In the News (from the Royal Society): “Swarming is an essential part of honeybee behavior. When a fertilized queen leaves the hive she takes a swarm of bees with her to start a new colony. Up to 20000 bees might accompany a newly fertilised queen bee on her quest. These bees usually form a cluster and cling to each other for several days whilst scouts leave to search for a new home to relocate to. The bees, exposed to the outside temperature, are at risk of getting too cold but in their tightly packed cluster they may also become too hot.

“Clusters of bees seem to react as one autonomous body to these changing temperatures. Whilst each bee only has information from its own local environment, the cluster as a whole responds cooperatively to maintain a temperature inside of within a few degrees of 35°C. Researchers from MIT and Harvard set about designing a mathematical model which would explain how clusters of bees can respond cooperatively without a central controller.

“Their model suggests that bees respond to their local conditions and move accordingly and that this causes variations in packing which can propagate information about ambient air temperature throughout the cluster.

“Bee clusters have two major parts. Around the outside of the cluster the bees are densely packed together forming a mantle, whilst within the core of the cluster, the bees are more sparsely packed.  When air temperature is cool the mantle becomes more densely packed and the cluster contracts, keeping the heat within. In high ambient temperatures the cluster expands and the mantle spreads out to prevent over heating in the core. …

“The model created by Samuel Ocko and L. Mahadevan uses the idea that cold bees prefer to huddle densely and hot bees like to be more sparsely packed. Cold bees attempt to push themselves towards higher temperatures, which creates what the team call a ‘behavioral pressure’. The bees seek to minimize this pressure by changing their packing. Using a series of equations, the team found that by minimizing behavioral pressure local bee packing mathematically relates both to local temperature and outside temperature. Their model suggests that bees respond to their local conditions and move accordingly and that this causes variations in packing which can propagate information about ambient air temperature throughout the cluster.

“With this method bees can share information across the cluster to work together to maintain constant temperatures in the swarm. The model shows bees’ extraordinary ability to act as a collective. The team suggest that in the cluster individuals can work so closely because ‘the difference between the individual and the collective is nearly non-existent.’”

My Comment: Bees and other animals interact instinctively, managed and driven by the force of nature. The human being was given the mind to learn from nature and reach similarity with it by his efforts. As a result of this work on ourselves, we reveal the higher hidden force of nature: the Creator.
[124191]

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Opinion (Vardan Baghdasaryan, Russian historian and political scientist): “The amount of gun violence shown in PG-13 films has more than tripled since 1985, the year the rating was introduced.” Source: ScienceDaily

“The greatest challenge to the prospects for the moral progress of humanity in the twentieth century was the challenge of fascism. Fascism was not, as it is often represented, an irrational failure in the cultural program of Europe, the blackout of the consciousness of the German or other European nations, an artificial regime.

“But the problems that gave rise to fascism were not solved, and in the late 1970s, a new wave of fascism emerged. Initially, it spread through the use of symbols, through cinema in the dissemination of swastikas and other fascist symbols, in the formation of the cult of violence, in its everyday use.

“The former pacifist ideals of the 1960s were discarded. Instead of them, the ideal of warrior-winner was produced. The “Superman” was not much different from the image of the blond winner in the propaganda of the Third Reich. These role models were instilled at an early age.

“The evil hero of computer games comes instead of the traditional folk tales that established the power of good. The new game culture teaches the idea that killing is not only permissible, but it is also necessary for reaching one’s goal.

“Cruelty was detected in various cultures, but the violence on the basis of anthropological superiority is a characteristic feature of the fascist consciousness. Killing in a computer game is not considered killing a person at all.

“Perhaps, the encouraged images of the hero-killer do not go beyond the virtual framework, and by killing in a computer game, a person releases a charge of aggression, which is not transferred to others. Statistics says the opposite: in 1974, there were 3 predetermined murders per 100,000 people, with a downward trend, but from the 1980s, the vector turned upwards, and by 1993, there were 4 and today there are 7 per 100,000 people.

“Cultural hegemony precedes political hegemony. Popular culture has become largely fascist. What’s next?”

My Comment: Next, there will be an ordinary fascism, which Kabbalah warned about at the beginning of the 20^th century. Kabbalah also states that there are only two paths of human evolution: the path of suffering—fascist regimes, with a rapid coming of the third and fourth world thermonuclear wars—or the path of gradual conscious re-education (through Integral Education and Upbringing) of the entire humanity.
[124107]

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Opinion (Igor Agamirzyan, CEO Russian Venture Company): “Robotics and new production methods will turn factories into deserted premises, which will be run by a dozen of operators. What could be done with free time that people all over the world will have?

