In the News (from The Guardian): “News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.

“News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it’s worse than that. News severely affects memory. …

“News works like a drug. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientists used to think that the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It’s not because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It’s because the physical structure of their brains has changed.

“Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.”

My Comment: The media cannot be and has never been objective because, in principal, there is no objectivity in nature. The media perform the orders of those who pay them. The media is needed to ensure that people have contact with the entire world and reveal its emptiness, finiteness, and limitation sooner—it is necessary for the subsequent correction.
[105704]

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In the News (from the United Nations): “On 20 March, the first ever International Day of Happiness will be celebrated worldwide. The day was proclaimed by the UN General Assembly to promote happiness as a universal goal and aspiration in the lives of people around the globe.

“The initiative to declare a day of happiness came from the Kingdom of Bhutan – a country whose Gross National Happiness Index takes the view that sustainable development should take a holistic approach towards progress and give equal importance to non-economic aspects of well-being.

“The International Day of Happiness recognizes the efforts of other nations and groups who work to measure prosperity that go beyond material wealth. By designating a special day for happiness, the UN aims to focus world attention on the idea that economic growth must be inclusive, equitable, and balanced, such that it promotes sustainable development and alleviates poverty. …

“In addition, a special event arranged at UN Headquarters on 19 March at 6 pm, will also mark this occasion. There will be a launch of the audio book by Sri Chinmoy, Founder of the Peace Meditation at the United Nations. …

“Ban Ki-moon affirms that, ‘On this first International Day of Happiness, let us reinforce our commitment to inclusive and sustainable human development and renew our pledge to help others. When we contribute to the common good, we ourselves are enriched. Compassion promotes happiness and will help build the future we want.’”

My Comment: Like everything that humanity creates, the UN is a representation of our egoism…
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In the News (from Deutsche Welle): “With unemployment at unprecedented levels in the EU, the risk of social unrest is rising, says the UN’s International Labour Organization. The ILO is warning politicians to abandon austerity and embrace job creation.

“’When unemployment is as high as it is right now – as poverty and welfare protection become worse – then the danger of social unrest grows along with it,’ says Miguel Angel Malo.

“Malo is a professor of economics in Salamanca, Spain – a country where youth unemployment is at 56 percent. …

“If one looks at who the losers are, it becomes clearer exactly why the ILO is warning of unrest. The losers are made of three groups which have scarcely any access to the labor market.

The first group is young people: one in four youths – a group that includes those who have finished higher education but have not found work – is currently unemployed. In Spain and Greece it’s more than half. …

“The second group is the long-term unemployed, whose numbers have nearly doubled, from 5.8 million in 2008 to 11 million today.

“And the third group is those with few qualifications: ‘unskilled labor’ has been hit particularly hard by negative economic developments, much more so than skilled workers or university graduates.”

My Comment: There will be no work. One solution is to implement a shorter workday. I have written about this and it is encouraging to see that the 90-year-old Israeli President Shimon Peres says about it as well:

Translation: “It is necessary to reduce working hours and to increase the time of study. Who says that you need to work 8 hours a day? It is possible to work 4 hours a day and study 4 hours a day, and the studies will be considered work. It is necessary to employ young people. We must provide Grade 11 and 12 students with 2 hours of work a day. They will be trained in the community not less than at the university. Their workplaces will benefit from their youthful energy, and the young will have some income. I also propose that we start teaching English from 3 years of age; it is the right time for this.”
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In the News (from LiveScience): “If the sheet of ice covering Greenland were to completely melt, such destruction of 720,000 cubic miles (3 million cubic kilometers) of ice would raise global sea levels by 24 feet (7.3 meters). In summer 2012, Greenland saw an extraordinarily large amount of melting across nearly its entire ice sheet. In fact, it was the largest ice melt seen in Greenland since scientists began tracking melt rates there in 1979.”

My Comment: The problem is that we have no sense of responsibility and necessity. Our nearsightedness affects us. We love children but cannot look sensibly at the future that we are preparing for them. This is what is said in The Book of Zohar about our generation: “Today, we will eat and drink, and tomorrow – even death!” The force of unity is above the nature of our world, and if we begin to apply it to the general balance of the system, we will immediately find restoration of everything “broken, ruined, and crooked.”
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In the News (from Stanford): “Engineering researchers at Stanford University have devised a mathematical model that helps demonstrate what’s behind the growing rift in American society. They have used the knowledge to create Internet-based social systems that counteract polarization. …

“The prevailing sociological theory, known as homophily, is that like seeks like. Those who have similar opinions tend to aggregate together and reinforce opinions that grow more divergent from the center over time. This is the echo chamber model that would seem to gain validation in the era of talk radio, cable news and the Internet.

“According to this theory, we are polarized precisely because we have greater ability to choose our social networks and news sources. We narrowly tailor our information sources by selecting them based on how closely they mirror our own tastes.

