Do Less, Be More: What History Teaches Us About Living More Simple, Less Consumerist Lifestyles

Oldspeak: “An avalanche of studies… have shown that as our income and consumption rises, our levels of happiness don’t keep pace. Buying expensive new clothes or a fancy car might give us a short-term pleasure boost, but just doesn’t add much to most people’s happiness in the long-term. It’s no wonder there are so many people searching for new kinds of personal fulfillment that don’t involve a trip to the shopping mall or online retailers. If we want to wean ourselves off consumer culture and learn to practice simple living, where might we find inspiration?” –Roman Krznaric

“On the occasion of  New Years 2013, resolve to do less shit that doesn’t matter. Spend more face-time with people and less with iphones. Be more present. Consume less. Be open. Fear less. Love more. Decrease your web and carbon footprints. Breathe more deeply, often. Abandon old paradigms and beliefs. Think freely. Question everything. Discover new definitions of “Health”, ‘Wealth”, “Luxury” Withdraw your support as much as you can for the systems that are destroying us and our planet. Enjoy “the luxury of doing good.” ” -OSJ

By Roman Krznaric @ Yes Magazine:

When the recently elected Pope Francis assumed office, he shocked his minders by turning his back on a luxury Vatican palace and opting instead to live in a small guest house. He has also become known for taking the bus rather than riding in the papal limousine.

The Argentinian pontiff is not alone in seeing the virtues of a simpler, less materialistic approach to the art of living. In fact, simple living is undergoing a contemporary revival, in part due to the ongoing recession forcing so many families to tighten their belts, but also because working hours are on the rise and job dissatisfaction has hit record levels, prompting a search for less cluttered, less stressful, and more time-abundant living.

This article is based on the author’s new book, How Should We Live? Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life.

At the same time, an avalanche of studies, including ones by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, have shown that as our income and consumption rises, our levels of happiness don’t keep pace. Buying expensive new clothes or a fancy car might give us a short-term pleasure boost, but just doesn’t add much to most people’s happiness in the long term. It’s no wonder there are so many people searching for new kinds of personal fulfillment that don’t involve a trip to the shopping mall or online retailers.

If we want to wean ourselves off consumer culture and learn to practice simple living, where might we find inspiration? Typically people look to the classic literature that has emerged since the 1970s, such as E.F. Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful, which argued that we should aim “to obtain the maximum of wellbeing with the minimum of consumption.” Or they might pick up Duane Elgin’s Voluntary Simplicity or Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin’s Your Money or Your Life.

I’m a fan of all these books. But many people don’t realize that simple living is a tradition that dates back almost three thousand years, and has emerged as a philosophy of life in almost every civilization.

What might we learn from the great masters of simple living from the past for rethinking our lives today?

Eccentric philosophers and religious radicals

Anthropologists have long noticed that simple living comes naturally in many hunter-gatherer societies. In one famous study, Marshall Sahlins pointed out that aboriginal people in Northern Australia and the !Kung people of Botswana typically worked only three to five hours a day. Sahlins wrote that “rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.” These people were, he argued, the “original affluent society.”

In the Western tradition of simple living, the place to begin is in ancient Greece, around 500 years before the birth of Christ. Socrates believed that money corrupted our minds and morals, and that we should seek lives of material moderation rather than dousing ourselves with perfume or reclining in the company of courtesans. When the shoeless sage was asked about his frugal lifestyle, he replied that he loved visiting the market “to go and see all the things I am happy without.” The philosopher Diogenes—son of a wealthy banker—held similar views, living off alms and making his home in an old wine barrel.

We shouldn’t forget Jesus himself who, like Guatama Buddha, continually warned against the “deceitfulness of riches.” Devout early Christians soon decided that the fastest route to heaven was imitating his simple life. Many followed the example of St. Anthony, who in the third century gave away his family estate and headed out into the Egyptian desert where he lived for decades as a hermit.

Later, in the thirteenth century, St. Francis took up the simple living baton. “Give me the gift of sublime poverty,” he declared, and asked his followers to abandon all their possessions and live by begging.

Simplicity arrives in colonial America

Simple living started getting seriously radical in the United States in the early colonial period. Among the most prominent exponents were the Quakers—a Protestant group officially known as the Religious Society of Friends—who began settling in the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth century. They were adherents of what they called “plainness” and were easy to spot, wearing unadorned dark clothes without pockets, buckles, lace or embroidery. As well as being pacifists and social activists, they believed that wealth and material possessions were a distraction from developing a personal relationship with God.

But the Quakers faced a problem. With growing material abundance in the new land of plenty, many couldn’t help developing an addiction to luxury living. The Quaker statesman William Penn, for instance, owned a grand home with formal gardens and thoroughbred horses, which was staffed by five gardeners, 20 slaves, and a French vineyard manager.

Partly as a reaction to people like Penn, in the 1740s a group of Quakers led a movement to return to their faith’s spiritual and ethical roots. Their leader was an obscure farmer’s son who has been described by one historian as “the noblest exemplar of simple living ever produced in America.” His name? John Woolman.

Woolman is now largely forgotten, but in his own time he was a powerful force who did far more than wear plain, undyed clothes. After setting himself up as a cloth merchant in 1743 to gain a subsistence living, he soon had a dilemma: his business was much too successful. He felt he was making too much money at other people’s expense.

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In a move not likely to be recommended at Harvard Business School, he decided to reduce his profits by persuading his customers to buy fewer and cheaper items. But that didn’t work. So to further reduce his income, he abandoned retailing altogether and switched to tailoring and tending an apple orchard.

Woolman also vigorously campaigned against slavery. On his travels, whenever receiving hospitality from a slave owner, he insisted on paying the slaves directly in silver for the comforts he enjoyed during his visit. Slavery, said Woolman, was motivated by the “the love of ease and gain,” and no luxuries could exist without others having to suffer to create them.

The birth of utopian living

Nineteenth-century America witnessed a flowering of utopian experiments in simple living. Many had socialist roots, such as the short-lived community at New Harmony in Indiana, established in 1825 by Robert Owen, a Welsh social reformer and founder of the British cooperative movement.

In the 1840s, the naturalist Henry David Thoreau took a more individualist approach to simple living, famously spending two years in his self-built cabin at Walden Pond, where he attempted to grow most of his own food and live in isolated self-sufficiency (though by his own admission, he regularly walked a mile to nearby Concord to hear the local gossip, grab some snacks, and read the papers). It was Thoreau who gave us the iconic statement of simple living: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” For him, richness came from having the free time to commune with nature, read, and write.

Simple living was also in full swing across the Atlantic. In nineteenth-century Paris, bohemian painters and writers like Henri Murger—author of the autobiographical novel that was the basis for Puccini’s opera La Bohème—valued artistic freedom over a sensible and steady job, living off cheap coffee and conversation while their stomachs growled with hunger.

Redefining luxury for the twenty-first century

What all the simple livers of the past had in common was a desire to subordinate their material desires to some other ideal—whether based on ethics, religion, politics or art. They believed that embracing a life goal other than money could lead to a more meaningful and fulfilling existence.

Woolman, for instance, “simplified his life in order to enjoy the luxury of doing good,” according to one of his biographers. For Woolman, luxury was not sleeping on a soft mattress but having the time and energy to work for social change, through efforts such as the struggle against slavery.

Simple living is not about abandoning luxury, but discovering it in new places. These masters of simplicity are not just telling us to be more frugal, but suggesting that we expand the spaces in our lives where satisfaction does not depend on money. Imagine drawing a picture of all those things that make your life fulfilling, purposeful, and pleasurable. It might include friendships, family relationships, being in love, the best parts of your job, visiting museums, political activism, crafting, playing sports, volunteering, and people watching.

There is a good chance that most of these cost very little or nothing. We don’t need to do much damage to our bank balance to enjoy intimate friendships, uncontrollable laughter, dedication to causes or quiet time with ourselves.

As the humorist Art Buchwald put it, “The best things in life aren’t things.” The overriding lesson from Thoreau, Woolman, and other simple livers of the past is that we should aim, year on year, to enlarge these areas of free and simple living on the map of our lives. That is how we will find the luxuries that constitute our hidden wealth.

Roman Krznaric, Ph.D., wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Roman is an Australian cultural thinker and cofounder of The School of Life in London. This article is based on his new book, How Should We Live? Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life (BlueBridge). www.romankrznaric.com @romankrznaric

 

 

Why Life in America Can Literally Drive You Insane

Oldspeak: “Can you imagine the uproar, the national panic if 1 in every 78 Americans had cancer? Or was a victim of gun violence? Or if 1 in 78 Americans had AIDS? Why then is it acceptable that 1 in 78 Americans is suffering from severe and disabling mental illness? Why is it acceptable that there has been a 35 FOLD INCREASE in mental illness among children!?!!  Pathology has been normalized. Sociopathy is a key trait in the dominant institutions of our civilization (corporations) and by extension the people who work within them. 70% of Americans hate their jobs.  Lack of empathy and compassion is seen as normal.  You see it every day walking down the street; people looking upon with disdain or just plain actively ignoring the steadily growing number of homeless and mentally ill who populate our streets.  Elder abuse is institutionalized in this time where there our population is the greyest it’s ever been. Youth are increasingly disposable, with children serving as fodder for the burgeoning prison-industrial complex; pumped full of powerful toxic, illness inducing pills that no one has any idea what the long-term health effect will be. While pharmaceutical drug dealers’ profit margins explode.  Whole cities are failing while the banks & other corporations that greatly contributed to their failure are given unlimited resources. Something is terribly terribly wrong. Our society is making us crazy. Destroying our planet. How much longer well we go on without having serious discussion about restructuring our civilization in a way that healthy, beneficial and sustainable for all? ” –OSJ

By Bruce E. Levine @ AlterNet:

In “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why [3]?” (New York Review of Books, 2011), Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, discusses over-diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, pathologizing of normal behaviors, Big Pharma corruption of psychiatry, and the adverse effects of psychiatric medications. While diagnostic expansionism and Big Pharma certainly deserve a large share of the blame for this epidemic, there is another reason.

A June 2013 Gallup poll [4] revealed that 70% of Americans hate their jobs or have “checked out” of them. Life may or may not suck any more than it did a generation ago, but our belief in “progress” has increased expectations that life should be more satisfying, resulting in mass disappointment. For many of us, society has become increasingly alienating, isolating and insane, and earning a buck means more degrees, compliance, ass-kissing, shit-eating, and inauthenticity. So, we want to rebel. However, many of us feel hopeless about the possibility of either our own escape from societal oppression or that political activism can create societal change. So, many of us, especially young Americans, rebel by what is commonly called mental illness.

While historically some Americans have consciously faked mental illness to rebel from oppressive societal demands (e.g., a young Malcolm X acted crazy to successfully avoid military service), today, the vast majority of Americans who are diagnosed and treated for mental illness are in no way proud malingerers in the fashion of Malcolm X. Many of us, sadly, are ashamed of our inefficiency and nonproductivity and desperately try to fit in. However, try as we might to pay attention, adapt, adjust, and comply with our alienating jobs, boring schools, and sterile society, our humanity gets in the way, and we become anxious, depressed and dysfunctional.

The Mental Illness Epidemic

Severe, disabling mental illness has dramatically increased in the Untied States. Marcia Angell, in her 2011 New York Review of Bookspiece, summarizes [3]: “The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from 1 in 184 Americans to 1 in 76. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades.”

Angell also reports that a large survey of adults conducted between 2001 and 2003 sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health found that at some point in their lives, 46% of Americans met the criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association for at least one mental illness.

In 1998, Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association, spoke [5] to the National Press Club about an American depression epidemic: “We discovered two astonishing things about the rate of depression across the century. The first was there is now between ten and twenty times as much of it as there was fifty years ago. And the second is that it has become a young person’s problem. When I first started working in depression thirty years ago. . . the average age of which the first onset of depression occurred was 29.5. . . .Now the average age is between 14 and 15.”

In 2011, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [6] (CDC) reported that antidepressant use in the United States has increased nearly 400% in the last two decades, making antidepressants the most frequently used class of medications by Americans ages 18-44 years. By 2008, 23% of women ages 40–59 years were taking antidepressants.

The CDC, on May 3, 2013, reported [7] that the suicide rate among Americans ages 35–64 years increased 28.4% between 1999 and 2010 (from 13.7 suicides per 100,000 population in 1999 to 17.6 per 100,000 in 2010).

The New York Times [8]reported in 2007 that the number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder had increased 40-fold between 1994 and 2003. In May 2013, CDC reported in “Mental Health Surveillance Among Children—United States, 2005–2011 [9],” the following: “A total of 13%–20% of children living in the United States experience a mental disorder in a given year, and surveillance during 1994–2011 has shown the prevalence of these conditions to be increasing.”

Over-Diagnosis, Pathologizing the Normal and Psychiatric Drug Adverse Effects

Even within mainstream psychiatry, few continue to argue that the increase in mental illness is due to previous under-diagnosis of mental disorders. The most common explanations for the mental illness epidemic include recent over-diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, diagnoses expansionism, and psychiatry’s pathologizing normal behavior.

The first DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), psychiatry’s diagnostic bible, was published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1952 and listed 106 disorders (initially called “reactions”). DSM-2 was published in 1968, and the number of disorders increased to 182. DSM-3 was published in 1980, and though homosexuality was dropped from it, diagnoses were expanded to 265, with several child disorders added that would soon become popular, including oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). DSM-4, published in 1994, contained 365 diagnoses.

DSM-5 was published in May, 2013. The journal PLOS Medicinereported [10] in 2012, “69% of the DSM-5 task force members report having ties to the pharmaceutical industry.” DSM-5 did not add as many new diagnoses [11] as had previous revisions. However, DSM-5 has been criticized even by some mainstream psychiatrists such as Allen Frances, the former chair of the DSM-4 taskforce, for creating more mental patients by making it easier to qualify for a mental illness, especially for depression. (See Frances’ “Last Plea To DSM-5: Save Grief From the Drug Companies [12].”)