“The first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18^th century with the mechanization of the textile industry. The culmination of the second industrial revolution became Ford’s assembly lines.

“In less than two centuries, the economic, political and social structure of the world became completely subordinated to the new industrial reality. Now we live in the era of the third industrial revolution. However, not everyone understands that it is radically different from the previous two. And together with it, our life will be fundamentally different.

“The main feature of the new industrialization is the shift of the center of the added value from manufacturing to the development, engineering and design. In the modern technological economy, the replication of complex objects became practically free.

“In the pharmaceutical industry, the production cost of a pill is nearing zero, while corporations spend billions of dollars on the development and marketing of new drugs. In the near future, the production capacity will be in the form of a home printer.

“Production returns from developing countries to the developed ones because now goods are created in shops without people. As a result, the role of the various states will change in the global world.

“The first two industrial revolutions brought changes to the structure of society. In a short time, the number of people in the world grew from tens of millions to seven billion. The average life expectancy has doubled; for the first time in human history, the majority of the population do not starve; only 5% of the population can satisfy the basic needs of humankind. The main outcome of this transformation is the emergence of surplus of the free time that people have. The third industrial revolution will fill this time with ideas and meaning.”

My Comment: Our development is heading towards freeing the human being from the animal level where it is necessary to take care of the body, so that at the moment when we begin to recognize the evil of our egoism and its finality, we could become fully engaged in our re-education and similarity to the next degree of our —the level of “human,” in the implementation of the Biblical condition of “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
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Opinion (Michael Khazin, economist and political research analyst): “Today, there are no forces in the world that are ready to take on responsibility to develop and implement solutions. There are no new concepts, no resources to impose them and to punish those who depart from them.

“The modern political world consists not of politicians, that is, people who are ready to assume political responsibility, but administrators who are just ready to irresponsibly apply standard solutions. An exemplary embodiment of this policy is to make decisions collectively – so that none of the administrators is responsible for anything.

“In the conditions of hard crisis, this trick will not do, and this will inevitably lead to a situation when the rats flee the sinking ship. A modern administrator will never agree to take responsibility, and that is why we will inevitably see the return of real politicians who will begin to work on the development of new ‘rules of the game.’”

“But since in the last decades no one prepared these people, then the quality of their first decisions will be very far from ideal.”

My Comment: The problem is that it is impossible to prepare future leaders in any modern systems because the future will be built on completely different principles of integral interaction. These managers can be trained only by the method of integral education.
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In the News (from The Guardian): “Limitless growth is the fantasy of economists, businesses and politicians. It is seen as a measure of progress. As a result, gross domestic product (GDP), which is supposed to measure the wealth of nations, has emerged as both the most powerful number and dominant concept in our times. However, economic growth hides the poverty it creates through the destruction of nature, which in turn leads to communities lacking the capacity to provide for themselves.

“Thus nature’s amazing cycles of renewal of water and nutrients are defined into nonproduction. The peasants of the world, who provide 72% of the food, do not produce; women who farm or do most of the housework do not fit this paradigm of growth either. A living forest does not contribute to growth, but when trees are cut down and sold as timber, we have growth. Healthy societies and communities do not contribute to growth, but disease creates growth through, for example, the sale of patented medicine. …

“Both ecology and economics have emerged from the same roots – ‘oikos,’ the Greek word for household. As long as economics was focused on the household, it recognized and respected its basis in natural resources and the limits of ecological renewal. It was focused on providing for basic human needs within these limits. Economics as based on the household was also women-centered. Today, economics is separated from and opposed to both ecological processes and basic needs. While the destruction of nature has been justified on grounds of creating growth, poverty and dispossession has increased. While being non-sustainable, it is also economically unjust.”

My Comment: Our evil inclination, egoism, plays with us and drives is into crisis and a dead end, so that we recognize its evil and begin to seek the way to correct it, until we find the wisdom of Kabbalah and take over its realization and goal. This happens according to plan: “I have created the evil inclination, I have created the Torah as a spice. This refers to the Light in it, since the Light in it reforms it.” First, there is the recognition of evil of our nature, and then search for the means to correct the evil.
[121598]

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In the News (from ScienceDaily): “Writing in the current special ‘peace psychology’ issue of American Psychologist, lead author Bernhard Leidner, Linda Tropp and Brian Lickel of UMass Amherst’s Psychology of Peace and Violence program say that if social psychology research focuses only on how to soften the negative consequences of war and violence, ‘it would fall far short of its potential and value for society.’

