves as volunteers. The best way to get people to do good, it seems, is to make them feel bad about themselves.”

My Comment: We are commanded to act either by nature (the path of suffering) or by Kabbalah (the path of Light) in order to realize the insignificance of our egoistic nature, from which, in this case, there is an opportunity to escape.
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