In the last two decades, there have been a slew of books written by journalists and mental health professionals about the lack of science behind the DSM, the over-diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, and the pathologizing of normal behaviors. A sample of these books includes: Paula Caplan’s They Say You’re Crazy (1995), Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk’s Making Us Crazy (1997), Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield’s The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (2007), Christopher Lane’s Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (2008), Stuart Kirk, Tomi Gomory, and David Cohen’s Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs (2013), Gary Greenberg’s The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (2013), and Allen Frances’ Saving Normal (2013).

Even more remarkable than former chair of the DSM-4 taskforce, Allen Frances, jumping on the DSM-trashing bandwagon has been the harsh critique [13] of DSM-5 by Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Insel recently announced that the DSM’s diagnostic categories lack validity, and that “NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” And psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, former chair of the DSM-3 task force, wrote the foreword to Horwitz and Wakefield’s The Loss of Sadness and is now critical [14] of DSM’s inattention to context in which the symptoms occur which, he points out, can medicalize normal experiences.

So, in just two decades, pointing out the pseudoscience of the DSM has gone from being an “extremist slur of radical anti-psychiatrists” to a mainstream proposition from the former chairs of both the DSM-3 and DSM-4 taskforces and the director of NIMH.

Yet another explanation for the epidemic may also be evolving from radical to mainstream, thanks primarily to the efforts of investigative journalist Robert Whitaker and his book Anatomy of An Epidemic [15] (2010). Whitaker argues that the adverse effects of psychiatric medications are the primary cause of the epidemic. He reports that these drugs, for many patients, cause episodic and moderate emotional and behavioral problems to become severe, chronic and disabling ones.

Examining the scientific literature that now extends over 50 years, Whitaker discovered that while some psychiatric medications for some people may be effective over the short term, these drugs increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill over the long term. Whitaker reports, “The scientific literature shows that many patients treated for a milder problem will worsen in response to a drug—say have a manic episode after taking an antidepressant—and that can lead to a new and more severe diagnosis like bipolar disorder.”

With respect to the dramatic increase of pediatric bipolar disorder, Whitaker points out that, “Once psychiatrists started putting ‘hyperactive’ children on Ritalin, they started to see prepubertal children with manic symptoms. Same thing happened when psychiatrists started prescribing antidepressants to children and teenagers. A significant percentage had manic or hypomanic reactions to the antidepressants.” And then these children and teenagers are put on heavier duty drugs, including drug cocktails, often do not respond favorably to treatment and deteriorate. And that, for Whitaker, is a major reason for the 35-fold increase between 1987 and 2007 of children classified as being disabled by mental disorders. (See my 2010 interview with him, “Are Prozac and Other Psychiatric Drugs Causing the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America [16]?”)

Whitaker’s explanation for the epidemic has now, even within mainstream psychiatric institutions, entered into the debate; for example, Whitaker was invited by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) to speak at their 2013 annual convention [17] that took place last June While Whitaker concludes that psychiatry’s drug-based paradigm of care is the primary cause of the epidemic, he does not rule out the possibility that various cultural factors may also be contributing to the increase in the number of mentally ill.

Mental Illness as Rebellion Against Society

“The most deadly criticism one could make of modern civilization is that apart from its man-made crises and catastrophes, is not humanly interesting. . . . In the end, such a civilization can produce only a mass man: incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost pathetic degree. . . . Ultimately such a society produces only two groups of men: the conditioners and the conditioned, the active and passive barbarians.” —Lewis Mumford, 1951

Once it was routine for many respected social critics such as Lewis Mumford and Erich Fromm to express concern about the impact of modern civilization on our mental health. But today the idea that the mental illness epidemic is also being caused by a peculiar rebellion against a dehumanizing society has been, for the most part, removed from the mainstream map. When a societal problem grows to become all encompassing, we often no longer even notice it.

We are today disengaged from our jobs and our schooling. Young people are pressured to accrue increasingly large student-loan debt so as to acquire the credentials to get a job, often one which they will have little enthusiasm about. And increasing numbers of us are completely socially isolated, having nobody who cares about us.

Returning to that June 2013 Gallup survey, “The State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement [18],” only 30% of workers “were engaged, or involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their workplace.” In contrast to this “actively engaged group,” 50% were “not engaged,” simply going through the motions to get a paycheck, while 20% were classified as “actively disengaged,” hating going to work and putting energy into undermining their workplace. Those with higher education levels reported more discontent with their workplace.

How engaged are we with our schooling? Another Gallup poll “The School Cliff: Student Engagement Drops With Each School Year [19]” (released in January 2013), reported that the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become. The poll surveyed nearly 500,000 students in 37 states in 2012, and found nearly 80% of elementary students reported being engaged with school, but by high school, only 40% reported being engaged. As the pollsters point out, “If we were doing right by our students and our future, these numbers would be the absolute opposite. For each year a student progresses in school, they should be more engaged, not less.”

Life clearly sucks more than it did a generation ago when it comes to student loan debt. According to American Student Assistance’s “Student Debt Loan Statistics [20],” approximately 37 million Americans have student loan debt. The majority of borrowers still paying back their loans are in their 30s or older. Approximately two-thirds of students graduate college with some education debt. Nearly 30% of college students who take out loans drop out of school, and students who drop out of college before earning a degree struggle most with student loans. As of October 2012, the average amount of student loan debt for the Class of 2011 was $26,600, a 5% increase from 2010. Only about 37% of federal student-loan borrowers between 2004 and 2009 managed to make timely payments without postponing payments or becoming delinquent.

In addition to the pain of jobs, school, and debt, there is increasingly more pain of social isolation. A major study reported in the American Sociological Review in 2006, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks Over Two Decades [21],” examined Americans’ core network of confidants (those people in our lives we consider close enough to trust with personal information and whom we rely on as a sounding board). Authors reported that in 1985, 10% of Americans said that they had no confidants in their lives; but by 2004, 25% of Americans stated they had no confidants in their lives. This study confirmed the continuation of trends that came to public attention in sociologist Robert Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone.

Underlying many of psychiatry’s nearly 400 diagnoses is the experience of helplessness, hopelessness, passivity, boredom, fear, isolation, and dehumanization—culminating in a loss of autonomy and community-connectedness. Do our societal institutions promote:

• Enthusiasm—or passivity?
• Respectful personal relationships—or manipulative impersonal ones?
• Community, trust, and confidence—or isolation, fear and paranoia?
• Empowerment—or helplessness?
• Autonomy (self-direction)—or heteronomy (institutional-direction)?
• Participatory democracy—or authoritarian hierarchies?
• Diversity and stimulation—or homogeneity and boredom?

Research (that I documented in Commonsense Rebellion [22]) shows that those labeled with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) do worst in environments that are boring, repetitive, and externally controlled; and that ADHD-labeled children are indistinguishable from “normals” when they have chosen their learning activities and are interested in them. Thus, the standard classroom could not be more imperfectly designed to meet the learning needs of young people who are labeled with ADHD.

As I discussed last year in AlterNet in “Would We Have Drugged Up Einstein? How Anti-Authoritarianism Is Deemed a Mental Health Problem [23],” there is a fundamental bias in mental health professionals for interpreting inattention and noncompliance as a mental disorder. Those with extended schooling have lived for many years in a world where all pay attention to much that is unstimulating. In this world, one routinely complies with the demands of authorities. Thus for many M.D.s and Ph.D.s, people who rebel against this attentional and behavioral compliance appear to be from another world—a diagnosable one.

The reality is that with enough helplessness, hopelessness, passivity, boredom, fear, isolation, and dehumanization, we rebel and refuse to comply. Some of us rebel by becoming inattentive. Others become aggressive. In large numbers we eat, drink and gamble too much. Still others become addicted to drugs, illicit and prescription. Millions work slavishly at dissatisfying jobs, become depressed and passive aggressive, while no small number of us can’t cut it and become homeless and appear crazy. Feeling misunderstood and uncared about, millions of us ultimately rebel against societal demands, however, given our wherewithal, our rebellions are often passive and disorganized, and routinely futile and self-destructive.

When we have hope, energy and friends, we can choose to rebel against societal oppression with, for example, a wildcat strike or a back-to-the-land commune. But when we lack hope, energy and friends, we routinely rebel without consciousness of rebellion and in a manner in which we today commonly call mental illness.

For some Americans, no doubt, the conscious goal is to get classified as mentally disabled so as to receive disability payments (averaging $700 to 1,400 per month [24]). But isn’t that too a withdrawal of cooperation with society and a rebellion of sorts, based on the judgment that this is the best paying and least miserable financial option?

Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/bruce-e-levine
[3] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/?page=1
[4] http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-employee-engagement-gallup-poll-20130617,0,5878658.story
[5] http://www.nonopp.com/ar/Psicologia/00/epidemic_depersion.htm
[6] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db76.htm
[7] http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6217a1.htm?s_cid=mm6217a1_w
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/health/04psych.html?_r=0
[9] http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6202a1.htm?s_cid=su6202a1_w
[10] http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001190
[11] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/15-new-mental-illnesses-in-the-dsm-5-2013-05-22
[12] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-frances/saving-grief-from-dsm-5-a_b_2325108.html
[13] http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml
[14] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Spitzer_%28psychiatrist%29
[15] http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing/dp/0307452425/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354546881&sr=1-1&keywords=Anatomy+of+an+Epidemic%3A+Magic+Bullets%2C+Psychiatric+Drugs%2C+and+the+Astonishing+Rise+of+Mental+Illness+in+Ame
[16] http://www.alternet.org/story/146659/are_prozac_and_other_psychiatric_drugs_causing_the_astonishing_rise_of_mental_illness_in_america?paging=off
[17] http://www.peteearley.com/2013/07/01/nami-convention-coverage-robert-whitakers-case-against-anti-psychotics/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+peteearley+%28The+Official+Blog+of+Author+Pete+Earley%29
[18] http://businessjournal.gallup.com/content/162953/tackle-employees-stagnating-engagement.aspx
[19] http://thegallupblog.gallup.com/2013/01/the-school-cliff-student-engagement.html
[20] http://www.asa.org/policy/resources/stats/
[21] http://sites.duke.edu/theatrst130s02s2011mg3/files/2011/05/McPherson-et-al-Soc-Isolation-2006.pdf
[22] http://www.amazon.com/Commonsense-Rebellion-Taking-Shrinks-Corporations/dp/0826414508/ref=pd_sim_b_2
[23] http://www.alternet.org/story/154225/would_we_have_drugged_up_einstein_how_anti-authoritarianism_is_deemed_a_mental_health_problem?paging=off
[24] http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/social-security-disability-benefits-29686.html
[25] http://www.alternet.org/tags/mental-illness
[26] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Capitalism Makes Us Crazy: How The Rise Of Capitalism Has Destroyed Mind & Body Health.

Oldspeak: “Is really important for people to search for the truth themselves, and not to automatically identify with any particular system, because as soon as you start to identify, as soon you try to find the answer aside yourself, you may surrender your critical faculties, so if we hold onto our critical faculties and look at the truth, what do we see? In this society what we see is a society that literally makes people sick. Because 50 percent of north american adults have a chronic illness, either diabetes, or high blood pressure, or heart disease, or cancer, or any number of auto-immune illnesses. now, according to the strict medical model, that is too bad, these people are just unfortunate, because what the medical model does, whether with mental illness or physical illness, it makes two separations, it separates the mind from the body, so that what happens emotionally is not seen to have an impact on our physical health. Number one, and number two it separates individuals from their environment. So that we try to understand individuals in separation from their actual lives. Those separations are socially imposed, they’re culturally defined and scientifically they are completely invalid.” –Dr Gabor Mate.

“I don’t believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.)” –Robert Anton Wilson.

“Our beliefs,  that we have freedom, liberty, security, justice, safety, education, equality, wealth, democracy, separation from our environment…. Are all illusions, combined with as Huxley says: “a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods“. Our belief systems are being used to manage and control us while constantly degrading our mental and physical health. All the while blaming all the deleterious effect of capitalism, on not the system that is causing them, but everything from “genetic predisposition” to unhealthy personal choices and individual weaknesses. Don’t believe the hype. The Crisis of Capitalism, is usually the cause of our pain and suffering. ”

Related Videos:
Dr. Gabor Mate : Addiction

Brain Development and Addiction

Related Audio:

http://radioproject.org/embed.php?show=11399

For more information:

Dr. Gabor Maté

The Canadian Institute of Stress 

National Alliance on Mental Illness

National Institute of Mental Health

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study

Patients Seek Greater Role in Recovery by Ryan Faughnder

7 Reasons America’s Mental Health Industry Is a Threat to Our Sanity by Bruce Levine

What’s Needed Next by Richard Frank

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs by Marc Lewis

The International Dyslexia Association

By Dr Gabor Mate @ Truthout: It’s very Interesting to look at the United States from the outside, of course, because your politicians are always saying what a great, the greatest country in the world, they all want to be like us, you know? And I want to ask you this question, psychological question. . .

If you met some guy who kept telling you how great he was, and everyone wants to be like him, how would you diagnose him? He’s got a grandiose personality disorder. In other words, what he is actually doing is compensating for his deep insecurity. So that, this is a country that in its very rhetoric betrays extraordinary insecurity ….

I grew up in communist Hungary, where the joke of course was: What is capitalism? Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and what is communism? It’s opposite *laughs*. I grew up in a system that spoke the language of socialism, that spoke the language of struggle, of anti-imperialism, of equality and justice, but in it’s actual functioning was just the very opposite. And then I came to North America, after the Hungarian Revolution, which is really uprising against a very brutal dictatorship and bought into the American idea. That lasted for exactly 4 years. Between 1957 and the early 60’s, when the Vietnam War started. And what became very clear to me that everything the Soviets said of the Americans were true, and everything they said about themselves were a total pack of lies.

