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“They Can’t Marginalize All of Us”

Bruce Levine is an American clinical psychologist, often at odds with the mainstream of his profession. He has practiced in Cincinnati, Ohio for nearly...

Crimes of the Surveillance State: A Victim’s Story

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Dictator Rising but Don’t Blame the President

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Tokyo Turbulence: The Looming Japanese Crisis

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Tokyo Turbulence: The Looming Japanese Crisis

Nile Bowie discusses the Fukushima disaster and the daunting possibility of economic collapse in an increasingly militaristic Japan with James Corbett, independent journalist and editor of the Corbett Report:

NB: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling coalition has grasped a strong mandate in recent parliamentary elections, and this is viewed as a green light to continue pressing ahead with the much-touted “Abenomics” economic reform program. In Japan, government debt to GDP sits at a staggering 245%, while government expenditure to government revenue amounts to some 2000%. The strategy being employed in Tokyo has essentially been mass Ben Bernanke-style money printing with the aim of inflating away some of the debt and boosting Japanese exports off the back of a weakened yen. Is this a long-term solution, or could mishandling lead to a hyper-inflationary situation, or a currency war brought on by Japan’s neighbors because their exports are being priced out of the market by Abe’s QE?
JC: The risks posed by Abenomics are manifold. While the hyperinflationary risk seems slightly less pressing given the past two decades of deflationary recession here in Japan, the currency war is already underway and shows no signs of abating. The Federal Reserve just has to talk about the possibility of curtailing their own stimulus programs and the markets there begin to plunge. This is an increasingly dangerous situation. The real risk, however, lies in the Japanese bond market. It's the second largest bond market in the world (after the US') and is the real backbone of the Japanese economy, itself the third largest economy in the world. If it becomes destabilized as a result of unforeseen consequences of Abenomics, not only is the government's ability to continue financing its mountainous debt called into question, but so is the stability of much of the Japanese banking system which has large exposures to that bond market.
NB: Abenomics has earned the praise of US pundits and prominent western economists, and much of the news coverage of Japan’s economic restructuring has been pretty positive in light of the dramatic surges in the Japanese stock market. Are Japan’s improved GDP rates an accurate measure of its real economic growth? Over the past two decades, wages have stagnated; are any measures being taken to raise real wages? Is there a real danger of a mass sell-off in the Japanese bond market in the face of extreme interest rate volatility?
JC: Proponents of Abenomics simply spoke too soon. The modest 1% GDP growth achieved in the first quarter was attributed largely to psychology and expectations of Abenomics' effects. Private consumption was up 0.9% on the quarter. However, private capital investment, signaling the strength of the economy from the business perspective, actually fell by 0.3%. Meanwhile, excited projections of 3.6% growth in Q2 fell considerably short, clocking in at only 2.6%, again boosted by consumer spending (up 0.8%) and dragged down by lack of capital investment (down 0.1%).

Again, it is the bond market that tells the true tale of whether this monetary expansion will work in the long run. Remarkably, Japanese 10 year bond yields were at their lowest point this year (0.45%) when the BOJ announced their plan to purchase 7 trillion yen of JGB a month and double the monetary base. After the announcement, yields actually rose, flirting with 1% and now trading in a channel around 0.77%. This is the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen in the wake of this type of stimulus announcement, and only goes to show that Abe and his crew do not have a handle on the situation. With debt to GDP already the highest in the developed world and more of Japan's aging population beginning to retire and draw on their JGB holdings rather than purchasing fresh ones, the Japanese government may be unable to stem the coming carnage.
 