“Mathematical models that try to use homophily to explain polarization have come up short, however. Most are based on something known as De Groot’s model that assumes that people form opinions in a way that minimizes overall disagreement within their network of friends and relations. As a result, an individual’s opinion gradually converges to an average of those in his or her network, or so the theory goes. The flaw in these models is that they predict that opinions in society as a whole can only become more uniform over time, resulting in depolarization rather than polarization.

“’We show that repeated averaging of opinions always results in less divergent opinions, even in networks where the people are like-minded,’ said Pranav Dandekar, a doctoral candidate in MS&E and a co-author on the paper. ‘You can’t create outliers by averaging.’…

“The Stanford team instead took a different approach based on a phenomenon well known in the social sciences called biased assimilation. In biased assimilation people more easily accept evidence that supports their opinion and, likewise, are prone to discredit evidence that does not fit. More specifically, people look at inconclusive evidence in a way that is most favorable to their existing point of view.

“’It seems counter-intuitive that two individuals would arrive at a more divergent opinion when presented with identical information that is inconclusive, but that’s what happens,’ said David Lee, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering and a co-author of the paper. ‘You might think that seeing identical evidence would produce greater moderation and agreement, but it doesn’t.’

“’It seems we look at the world with rose-colored blinders. We see what we want and ignore what doesn’t fit,’ Dandekar said.”

My Comment: Not a single person is like another and that is why everyone’s opinion is different in one thing. Egoism is not ready to accept a different point of view. Thus, as a result of communication, opinions distance from each other. The more we develop, the greater egoism becomes. The more we develop, the more diverse egoism is. Envy, jealousy, rivalry, authoritativeness, and other egoistic qualities increase.

And when in our time, total cultural, economic, and other dependencies of everyone on everyone else are manifested, then negative opinions appear greater up to the point of hatred. The solution to this problem is only in integral education, up to mutual love because Nature will increasingly manifest itself as a single entity.
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In the News (from Stratfor): “The global financial crisis of 2008 has slowly yielded to a global unemployment crisis. This unemployment crisis will, fairly quickly, give way to a political crisis. The crisis involves all three of the major pillars of the global system – Europe, China and the United States. The level of intensity differs, the political response differs and the relationship to the financial crisis differs. But there is a common element, which is that unemployment is increasingly replacing finance as the central problem of the financial system. …

“Consider the geography of unemployment. Only four countries in Europe are at or below 6 percent unemployment: the geographically contiguous countries of Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The immediate periphery has much higher unemployment: Denmark at 7.4 percent, the United Kingdom at 7.7 percent, France at 10.6 percent and Poland at 10.6 percent. In the far periphery, Italy is at 11.7 percent, Lithuania is at 13.3 percent, Ireland is at 14.7 percent, Portugal is at 17.6 percent, Spain is at 26.2 percent and Greece is at 27 percent. …

“A rule I use is that for each person unemployed, three others are affected, whether spouses, children or whomever. That means that when you hit 25 percent unemployment virtually everyone is affected. At 11 percent unemployment about 44 percent are affected.

“It is important to understand the consequences of this kind of unemployment. There is the long-term unemployment of the underclass. This wave of unemployment has hit middle and upper-middle class workers. … Poverty is hard enough to manage, but when it is also linked to loss of status, the pain is compounded and a politically potent power arises. …

“Fascism had its roots in Europe in massive economic failures in which the financial elites failed to recognize the political consequences of unemployment. They laughed at parties led by men who had been vagabonds selling postcards on the street and promising economic miracles if only those responsible for the misery of the country were purged. Men and women, plunged from the comfortable life of the petite bourgeoisie, did not laugh, but responded eagerly to that hope. The result was governments who enclosed their economies from the world and managed their performance through directive and manipulation.

“This is what happened after World War I. It did not happen after World War II because Europe was occupied. But when we look at the unemployment rates today, the differentials between regions, the fact that there is no promise of improvement and that the middle class is being hurled into the ranks of the dispossessed, we can see the patterns forming.”

My Comment: As the technical and technological progress continues, unemployment will rise. In addition, human desires grow not only in size, but also in quality: a person does not want to work and buy, to be a slave of those who grow wealthy because of this. Desires change. The era of the consumer society is ending for several reasons.

A new era is ahead—a transition of the mass of unemployed to work on themselves, to build a new integral society. This phase is preceded by the phase of integral education, training, upbringing, and changing of the human being, and then his conscious transformation of the world. Working from offices and in factories will be transformed to going to the schools of integral education, the courses for retraining people who will then create new public relations—rational consumption in a unified integral community.
[104343]

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In the News (from New Scientist): “Hurricanes usually form in the western tropical Atlantic and head north-west to the US. Occasionally they make it to Europe by piggybacking on the jet stream.