The powers that be are oppressive and unjust is just how it is and it doesn’t matter in what guise  . . . This is, by the way, not an anti-communist rant; I may be one of the only two Marxists I know who came out of Eastern Europe. The reason I say that is when they beat you over the head in the name of a certain system, you’re not going to be going for that system very much. And what I’ve actually come to understand that is really important for people to search for the truth themselves, and not to automatically identify with any particular system, because as soon as you start to identify, as soon you try to find the answer aside yourself, you may surrender your critical faculties, so if we hold onto our critical faculties and look at the truth, what do we see?

In this society what we see is a society that literally makes people sick. Because 50 percent of north american adults have a chronic illness, either diabetes, or high blood pressure, or heart disease, or cancer, or any number of auto-immune illnesses. now, according to the strict medical model, that is too bad, these people are just unfortunate, because what the medical model does, whether with mental illness or physical illness, it makes two separations, it separates the mind from the body, so that what happens emotionally is not seen to have an impact on our physical health.

Number one, and number two it separates individuals from their environment. So that we try to understand individuals in separation from their actual lives. So that if somebody has cancer, well that is just their bad luck, or maybe because they smoke too many cigarettes. Which leaves us completely bereft of understanding what causes most of disease and what they’re betraying there is the complete poverty of understanding of what makes the human brain tick, and what creates a human being, and what causes people to behave and to function and feel the way they actually do.

Now, those separations are socially imposed, they’re culturally defined and scientifically they are completely invalid. Cause the truth of it is that the traditional teachings of shamanic medicinal cultures around the world, and of traditional Chinese medicine, or Ayurvedic Indian medicine, that mind and body are inseparable, have not been validated by modern science. So my profession, although it claims to ground itself in Science, and what they call evidence based practice, I only wish, I only wish they looked at the actual evidence. I only wished they would ask themselves why is it that [in] the United States an Afro-American male has six-times the risk of dying of prostate cancer than a caucasian.

’Well it’s got to be genetic’, no it isn’t, because their genetic relatives in Africa don’t suffer the same risk at all. So why is it that in this society, why are black women, even middle-class black women, more likely to suffer miscarriages in this country? Well that is not a genetic question, it’s a social question. There is something going on here.

If you look at something like the rate of autism in this country, or industrial society, particularly in North America, has gone up 40 fold in the last 50 years, or is it 30 fold in the last 30 years. Well, you know you can’t be dealing with a genetic effect because genes don’t change in a population over 30 years, or even 500 years. There is gotta be something going on in society that is driving the emotional ill-health of children. And furthermore if you look at addictions, there is a couple of myths associated with it. One of them is that it’s a choice that people make, and the criminal justice system, which I think is a very apt way of putting it, is a criminal system.

The justice system is criminal. It’s based on the very idea that people are making choices when they become addicts. If they are not making choices, why punish them for it? And the other idea is that it is genetics. And a third idea, of course, is that drugs are addictive, which is inherently nonsense. Because if it was true then anybody who tried a drug should become addicted. But most people who try most drugs don’t become addicted. most people who try cigarettes don’t become nicotine addicts. Most people who have a drink don’t become alcoholics.

Most people who try heroin, crystal meth, cocaine, don’t become addicts. The real question is, why are the drugs addictive to certain people? What creates a susceptibility? What makes them vulnerable? When the American army came back from Vietnam 20 percent of the GIs were addicted to heroin.  A few years later one percent was. There was a 95 percent curate, if you wish. Now if in my work with drug addicted clients in Downtown-east side of Vancouver, I had a 6 percent curate with 16 percent curate I’d be recognized as an international genius because the curates are really low. How come 95 percent of these GIs? If the drugs are addictive in themselves. Well maybe we have to look at their lives and maybe you have to look at the circumstances under which they became addicted. Furthermore, if you look at the aboriginal population of North America; these people actually had potentially addictive substances available to them.

Not only were they available, they used them. There was of course tobacco, but there was no addiction. If the substances in themselves had been addictive, and if these people are genetically predisposed, either or, they should have been addicted. But there was no history of addiction prior to the coming of the caucasians. As a matter of fact, the natives used these plants, but what did they use them for? They used them in spiritual ways. In other words they used them to elevate their level of consciousness, whereas the very essence of addiction is to obstruct your level of consciousness, because you don’t want to be aware. So, addiction is an escape from awareness whereas the spiritual use of these substances is the enhancement of awareness.

Now if choice and genetics don’t explain it, all we have to do is look at history. We’d have to actually ask what happened to the native people in this part of the world that drove them into addiction? Now alcohol has been known in the Western world for thousands of years, and there was plenty of drunkenness, even in ancient times, but there is no alcoholism for the most part. Alcoholism came around in the 18th century with the rise of capitalism. You can make a very good case that one of the medical outcomes or one of the health outcomes of capitalism is addiction. In other words, can you understand people in isolation from the system in which they live. Well the answer is that you can’t.

First of all, because the biology of humans beings is shaped by the psychological and social environment in which they live. I can give you one example. Asthma. It’s well known now, not controversial, that children whose parents are stressed, are more likely to have asthma. Now, ask the average physician what’s the connection, they’d have no idea. And yet, if you ask the physician how do you treat the asthma, you know how they treat the asthma, with stress hormones — with adrenaline and cortisol, or copies of it; this is how you treat asthma. I’m not going to go into the reasons why, but shouldn’t the very fact that we are treating this condition with stress hormones cause us to ask if stress has something to do with it?

So in a polluted area where children are more likely to have asthma, is the children of stressed parents much more likely to have asthma? Simply because the emotional levels of stress in the parents disorganize the stress response mechanisms of the child. And when women are stressed during pregnancy, their children have abnormal stress hormone levels more likely to use addictive substances to soothe their stresses. That’s because the emotional state of their parents have something to do with the physiology of the child. That’s just how it works, because you can’t separate the mind from the body and you can’t separate the individual from the environment.

Now, if you look at the parameters of stress, what it is that stresses people? The research shows that what is the most stressful in people is the uncertainty, lack of information, loss of control, and lack of opportunity to express yourself. When Karl Marx talked about freedom, he talked about freedom in three sense of the word. Freedom, for him, was, number one, freedom from economic necessities, freedom from the threat to life, freedom from interference of other people, and the freedom to express yourself — to be yourself. That’s freedom. Now what freedom is there in this “free society”, you know, in the free world, the free-est society in history. What freedom is there when people are not free of economic worry, where there is tremendous uncertainty and fear lack of control. When people lack control over their lives, they have no freedom. And they’re physiologically stressed. And when they’re physiologically stressed, that’s going to manifest in the form of illness.

So if you look at the California based studies called the adverse childhood experience studies, looked at 18,00 people, 80 percent Caucasian, 10 Hispanic, 10 Afro-American they looked at what happened to them in childhood and what the adult outcomes were. And an adverse childhood experience as something like physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, the loss of a parent due to a death, being jailed, or rancorous divorce, violence in the family, addiction in the family; for each of these adverse childhood experiences the risk of addiction went up by 2 to 4 fold. So, by the time a male child had had 6 of these experiences his risk of becoming an injection using substance addict was 4600 greater than that of a male child that had had no such experiences. So the risk of mental illness goes up exponentially, the risk of physical illness, like autoimmune disease goes up exponentially, and in Canadian studies it has been shown when children are abused in childhood their cancer risk goes up by nearly 50 percent. Why? Because you can’t separate the mind from the body and you can’t separate the individuals from the psycho-social environment.

But if you understand human beings, in their psycho-social context, what do we see? We see that stress is not just an abstract psycho social event. It has physiological correlates. So when you’re stressed, your whole body, homeostasis, or the internal balance, is perturbed and fundamentally you have disturbances in the nervous system, increase in heart-rate, blood pressure, and in the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline, which play their job in helping you escape, or to fight back in the face of an acute threat, but if you’re chronically stressed they actually create stress, thin your bones, suppress your immune system, give you heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes– a whole range of heart conditions.

Dr. Mate: No when it comes to addiction, specifically, in the Downtown-East side of Vancouver I never had a single female patient who had not been sexually abused as a child. And as, were many of the men, and so it’s always, the heart of addiction is always emotional loss. And the obvious ones were those losses incurred by those adverse childhood experiences identified in this California study. But there is another side to it as well, because if you look at what is happening with this burgeoning number of children being diagnosed with this or that disorder — not all of them were abused, many of them were not, but what is going on? Well as D.W. Winnicott, the great British child psychiatrist pointed out, there’s two things that can go wrong in childhood.

First of all, when things go, things happen that shouldn’t happen, and that’s the abuse and the trauma,  and secondly when things don’t happen that should happen and that’s the presence of non stressed, non depressed, emotionally attuned available caregivers. That’s not available in a country with average maternity leave with six and a half weeks. That’s not available where kids spend most of the time away from the nurturing adults in their lives and in company of other kids. So that they are forced to look to each other as their attachment figures. The desperation of the kids to always connect.

The sense of disorientation of they feel when they can’t connect with their friends by some electronic means. Its not a technology problem its an attachment problem. Those kids have been disconnected from the adults in their lives because the adults can’t be for them. They can’t be they are too stressed. There was a study few weeks ago that showed that stressed parents and not unloving parents but stressed parents simply are not  as emotionally attuned to the emotional cues of their kids as they would like to be.

And that’s was Psychologist formerly at UCLA Alan Schore calls ‘proximal separation.’ Proximal Separation is when a parent is physically there but emotionally unavailable because they are too stressed and too distracted. And that’s what my children experienced when they were small because I was a workaholic physician. And this society rewards workaholism. They tell you what a great you are. They reward you for things that undermine the health of your family. And for a lot of people its not even a question of a choice. When under the … and … Bill Clinton, the welfare laws were changed so that mothers could have only a number  of years and have off and didn’t have to go to work. Where exactly does a single mother often have to go to work ? Usually to a low paying job far away from home. And, all that time that she is working and all that time that she is commuting her child is at a daycare, inadequately staffed. With under-trained personnel. Who does that kid get connected to then. The other kids. And the children become each others connection ….

And that means for the first time in history you have large numbers of kids immature creatures getting them modelling and their cue giving  and their sense of direction and the sense of value on how to talk and how to walk from other immature creatures. But what do you expect from that culture but all kinds of dysfunction. And again that is not the choice that individual parents have made that’s just another way in which this system has undermined the necessary conditions for child development.

A study out of Notre Dame University, last year, showed that the healthiest environment for child rearing is the hunter gatherer society, hunter gatherer village. And Why? Because in the HG village three things that happen to the kids that does not happen in our culture anymore for many many kids. Number one, the kids are always with their parents. Well, That’s not possible in this country. Civilized countries actually have a paternity leave, never mind the six weeks maternity leave.

When ?? arrived in North America they were appalled at the parenting practices of the natives you know why because the natives did not beat their kids and to the Christians this meant ?? the rod and spoiling the child. So that’s the first thing and the second thing is when the kids cry they picked up.Imagine picking up a kid when he is crying. We tell people when the kid is five or six months old we tell don’t pick up you want them to become independent . We are missing a point. The way to promote independence is to invite dependence. Because people go independent when they feel secure in the world. So you promote independence by inviting dependence.

So in that bourgeois cultures they picked up kids when they cried which meant a child’s brain don’t become overrun the brain by stress hormone. If the kids brain is overrun by the stress hormones. When child’s brains becomes overruns with stress hormones it impacts the child development  because the brain develops an interaction with the environment. So, even if you don’t abuse the kids in this country but if you just follow the parenting practices recommended by so called experts you are going to screw up your kids tremendously.

And the third quality of the hunter gatherer society is that the children are brought up in the context of nurturing adults by not just parents, not just the father, not just the mother but that clan, tribe, community and the neighborhood that I was talking before. So any system that destroys those conditions that stresses the parents.  See if everything is genetic we don’t have to asked what happened to black people in this country. And what are stresses on the black males that trigger their prostate cancer.  We have to look at the native people that triggers addiction or to … many to other people native, black, caucasians or whoever.

Its all in the genes the explanation the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the free-est and most prosperous nation on earth? It can’t be in system there is must be something wrong with the wiring.

And finally let me read some quote from another chapter of my books on addiction…

It is beyond horrible to listen to the In the graphic videos and soundtracks of the movie. They are not screaming but just accepting the pictures they have dead eyes. You can tell that their spirit is broken.That’s their life. Why dead eyes? Dead eyes because the child can’t escape, fight back or seek help. The only way that they can possible ?? the trauma is by shutdown of the emotion and pain.

In this society we have massive emotional shutdown. And you can see it in the increasing violence in the culture. Increased violence in media culture. That gory movies have to be more and more gory. Sports have to be more violent. People have to beat themselves to each other to a … on television. Because we are so emotionally shut down that it takes more and more to titillate us and the sex has to be objectified and more and more salacious really because what used to excite people decades ago is no longer sufficient. Why? Because what we are shutting down and why we are shutting down because we are hurt so much. Because the more we shut down the more we need to external sources of stimulation to feel at all.

In the case of abused child the shutdown is obvious. But, the second point is that if the same cop instead of quitting the force had he transferred to the drug squad according to all the research who do you think he would have caught? Those kids he did not rescue because according to all the research and brain development data they are the ones which are drug addicts because they are the ones who are in so much pain that they want to sooth themselves with drugs.

If we take people who abuse to start with and we make them into our social enemy. And they are the ones who are our ?? population. So we try and rescue them and if we fail to rescue them we persecute them for their rest of the lives. And that we are doing with war on drugs. There is no war on drugs because you cannot have a war against inanimate objects. There is only war on drug addicts. Which means we are warring on the most abused and vulnerable segments of the population. You can see left and right of the war on drugs and you can see it is not working.

