In the News (from World Socialist Web Site): “In the European countries, 12.7 percent of all young people are neither employed nor in education or training, a rate 2 percentage points higher than before the crisis. The ILO report notes: ‘The crisis has dramatically diminished the labor market prospects for young people, as many experience long-term unemployment right from the start of their labor market entry, a situation that was never observed during earlier cyclical downturns.’

“’Social protection is both a human right and sound economic policy. Social security enables access to health care, education and nutrition. Well-designed social protection systems support incomes and domestic consumption, build human capital, and increase productivity. Yet over 76 per cent of the world’s population continues to live without adequate health and social protection coverage.’ …

“’As a result, we are faced with a deep social crisis, a crisis too of social justice. Disturbing – and rising levels of inequality – in advanced and developing economies are widely acknowledged as cause for great concern. Today the wealth of the top one per cent of the global population equals that of the poorest 3.5 billion people.’“ Source: International Labour Organization

My Comment: Governments will have no choice but to provide the entire population, employed and unemployed, with essential goods and services. But it will not eliminate the degradation of the population, and maybe then the need for integral education and upbringing will be realized. Otherwise, there will be confrontations, pushing towards civil or international war.
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In the news (from the American Dream): “The American people are the most drugged people in the history of the planet. Illegal drugs get most of the headlines, but the truth is that the number of Americans that are addicted to legal drugs is far greater than the number of Americans that are addicted to illegal drugs. As you will see below, close to 70 percent of all Americans are currently on at least one prescription drug. In addition, there are 60 million Americans that ‘abuse alcohol’ and 22 million Americans that use illegal drugs. What that means is that almost everyone that you meet is going to be onsomething. …

“That sounds absolutely crazy but it is true. We are literally being drugged out of our minds. In fact, as you will read about below, there are 70 million Americans that are taking ‘mind-altering drugs’ right now. If it seems like most people cannot think clearly these days, it is because they can’t. We love our legal drugs and it is getting worse with each passing year. And considering the fact that big corporations are making tens of billions of dollars peddling their drugs to the rest of us, don’t expect things to change any time soon.”

My Comment: This condition is spreading around the world, in the favor of the ruling circles: it is easier to control a weak-willed and dependent population. People need to go through the lowest point of the fall, the recognition of evil, and only then will they be willing to change themselves. Then they will be able to hear about the existence of the method of integral education.
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In the News (from RollingStone): “There’s a lot of talk of Karl Marx in the air these days … But few people actually understand Marx’s trenchant critique of capitalism. Most people are vaguely aware of the radical economist’s prediction that capitalism would inevitably be replaced by communism, but they often misunderstand why he believed this to be true. …

“Here are five facts of life in 2014 that Marx’s analysis of capitalism correctly predicted more than a century ago:

1. The Great Recession (Capitalism’s Chaotic Nature)

The inherently chaotic, crisis-prone nature of capitalism was a key part of Marx’s writings. He argued that the relentless drive for profits would lead companies to mechanize their workplaces, producing more and more goods while squeezing workers’ wages until they could no longer purchase the products they created. Sure enough, modern historical events from the Great Depression to the dot-com bubble can be traced back to what Marx termed ‘fictitious capital’ – financial instruments like stocks and credit-default swaps. We produce and produce until there is simply no one left to purchase our goods, no new markets, no new debts. The cycle is still playing out before our eyes: Broadly speaking, it’s what made the housing market crash in 2008. Decades of deepening inequality reduced incomes, which led more and more Americans to take on debt. When there were no subprime borrows left to scheme, the whole façade fell apart, just as Marx knew it would.

2. The iPhone 5S (Imaginary Appetites). Marx warned that capitalism’s tendency to concentrate high value on essentially arbitrary products would, over time, lead to what he called ‘a contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites.’ It’s a harsh but accurate way of describing contemporary America, where we enjoy incredible luxury and yet are driven by a constant need for more and more stuff to buy… While Chinese families fall sick with cancer from our e-waste, megacorporations are creating entire advertising campaigns around the idea that we should destroy perfectly good products for no reason.

3. The IMF (The Globalization of Capitalism). Marx’s ideas about overproduction led him to predict what is now called globalization – the spread of capitalism across the planet in search of new markets. ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe,’ he wrote. ‘It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.’ While this may seem like an obvious point now, Marx wrote those words in 1848, when globalization was over a century away. And he wasn’t just right about what ended up happening in the late 20^th century – he was right about why it happened: The relentless search for new markets and cheap labor, as well as the incessant demand for more natural resources, are beasts that demand constant feeding.

