In the News (from The Independent): “There’s a lot more to being bored than you might think, if new research is to be believed.

“Science has known about four types of boredom for a while now, but a team of international scientists have now built on their research and discovered a fifth, “especially unpleasant” form of tedium.

“Dubbed ‘apathetic boredom,’ it elicits a feeling of learned helplessness similar to depression.

“According to the scientists, led by Dr Thomas Goetz of the University of Konstanz in Germany, boredom can be categorised by levels of arousal (ranging from ‘calm’ to ‘fidgety’), and how positive or negative boredom is experienced – its ‘valence.’

“Previously, it was thought that people could suffer from ‘indifferent boredom,’ in which people felt withdrawn but relaxed; ‘calibrating boredom,’ a feeling of uncertainty in which people are receptive to but do not seek out change; ‘searching boredom,’ which is restless and pursues distraction; and ‘reactant boredom,’ wherein people are motivated to leave their situation for a specific change.

“Goetz, his colleague Anne Frenzel, and a team of fellow researchers conducted two studies among 63 German university students and 80 German high school learners. …

“Apathetic boredom was reported in slightly more than a third of the high school students – a fact the researchers found ‘alarming.’”

My Comment: This is a transition period from the egoistic lifestyle, with its natural energy, search, and competition aimed at obtaining at the expense of others, to the altruistic lifestyle of society, with its energy, exploration, and competition aimed at bestowal unto society and getting the fulfillment of the whole society.
[121968]

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In the News (from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations): “The waste of a staggering 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year is not only causing major economic losses but also wreaking significant harm on the natural resources that humanity relies upon to feed itself, says a new FAO report. …

“Among its key findings: Each year, food that is produced but not eaten guzzles up a volume of water equivalent to the annual flow of Russia’s Volga River and is responsible for adding 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases to the planet’s atmosphere.

“And beyond its environmental impacts, the direct economic consequences to producers of food wastage (excluding fish and seafood) run to the tune of $750 billion annually, FAO’s report estimates. …

“‘We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practices, when 870 million people go hungry every day,’ said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva. …

“Where wastage happens:

“Fifty-four percent of the world’s food wastage occurs ‘upstream’ during production, post-harvest handling and storage, according to FAO’s study. Forty-six percent of it happens ‘downstream,’ at the processing, distribution and consumption stages.

“As a general trend, developing countries suffer more food losses during agricultural production, while food waste at the retail and consumer level tends to be higher in middle and high-income regions — where it accounts for 31-39 percent of total wastage — than in low-income regions (4-16 percent).

“The later a food product is lost along the chain, the greater the environmental consequences, FAO’s report notes, since the environmental costs incurred during processing, transport, storage and cooking must be added to the initial production costs.”

My Comment: All this says only one thing: Until we change ourselves, our egoistic nature, we will not stop suffering from hunger and destroying each other. We must decide where the root of evil is and look for the ways to solve it—this will take us to the realization of the need to use the method of integral education.

It is possible to bring integral education to the entire planet by the modern means of communication and technology. After all, we are talking about saving humanity. Baal HaSulam writes that otherwise we will come to a war of extermination, after which a small number of remaining people will reach unity and equality, becoming similar to nature and moving to the next stage of development.
[121586]

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In the News (from Finmarket): “Alexander Fleming, the creator of penicillin, warned still in 1940 that the effect of his discovery would not last forever, that microbes would adapt to medications. The more available medications became, the faster microbes developed the ways to protect against them.

“Antibiotics are losing their properties so quickly that it becomes unprofitable for companies to develop them. Making one drug cost about a billion dollars, and these costs do not have time to pay off before the microbes adapt to them. Soon, minor infections will become fatal again.

“Without antibiotics people would not be able to treat cancer and to transplant organs because these procedures are not possible without suppressing the immune system. Any treatment which requires injecting drugs in the human body, for example, kidney dialysis, will become impossible.

“We will have to forget about implants. This also applies to cosmetic surgery and heart valve surgery. Childbirth will become as dangerous, as a hundred years ago, when five of a thousand pregnant women died.”