But you know what, I have a different point of view. If decade after decade, after decade, after decade, if the intentions of the policies are not being realized; in fact the opposite is what it is happening … may be its serving some purpose a maintaining a rational the raison d’etre of repressive apparatus that can be used against the people when the need arises. Is it really a failure or maybe it has a function of demonizing a certain section of population that justifies more repression.? May be it has a function of keeping the legal apparatus going, may it has a function of making a money for a lot of people, may be it has a function of fueling the privatized to incarceration industry.

So may be after all it is not a failure at all. And from that perspective was the Vietnam War? No not all. It was militarily. But, the end result was that US took control of the economies of the South East Asia. Is the Iraq War a failure? Well, it is for the people who died there, for a half a million Iraqis who died it is but it is not a failure for american oil companies. So that everywhere we have to be careful before we call them a failures. Somebody wins. Somebody who wins are the same people who destroy -neighborhoods, communities. It is the same system that undermines human health, that undermines dignity, that undermines human connections that really makes life less tolerable on this planet. Now, we don’t have to agree on what the solutions might be. And that’s okay. But what do we agree on is the importance of speaking for truth,  but what we do agree is on importance of people getting together and struggling in a healthy way for different life. Because if its the loss of control, and the isolation and the suppression of self expression that are the greatest cause for stress then surely one to has to distress the culture and get together express yourself  and not to be silent and to connect with human beings.

As Joy Hill said don’t mourn- organise. Thank you very much.

Abnormalcy Bias: To Be Well Adjusted To A Profoundly Sick Society

Oldspeak: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society” –Jiddu Krishnamurti. While I don’t agree with every assertion in this piece, the general point is well taken. We have created vast, sprawling, global and influential industries to adjust ourselves to the profound sickness that envelops our society. Big Pharma has the task of blunting the constellation of  responses we are having to our sick society. Diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, allergies, heart disease, fibromyliglia, ADHD,  autism, stress, immune dysfunction, obesity, anxiety, sleeplessness, depression, mania, psychopathy, sociopathy, amorality, depravity, etc, etc, etc… are all predictable and valid responses to the artificial & abnormal conditions we exist in. Yet we glibly “medicate” them away, ignoring and further medicating the toxic side effects the “medications” cause. Big Media is tasked with creating “happiness machines”  distracting our attention away from our sick society as our “painless concentration camp for entire societies” is ever strengthened and built out. Focusing our attention on nonsense , scandal, “news”, politricks, celebrity, dancing, singing, dating, fighting, marriage, sports, babies, sexism, racism, the cult of youth, consumption, the future, the past…. Everything EXCEPT actual reality and the present moment.  Big Education is tasked with facilitating “complacent adjustment of the conforming majority” to of the sickness of our society. It is as Chomsky says: “The  New Spirit of the Age: Gain Wealth, Forgetting All But Self.” No efforts have  been spared… to drive this spirit into people’s heads. People must come  to believe that suffering and deprivation result from the failure of individuals, not  the reigning socioeconomic system. There are huge industries devoted to this  task. About one-sixth of the entire US economy is devoted to what’s called “marketing,”  which is mostly propaganda. Advertising is described by analysts and the business  literature as a process of fabricating wants – a campaign to drive people to the  superficial things in life, like fashionable consumption, so that they will remain  passive and obedient. The schools are also a target. As I mentioned, public mass education was a major  achievement, in which the US was a pioneer. But it had complex characteristics,  rooted in the sharp class conflicts of the day. One goal was to induce farmers  to give up their independence and submit themselves to industrial discipline and  accept what they regarded as wage slavery. That did not pass without notice.  Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that political leaders of his day were calling for  popular education. He concluded that their motivation was fear. The country was  filling up with millions of voters and the Masters realized that one had to therefore  “educate them, to keep them from (our) throats.”  In other words: educate them  the “right way” — to be obediently passive and accept their fate as right and just,  conforming to the New Spirit of the Age. Keep their perspectives narrow, their  understanding limited, discourage free and independent thought, instill docility and  obedience to keep them from the Masters’ throats. This common theme from 150 years ago is inhuman and savage. It also meets  with resistance. And there have been victories. There were many in the struggles  of the 1930s, carried further in the 1960s. But systems of power never walk  away politely. They prepare a new assault. This has in fact been happening since  the early 1970s, based on major changes in the design of the economic system.”  We’re groomed to support our sick systems without question. This abnormalcy bias is also driving our willful ignorance of the environmental and climate catastrophe soon to come. How do we override this bias? How do we awaken from the world that has been pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth?” We need the “creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority” to become the majority.

By Jim Q @ Washingtons Blog:

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited

The political class set in motion the eventual obliteration of our economic system with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Placing the fate of the American people in the hands of a powerful cabal of unaccountable greedy wealthy elitist bankers was destined to lead to poverty for the many, riches for the connected crony capitalists, debasement of the currency, endless war, and ultimately the decline and fall of an empire. Ernest Hemingway’s quote from The Sun Also Rises captures the path of our country perfectly:

“How did you go bankrupt?”
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

The 100 year downward spiral began gradually but has picked up steam in the last sixteen years, as the exponential growth model, built upon ever increasing levels of debt and an ever increasing supply of cheap oil, has proven to be unsustainable and unstable. Those in power are frantically using every tool at their disposal to convince Boobus Americanus they have everything under control and the system is operating normally. The psychotic central bankers, “bought and sold” political class, mega-corporation soulless chief executives and corporate controlled media use propaganda techniques, paid “experts”, talking head “personalities”, captured think tanks, and the willful ignorance of the majority to spin an increasingly dire economic descent as if we are recovering and getting back to normal. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There is nothing normal about what Ben Bernanke and the Federal government have done over the last five years and continue to do today. Truthfully, nothing has been normal since the mid-1990s when Alan Greenspan spoke the last truthful words of his lifetime:

“Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?”

The Greenspan led Federal Reserve created two epic bubbles in the space of six years which burst and have done irreparable harm to the net worth of the middle class. Rather than learn the lesson of how much damage to the lives of average Americans has been caused by creating cheap easy money out of thin air, our Ivy League self-proclaimed expert on the Great Depression, Ben Bernanke, has ramped up the cheap easy money machine to hyper-speed. There is nothing normal about the path this man has chosen. His strategy has revealed the true nature of the Federal Reserve and their purpose – to protect and enrich the financial elites that manipulate this country for their own purposes.

Despite the mistruths spoken by Bernanke and his cadre of banker coconspirators, he can never reverse what he has done. The country will not return to normalcy in our lifetimes. Bernanke is conducting a mad experiment and we are the rats in his maze. His only hope is to retire before it blows up in his face. Just as Greenspan inflated the housing bubble and exited stage left, Bernanke is inflating a debt bubble, stock bubble, bond bubble and attempting to re-inflate the housing bubble just in time for another Ivy League Keynesian academic, Janet Yellen, to step into the banker’s box. This genius thinks Bernanke has been too tight with monetary policy. It seems inflated egos are common among Ivy League economist central bankers who think they can pull levers and push buttons to control the economy. Results may vary.

The gradual slide towards our national bankruptcy of wealth, spirit, freedom, self-respect, morality, personal responsibility, and common sense began in 1913 with the secretive creation of the Federal Reserve and the imposition of a personal income tax. Pandora’s Box was opened in this fateful year and the horrors of currency debasement and ever increasing taxation were thrust upon the American people by a small but powerful cadre of unscrupulous financial elite and the corrupt politicians that do their bidding in Washington D.C. The powerful men who thrust these evils upon our country set in motion a chain of events and actions that will undoubtedly result in the fall of the great American Empire, just as previous empires have fallen due to the corruption of its leaders and depravity of its people. Creating a private central bank, controlled by the Wall Street cabal, and allowing the government to syphon the earnings of workers through increased taxation has allowed politicians the ability to spend, borrow, and print money at an ever increasing rate in order to get themselves re-elected and benefit the cronies, hucksters and bankers that pay the biggest bribes. None of this benefit the average American, who sees their purchasing power systematically inflated and taxed away. This is not capitalism and it is not a coincidence that war and inflation have been the hallmarks of the last century.

“A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank. It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.” – Ron Paul

As you can see, the bankruptcy of our country and our culture began gradually, accelerated after Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, really picked up steam in 1980 when the debt happy Baby Boom generation came of age, and has “suddenly” reached maximum velocity as we approach the true fiscal cliff. There were many checkpoints along the way where fatefully bad choices were made. They include the New Deal, Cold War, Great Society, Morning in America, Dotcom New Paradigm, Housing Wealth Retirement Plan, Obamacare, and present belief that creating more debt will solve a problem created by too much debt. The Federal Reserve allowed interventionist politicians to fight two declared wars (World War I, World War II), fight five undeclared wars (Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq), conduct hundreds of military engagements around the globe, occupy foreign countries, begin a war on poverty that increased poverty, begin a war on drugs that increased the amount of available drugs, and finally start a war on terror that has increased the number of terrorists and pushed us closer to national bankruptcy. The terrorists have already won, as the explosion of stupidity and irrational fear has allowed those in power to acquire more power and dominion over our lives.

Abnormality Reigns

“We live surrounded by a systematic appeal to a dream world which all mature, scientific reality would reject. We, quite literally, advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility. It is as the hallmark of the culture. And it is justified as being economically indispensable.” – John Kenneth Galbraith

When I critically scrutinize the economic, political, financial, and social landscape at this point in history, I come to the inescapable conclusion that our country and world are headed into the abyss. This is most certainly a minority viewpoint. The majority of people in this country are oblivious to the disaster that will arrive over the next decade. Some would attribute this willful ignorance to the normalcy bias that infects the psyches of millions of ostrich like iGadget distracted, Facebook addicted, government educated, financially illiterate, mass media manipulated zombies. Normalcy bias refers to a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to inform the populace about the impending disaster. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster hasn’t occurred yet, then it will never occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with the disaster once it occurs. People tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.

The unsustainability of our economic system built upon assumptions of exponential growth, ever expanding debt, increasing consumer spending, unlimited supplies of cheap easy to access oil, impossible to honor entitlement promises, and a dash of mass delusion should be apparent to even the dullest of government public school educated drones inhabiting this country. I don’t attribute this willful ignorance to normalcy bias. I attribute it to abnormalcy bias. In a profoundly abnormal society, adjusting your thinking to fit in appears normal, but is just a symptom of the disease that has infected our culture. There is nothing normal about anything in our society today. If you were magically transported back to 1996 and described to someone the economic, political, financial and social landscape in 2013, they would have you committed to a mental institution and given shock therapy.

Even though we’ve been in a 100 year spiral downwards, things still appeared relatively normal in 1996 when Greenspan uttered his “Irrational Exuberance” faux pas that so upset his Wall Street puppet masters. The ruling class had not yet repealed Glass-Steagall (pre-requisite for pillaging the muppets), created the internet bubble, fashioned the greatest control fraud in world history (housing bubble unrecognized by Ben Bernanke), or taken advantage of mass hysteria over 9/11 to begin the never ending war on terror and expansion of the Orwellian state. The citizens, and I use that term loosely, of this country have allowed those in control of the government and media to convince them the situation confronting us is just a normal cyclical variation that will be alleviated by tweaking existing economic policies and trusting that Ben Bernanke will pull the right monetary levers to get us back on course. The stress inflicted on their brains in the last thirteen years of bubbles and wars has made the average person incapable of distinguishing between normality and abnormality. What they need is slap upside of their head. Is there anything normal about these facts?

• The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet in 1996 consisted of $422 billion, of which 91% were Treasury securities. Today it consists of $3.25 trillion, of which only 56% are Treasury securities, and the rest is toxic home mortgages, toxic commercial mortgages, and whatever other crap the Wall Street banks have dumped on their books. Their balance sheet is leveraged 57 to 1 and Bernanke has promised his Wall Street bosses he will add another $750 billion before the year is out. Is there anything normal about a central bank adding twice as much debt to its balance sheet in less than twelve months than existed on its entire balance sheet in 1996?
• The National Debt at the end of fiscal 1996 was $5.25 trillion. It increased by $250 billion that year. The GDP of the country was $7.8 trillion. Our national debt as a percentage of GDP was only 67% and our annual deficit was only 3% of GDP. At the time, the country was worried about these outrageous levels of debt. Today the National Debt stands at a towering $16.8 trillion. It has increased by a staggering $1.12 trillion in the last twelve months. The GDP of the country today is $15.7 trillion. Our national debt as a percentage GDP has soared to 107%. Our annual deficits now exceed 7% of GDP on a consistent basis. Our budgets are on automatic pilot, with the $20 trillion level to be breached by 2016. Is it a normal state of affairs when the GDP of your country rises by 100% over seventeen years, while your debt rises by 320%?

• Total government spending (Federal, State, Local) in 1996 totaled $2.7 trillion, or 35% of GDP. Today total government spending is $6.3 trillion, or 40% of GDP. In 1979, before the belief in government became a religion, total government spending was only 31.5% of GDP (27% in 1965). Are you receiving twice the service from government than you received in 1996? Are you safer from terrorists due to the massive expansion of the police state? Are your kids getting a much better education than they did in 1996? Have the undeclared wars benefitted you in any way, other than tripling the price of gas? Are the higher wage taxes, real estate taxes, school taxes, sewer fees, utility fees, phone fees, gasoline taxes, permit fees, and myriad of other government charges worth it? Is it normal for government to account for almost half of our economy?