“To simulate future hurricanes, Reindert Haarsma of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt and colleagues ran a detailed climate model for 2094 to 2098, assuming modest future greenhouse gas emissions.

“They found that future hurricanes formed further east in the tropical Atlantic, as that area had warmed sufficiently to provide enough heat and moisture to power them. As a result, many didn’t hit the US and instead struck Western Europe. The storms weakened once they left the tropics, but powered up again when they entered cold and windy areas, becoming hybrid storms like Sandy, halfway between winter storms and hurricanes.”

My Comment: Catastrophic climate change should appear not at the end of the century, but in the coming years. Disturbing the balance with nature will lead to huge losses. But the problem is not in the environment, but in the human being because of all the levels of nature, still, vegetative, animal, and human—only the human being by his social behavior, rather than by the impact of technology, is capable of influencing the balance of system, for better or for worse.
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Opinion (Julia Fang and Jean-Luc Margot, University of California, Los Angeles): “The planets in our solar system are delicately arranged, according to astronomers. If a new planet were suddenly introduced, the additional gravitational pull would result in collisions and orbital ejections. Now that significant planetary systems have been discovered around other stars, astronomers are trying to determine whether those systems are similarly delicate. To that end, Julia Fang and Jean-Luc Margot of UCLA created millions of simulations of three- and four-planet solar systems, based on the arrangements of those that have been discovered by the Kepler space telescope. The average spacing of the simulated planets was very similar to that of the planets in our solar system. When Fang and Margot then introduced a new planet to each of the simulated systems, they found that at least one-third of the three-planet systems and nearly one-half of the four-planet systems became catastrophically unstable. Although the researchers caution that Kepler‘s observations allow for some variations in planetary arrangements, they believe that balanced systems such as our own are common.”

My Comment: There is a plan in everything, system dependence, full mutual connection and purpose. The only correct work of man is being in accordance with the absolute law of nature, which is achieved by studying and applying integral education and upbringing. Knowledge of the upper system will allow us to travel beyond time and space, changing them by changing our properties. How to realize it practically is explained and studied in the science of Kabbalah.
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In the News (from Spiegel International): “Needy families and individuals in the European Union are becoming increasingly reliant on charity organizations like the Red Cross for basic needs like food, water and shelter. While Germany is relatively unaffected, unemployment and austerity in countries like Spain are making the problem even more severe.

“Two-thirds of national Red Cross societies within the European Union have begun distributing food aid, according to the head of the aid groups’ international organization – a sign that the economic crisis in Europe is having an alarming effect on poverty.

“Yves Daccord, Director-General of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said on a visit to New Delhi on Monday that the scope of food distribution had not been at its current level since the end of World War II.

“Germany’s relative economic strength has made it mostly immune to the rise in food need. In contrast, the Spanish Red Cross is supporting 3 million Spaniards with food aid. … Last year alone, the Spanish Red Cross provided 33 million kilograms (73 million pounds) of groceries to the needy.

“The organization’s counterpart in Romania has been operating a donation-based food distribution program since 2009. Three million people live in absolute poverty, according to the aid group, a figure that constitutes 14 percent of the country’s total population. The relative poverty rate in Romania is also shockingly high, at 40 percent. Last year, the Romanian Red Cross distributed more than 500,000 kilograms (1.1 million pounds) of food to more than 81,000 needy families.

“The IFRC also noted a rise in poverty in previously middle-class families and individuals. In Italy, the group noted a rise in the homeless population to include single parents.”

My Comment: Meanwhile, according to the same Red Cross, more food than is needed is thrown away, i.e. it is not a lack of food, but a lack of attention to people in need, and that can be corrected only by correcting people …
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Opinion (Chris Martenson): “Chris Martenson is a world-renowned expert on identifying dangerous, yet hidden, exponential growth patterns in global economies, energy demand, and food consumption…

“And he is predicting a 60% stock market collapse will strike in the next three months.

“Martenson’s opinion isn’t to be taken lightly, as his research is highly regarded by the United Nations, UK Parliament, and Fortune 500 companies. …

“Unfortunately, Martenson is not the only economist predicting a massive, historic meltdown.

“In fact, his figures are conservative compared to other experts in his field.

“In a recent interview, Robert Wiedemer — an economist best known for correctly predicting the collapse of the U.S. housing market of 2006 and the stock market collapse of 2008 — provides disturbing evidence for 50 percent unemployment, a 90 percent stock market crash, and 100 percent annual inflation . . . starting this year.”

My Comment: The fact is this trend can be stopped only by moving immediately to integral education for the public, and in line with this, gradually reducing production to the necessary dimensions.

Integral education will allow the transition to equal rational allocation of required products, goods, and services, and will provide all the other resources for education and training, i.e., for the correction of people as an integral part of nature. Only in this way will we be able to prevent blows that will nonetheless bring us to make the same conclusions. for the correction of people as an integral part of nature.
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