My Comment: The problem is food: the development of new varieties, processing plants, and raising meat with antibiotics. We get a huge amount of food with harmful substances together. Objections are usually limited to the notion that this is better than starvation. But if we had changed ourselves to a mutual caring attitude, then we would have distributed good correctly, and we would not have to grow plant and animal food with pesticides, antibiotics, etc.
[121584]

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In the News (from Novaya Gazeta): “The ideology of the new order of life: everyone is entitled to a guaranteed monthly income. The collection of signatures under this proposal (referendum) took place in Switzerland.

“In general, this is a new principle of life, another option of human development, a different economy, a different state. Behind the activists’ idea there is an international network of BIEN (Basic Income Earth Network), which includes 17 national organizations from Austria, Australia, Holland, America, England and Germany.

“The organization’s leadership consists of professors from the world’s best universities (next congress – Summer 2014).

“BIEN develops the ideology of a new order of life, assuming that everyone will have the right to a guaranteed monthly income.

“While the world is changing, but both the Roman slave and modern worker are chained to work for life, give it the best years of their life; they work because would not be able to survive otherwise, live in fear of punishment (dismissal); they are lifetime slaves in the labor market.

“It is possible to abolish slavery only by providing a person with a guaranteed income that will give him the right to choose the way of his own, only, unique life. Money should be paid to everyone – regardless of character, views, station in life. This is not about supporting weak social layers, but about everyone’s right to a basic income.”

My Comment: This will work well only under one condition: All citizens should devote all their free time to integral education and upbringing. Otherwise they should receive no benefits. If this rule is not observed, society will turn into animals in a short time. There is nothing more harmful to humans than idleness, even more so, collective idleness.
[121375]

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In the News (from CypLive): “European Council President Herman Van Rompuy urged rethinking the geographic and demographic parameters and the European Union to abandon any attempt to restore national identity. Concepts such as ‘people’ and ‘homeland’ should go to the dustbin of history. …

“President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy said the unexpected speech, in which he tried to outline new principles of social development on the Old Continent. First of all Europeans, according to the first person of European bureaucracy, the need to rethink the concept of the homeland, which in its traditional sense is simply impossible in the face of ever- expanding European Union.

“In addition, Van Rompuy accused politicians who are trying to prevent these trends of populism. … ‘Those who think that their country can survive on its own, live in illusions. Populism and nationalism cannot be the answer to the challenges of our time.’”

My Comment: Kabbalah states that otherwise Europe and (and the world) would be faced with Fascism and war again. (See Baal HaSulam “The Last Generation.”)
[121184]

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In the News (from InoPressa): “Even four years ago the UN has warned that humanity is entering an era of extreme weather events. Events that used to be registered once in 100 or 200 years are to be repeated every few years.

“The world community has the opportunity to discuss pressing issues in the climate conference, which opens in Warsaw. But one should not expect any radical decisions. Scientists believe that the human race will be able to stay within the global temperature increase to two degrees Celsius, which is considered to be the limit, beyond which we face a disaster.

“But two degrees is the average for the planet, it should be noted that in Europe the rise in temperature can be up to 6 degrees, and such a summer, as the summer of 2003, when heat caused death of tens of thousands of people, will be repeated annually. The era of extreme performance began for everyone.”

My Comment: Even if we stopped polluting the atmosphere, land, and oceans; even if we were able to remove everything that we had contaminated, returned the environment to the state of the last century, we would still have experienced blows of nature, only perhaps in a different form. This attitude of nature toward us stems from our opposition to its integrality, interdependence, and community. Until we heal ourselves, we will not stop being a cancerous tumor in the body of nature, we will not stop bringing about increasing blows of the elements.
[120452]

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In the News (from ITAR-TASS): “In the near future, millions of people around the world may be in extreme poverty, providing only their physical survival. The middle class is being eroded by the fact that there is an increasing stratification between the rich and the poor. This year, the unemployment rate will reach a record high of 200 million people. …

“Scientists point out that chronic poverty is characterized by the point of no return, after which the hopes for changes for the better are lost. Usually, it takes three years, spent in extremely difficult circumstances. Over the past ten years, the number of poor people who display extreme passivity with respect to life has increased dramatically. They accept their plight and do not believe that they can change things for the better; they do not even want to look for some kind of work.