4. Walmart (Monopoly). The classical theory of economics assumed that competition was natural and therefore self-sustaining. Marx, however, argued that market power would actually be centralized in large monopoly firms as businesses increasingly preyed upon each other… Politicians give lip service to what minimal small-business lobby remains and prosecute the most violent of antitrust abuses – but for the most part, we know big business is here to stay.

5. Low Wages, Big Profits (The Reserve Army of Industrial Labor). Marx believed that wages would be held down by a ‘reserve army of labor,’ which he explained simply using classical economic techniques: Capitalists wish to pay as little as possible for labor, and this is easiest to do when there are too many workers floating around. Thus, after a recession, using a Marxist analysis, we would predict that high unemployment would keep wages stagnant as profits soared, because workers are too scared of unemployment to quit their terrible, exploitative jobs.

In Conclusion: Marx was wrong about many things. Most of his writing focuses on a critique of capitalism rather than a proposal of what to replace it with. But his work still shapes our world in a positive way as well. When he argued for a progressive income tax in the Communist Manifesto, no country had one. Now, there is scarcely a country without a progressive income tax, and it’s one small way that the U.S. tries to fight income inequality. Marx’s moral critique of capitalism and his keen insights into its inner workings and historical context are still worth paying attention to. As Robert L. Heilbroner writes, ‘We turn to Marx, therefore, not because he is infallible, but because he is inescapable.’”

My Comment: Baal HaSulam’s opinion is that, tracing the mechanism of natural development, Marx noted only the results of the positive and negative forces, i.e., creation and destruction that are produced in society.

Accordingly, he planned his tactics and did not pay attention to the causal factors that lead to such consequences. It’s like a doctor who does not pay attention to the root of the disease and treats the patient based just on its external manifestations (modern medicine operates on the same principle).
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In the News (from The Independent): “Scientists at Oxford University have made a startling discovery: they’ve found a region of the brain that makes you wonder if you’ve done something wrong, and whether you’d have been well advised to do something better.

“There are several things that you should know about this region, which is inside your head… One, it’s called the lateral frontal pole. Two, it’s unique to humans – they ran tests on monkeys in the course of the research at Oxford and, nope, they don’t have it. Three, it’s the size of ‘a large Brussels sprout.’ And four, it’s a leap beyond current scientific knowledge into realms that can only be described as spooky. …

“For centuries we thought that the conscience was just some faculty of moral insight in the human mind, an innate sense that one was behaving well or badly – although the great HL Mencken once defined it as, ‘the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.’ It’s been used by religions as a numinous something-or-other, kindly bestowed by God, to give humans a choice between sin and Paradise.”

My Comment: Our world and our body is a replica of the higher worlds. The only difference is in the program of their work: for one’s own sake, in our world and for others, for the Creator, in the upper world. But all the details are identical.
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In the News (from Slate): “It’s not that rare these days for people to marry outside their ethnic or religious group or to live in a different region of the country from where they grew up. Among college-educated people, in particular, the tendency is not so much to marry within your community as to marry within your educational cohort. Every once in a while you do see a college graduate married to a high school dropout (my parents, for example), but it’s quite rare. Since incomes are normally measured on the household level for statistical purposes, it matters quite a bit to big-picture national trends. In particular, “assortative mating” of this kind is a major driver of household-level income inequality.

“How big? Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, Georgi Kocharkov, and Cezar Santosreport in a new paper that if in 2005 the matching of husbands and wives had been random, the Gini coefficient—the most common summary measure of income inequality—would have been 0.34 rather than its real-world 0.43, a difference of almost 25 percent.

Of course, saying that inequality would be lower if marriages were randomized isn’t telling us much. It’s long been the case that a college-educated woman’s husband is much more likely to have a college degree than would be suggested by pure chance. But a number of closely related demographic factors have shifted dramatically over the past generation or two in a way that’s made assortative mating a much more potent economic force. And the nexus between marriage patterns and those other trends is an important motor of inequality.”

My Comment: Egoism rules the world, not romance. Only requiring the equal distribution of income for everyone and the education of all, as if we all belong to the same family, will bring the world to calm. In the meantime, we still need to become convinced that our nature drives us to the manifestation of rejection and hatred in all its forms to come to the realization of egoism as absolute evil in order to seek the way to correct it.
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In the News (from Marketwatch): “Facebook could end up shedding a big chunk of its 1.2 billion users in three years, says a Princeton University study that cited ‘disease-like dynamics’ in the social network’s upcoming doom.