NB: The Abe government is now aiming to boost private investment, privatize more publicly-owned assets and industries, deregulate energy and financial sectors, and pass laws that will allow corporations to fire workers without review; Japan is also taking part in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, which will have enormous implications for the way business is conducted in the country. What will be the long-term ramifications of these measures?
JC: Japan's labor laws have long been completely out of step with the rest of the Western world. Ask any Western economist or businessman about the root of Japan's economic problems and they will talk about the inability of corporations to fire workers or streamline bureaucracies. The Japanese, of course, by and large don't see things that way and as a result all previous promises of labor reform have come to nothing. With the TPP, however, we could conceivably see the lowering of the bar across the board, in labor laws and just about every other aspect of society. If the TPP goes through, the changes to Japan's economy, and even the fabric of its society, will be overwhelming. Of course, this is not an issue that is isolated to Japan. Every signatory to the treaty will see drastic changes to business practices, financial regulations, and other key aspects of their economy.
NB: It’s not just economic policy that is changing under Japan’s new government; Abe’s right-wing administration has taken steps to revive Japanese militarism. Reports issued by the Defence Ministry call for Japan acquiring offensive strike capabilities and building up its military. How is the government’s embrace of militant nationalism affecting Japan’s traditional pacifism? Abe’s approach has worked to fuel tensions with China over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islets in the East China Sea – what is the position of the Obama administration on these developments vis-à-vis the pivot to Asia policy?
JC: The US DoD's so-called Asia-Pacific Pivot has to be seen as the green light signal for increased militarism across the board in the Asia-Pacific region. With the US increasingly turning its attention (and overwhelming military superiority) to the region, governments across the board feel more free to ratchet up the rhetoric and increase military budgets. The Abe administration, too, is taking full advantage of this, engaging in a dangerous game of one-upsmanship with China over their territorial issues that Japan is increasingly confident will be backed up by American firepower if need be. Attendant with this is a complete reversal of Hatoyama's DPJ rhetoric about getting the Americans out of Okinawa. As the recent downing of the HH-60 over Okinawa and the US Air Force's subsequent no fly zone enforcement shows, if anything the American military presence in Japan is going to expand and strengthen under Abe.
NB: Regarding plans to amend the country’s post-World War II Constitution to allow for expanding the military, Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso was actually quoted saying, “We should proceed quietly. One day, people realised that the Weimar Constitution had changed to the Nazi Constitution. No one had noticed. Why don’t we learn from that approach?” Some have expressed concern that Abe’s drive toward creating offensive military capabilities aims to revive Japan’s imperialistic policies – is that an accurate assessment? Is Japan really in a position to dramatically bolster its military spending?
JC: Japan already is bolstering its military spending, with the Abe administration increasing the defense budget for the first time in 11 years earlier this year. But its important to realize that Japan doesn't need to expand its defense budget significantly; it already has one of the world's most advanced and well-trained militaries. That military has simply been operating under the guise of a "Self-Defense Force" but the switchover of Japanese forces to an active military would be more to do with perception than with actual switchover.

The big issue is one of public opposition. A significant majority of the Japanese public are extremely wary of these moves to amend the constitution, but the 2012 parliamentary election that led to Abe's victory was primarily about domestic issues. Now that Abe has a strong position in the Diet he is almost certainly going to use that momentum to push for constitutional reform. The amendment of Article 9 of the constitution is a very real possibility at this point, and a very worrying one given the implications that would have for Japan's relations with China and the inevitable bolstering of tensions it would bring.
 
NB: Reports claim that for the past two years, some 300 tons of extremely radioactive water from the failed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant – containing 2.35 billion Becquerels of cesium per liter, or 16 million times above the limit – has been flowing into the Pacific Ocean every day. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has recently announced that the contaminated groundwater accumulating at the site has risen 60cm above the protective barrier, and is now freely leaking into the Pacific Ocean. What are the long-term health and environmental implications if TEPCO is unable to contain the contaminated water? Has the Japanese media accurately portrayed the scale of the crisis?
JC: The major threat to northern Japan remains the contamination of the groundwater and the fishing areas around Fukushima. Unfortunately, throughout the crisis the government has collaborated with TEPCO to keep the true extent of this problem from the public, and rushed to lower radiation standards and get Fukushima produce and fish back on the market as quickly as possible. The media, with a few notable exceptions, has by and large played along with this agenda, and has dutifully focused attention on things that they have been told to concentrate on (like TEPCO's "cold shutdown" announcement) and avoided some of the thornier issues (like the contamination of the groundwater).
NB: The previous administration of Yoshihiko Noda responded to anti-nuclear protests in the wake of the Fukushima disaster by looking at ways in which Japan could reduce the country’s dependence on nuclear power – this of course would come at extraordinary costs for the energy sector. How strong is the anti-nuclear movement in Japan today, and what is the Abe government’s position on the phasing out of nuclear power?
JC: Whatever momentum might have existed last year to end nuclear power in Japan has completely faded with the Abe government. Recommendations for Japan to become nuclear free later this century have been abandoned, and the administration is moving to restart nuclear reactors as soon as possible. At this point, there does not seem to be a political force, either grassroots or parliamentary, that is able to effectively prevent the restart from taking place.
James Corbett is the editor of the Corbett Report. He produces video reports for GRTV, the video production arm of the Centre for Research on Globalization, and BoilingFrogsPost.com, the website of noted FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds.