“The situation seems hopeless to the poor segments of society, and they are not ready to rise internally.”

My Comment: That is why integral education, which can give relief to the masses through unity, is especially desirable for them. As Marx wrote and Baal HaSulam emphasized, that he addressed not the bourgeoisie, but the oppressed masses, calling them to change themselves, to change society (See Baal HaSulam “The Last Generation”).

But as they distorted religion, replacing the commandment “Love thy neighbor” with only carrying out the requirements mechanically (See Baal HaSulam, “The Essence of Religion and Its Purpose“), so they ignored Marx’s message about changing society by changing the human being, thinking that it was possible to compel people to be altruistic by the force of KGB pressure. We must bring the method of integral education to the masses, and proceeding from changes in themselves, they will rebuild public relationships.
[120366]

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In the News (from The Telegraph): “The children of rich parents are put under so much pressure to succeed they are at an increased risk of suffering of mental illness, a study has claimed.

“Scientists found that children from homes with an annual income of more than £100,000 ($160,000 US) a year were suffering anxiety and depression at twice the normal rate of their less well-off peers.

“Researchers found issues such as eating disorders, drug abuse, neuroses and self harming were soaring among wealthy teenagers.

“It is thought the relentless pressure being piled on youngsters both at school and in extra-curricular activities is leading to increased feelings of vulnerability.”

My Comment: The reason for this is that they are being pressured by parents and competition among peers; they continue to live in full capitalism, while their poorer peers are in a more sociable environment.
[120303]

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In the News (from Pravda): “The indicator of the level of GDP is increasingly criticized. According to experts, this is not a good indicator of social welfare. GDP cannot estimate the international flow of income, production of services by households, destruction of the environment, quality of social relations, economic and personal security, health and life expectancy.

“GDP increases when growing crime, pollution, disasters and public health threats entail costs for protective or remedial actions. Economists suggest using the ‘happiness index’ instead of GPD. The UN has adopted a resolution that happiness should be included among development indicators.

“Despite the broad public interest in the happiness index, this indicator is purely subjective. From the point of view of each individual, the state of happiness is considered the highest achievement, which include all the other desired acquisitions: intellect, wealth, health, fame, love, peace, children, joy, and so on.”

“Otto von Bismarck said about happiness: ‘For happiness one needs to be healthy, to be rich and to be a fool. Without the latter, the first two qualities do not matter!’”

My Comment: The method of integral development of man creates a feeling of happiness outside ourselves, collective, and the quality of being a fool is no longer necessary for happiness!
[120190]

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In the News (from The Atlantic): “By sending every adult and child $3,000 a year, the government could achieve historic poverty reductions. Think of it as Social Security for all, not just the elderly….

“The upside of giving everybody about $3,000 is that it’s a very easy policy to run and a surefire way to cut poverty in half. But it’s a large program: it would require about $907 billion in 2012, or 5.6 percent of the nation’s GDP. …

“Could we afford it? Sure. For starters, we could raises taxes, first on the rich, who would pay more in new taxes than they would receive in basic income, and then on lower-middle class and poor families, who would come out ahead. There is also plenty of room to cut tax expenditures on homeowners, personal retirement accounts, capital gains exclusions at death, and exclusions on annuity investment returns. This submerged welfare state for the affluent costs hundreds of billions of dollars each year. There is also the matter of the $700 billion military budget, which could take some trimming. …

“The appeal of such a program is immense. You get a check from the government every month no matter how much you make or how much you work. Maybe that will convince a few Americans work isn’t worth it anymore—but the vast majority who will probably continue to work won’t have to worry about losing their check as they move up the income ladder. That security might not just keep people out of poverty. It might let workers demand better wages and working conditions, because they know they always have something to fall back on. In other words, it could level the playing field for the bottom 99 percent.”

My Comment: Thus, we see that the idea of the equal rational provision for the population is being born. There will be less and less work. But it is necessary to occupy people, and with what if not with the method of integral education and upbringing, which will completely heal society.
[119924]

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