• In 1996 personal consumption expenditures accounted for 67% of GDP, while private domestic investment accounted for 16% of GDP and we ran small trade deficits of 1% of GDP. Today, consumer spending accounts for 71% of GDP (despite the storyline about consumer retrenchment), while domestic investment has contracted to 13% of GDP and our trade deficits have surged to almost 4% of GDP. The Federal government has expanded their piece of the GDP pie by 130% since 1996, with the Department of War accounting for the bulk of the increase. Saving and capital investment is now penalized in this country. Is it normal for a country to borrow, consume and bleed itself to death?
• Consumer credit outstanding totaled $1.2 trillion in 1996, or $4,500 per every man, woman and child in the country. Today, the austere balance is now $2.8 trillion, or $8,800 per every man, woman and child inhabiting our debt saturated paradise. The more than doubling of consumer debt would be acceptable if wages were rising at a similar rate. But that hasn’t been the case, as wages have only advanced from $3.6 trillion in 1996 to $7.0 trillion today. With even the massively understated CPI showing 50% inflation since 1996 and 23% more Americans in the working age population (45 million), real wages have advanced by 30%. Using a true measure of inflation, real wages have fallen. Total credit market debt in 1996 was $19 trillion, or 243% of GDP. Today total credit market debt sits at an all-time high of $56.2 trillion, or 358% of GDP. Is it normal for credit market debt to increase at three times the rate of GDP?

• In 1996, personal income totaled $6.6 trillion, with wages accounting for 55% of the total, interest income on savings accounting for 12% and government entitlement transfers accounting for 14%. Today personal income totals $13.6 trillion, with wages accounting for 51% of the total, interest income on savings plunging to 7% due to Bernanke’s “Screw a Senior Zero Interest Policy”, and Big Brother entitlement transfers skyrocketing to 18%. In what Orwellian dystopian society is taking money from wage earners and redistributing it to non-wage earners considered personal income? Is it normal for a government to punish savers and makers in order to benefit the borrowers and takers?
• Prior to the financial collapse and during the mid-1990s prudent risk-averse savers could get a 4% to 5% return on money market accounts. Since the Wall Street created worldwide financial collapse, Ben Bernanke, at the behest of these very same Wall Street banks, has reduced short term interest rates to 0%. The result has been to transfer $400 billion per year from the pockets of savers and senior citizens into the grubby hands of bankers that have destroyed our economy. The prudent are left earning .02% on their savings, while the profligate bankers can borrow for 0% and earn billions by re-depositing those funds at the Federal Reserve. In what bizarro world this be a normal state of affairs?

• Total mortgage debt outstanding in 1996, before the epic Wall Street produced housing bubble, was $4.7 billion. Today, even after the transfer of almost $1 trillion of bad debt to the balance sheet of the American taxpayer, the amount of mortgage debt is an astounding $13.1 trillion. Despite home values rising since 1996, there are 20% of all households still in a negative equity position. Total household real estate equity was 60% in 1996, plunged below 40% in 2009, and has only slightly rebounded to 47% today because Wall Street dumped the bad mortgages on the backs of the American taxpayer. Is it normal for mortgage debt to triple and home equity to plunge in a rationally functioning world? Is it normal when 25% of all existing home sales are distressed sales and another 30% are sales to Wall Street hedge funds like Blackrock?

• In 1996 there were 200 million working age Americans, with 134 million (67%) in the labor force, 127 million (63.5%) employed, and 66 million (33%) not in the labor force. Today there are 245 million working age Americans, with 155 million (63%) in the labor force, 143 million (58%) employed, and 90 million (37%) supposedly not in the labor force. The number of working age Americans has increased by 22.5%, while the number of those employed has advanced by only 12.5%. The population to employment ratio has reached a three decade low as millions have given up, been lured into college by cheap plentiful government debt, or developed a mysterious ailment that has gotten them into the SSDI program. Is it normal for millions of Americans to leave the labor force when the economy is supposedly recovering?

• In 1996 there were 25.5 million Americans on food stamps, or 9.6% of the population, costing $24 billion per year. Today there are 47.8 million Americans on food stamps, or 15% of the population, costing $75 billion per year. Historically, the number of people in this program would rise during recessions and recede when the economy recovered, just as a safety net program should function. According to our government keepers the economy has been in recovery since late 2009. The number of people entering the food stamp program has gone up by 7 million since the recession officially ended. This is not normal. Either the government is lying about the recession or they are screwing the taxpayer by encouraging constituents to enter the program in an effort to gain votes. Which is it?

• The price of oil averaged $20 per barrel in 1996 and it cost you $1.20 per gallon to fill your tank. Oil averaged $85 per barrel in 2012 and currently hovers around $90 per barrel. Most Americans are now paying between $3.50 and $4.00 per gallon to fill their tanks. This result seems abnormal considering the propaganda machine is proclaiming we are on the verge of energy independence. After two Middle East wars, 6,700 dead American soldiers, 50,000 wounded American soldiers, and $1.5 trillion of national wealth wasted, this is all we get – a tripling in gas prices and creation of thousands of new terrorists?

You have to have a really bad case of normalcy bias to be able to convince yourself that everything that has happened since 1996 is normal. Every fact supports the reality that we’ve entered a period of extreme abnormality and our response as a nation thus far has insured that a disaster of even far greater magnitude is just over the horizon. Anyone with an ounce of common sense realizes the social mood is deteriorating rapidly. We are in the midst of a Crisis period that will result in earth shattering change, but the masses want things to go back to normal and don’t want to face the facts. The cognitive dissonance created by reality versus their wishes will resolve itself when the next financial collapse makes 2008 look like a walk in the park. But, until then most will just stick their heads in the sand and hope for the best.

Loving Your Servitude

“Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.” – Ron Paul

The most disgraceful example of abnormality that has infected our culture has been the cowardice and docile acquiescence of the citizenry in allowing an ever expanding police state to shred the U.S. Constitution, strip us of our freedoms, and restrict our liberties. Our keepers have not let any crisis go to waste in the last seventeen years. They have also taken advantage of the willful ignorance, childish immaturity, extreme gullibility, historical cluelessness, financial illiteracy and techno-narcissism of the populace to reverse practical legislation and prey upon irrational fears to strip the people of their constitutionally guaranteed liberties and freedoms. If you had told someone in 1996 the security measures, laws, and police agencies that would exist in 2013, they would have laughed you out of the room. Every crisis, whether government created or just convenient to their agenda, has been utilized by the oligarchs to expand the police state and benefit the crony capitalists that profit from its expansion. The character of the American people has been found wanting as they obediently cower and beg for protection from unseen evil doers. The propagandist corporate media reinforces their fears and instructs them to submissively tremble and implore the government to do more. The cosmic obliviousness and limitless sense of complacency of the general population with regards to a blatantly obvious coup by a small cadre of sociopathic financial elite and their army of bureaucrats, lackeys and jackboots is a wonder to behold.

The 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression was primarily the result of excessively loose Federal Reserve monetary policy during the Roaring 20’s and the unrestrained fraud perpetrated by the Wall Street banks. The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act was a practical 38 page law which kept Wall Street from ravenously raping its customers and the American people for almost seven decades. The Wall Street elite and their bought off political hacks in both parties repealed this law in 1999, while simultaneously squashing any effort to regulate the financial derivatives market. The day trading American public didn’t even look up from their computer screens. Over the next nine years Wall Street went on a fraudulent feeding frenzy rampage which brought the country to its knees and then held the American taxpayer at gunpoint to bail them out. The Federal Reserve arranged rescue of LTCM in 1998 gave the all clear to Wall Street that any risk was acceptable, since the Fed would always bail them out. Just as they did in the 1920’s, the Federal Reserve set the table for financial disaster with excessively low interest rates and non-existent regulatory oversight.

The downward spiral of our empire towards an Orwellian/Huxley merged dystopian nightmare accelerated after the 9/11 attacks. Within one month those looking to exert hegemony over all domestic malcontents had passed the 366 page, 58,000 words Patriot Act. Did the terrified masses ask how such a comprehensive destruction of our liberties could be written in under one month? It is apparent to anyone with critical thinking skills that the enemy within had this bill written, waiting for the ideal opportunity to implement this unprecedented expansion of federal police power. Electronic surveillance of our emails, phone calls and voice mails, along with warrantless wiretaps, and general loss of civil liberties was passed without question under the guise of protecting us. Next was the invasion of a foreign country based upon lies, propaganda and misinformation without a declaration of war, as required by the Constitution. Our government began torturing suspects in secret foreign prisons. The shallow, self-centered, narcissistic, Facebook fanatic populace has barely looked up from texting on their iPhones to notice that we have been at war in the Middle East for eleven years, because it hasn’t interfered with their weekly viewing of Honey Boo Boo, Dancing With the Stars, or Jersey Shore. They occasionally leave their homes to wave a flag and chant “USA, USA, USA”, as directed by the media, when a terrorist like Bin Laden or Boston bomber is offed by our security services, but for the most part they can live their superficial vacuous lives of triviality unscathed by war.

The creation of the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security ushered in a further encroachment of our everyday freedoms. They attempted to keep the masses frightened through a ridiculous color coded fear index. Little old ladies, people in wheelchairs and little children are subject to molestation by lowlife TSA perverts. Military units conduct “training exercises” in cities across the country to desensitize the sheep-like masses, who fail to acknowledge that the U.S. military cannot constitutionally be used domestically. DHS considers military veterans, Ron Paul supporters, and Christians as potential enemies of the state. The use of predator drones to murder suspected adversaries in foreign countries, while killing innocent men, women and children (also known as collateral damage), has just been a prelude to the domestic surveillance and eventually extermination of dissidents and nonconformists here in the U.S. We are already becoming a 1984 CCTV controlled nation. DHS has been rapidly militarizing local police forces in cities and towns to supplement their jackbooted thugs. Obama’s executive orders have given him the ability to take control of industry. He can imprison citizens without charges for as long as he deems necessary. Attempts to control gun ownership and shutdown the internet is a prologue to further government domination and supremacy over our lives when the wheels come off this unsustainable bus.

The last week has provided a multitude of revelations about our government and the people of this country. The billions “invested” in our police state, along with warnings from a foreign government, and suspicious travel patterns were not enough for our beloved protectors to stop the Boston Marathon bombing. After stumbling upon these amateur terrorists by accident, the 2^nd responders, with their Iraq war level firepower, managed to slaughter one of the perpetrators, but somehow allowed a wounded teenager to escape on foot and elude 10,000 donut eaters for almost 24 hours. The horde of heavily armed, testosterone fueled thugs proceeded to bully and intimidate the citizens of Watertown by illegal searches of homes and treating innocent people like criminals. The government completely shut down the 10^th largest metropolitan area in the country for an entire day looking for a wounded 19 year old. The people of Boston obeyed their zoo keepers and obediently cowered in their cages.

The entire episode was an epic fail. The gang that couldn’t shoot straight needed an old man to find the bomber in his backyard boat. The people of Boston exhibited the passivity and subservience demanded by their government. Since the capture of the remaining terrorist, the shallow exhibitions of national pride at athletic events and smarmy displays of honoring the police state apparatchiks who screwed up – allowing the attack to occur and looking like the keystone cops during the pursuit of the suspects, has revealed a fatal defect in our civil character. We are living in a profoundly abnormal society, with millions of medicated mindless zombies controlled by a vast propaganda machine, who seemingly enjoy having their liberties taken away. Most have willingly learned to love their servitude. For those who haven’t learned, the boot of our vast security state will just stomp on their face forever. We’re realizing the worst dystopian nightmares of Orwell and Huxley simultaneously. This abnormalcy bias will dissipate over the next ten to fifteen years in torrent of financial collapse, war, bloodshed, and retribution. Sticking your head in the sand will not make reality go away. The existing social, political, and financial order will be swept away. What it is replaced by is up to us. Will this be the final chapter or new chapter in the history of this nation? The choice is ours.

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
– George Orwell

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution” –Aldous Huxley, 1961

DNA Can Be Influenced And Reprogrammed By Words And Frequencies

Oldspeak:”How bout that. No artificial toxic pills and medicines necessary. We have the power to heal ourselves with our voicies. In another instance of nature doing it better, we find more ancient wisdom confirmed by ‘modern science’. Turns out all those shamen, witch doctors, and spiritual healers aren’t ignorant savages after all. THE HUMAN DNA IS A BIOLOGICAL INTERNET and superior in many aspects to the artificial one. The latest Russian scientific research directly or indirectly explains phenomena such as clairvoyance, intuition, spontaneous and remote acts of healing, self healing, affirmation techniques, unusual light/auras around people (namely spiritual masters), mind’s influence on weather patterns and much more. In addition, there is evidence for a whole new type of medicine in which DNA can be influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies WITHOUT cutting out and replacing single gene.” Woah. Why has this knowledge been actively and deliberately unlearned? Why have we been taught to trust and promote toxic, debilitating and unnatural “western medicine” over homeopathy, meditation and other forms of natural healing? Three words: “Profit is Paramount”.

By Grazyna Fosar and Franz Bludorf @ Quantum Pranx:

Russian DNA Discoveries:
Original version

THE HUMAN DNA IS A BIOLOGICAL INTERNET and superior in many aspects to the artificial one. The latest Russian scientific research directly or indirectly explains phenomena such as clairvoyance, intuition, spontaneous and remote acts of healing, self healing, affirmation techniques, unusual light/auras around people (namely spiritual masters), mind’s influence on weather patterns and much more. In addition, there is evidence for a whole new type of medicine in which DNA can be influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies WITHOUT cutting out and replacing single genes.

Only 10% of our DNA is being used for building proteins. It is this subset of DNA that is of interest to western researchers and is being examined and categorized. The other 90% are considered “junk DNA.” The Russian researchers, however, convinced that nature was not dumb, joined linguists and geneticists in a venture to explore those 90% of “junk DNA.” Their results, findings and conclusions are simply revolutionary! According to them, our DNA is not only responsible for the construction of our body but also serves as data storage and in communication. The Russian linguists found that the genetic code, especially in the apparently useless 90%, follows the same rules as all our human languages. To this end they compared the rules of syntax (the way in which words are put together to form phrases and sentences), semantics (the study of meaning in language forms) and the basic rules of grammar.