“’In summarizing psychological perspectives on the conditions and motivations that underlie violent conflict,’ says Tropp, ‘we find that psychology’s contributions can extend beyond understanding the origins and nature of violence to promote nonviolence and peace.’ She adds, ‘We oppose the view that war is inevitable and argue that understanding the psychological roots of conflict can increase the likelihood of avoiding violence as a way to resolve conflicts with others.’…

“The authors acknowledge that conflict and violence between groups persist because they often give people ways to address psychological needs, for identity, safety, security and power.”

My Comment: The cause of all conflicts is our nature: egoism, the desire to fulfill ourselves at the expense of others. Until we correct it, we will fight for any reason, up to the point of causeless mutual destruction because the natural psychological need to conflict motivates us to action.

It is only left to head towards mutual destruction or to correction of our nature to the opposite so that connection, unity, and mutual concern become our psychological need. This transformation can be done only by the Upper Light.
[121994]

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In the News (from Business Spectator): “A Pew Research Center opinion survey, conducted in 39 countries this spring, asked: ‘Will children in your country be better off than their parents?’ Only 33 per cent of Americans believed their children would live better, while 62 per cent said they would live worse. Europeans were even gloomier. Just 28 per cent of Germans, 17 per cent of Brits, 14 per cent of Italians and 9 per cent of French thought their children would be better off than previous generations. This Western pessimism contrasts strongly with optimism in the developing world: 82 per cent of Chinese, 59 per cent of Indians and 65 per cent of Nigerians believe in a more prosperous future.”

My Comment: Do we really need to wait until the deadlock is right before our eyes and there will be no escape from the deadly clash with it? Human egoism does not allow him to really see the future.

It is said that the angel of death offers a person a knife with a drop of poison on its tip, and a person inevitably opens his mouth and swallows the poison because he cannot refuse the egoistic pleasure contained in it. There is no other way to escape death but to obey the wisdom of those who foresee the future.
[123357]

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Opinion (Sir Christopher Pissarides, School Professor of Economics & Political Science and Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, Nobel Prize winner for economics in 2010): “One of the world’s leading economists will today admit he was wrong to back the creation of the euro – and call for it to be dismantled.

“Sir Christopher Pissarides, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2010, was once a passionate believer in the benefits of the single currency.

“But in an extraordinary change of heart, today he will warn the euro is creating a ‘lost generation’ of unemployed youngsters and is ‘dividing Europe.’

“The Cypriot-British economist will call for action to ‘restore the euro’s credibility in international markets’ and to ‘restore the trust that Europe’s nations once had in each other.’

But, in a lecture at the London School of Economics, where he teaches, he will add: ‘Regretfully, I do not see either materializing.’ …

“Experts believe Europe will never be able to implement the policies required to boost growth and create jobs because of the huge differences between economies across the region. …

“He will say that unless there is a dramatic change of policy the euro should be broken up.

“‘The euro should either be dismantled in an orderly way or the leading members should do the necessary as fast as possible to make it growth and employment-friendly,’ he will say.

“‘We will get nowhere plodding along with the current line of ad hoc decision-making and inconsistent debt-relief policies.”

My Comment: Such views are increasingly heard among specialists. But how can this project be rolled out without destroying all of Europe and plunging it into a deadly conflict? Isn’t it better to accept the program of the integral education and transformation of the EU that should have been done before forming the EU?
[123360]

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Opinion (Chris Hedges, American journalist specializing in American politics and society, best-selling author of several books, senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City): “As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden. …

“Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a question of which ideas will capture the public’s imagination.

“Revolution usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances, be considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and widespread despair, means that blowback is inevitable.”

My Comment: Indeed, even with all the sophistication of the police apparatus of the authorities, no one can predict the course of events when the masses are not provided with the basic necessities. To satisfy their necessities of life, it is necessary to educate people in the spirit of integral education and upbringing, reciprocity and to replace material values with the spiritual ones, fulfillment from unity, mutual support—and further from the revelation of the higher existence.
[123339]

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Opinion (Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, interviewed by Piotr Dutkiewicz): “With the global crisis ongoing and the ruling class tittering on the verge of panic, there is a real possibility of a massive shift to the right, not unlike that of the 1930s. I think that such a shift will be difficult to prevent, let alone counteract and reverse, without a totally new theoretical alternative. …

“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when capitalism was just taking hold, there was nothing apologetic about the market. On the contrary. The market was seen as the harbinger of progress – a powerful institution that heralded liberty, equality and tolerance. …

“The political system, by contrast, is wasteful and parasitical. Its purpose is not production, but redistribution. Its members – the politicians, state officials and bureaucrats – seek power and prestige. They eagerly ‘intervene’ in and ‘monopolize’ the economy. They tax, borrow and spend – and in the process stifle the economy and ‘distort’ its efficiency.