Nile Bowie is a Malaysia-based political analyst and a columnist with Russia Today. He also contributes to PressTV, Global Research, and CounterPunch. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.

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The Massive Conspiracy Designed to Separate You From Your Children

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You Won’t BELIEVE What’s Going On with Government Spying on Americans

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Rand Paul: Obama’s Actions On Healthcare Legislation Are “Illegal And Unconstitutional”

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The Rise of the Internet Dissidents

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American Education Nears Its Collectivist Goal

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A Quadrillion Yen And Counting — The Japanese Debt Bomb Could Set Off Global...

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Gun Confiscation Has Begun

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Hawai’ian Mind Games

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The Time To Fight Back Is Now: Striking Back at Police State Amerika

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Insomniac Capitalism

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Film: State Of Mind — Full Version in High Definition

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Schools Drop Federal Lunch Menu: Costly, Students Still Hungry

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Info Wars: Paranoia, Surveillance and an Empire in Decline

Global Research and Countercurrents 1/7/2013

Back in 1992, the academic Francis Fukuyama mistakenly informed the world that, with the apparent triumph of western capitalism and the downfall of the USSR, we had arrived at the end of history, the end of ideology. Fast forward a couple of decades and in 2011 Hilary Clinton announced the US was at war. She wasn’t talking about the US’s ongoing illegal invasions, occupations and mass slaughters, as if that wasn’t enough, but an ideological war for the hearts and minds of the global community.

While the likes of Voice of America were aggressively assertive during the Cold War, Clinton was lamenting the fact that, since then, US global ideological influence had weakened, especially with the advent of the internet as well as new kids on the block gaining influence, such as Russia Today.


Of course, Hollywood too has been a long-time cheerleader of the ‘great myth’: the propagator of the US as the beacon of freedom, as the flagship of democratic ideals. The great 'American Lie' of the great 'American Dream' whereby the individual can somehow miraculously overcome adversity and make it in life, just as long as s/he keeps his or her nose to the grind. No actual chains required. The suffocating clasp of popular culture will suffice. The ‘self-made man’ syndrome rammed down the collective throat by Hollywood, which magics away into thin air the debilitating effects of class-based structural inequalities (1). As the commentator and comedian once stated: “The American Dream, you have to be asleep to believe it.”(2)


And let’s not forget Uncle Sam the movie star, the liberator of the oppressed, the protector of universal good, the sweeper of its mass terror and atrocities away from the screen and conveniently under the carpet.

Enter some balance. Enter the internet, Press TV, RT and the ‘alternative media’. The media landscape has been transformed. In recent years, the US 
has had to face up to the harsh truth that it cannot dominate the global debate to the extent it once did when it comes to shaping the analysis and reporting of news through its compliant media outlets. 


Trying to keep the lid on things 


Two years on from Clinton voicing her concerns about the US struggle to win the info wars, Edward Snowden has revealed what many of us had already strongly suspected - that people and foreign governments, including allies and the EU (3), are being heavily monitored by the US government. Before Snowden became public enemy number one, the US had set out to curtail WikiLeaks’ voice by shutting down its access to finance, notably by initially applying pressure on PayPal and MasterCard.