They found that the alkalines of our DNA follow a regular grammar and do have set rules just like our languages. So human languages did not appear coincidentally but are a reflection of our inherent DNA.

The Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr Garjajev and his colleagues also explored the vibrational behavior of the DNA. [For the sake of brevity I will give only a summary here. For further exploration please refer to the appendix at the end of this article.] The bottom line was: “Living chromosomes function just like solitonic/holographic computers using the endogenous DNA laser radiation.” This means that they managed for example to modulate certain frequency patterns onto a laser ray and with it influenced the DNA frequency and thus the genetic information itself. Since the basic structure of DNA-alkaline pairs and of language (as explained earlier) are of the same structure, no DNA decoding is necessary.

One can simply use words and sentences of the human language! This, too, was experimentally proven! Living DNA substance (in living tissue, not in vitro) will always react to language-modulated laser rays and even to radio waves, if the proper frequencies are being used.

This finally and scientifically explains why affirmations, autogenous training, hypnosis and the like can have such strong effects on humans and their bodies. It is entirely normal and natural for our DNA to react to language. While western researchers cut single genes from the DNA strands and insert them elsewhere, the Russians enthusiastically worked on devices that can influence the cellular metabolism through suitable modulated radio and light frequencies and thus repair genetic defects.

Garjajev’s research group succeeded in proving that with this method chromosomes damaged by x-rays for example can be repaired. They even captured information patterns of a particular DNA and transmitted it onto another, thus reprogramming cells to another genome. 
So they successfully transformed, for example, frog embryos to salamander embryos simply by transmitting the DNA information patterns! This way the entire information was transmitted without any of the side effects or disharmonies encountered when cutting out and re-introducing single genes from the DNA. This represents an unbelievable, world-transforming revolution and sensation! All this by simply applying vibration and language instead of the archaic cutting-out procedure! This experiment points to the immense power of wave genetics, which obviously has a greater influence on the formation of organisms than the biochemical processes of alkaline sequences.

Esoteric and spiritual teachers have known for ages that our body is programmable by language, words and thought. This has now been scientifically proven and explained. Of course the frequency has to be correct. And this is why not everybody is equally successful or can do it with always the same strength. The individual person must work on the inner processes and maturity in order to establish a conscious communication with the DNA. The Russian researchers work on a method that is not dependent on these factors but will ALWAYS work, provided one uses the correct frequency.

But the higher developed an individual’s consciousness is, the less need is there for any type of device! One can achieve these results by oneself, and science will finally stop to laugh at such ideas and will confirm and explain the results. And it doesn’t end there.
The Russian scientists also found out that our DNA can cause disturbing patterns in the vacuum, thus producing magnetized wormholes! Wormholes are the microscopic equivalents of the so-called Einstein-Rosen bridges in the vicinity of black holes (left by burned-out stars).
These are tunnel connections between entirely different areas in the universe through which information can be transmitted outside of space and time. The DNA attracts these bits of information and passes them on to our consciousness. This process of hypercommunication is most effective in a state of relaxation. Stress, worries or a hyperactive intellect prevent successful hypercommunication or the information will be totally distorted and useless.

In nature, hypercommunication has been successfully applied for millions of years. The organized flow of life in insect states proves this dramatically. Modern man knows it only on a much more subtle level as “intuition.” But we, too, can regain full use of it. An example from Nature: When a queen ant is spatially separated from her colony, building still continues fervently and according to plan. If the queen is killed, however, all work in the colony stops. No ant knows what to do. Apparently the queen sends the “building plans” also from far away via the group consciousness of her subjects. She can be as far away as she wants, as long as she is alive. In man hypercommunication is most often encountered when one suddenly gains access to information that is outside one’s knowledge base. Such hypercommunication is then experienced as inspiration or intuition. The Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini for instance dreamt one night that a devil sat at his bedside playing the violin. The next morning Tartini was able to note down the piece exactly from memory, he called it the Devil’s Trill Sonata.

For years, a 42-year old male nurse dreamt of a situation in which he was hooked up to a kind of knowledge CD-ROM. Verifiable knowledge from all imaginable fields was then transmitted to him that he was able to recall in the morning. There was such a flood of information that it seemed a whole encyclopedia was transmitted at night. The majority of facts were outside his personal knowledge base and reached technical details about which he knew absolutely nothing.

When hypercommunication occurs, one can observe in the DNA as well as in the human being special phenomena. The Russian scientists irradiated DNA samples with laser light. On screen a typical wave pattern was formed. When they removed the DNA sample, the wave pattern did not disappear, it remained. Many control experiments showed that the pattern still came from the removed sample, whose energy field apparently remained by itself. This effect is now called phantom DNA effect. It is surmised that energy from outside of space and time still flows through the activated wormholes after the DNA was removed. The side effect encountered most often in hypercommunication also in human beings are inexplicable electromagnetic fields in the vicinity of the persons concerned. Electronic devices like CD players and the like can be irritated and cease to function for hours. When the electromagnetic field slowly dissipates, the devices function normally again. Many healers and psychics know this effect from their work. The better the atmosphere and the energy, the more frustrating it is that the recording device stops functioning and recording exactly at that moment. And repeated switching on and off after the session does not restore function yet, but next morning all is back to normal. Perhaps this is reassuring to read for many, as it has nothing to do with them being technically inept, it means they are good at hypercommunication.

In their book “Vernetzte Intelligenz” (Networked Intelligence), Grazyna Gosar and Franz Bludorf explain these connections precisely and clearly. 
The authors also quote sources presuming that in earlier times humanity had been, just like the animals, very strongly connected to the group consciousness and acted as a group. To develop and experience individuality we humans however had to forget hypercommunication almost completely. Now that we are fairly stable in our individual consciousness, we can create a new form of group consciousness, namely one, in which we attain access to all information via our DNA without being forced or remotely controlled about what to do with that information. We now know that just as on the internet our DNA can feed its proper data into the network, can call up data from the network and can establish contact with other participants in the network. Remote healing, telepathy or “remote sensing” about the state of relatives etc. can thus be explained. Some animals know also from afar when their owners plan to return home. That can be freshly interpreted and explained via the concepts of group consciousness and hypercommunication. Any collective consciousness cannot be sensibly used over any period of time without a distinctive individuality. Otherwise we would revert to a primitive herd instinct that is easily manipulated.

Hypercommunication in the new millennium means something quite different: Researchers think that if humans with full individuality would regain group consciousness, they would have a god-like power to create, alter and shape things on Earth! AND humanity is collectively moving toward such a group consciousness of the new kind. Fifty percent of today’s children will be problem children as soon as the go to school. The system lumps everyone together and demands adjustment. But the individuality of today’s children is so strong that that they refuse this adjustment and giving up their idiosyncrasies in the most diverse ways.

At the same time more and more clairvoyant children are born [see the book “China’s Indigo Children” by Paul Dong or the chapter about Indigos in my book“Nutze die taeglichen Wunder” (Make Use of the Daily Wonders)]. Something in those children is striving more and more towards the group consciousness of the new kind, and it will no longer be suppressed. As a rule, weather for example is rather difficult to influence by a single individual. But it may be influenced by a group consciousness (nothing new to some tribes doing it in their rain dances). Weather is strongly influenced by Earth resonance frequencies, the so-called Schumann frequencies. But those same frequencies are also produced in our brains, and when many people synchronize their thinking or individuals (spiritual masters, for instance) focus their thoughts in a laser-like fashion, then it is scientifically speaking not at all surprising if they can thus influence weather.

Researchers in group consciousness have formulated the theory of Type I civilizations. A humanity that developed a group consciousness of the new kind would have neither environmental problems nor scarcity of energy. For if it were to use its mental power as a unified civilization, it would have control of the energies of its home planet as a natural consequence. And that includes all natural catastrophes!!! A theoretical Type II civilization would even be able to control all energies of their home galaxy. In my book “Nutze die taeglichen Wunder,” I have described an example of this: Whenever a great many people focus their attention or consciousness on something similar like Christmas time, football world championship or the funeral of Lady Diana in England then certain random number generators in computers start to deliver ordered numbers instead of the random ones. An ordered group consciousness creates order in its whole surroundings! [http://noosphere.princeton.edu/fristwall2.html] [1] When a great number of people get together very closely, potentials of violence also dissolve. It looks as if here, too, a kind of humanitarian consciousness of all humanity is created.

At the Love Parade, for example, where every year about one million of young people congregate, there has never been any brutal riots as they occur for instance at sports events. The name of the event alone is not seen as the cause here. The result of an analysis indicated rather that the number of people was TOO GREAT to allow a tipping over to violence.

To come back to the DNA: It apparently is also an organic superconductor that can work at normal body temperature. Artificial superconductors require extremely low temperatures of between 200 and 140°C to function. As one recently learned, all superconductors are able to store light and thus information. This is a further explanation of how the DNA can store information. There is another phenomenon linked to DNA and wormholes. Normally, these supersmall wormholes are highly unstable and are maintained only for the tiniest fractions of a second. Under certain conditions (read about it in the Fosar/Bludorf book above) stable wormholes can organize themselves which then form distinctive vacuum domains in which for example gravity can transform into electricity.

Vacuum domains are self-radiant balls of ionized gas that contain considerable amounts of energy. There are regions in Russia where such radiant balls appear very often. Following the ensuing confusion the Russians started massive research programs leading finally to some of the discoveries mentions above. Many people know vacuum domains as shiny balls in the sky. The attentive look at them in wonder and ask themselves, what they could be. I thought once: “Hello up there. If you happen to be a UFO, fly in a triangle.” And suddenly, the light balls moved in a triangle. Or they shot across the sky like ice hockey pucks. They accelerated from zero to crazy speeds while sliding gently across the sky. One is left gawking and I have, as many others, too, thought them to be UFOs. Friendly ones, apparently, as they flew in triangles just to please me. Now the Russians found in the regions, where vacuum domains appear often that sometimes fly as balls of light from the ground upwards into the sky, that these balls can be guided by thought. One has found out since that vacuum domains emit waves of low frequency as they are also produced in our brains.

And because of this similarity of waves they are able to react to our thoughts. To run excitedly into one that is on ground level might not be such a great idea, because those balls of light can contain immense energies and are able to mutate our genes. They can, they don’t necessarily have to, one has to say. For many spiritual teachers also produce such visible balls or columns of light in deep meditation or during energy work which trigger decidedly pleasant feelings and do not cause any harm. Apparently this is also dependent on some inner order and on the quality and provenance of the vacuum domain. There are some spiritual teachers (the young Englishman Ananda, for example) with whom nothing is seen at first, but when one tries to take a photograph while they sit and speak or meditate in hypercommunication, one gets only a picture of a white cloud on a chair. In some Earth healing projects such light effects also appear on photographs. Simply put, these phenomena have to do with gravity and anti-gravity forces that are also exactly described in the book and with ever more stable wormholes and hypercommunication and thus with energies from outside our time and space structure.

Earlier generations that got in contact with such hypercommunication experiences and visible vacuum domains were convinced that an angel had appeared before them. And we cannot be too sure to what forms of consciousness we can get access when using hypercommunication. Not having scientific proof for their actual existence (people having had such experiences do NOT all suffer from hallucinations) does not mean that there is no metaphysical background to it. We have simply made another giant step towards understanding our reality.

Official science also knows of gravity anomalies on Earth (that contribute to the formation of vacuum domains), but only of ones of below one percent. But recently gravity anomalies have been found of between three and four percent. One of these places is Rocca di Papa, south of Rome (exact location in the book “Vernetzte Intelligenz” plus several others). Round objects of all kinds, from balls to full buses, roll uphill. But the stretch in Rocca di Papa is rather short, and defying logic sceptics still flee to the theory of optical illusion (which it cannot be due to several features of the location).

All information is taken from the book “Vernetzte Intelligenz” von Grazyna Fosar und Franz Bludorf, ISBN 3930243237, summarized and commented by Baerbel. The book is unfortunately only available in German so far. You can reach the authors here: www.fosar-bludorf.com

White House, Pentagon Shift Policy On Condolences Letters Sent To Families Of Soldiers Who Commit Suicide In Combat

Oldspeak:“Well done President Obama. Recognizing that death resulting from psychological injuries is just as valid  as death resulting from physical injuries is a big step forward in beginning to substantively deal with the usually undiagnosed but no less devastating psychological injuries often suffered by soldiers in combat. Now if more resources could be devoted to mental health and fitness by the U.S. Military, and changing the deeply entrenched disdain for mental health care in military culture, perhaps fewer soldiers would come back home more broken in ways not easily fixed. Obama, Bring ALL our troops home.

By Julian E. Barnes @ The Wall Street Journal:

Families of military service members who commit suicide while deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan will now receive condolence letters from President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, reversing a long standing policy, officials said Wednesday.

“The administration will now send letters to families of service members who commit suicide while deployed to Operation New Dawn, Operation Enduring Freedom and other combat operations,” said Pentagon spokesman Col. David Lapan.

The shift comes after lawmakers pressed the White House to consider changing its policy. The Obama administration made the decision to reverse the policy after a year long review, Col. Lapan said.

“It is an administration policy but the department of Defense will follow that same policy,” Col. Lapan said.

He also said that condolence letters  won’t be sent to families of service members and veterans who commit suicide after a deployment. Less than a quarter of Army suicides take place in a combat zone, with the majority occurring when units are not deployed.

In a statement, Mr. Obama said he did not make the change in policy lightly.

“This issue is emotional, painful, and complicated, but these Americans served our nation bravely.  They didn’t die because they were weak,” he said.

“And the fact that they didn’t get the help they needed must change.”

Mr. Obama said that since taking office, he has been working on “removing the stigma associated with the unseen wounds of war” and expanding the budget for mental health services.

“Our men and women in uniform have borne the incredible burden of our wars, and we need to do everything in our power to honor their service, and to help them stay strong for themselves, for their families and for our nation,” he said in the statement.