“The market became the chief ideology of the triumphant capitalist regime. It helped spread capitalism around the world, and it assisted in the fight against competing regimes, such as fascism and communism. In the Soviet Union, where production was besieged by chaotic planning and accompanied by tyrannical rule, organized violence, open corruption and restricted consumption, the market symbolized the ‘other life.’

“When economics first emerged in the late nineteenth century, capitalism was already victorious. But it was also highly turbulent and increasingly contested by critiques and revolutionaries, so it had to be defended; and the ideological part of that defense was delegated to the new priests of liberalism: the economists. In order to perform their role, the economists have elaborated an intricate system of mathematical models. This system, they claim, proves that a free, totally unregulated economy – if we could ever have one – would yield the best of all possible worlds, by definition.

“The conventional counterclaim, marshaled by many heterodox critiques, is that neoclassical models may be elegant, but they have little or nothing to do with the actual world we live in. And there is certainly much truth in this observation. But the ‘science of economics’ is besieged by a far deeper problem that rarely if ever gets mentioned: it relies on fictitious quantities.

“Every science rests on one or more fundamental quantities in which all other magnitudes are denominated. Physics, for example, has five fundamental quantities – length, time, mass, electrical charge and heat – and every other measure is derived from those quantities. For instance, velocity is length divided by time; acceleration is the time derivative of velocity; and gravity is mass multiplied by acceleration. Now, as a science, economics too has to have fundamental quantities – and the economists claim it does. The fundamental quantity of the neoclassical universe is the unit of hedonic pleasure, or ‘util.’ …

“Now, in the final analysis, all economic quantities are reducible to utils. The util is the elementary particle of economic science. It is the fundamental quantity, the basic building block everything economic is made of. The utils themselves, like Greek atoms, are identical everywhere, but their combination yields infinitely complex forms that economists call ‘goods and services.’ Every composite of the “real economy” – from the aggregate quantities of production, consumption and investment, to the size of GDP, to the magnitude of military spending and the scale of technology – is the sum total of the utils it generates. And the price magnitudes of the “nominal” economy – for instance, the dollar prices of an industrial robot (say $5 million) and a trendy iPhone ($500) – merely represent and reflect the util-denominated quantities of their respective ‘real’ quantities (whose ratio, assuming the reflection is accurate, is 10,000:1).

“And, yet, and here we come to the crux of the matter, this util – this basic quantum that everything economic is supposedly derived from – is immeasurable and in fact unknowable!

“Nobody has been able to identify the quantum of a util, and I very much doubt that anyone ever will. It is a pure fiction. And since all ‘real’ economic quantities are denominated in this fictitious unit, it follows that their own quantities are fictitious as well. To measure ‘real GDP’ or the ‘standard of living’ without utils is like measuring velocity without time, or gravity without mass. (I should note here that a similar critique can be leveled against classical Marxism. The elementary particle of the Marxist universe is socially necessary abstract labor. This is the fundamental quantity that all “real” magnitudes are made of and which the nominal spheres (should) reflect – and yet no Marxist has ever measured it.)

“The students, dazed by the endless drill of ‘practical’ assignments, do not even suspect that their ‘computations’ are practically meaningless. Most professors, having graduated from the meat grinder of neoclassical training, have had all traces of the problem safely erased from their memory (assuming they were aware of it in the first place). And the statisticians, whose job is to measure the economy, have no choice but to concoct numbers based on arbitrary assumptions that nobody can either validate or refute. The entire edifice hangs in thin air, and everyone keeps quite lest it collapse.”

My Comment: But today the edifice is crumbling, and we need a new economy: an integral interaction. Production is necessary only to meet the required needs. Distribution is equal, in accordance with everyone’s needs. Money is void. To receive necessities, it is mandatory for everyone to take part in the life of society and most importantly in integral education and upbringing. Thus, society will come to its natural balance, in itself and with nature.
[123333]

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