The 
US state-corporate machine did almost everything in its power to curtail WikeLeaks’ influence. Most debilitating of all was the shutting down of WikiLeaks’ access to finance, notably via PayPal, MasterCard, the Swiss bank PostFinance, Moneybookers, Bank of America and Visa Inc.

Bank of America was accused as being especially strident in attempting to discredit and shut down WikiLeaks with various dirty tricks, including backing a smear campaign that involved the use of false documents, disinformation, and sabotage (4).


These actions along with demands that Snowden be ‘handed over’ by the countries the US has been caught red handed of spying on, come as little surprise. The US deems fit to break international laws with impunity, yet bleats about about legalities where Snowden is concerned. Such high-mindedness. But this is par for the course. Successive US administrations have shown a strong dislike of proper democracy, legalities or open debate, whether at home or abroad, and have done everything to stifle it or bomb it out of existence (5).

In exposing state-corporate secrets and challenging powerful institutions, Assange made many enemies in high places. US Attorney General Eric Holder has said that Assange put the lives of US citizens at risk by leaking diplomatic cables. Dick Cheney calls Snowden a ‘traitor’. Who are the real ‘traitors’? If anyone has placed US lives at risk or has attacked the rights and freedoms of US citizens, it’s not Assange. People like Holder and Dick ‘Halliburton’ Cheney should look at their own actions and unbridled support for and benefits accrued from the robber baron regime they are part of and which they seek to legtimise and protect (6)(7). 
  


The hegemony of an empire in decline


Central to this whole debate is the struggle to maintain hegemony, which involves the dominant class attempting to legitimize its position in the eyes of the ruled over – a kind of ‘consented coercion’ that disguises the iron fist of power. If state violence and outright oppression is to be avoided, people's consent must be achieved via ‘ideological state-corporate apparatuses’, including the mass media. Former CIA boss General Petraeus is on record as saying US strategy is to conduct a war of perceptions continuously through the news media. According to the recently deceased journalist Michael Hastings, Petraeus was a master of duplicity and expert in manipulating the media and thus public perception (8). 


We therefore don't have to imagine much that the prevailing view of world conveyed through the mainstream media and swallowed by many people is based on 'a pack of lies' carefully presented by men like Petraeus, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest to try to gloss over their corruption and sanctioning of mass killing and plunder. British MP George Galloway’s powerful performance in front of a US Senate committee in 2005 highlighted it as such (9). 


These days, despite state-corporate control and manipulation of the mainstream media, many see through the charade of today's 'liberal democracy’ and the ‘pack of lies’ which underpin it. The more the US lacks control over ‘the message’, the more it has to resort to violence and restrictions on freedoms. The more paranoid it becomes, the more penetrating and widespread the surveillance and 'information gathering' is. It is the type of insecurity that derives from an empire in decline. It is the type of oppression that derives from an empire that is ideologically and militarily fighting for its continued existence (10).


Notes



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Fred Reed Ditched His PC for a Mac

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Religious Trauma Syndrome: How Some Organized Religion Leads to Mental Health Problems

Groups that demand obedience and conformity produce fear, not love and growth.

March 25, 2013  |  

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At age sixteen I began what would be a four year struggle with bulimia.  When the symptoms started, I turned in desperation to adults who knew more than I did about how to stop shameful behavior—my Bible study leader and a visiting youth minister.  “If you ask anything in faith, believing,” they said.  “It will be done.” I knew they were quoting the Word of God. We prayed together, and I went home confident that God had heard my prayers.  But my horrible compulsions didn’t go away. By the fall of my sophomore year in college, I was desperate and depressed enough that I made a suicide attempt. The problem wasn’t just the bulimia.  I was convinced by then that I was a complete spiritual failure. My college counseling department had offered to get me real help (which they later did). But to my mind, at that point, such help couldn’t fix the core problem: I was a failure in the eyes of God. It would be years before I understood that my inability to heal bulimia through the mechanisms offered by biblical Christianity was not a function of my own spiritual deficiency but deficiencies in Evangelical religion itself.  