The statement follows:

As Commander in Chief, I am deeply grateful for the service of all our men and women in uniform, and grieve for the loss of those who suffer from the wounds of war – seen and unseen.  Since taking office, I’ve been committed to removing the stigma associated with the unseen wounds of war, which is why I’ve worked to expand our mental health budgets, and ensure that all our men and women in uniform receive the care they need.

As a next step and in consultation with the Secretary of Defense and the military chain of command, I have also decided to reverse a long-standing policy of not sending condolence letters to the families of service members who commit suicide while deployed to a combat zone. This decision was made after a difficult and exhaustive review of the former policy, and I did not make it lightly.  This issue is emotional, painful, and complicated, but these Americans served our nation bravely.  They didn’t die because they were weak.  And the fact that they didn’t get the help they needed must change.  Our men and women in uniform have borne the incredible burden of our wars, and we need to do everything in our power to honor their service, and to help them stay strong for themselves, for their families and for our nation.

UCLA Scientists: Vitamin D Deficiency Linked To Increase In All Diseases And Illnesses

Oldspeak: Newsflash! Sunlight is good for you! Duh. It is the giver of all life. It helps you fight disease and illness. Isn’t it alarming that in the past 30 years coinciding with the rise of propaganda encouraging us to limit sun exposure and cover our skins with toxic carcinogenic chemicals that block our absorption of  health-promoting Vitamin D generating UVB light we’ve been told to fear, that the incidence of skin cancer has increased  %1,800? And that in that time, incidence of all types of cancer, and all other kinds of disease has exploded? Could it really be the Sun contributing to that? We actually spend much less time in the sun than we did 30 years ago, yet the incidence of skin cancer has exponentially increased . Are we really supposed to believe that our ancient and life-giving Sun has changed that dramatically in 30 years, from life giver to cancer giver? I’ll tell you what definitely has changed dramatically in that time: the western diet. Nutrient deficient and chock full o toxic and artificial chemicals. Grown in nutrient deficient and petrochemical (“Pesticide”) filled soil. The sun isn’t making people sick, our “food” and our toxin laden environment is. You are the People of The Sun. Commune with it!

Related Story: The Skin Cancer Myth

By PC @ PressCore:

A group of scientists from UCLA recently published a paper, “Toll-like receptor triggering of a vitamin D-mediated human antimicrobial response“, wherein they revealed that Vitamin D, a naturally occurring steroid hormone was a very potent antibiotic.  Dr. Philip Liu and colleagues at UCLA wrote that instead of directly killing bacteria and viruses, the steroid hormone Vitamin D increases the body’s production of a remarkable class of proteins, called antimicrobial peptides (link is to a pdf file called “Antimicrobial Peptides…Small, But Potent Killers“).  The 200 known antimicrobial peptides directly and rapidly destroy the cell walls of bacteria, fungi, and viruses, including all influenza viruses, and play a key role in keeping the lungs free of infection.

What is the best source for getting an ample daily dosage of Vitamin D – free of charge? You were probably going to say milk.  But milk isn’t free and the milk Americans depend on for their vitamin D contains no naturally occurring vitamin D at all.  Instead, the U.S. government requires fortified milk to be supplemented with synthesized vitamin D – a paltry 100 units per eight-ounce glass.  The best source for getting an ample dosage of Vitamin D is 20 minutes outside. Exposure to the Sun for just 20 minutes gives your body more Vitamin D than any store bought or man made supplement.

The vitamin D steroid hormone system has always had its origins in the skin, not in the mouth. Until quite recently, when dermatologists and governments began warning us about the dangers of sunlight, humans made enormous quantities of vitamin D where humans have always made it, where naked skin meets the ultraviolet B radiation of sunlight. We just cannot get adequate amounts of vitamin D from our diet. We make about a thousand units of vitamin D a day just from sunlight exposure.

A single, twenty-minute, skin exposure to the summer sun will trigger our body to produce and deliver 20,000 units of vitamin D into the circulation of most people within 48 hours. Our body produces 20,000 units of Vitamin D naturally and freely – without the aid of any supplements or drugs. Twenty thousand units, that’s the single most important fact about vitamin D. Compare that to the 100 units you get from a glass of milk, or the several hundred daily units the U.S. government recommend as “Adequate Intake.”

Humans evolved naked in sub-equatorial Africa, where the sun shines directly overhead much of the year and where our species must have obtained tens of thousands of units of vitamin D every day, in spite of our skin developing heavy melanin concentrations (racial pigmentation) for protecting the deeper layers of the skin. Even after humans migrated to temperate latitudes, where our skin rapidly lightened to allow for more rapid vitamin D production, humans worked outdoors. However, in the last three hundred years, we began to work indoors; in the last one hundred years, we began to travel inside cars; in the last several decades, we began to lather on sunblock and consciously avoid sunlight. All of these things lower vitamin D blood levels. The inescapable conclusion is that vitamin D levels in modern humans are not just low – they are aberrantly low.

Sunlight is the only effective treatment against colds, flus, influenza virus and every major disease known to man. In the last several years, dozens of medical studies have called attention to worldwide vitamin D deficiency, especially among African Americans and the elderly, the two groups most likely to die from influenza. Cancer, heart disease, stroke, autoimmune disease, depression, chronic pain, depression, gum disease, diabetes, hypertension, and a number of other diseases have recently been associated with vitamin D deficiency.

Vitamin D deficiency accounts for hundreds of thousands of deaths every year? Studies have found the influenza virus is present in the population year-around; why is it a wintertime illness? Even the common cold got its name because it is common in cold weather and rare in the summer. Vitamin D blood levels are at their highest in the summer but reach their lowest levels during the flu and cold season.

Scientific Facts:

1. The flu predictably occurs in the months following the winter solstice, when vitamin D levels are at their lowest,

2. The flu disappears in the months following the summer solstice,

3. Influenza is more common in the tropics during the rainy season,

4. The cold and rainy weather associated with El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which drives people indoors and lowers vitamin D blood levels, is associated with influenza,

5. The incidence of influenza is inversely correlated with outdoor temperatures,

6. Children exposed to sunlight are less likely to get colds,

7. Cod liver oil (which contains vitamin D) reduces the incidence of viral respiratory infections,

8. Vitamin D-producing UVB lamps reduced colds and flu in schoolchildren and factory workers,

9. Volunteers, deliberately infected with a weakened flu virus – first in the summer and then again in the winter – show significantly different clinical courses in the different seasons,

10. The elderly who live in countries with high vitamin D consumption, like Norway, are less likely to die in the winter,

11. Children with vitamin D deficiency and rickets suffer from frequent respiratory infections,

12. Physicians who gave high doses of vitamin D to children who were constantly sick from colds and the flu, found the treated children were suddenly free from infection,

13. The elderly are so much more likely to die from heart attacks in the winter rather than in the summer,

14. African Americans, with their low vitamin D blood levels, are more likely to die from influenza and pneumonia than Whites are.

Vitamin D deficiency has repeatedly been associated with many of the diseases of civilization. Lack of sunlight exposure is why we are vitamin D deficient and why we are inflicted by disease, colds, flus and influenza viruses. Lack of sunlight exposure is why thousands of people die each year. Sunlight is a hundred times more effective than any toxic and life threatening vaccine.

Can vitamin D cure cancer? The answer is yes. Vitamin D is a powerful hormone that regulates and repairs bodily cells. Vitamin D is needed for optimum functioning of the immune and cardiovascular systems, increases white blood cell production and supports the prostate as well as healthy skin and bones. UVB rays from sunshine is essential to convert cholesterol in skin to vitamin D. The skin cannot produce natural vitamin D without UVB rays. The people who receive $80 billion a year for cancer research knows that and because of this reason they are falsely claiming UVB rays are harmful. In order for them to keep on getting $billions from your government in the form of tax dollars they are telling everyone to lather on layers and layers of clothing and toxic sunscreen to block out the sun’s essential ultra violet light. They want us to cover our Vitamin D producing skin in order to interfere and prevent our body from fighting and destroying cancer cells. The United States Department of Health and Human Services has declared ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun and artificial sources, such as tanning beds and sun lamps, as a known carcinogen (cancer-causing substance). The estimated 2008 cost of cancer care was $228.1 billion – that figure is a very good motive for them to fraudulently claim that UVB rays from sunshine is harmful and cancer causing when in fact UVB rays exposure is essential for the body to produce vitamin D. 20 minutes of UVB exposure is essential for preventing cancer.

If you have adequate amounts of vitamin D in your body, the cancer cells in your body stop growing and dividing uncontrollably, stops invading and destroying other bodily tissues, stops spreading throughout your body, and begins specialization for specific bodily functions.

Also the cancer cells lose their immortality, and begin to die normally. Vitamin D forces cancer cells to behave like normal cells!

All cancer researchers have found that the singular most important contributor of cancer is vitamin D deficiency. Most, if not all, cancer patients are vitamin D deficient.

What is cancer?

Cancer involves groups of bodily cells growing and dividing uncontrollably, refusing specialization for specific bodily functions, invading and destroying other bodily tissues, and sometimes spreading throughout the body. Most cancers form a tumor, but not all. For example, leukemia (cancer of the blood or bone marrow) doesn’t.

Cancer affects people of all ages, but affects older people more. According to the American Cancer Society, cancer killed 7.6 million people worldwide in 2007!

Cancer is caused by damaged genes within bodily cells. These damages can be caused by tobacco smoke, asbestos fibers, radiation exposure (including from hospital and airport X-rays), fossil fuel (gasoline fumes and its CO2 emissions), chemicals, or viral infections. Cancer-promoting genetic damages can also be inherited.

Normal cells are programmed to kill themselves if they become damaged beyond repair. This program is turned off in cancer cells – allowing them immortality!

Basically, cancer cells are immortal “brain-damaged” cells that act crazy, killing normal cells, interfering with normal bodily functions.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D isn’t really a vitamin. Since vitamin D is usually produced by the body’s largest organ, the skin, it’s really a hormone. For a chemical substance to qualify as a hormone, it needs to be produced by one of the body’s organs.

Not only do plants need sunlight to be healthy, humans also need it. Long ago, sunlight exposure was the only way humans got adequate amounts of vitamin D. Most foods are vitamin D-free or contain small traces of it – not enough for best health! The human skin is designed to photosynthesize large amounts of vitamin D from sunlight exposure.

Researchers discovered vitamin D deficiencies among the following people:

People spending most of their time indoors,
People regularly covering all their skin with clothing,
People regularly slathering on sunscreen,
People aged 50 and older,
People with excessive body fat,
People with inflammatory bowel disease, and
People living far from the equator. For example, the following cities have high cancer rates: Seattle, Toronto, Boston, London, Dublin, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Berlin, Moscow, and Anchorage.

Researchers found that dark-skinned people living in cold climate regions are more susceptible to vitamin D deficiency, because their skin filters out more sunlight than light-skinned people.

Additionally, researchers have discovered that many of the vitamin D deficient people developed medical conditions such as diabetes (a normal bodily function of high and low blood sugar levels being classified as a disease by for-profit drug companies), osteoporosis, obesity, heart disease, clinical depression, chronic anxiety, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, psoriasis, eczema, high blood pressure (another normal bodily function of high and low blood pressure being classified as a disease by for-profit drug companies), bone softening diseases, chronic pain, muscle weakness, viral infections, polycystic ovary syndrome, and migraine headaches.

In the past, people believed that taking 600 IU of vitamin D daily was enough for good health. Currently, researchers found that adults need at least 4,000 IU of vitamin D daily for therapeutic anticancer effects!

But how much is too much? Doesn’t vitamin D become toxic at high doses? Vitamin D does become toxic at high doses, but it’s much higher than you think. Researchers recently found that to poison yourself with vitamin D, you need to take at least 40,000 IU of vitamin D daily.

So if you have cancer, a strong and safe therapeutic dose of vitamin D in the range between 10,000 IU and 20,000 IU is needed daily.

Sunlight – Free source of vitamin D.

These days we can no longer rely on our food supply as good sources of vitamin D. Either the soil is contaminated or too nutrient depleted to grow any food of good nutritional value. To make matters worse the FDA is now pasteurizing everything from milk, to eggs, to fruits and vegetables. Heat from pasteurization destroys the last remaining beneficial nutrients in our food. So where can we get an adequate supply of cancer curing Vitamin D? You can buy vitamin D tablets at vitamin and retail stores. It’s more convenient to buy tablets that have the highest dose per tablet. For example, bottles of vitamin D containing 2,000 IU per tablet. So you need to take only five tablets to equal 10,000 IU.

Sunlight exposure is the best way to get adequate amounts of cancer curing Vitamin D, as the body automatically regulates how much Vitamin D it makes from sunlight, and there is the added benefit of controlling cholesterol. Since vitamin D precursors require cholesterol for conversion into the hormone-like vitamin, without adequate sun exposure vitamin D precursors can turn into cholesterol instead of the vitamin.

It is estimated that for each 5% of skin surface exposed, approximately 435 IU of Vitamin D can be manufactured. Just 20 minutes of direct sun exposure to your skin will manufacture 20,000 IU of Vitamin D – enough to prevent and even cure you of cancer. In other words if you don’t have money to buy Vitamin D supplements or your diet doesn’t have enough Vitamin D, turn off your computers, TVs, video games, and go outside. With an adequate amount of daily sunlight exposure, the cancer cells in your body will stop growing and dividing uncontrollably, will stop invading and destroying other bodily tissues, will stop spreading throughout your body, and the Vitamin D produced naturally will begin specialization for specific bodily functions.