“The study, by two Princeton Ph.D. candidates Joshua Spechler and John Cannarella, has created a stir by speculating that the world’s biggest social network could lose ‘80% of its peak user base’ between 2015 and 2017. …

“Facebook, they suggest, is an idea, a fad that, like an illness, can spread — and then eventually fade away. They cited the rise and fall of MySpace.

“‘Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out,’ they write. …

“‘If the disease model holds it suggests that Facebook will need to evolve/mutate in order to begin another curve or it will die out. It has to overcome the immunization cycle.”

My Comment: By its plan, nature drives us to the ultimate goal, to the form of unity, to similarity to it. Only in this way, future integral means of communication will survive and prosper.
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In the News (from Encyclopedia of Safety): “Bill Gates, Founder of “Microsoft” …

‘The world today has 6.8 billion people. The population is rapidly approaching nine billion. If we did a good job on new vaccines, health care, assistance in the area of reproductive health, we may be able to lower it by 10 percent — 15.’

“John P. Holdren scientific adviser to the U.S. President Barack Obama… ‘It would be easier to implement a program of sterilization of women after the birth of their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, than trying to sterilize men.’

“’Development of sterilization time capsule, which can be sewed into the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. Capsule sewn to the period of puberty and have seized official permission for a limited number of births.’

“The founder of the news agency CNN  Ted Turner … ‘The entire population of 250 — 300 million people, 95% reduction from current levels — would be ideal.’

“David Brower, the first executive director of the environmental NGO Sierra Club …

‘Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents have a license of the government … All potential parents [would oblige] to use contraceptive chemicals, the government provides antidotes to citizens chosen for the birth of a child.’

“The founder of the American Federation of Family Planning Margaret Sanger (Margaret Sanger) … ‘The highest manifestation of mercy, which the family can have one of their children — is to kill him.’

“The philosopher at Princeton University Peter Singer …’So why do not we be the last generation on the planet? If we all agreed on its sterilization, then it would not take any sacrifice — we could celebrate our way into extinction!’

“Thomas Ferguson, former official of the U.S. State Department for the population: ‘There is only one theme throughout our work — we must reduce population. Either governments do it our way, through good, clean methods, or they will have trouble in the likeness of the ones that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population – a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it …’

“John Gvillebod, professor of family planning at University College London … ‘At the global scale the effect of the fact that families will be less than one child, it is much more than all the other measures, for example, turn off the light. Another child – the equivalent of a large number of flights across the planet.’”

My Comment: If we are against each other, we will never have enough room, and if we are together, there is enough for everyone. The only solution is in integral re-education of humanity, including the elite.
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In the News (from Oregon State University): “In ecosystems around the world, the decline of large predators such as lions, dingoes, wolves, otters, and bears is changing the face of landscapes from the tropics to the Arctic – but an analysis of 31 carnivore species to be published Friday in the journal Science shows for the first time how threats such as habitat loss, persecution by humans and loss of prey combine to create global hotspots of carnivore decline.

“More than 75 percent of the 31 large-carnivore species are declining, and 17 species now occupy less than half of their former ranges, the authors reported.

‘Globally, we are losing our large carnivores,” said William Ripple, lead author of the paper and a professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at OregonStateUniversity. …

“Ripple and his OregonState co-author Robert Beschta have documented impacts of cougars and wolves on the regeneration of forest stands and riparian vegetation in Yellowstone and other national parks in North America. Fewer predators, they have found, lead to an increase in browsing animals such as deer and elk. More browsing disrupts vegetation, shifts birds and small mammals and changes other parts of the ecosystem in a widespread cascade of impacts.

“Studies of Eurasian lynx, dingoes, lions and sea otters have found similar effects, the authors reported.

“Lynx have been closely tied to the abundance of roe deer, red fox and hare. In Australia, the construction of a 3,400-mile dingo-proof fence has enabled scientists to study ecosystems with and without the animals, which are closely related to gray wolves. In some parts of Africa, the decrease of lions and leopards has coincided with a dramatic increase in olive baboons, which threaten farm crops and livestock. In the waters off southeast Alaska, a decline in sea otters through killer whale predation has led to a rise in sea urchins and loss of kelp beds.

“The authors call for a deeper understanding of the impact of large carnivores on ecosystems, a view that they trace back to the work of landmark ecologist Aldo Leopold. The classic concept that predators are harmful and deplete fish and wildlife is outdated, they said. Scientists and wildlife managers need to recognize a growing body of evidence for the complex roles that carnivores play in ecosystems and for their social and economic benefits.

“Leopold recognized such relationships between predators and ecosystems, Ripple said, but his observations on that point were largely ignored for decades after his death in 1948. …

“’Nature is highly interconnected,’ said Ripple. ‘The work at Yellowstone and other places shows how one species affects another and another through different pathways. It’s humbling as a scientist to see the interconnectedness of nature.’”