Dr. Marlene Winell is a human development consultant in the San Francisco Area. She is also the daughter of Pentecostal missionaries. This combination has given her work an unusual focus. For the past twenty years she has counseled men and women in recovery from various forms of fundamentalist religion including the Assemblies of God denomination in which she was raised. Winell is the author of Leaving the Fold - A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving their Religion, written during her years of private practice in psychology. Over the years, Winell has provided assistance to clients whose religious experiences were even more damaging than mine. Some of them are people whose psychological symptoms weren’t just exacerbated by their religion, but actually caused by it.   

Two years ago, Winell made waves by formally labeling what she calls “Religious Trauma Syndrome” (RTS) and beginning to write and speak on the subject for professional audiences. When the British Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Psychologists published a series of articles on the topic, members of a Christian counseling association protested what they called excessive attention to a “relatively niche topic.” One commenter said, “A religion, faith or book cannot be abuse but the people interpreting can make anything abusive.” 

Is toxic religion simply misinterpretation? What is religious trauma? Why does Winell believe religious trauma merits its own diagnostic label?

Let’s start with the basics. What exactly is religious trauma syndrome?

Religious trauma syndrome (RTS) is a set of symptoms and characteristics that tend to go together and which are related to harmful experiences with religion. They are the result of two things: immersion in a controlling religion and the secondary impact of leaving a religious group. The RTS label provides a name and description that affected people often recognize immediately. Many other people are surprised by the idea of RTS, because in our culture it is generally assumed that religion is benign or good for you. Just like telling kids about Santa Claus and letting them work out their beliefs later, people see no harm in teaching religion to children.

But in reality, religious teachings and practices sometimes cause serious mental health damage. The public is somewhat familiar with sexual and physical abuse in a religious context. As Journalist Janet Heimlich has documented in, Breaking Their Will, Bible-based religious groups that emphasize patriarchal authority in family structure and use harsh parenting methods can be destructive.

How Noam Chomsky Is Discussed

One very common tactic for enforcing political orthodoxies is to malign the character, "style" and even mental health of those who challenge them. The most extreme version of this was an old Soviet favorite: to declare political dissidents mentally ill and put them in hospitals. In the US, those who take even the tiniest steps outside of political convention are instantly decreed "crazy", as happened to the 2002 anti-war version of Howard Dean and the current iteration of Ron Paul (in most cases, what is actually "crazy" are the political orthodoxies this tactic seeks to shield from challenge).Noam Chomsky, delivering the Edward W. Said lecture in London on 18 March 2013. (Photograph: guardian.co.uk)

This method is applied with particular aggression to those who engage in any meaningful dissent against the society's most powerful factions and their institutions. Nixon White House officials sought to steal the files from Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office precisely because they knew they could best discredit his disclosures with irrelevant attacks on his psyche. Identically, the New York Times and partisan Obama supporters have led the way in depicting both Bradley Manning and Julian Assange as mentally unstable outcasts with serious personality deficiencies. The lesson is clear: only someone plagued by mental afflictions would take such extreme steps to subvert the power of the US government.

A subtler version of this technique is to attack the so-called "style" of the critic as a means of impugning, really avoiding, the substance of the critique. Although Paul Krugman is comfortably within mainstream political thought as a loyal Democrat and a New York Times columnist, his relentless attacks against the austerity mindset is threatening to many. As a result, he is barraged with endless, substance-free complaints about his "tone": he is too abrasive, he does not treat opponents with respect, he demonizes those who disagree with him, etc. The complaints are usually devoid of specifics to prevent meaningful refutation: one typical example: "[Krugman] often cloaks his claims in professional authority, overstates them, omits arguments that undermine his case, and is a bit of a bully"). All of that enables the substance of the critique to be avoided in lieu of alleged personality flaws.