The Soy And Other ‘Natural’ Food Products In Your Kitchen May Contain A Dangerous Neurotoxin

Oldspeak:“All too often it’s the companies playing the “natural” card that are doing the most unnatural things to your food. Hexane is toxic waste product of gasoline production,  a highly flammable EPA-listed air pollutant that is used in the manufacture of cleaning agents, glues, roof sealer, automobile tires, energy bars, veggie burgers, and soy, corn, and canola oils. Big Oil exploiting yet another revenue stream at the expense of public health. Monsanto, (conincidentally controls 93% of the soybean market) profits greatly from the widespread use of nerotoxin laden soy lecithin and other soy products in our food supply. Big Food profits from widespread consumption of cheaply produced, nutrient-deficient food. Big Pharma profits from the explosion in neurological disorders in part driven by the widespread consumption of processed food. Yet another uncontrolled experiment conducted on the human populace.

From Ari LeVaux @ Alter Net:

Food purists often fuss about the inadequacies of USDA’s organic food standards, how pitifully watered down they are from the lofty principles that built the organic movement. They have a point. After all, the USDA’s National Organic Program was created to deal with the big agribusinesses determined to exploit the lucrative organic market. But for all the complaints about federal organic standards, the non-certified alternatives — with some foods especially — can be downright scary.

It’s ironic that many of the scariest, non-certified organic foods are labeled “natural” — a term that could not mean less, or mislead more. Like “home-style” or “old-fashioned,” the label “natural” can mean whatever the labeler wants it to mean. You could put “natural” on a lab-grade jar of MSG crystals, or on a packet of 10-year-old Twinkies, without violating any law. And all too often it’s the companies playing the “natural” card that are doing the most unnatural things to your food.

Consider the widespread use of hexane, a neurotoxin, in processed foods that aren’t certified organic (those lame organic standards do at least prohibit hexane use). Hexane is a highly flammable EPA-listed air pollutant that is used in the manufacture of cleaning agents, glues, roof sealer, automobile tires, energy bars, veggie burgers, and soy, corn, and canola oils. If these food products are not certified organic, some of the ingredients have probably been processed with hexane, no matter how many times the word “natural” is stamped on the package. Since hexane is used in the manufacturing process, it’s not listed as an ingredient in the foods it helps produce, though residues find their way into the finished product. The European Union has strict standards for acceptable hexane residue levels in soy and oilseed products, but in the U.S., there are no such limits.

The organic watchdog group Cornucopia Institute arranged for a lab to test samples of U.S. soy products for hexane content. Hexane was found, in levels as high as 21 parts per million — more than twice the 10 ppm allowed by the EU in comparable products.

Technology and Solvents for Extracting Oilseeds and Nonpetroleum Oils is a manual for managers and engineers. According to this book, published in 1997, the principle reason that hexane has been the solvent of choice for oilseed extraction since the 1930s is “its availability at a reasonable cost.”

The reason hexane is so reasonably priced is that it’s a byproduct of gasoline production that would otherwise be expensive to dispose of properly. Petroleum companies gain handsomely from the fact that industrial oilseed extraction — under status quo production methods since the 1930s — provides a profitable market for its toxic waste. Oilseed extraction is currently responsible for more than two thirds of hexane use nationwide. Not surprisingly, much of the research cited in the book is funded by the likes of Exxon and Phillips Petroleum.

A chapter devoted to “Toxicity Data for Commercial Hexane” appears to give serious consideration to concerns about hexane’s impact on human health, while presenting no evidence that such concerns have been seriously investigated. The chapter explains that “commercial hexane,” the type used to extract oilseeds, is a mix of petrochemicals. One of these, n-hexane, which composes more than 50 percent of commercial hexane, has been shown to be a neurotoxin.

The chapter acknowledges that humans are about four times as sensitive as rats to n-hexane, especially over prolonged exposures. Nonetheless, in the very next paragraph it’s revealed that only one acute neurotoxicity study was considered. The study evaluated the ability of rats to retain a learned behavior immediately following inhalation of commercial hexane, and 1 and 2 days later. That’s like conducting a carcinogen trial that only monitors the subjects for signs of cancer in the two days following exposure. The chapter concludes that “commercial hexane is a relatively safe chemical,” despite the fact that it consists mostly of a known neurotoxin.

Hexane-extracted soy protein, a favorite of vegetarians and body builders, turns up in some unexpected places, according to the November Cornucopia Institute report on ways that soy proteins and chemical solvents intermingle in nutrition bars and meat alternatives.

Popular protein bars like Clif, Mojo, Balance, and Luna all contain hexane-processed soy, according to the report, as do Boca veggie burgers, Gardenburger products, Trader Joe’s veggie burgers, and many more.

Because the supply chain of many soy-containing products is long and complex, companies have some wiggle room in how they respond to inquiries from concerned consumers. According to Cornucopia, companies that make soy-based food products have responded to inquiries about hexane with answers like “Our soy ingredients are not hexane-derived” and “[Our company] does not use hexane to process soybeans.”

Both answers are worded to give the impression that the product did not come into contact with hexane. But in the first sentence, “hexane-derived” actually means “created from” hexane, rather than “treated with.” And the latter claim leaves open the possibility that the company’s supplier did the hexane-laced dirty work. I got a similar answer when I contacted Dean Foods, which owns White Wave, the company that makes Silk Soymilk: “Silk does not use hexane in the manufacturing of any of our products.”

According to the Cornucopia Institute, Silk’s non-organic “Light” and “Heart Health” soymilk products are made with soy flour instead of whole soybeans, and the “only known” sources for non-organic soy flour involve hexane. Of course, it’s possible that White Wave has found a way to source its soy flour from hexane-free sources, which buys a measure of hope for Silk lovers who are concerned about hexane.

Soy products have been under fire from many directions for more than just the hexane issue. The heavily subsidized crop isn’t easily digested without some form of processing, and there are concerns that estrogen-like molecules in soy can mess with the human hormonal system. That’s why many consumers have switched from soy milk to other non-dairy milk substitutes, like almond milk. Nonetheless, another soy product, soy lecithin, manages to make its way into most of these alternatives. And guess what? Unless the product is organic, that soy lecithin was probably processed with hexane.

 

Ari LeVaux writes a syndicated weekly food column, Flash in the Pan.

 

Being Single Can Be Great for You — And Your Future Relationships

Oldspeak:”We need to get over this idea that being single is somehow less desirable than being married. Or that being single a just a way station before one is married or in a relationship. It’s not. It’s a valid and healthy way of being that is not a step in a “progression”. Being single doesn’t make you unworthy, unlovable or abnormal.”

From Greta Christina @ Alter Net:

In American culture, it’s generally assumed that everybody wants to be married, or to be in a long-term relationship. It’s assumed that everybody should be hitched up, and that everybody would be better off that way. Oh, sure, if you’ve just broken up with someone, it’s considered prudent to take a break between relationships. But it’s generally thought that this break is just that — a break. A temporary pause in the normal, correct state of affairs: the state of being in love. It’s assumed that, once a decent interval has passed, of course you’ll want to get back in the love game.

I was single for twelve years before my wife Ingrid and I fell in love. Very happily single. I am a huge fan of taking time to consider not just when to be coupled again and with whom, but whether to be coupled again. I am a huge fan of learning to be okay about being single: learning, not just to be okay with it, but to be actively happy about it. I am a huge fan of seeing our choices about romantic relationships include the choice, “None of the above.” I’m not alone in this. According to

Dr. Marty Klein,

Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist (and author of five books on sexuality, as well as the Sexual Intelligence blog), the consensus in the therapeutic community is that taking time to be alone after a breakup is, if not essential, certainly very beneficial to making future relationships work.

But how does that work? How can I be an advocate, both for happy marriage, and for happy bachelor/ bachelorette-hood? There are two basic things going on here. They’re going to seem paradoxical, but they’re really not. Paradox resolution is forthcoming, I promise. Thing One: Being single for so long was, in and of itself, awesome. Thing Two: Being single for so long has made my marriage stronger. Let’s get to Thing One first. Being single for twelve years was one of the best experiences of my life. It taught me self-reliance. It taught me self-confidence. It taught me an immense amount about who I was. It taught me how to keep myself company. It taught me how to keep myself sane. And for most of those years, it was just plain fun. I did what I wanted to, when I wanted to do it. I went to the movies when I wanted. I hung out with my friends when I wanted. I went out to nightclubs or sex clubs or nerdy folk dances when I wanted. I let the dishes rot in the sink when I felt like it. (And I felt like it a lot.)

I fucked dozens of different women: casual personal-ad hookups, ongoing fuckbuddies who became genuine friends, women at sex clubs whose names I never knew. I never would have known how valuable and fun being single was if I hadn’t thought to try it. As Dr. Charlie Glickman, AASECT Certified Sexuality Educator and Ph.D. in Adult Sexuality Education, said when I asked him about this, “I’ve always said that the only way to know for sure if something works for you is to try it on. Whether that’s a shirt or a relationship, we can often make educated guesses but until we take it off the hanger and put it on, we don’t really know for sure. I’ve spoken with a lot of people who thought that a particular sexual activity or relationship structure wouldn’t work for them until they tried it.” And obviously, we can’t try out a relationship option — including the “None” option — unless we know it’s both available and valid. You can’t try on a shirt if you don’t know it’s on the rack… and you’re a lot less likely to try on a shirt if your friends are all telling you it’s ugly.

An important point to make here: For most of those twelve solo years, I wasn’t just happily single. I was consciously and deliberately single. I wasn’t single for twelve years out of bad luck or bad vibes or bad dating skills. I was single because I chose to be single. By the time I fell in love with Ingrid, I was beginning to be open to serious relationships…but for most of those twelve years, I actively resisted them. I made it clear to anyone I was dating, right at the outset, that dating me was not going to end with us walking down the aisle.

So why the hell did I get married? That brings us to Thing Two, and the apparent paradox. Yes, being single for so long was a completely valuable and fun experience for its own sake.

And at the same time: My marriage is stronger because of the years I spent on my own. Being single for twelve years laid the emotional foundation for my side of this marriage. A significant part of it, anyway. Some of that is because, when I was single, I did a whole lot of soul-searching. About love, and a bucketload of other stuff. Having room to just be myself for a few years gave me the chance to figure out some bad emotional habits… and to unlearn them. I learned how to sort out what I wanted and felt from what other people told me I should want and feel. I learned how to balance assertiveness and clarity with generosity and kindness — or, as I put it to a friend recently, how to find the window between being a demanding, high-maintenance asshole and being a doormat. I learned why I kept being attracted to emotionally broken drug addicts… and I learned how not to be.

I learned how to find the sexiness and the intensity and the compelling sense of fascination and intrigue — in sane, balanced, stable people. And without all that, I doubt that my relationship with Ingrid would have lasted six months — much less thirteen years. But there’s something else here: something more crucial, something that’s right at the heart of this apparent paradox I keep talking about. Knowing that I can be happily single makes it easier to be happily married. My marriage is stronger because I see it as a real choice. I don’t feel trapped into it, and it’s not a default slot I fell into. It’s a choice between genuinely competing options, with real plusses and minuses to each of them. I’m not with Ingrid because I’m afraid of being alone. I’m with Ingrid because I want to be with Ingrid. So when I’m feeling cranky about something that’s less than perfect in our marriage — a compromise we made about money that I’m not totally happy with, an evening when we’re both tired and cranky and are snapping at each other, a party I promised to go to that I just don’t feel like coping with — the upsets aren’t compounded by feeling trapped into them.

Remembering that this is my choice reminds why I made it — and why I continue to make it. When I’m feeling happy about our marriage — which is most of the time, by a significant margin — that happiness is enhanced by the freedom with which we chose it. Our happiness isn’t a slot we got slotted into and were lucky enough to fit. We chose it. We’ve worked our asses off for it. So it feels like ours. It belongs to us. But as passionate as I feel about this question of choice — of making our own conscious decisions about our own damn relationships, and not letting ourselves get slotted into them by default — I have to admit that things aren’t always that simple. More choices don’t always make us happier. Some research suggests that having too many choices can make us as unhappy as not having any. It can overwhelm us, paralyze us, make us anxious about whether our choices are right, make us blame ourselves when things don’t work out, create a perpetual loop of second-guessing, raise our expectations to an impossible level. (Think about shopping for olive oil. If there’s only one kind on the grocery store shelf, we don’t much like that, especially if it’s a kind we don’t like… but if there are a hundred varieties, that can be just as frustrating.)

This is a point Dr. Klein was emphatic about. When I interviewed him about this question — about default decisions in general, and about the specific default decision of being coupled over being single — he pointed out that not everybody is as enamored of choice as I am. Personally, he also has a strong philosophical attachment to making his own free choices about his own life… but from a practical, clinical perspective, he recognizes that many people are happier, and better able to get on with their lives, when they let some of their decisions, big or small, be made by social consensus. And while Dr. Glickman is another fan of tailoring our relationships to fit instead of just buying them off the rack, he also acknowledges the challenges to this approach. “The more you move away from the default option,” he says, “the harder it is to find role models, which can feel really unstable as well as making it more difficult because you might not think of a possible solution to the challenges you face.” So I guess that’s what I’m trying to do here. I’m not trying to make a new rule that everyone has to follow. I’m trying to be a role model for an option some people might not have considered. As much as the demanding, high-maintenance asshole in me would love to tell everyone to live their lives exactly like I do, I can’t seriously argue that absolutely everybody should be single, and should try to be happy being single, for X amount of time before they get coupled again. I don’t want to replace the old set of Thou Shalts with a new one. I’m just trying to say: Being single is an option.  It’s a valid option: temporarily, or indefinitely. It’s one that some people are genuinely happy with. I was, for close to twelve years. If you tend to feel trapped in relationships — or if you get panicky and freaked-out when you’re not in one — it’s an option you might consider. It’s an option that might make you happy, simply because it’s fun and valuable for its own sake. And it’s an option that might do a world of good for any future relationships.

I’m not trying to say, “Thou Shalt.”

I’m just trying to say, “Thou Might.”

 

Read more of Greta Christina at her blog.