My Comment: Only if people stop in their headlong pursuit of maximum consumption and switch to rational consumption, i.e., to the extent of necessities, and apply their efforts in everything else to spiritual development in order to achieve, even in this world, eternity and perfection, only in this way they will come out of the crisis. Otherwise, they face a terrible path of suffering to the same goal.
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In the News (from News.com.au): “A recent study by researchers at the University of California Berkeley Campus has found a clear connection between wealth and a disregard for a fellow person’s feelings. The Berkeley research team is lead by Paul Piff, a psychologist with an avid interest in the power of money over human interaction.

“In one test Piff’s research team set up games of Monopoly between more than 100 pairs of strangers. A coin was flipped and randomly determined which person out of the pair would be the ‘rich’ player in the game. The game was clearly rigged in favour of the ‘rich’ player, with fascinating results.

“The rich player was given twice as much money as their poorer competitor, and when they passed ‘GO’ they collected twice the salary they were entitled to. They also got to roll two dice on their turn instead of one, and thus moved around the board quicker.

“The videos showed that the language and comments of the richer players became more confident as the game progressed. They began to move their piece around the board much louder, at times smacking it down.

“We were more likely to see signs of dominance and non-verbal signs, displays of power and celebration among the rich players,” said Piff. …

“’The rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person, less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor … players,’ said Piff. They became ‘more and more demonstrative of their material success, more likely to showcase how well they were doing.’

“Numerous surveys and studies made over seven years found that wealthier individuals are more likely to moralise greed as being good, and the pursuit of self-interest as being acceptable. …

“Individuals who made between $15,000 and $25,000 a year gave on average 44 per cent more of their money to the stranger than the individuals who earned between $150,000 and $200,000 a year.”

“They even tested hundreds of vehicles and found that drivers of expensive cars were more inclined to break the law, failing to stop at a pedestrian crossing when there was someone waiting to cross.

“Nearly 50 per cent of drivers of expensive range cars cut off pedestrians, while none of the drivers of the least expensive cars did. As the price of the car increased, the driver’s tendencies to break the law increased too.

“Other studies have tested whether richer individuals are more likely to lie in negotiations, to endorse unethical behavior at work like stealing cash from the cash register, taking bribes or lying to customers.

“What these studies have found is that, “the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to pursue a vision of personal success, of achievement and accomplishment, to the detriment of others around you.”

My Comment: How can we get back on the right track? Only by implementing re-education that will lead to the leveling of wealth in a voluntary way. Otherwise, we are faced with civil war.
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In the News (from ScienceDaily): “Neuroscientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) and the University of California, San Diego, have successfully demonstrated a technique to enhance a form of self-control through a novel form of brain stimulation. …

“Study participants were asked to perform a simple behavioral task that required the braking/slowing of action — inhibition — in the brain. In each participant, the researchers first identified the specific location for this brake in the prefrontal region of the brain. Next, they increased activity in this brain region using stimulation with brief and imperceptible electrical charges. This led to increased braking — a form of enhanced self-control. …

“’There is a circuit in the brain for inhibiting or braking responses,’ said Nitin Tandon, M.D., the study’s senior author and associate professor in The Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery at the UTHealth Medical School. ‘We believe we are the first to show that we can enhance this braking system with brain stimulation.’

“A computer stimulated the prefrontal cortex exactly when braking was needed. This was done using electrodes implanted directly on the brain surface.

“When the test was repeated with stimulation of a brain region outside the prefrontal cortex, there was no effect on behavior, showing the effect to be specific to the prefrontal braking system.

“The method of electrical stimulation was novel in that it apparently enhanced prefrontal function, whereas other human brain stimulation studies mostly disrupt normal brain activity. This is the first published human study to enhance prefrontal lobe function using direct electrical stimulation, the researchers report.”

My Comment: Undoubtedly, we will find a number of negative consequences of such interference in freedom of choice. Although this may work at the level of selfish preferences, choices, but with respect to love and bestowal on others, instead of selfish gain, the brain will not work because it calculates the profit of desires. If they are egoistic (the heart), then the mind calculates what it is better for egoism.Thus, until a person transforms his desires from “to receive” into “to give” with the help of Surrounding Light, the brain will not be able to calculate anti-egoistic actions. That is, without Kabbalah, to turn egoism into altruism, we will not be able to obtain freedom of will, but will remain slaves of egoism, only within it, programming ourselves in preference to enjoying a meal or being slim.
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