Nobody has been subjected to these vapid discrediting techniques more than Noam Chomsky. The book on which I'm currently working explores how establishment media systems restrict the range of acceptable debate in US political discourse, and I'm using Chomsky's treatment by (and ultimate exclusion from) establishment US media outlets as a window for understanding how that works. As a result, I've read a huge quantity of media discussions about Chomsky over the past year. And what is so striking is that virtually every mainstream profile or discussion of him at some point inevitably recites the same set of personality and stylistic attacks designed to malign his advocacy without having to do the work to engage the substance of his claims. Notably, these attacks come most frequently and viciously from establishment liberal venues, such as when the American Prospect's 2005 foreign policy issue compared him to Dick Cheney on its cover (a cover he had framed and now proudly hangs on his office wall).

Last week, Chomsky was in London to give the annual Edward W. Said lecture, and as always happens when he speaks, the large auditorium was filled to the brim, having sold out shortly after it was announced. The Guardian's Aida Edemariam interviewed him in London and produced an article, published Saturday morning, that features virtually all of those standard stylistic and personality critiques:

"When he starts speaking, it is in a monotone that makes no particular rhetorical claim on the audience's attention; in fact, it's almost soporific . . . . Within five minutes many of the hallmarks of Chomsky's political writing, and speaking, are displayed: his anger, his extraordinary range of reference and experience . . . . . Fact upon fact upon fact, but also a withering, sweeping sarcasm – the atrocities are 'tolerated politely by Europe as usual'. Harsh, vivid phrases – the 'hideously charred corpses of murdered infants'; bodies 'writhing in agony' – unspool until they become almost a form of punctuation.

"You could argue that the latter is necessary, simply a description of atrocities that must be reported, but it is also a method that has diminishing returns. The facts speak for themselves; the adjectives and the sarcasm have the counterintuitive effect of cheapening them, of imposing on the world a disappointingly crude and simplistic argument. 'The sentences,' wrote Larissa MacFarquhar in a brilliant New Yorker profile of Chomsky 10 years ago, 'are accusations of guilt, but not from a position of innocence or hope for something better: Chomsky's sarcasm is the scowl of a fallen world, the sneer of hell's veteran to its appalled naifs' – and thus, in an odd way, static and ungenerative. . . .

"But he answers questions warmly, and seriously, if not always directly – a surprise, in a way, from someone who has earned a reputation for brutality of argument, and a need to win at all costs. 'There really is an alpha-male dominance psychology at work there,' a colleague once said of him. 'He has some of the primate dominance moves. The staring down. The withering tone of voice." Students have been known to visit him in pairs, so that one can defend the other. . . .

"Chomsky, the son of Hebrew teachers who emigrated from Ukraine and Russia at the turn of the last century, began as a Zionist – but the sort of Zionist who wanted a socialist state in which Jews and Arabs worked together as equals. Since then he has been accused of antisemitism (due to defending the right to free speech of a French professor who espoused such views, some 35 years ago), and been called, by the Nation, 'America's most prominent self-hating Jew'. These days he argues tirelessly for the rights of Palestinians. . . . . Does he think that in all these years of talking and arguing and writing, he has ever changed one specific thing?"

So to recap: Chomsky is a sarcastic, angry, soporific, scowling, sneering self-hating Jew, devoid of hope and speaking from hell, whose alpha-male brutality drives him to win at all costs, and who imposes on the world disappointingly crude and simplistic arguments to the point where he is so inconsequential that one wonders whether he has ever changed even a single thing in his 60 years of political work.

Edemariam includes several other passages more balanced and even complimentary. She notes his academic accolades ("One study of the most frequently cited academic sources of all time found that he ranked eighth, just below Plato and Freud"), his mastery of facts, his willingness to speak to hostile audiences, his touching life-long relationship with his now-deceased wife, and his remarkable commitment, even at the age of 84, to personally answering emails from people around the world whom he does not know (when I spoke at a college near Rochester two weeks ago, one of the students, a college senior studying to be a high school social studies teacher, gushed as he told me that he had emailed Chomsky and quickly received a very generous personal reply). She also includes Chomsky's answer to her question about whether he has ever changed anything: a characteristically humble explanation that no one person - not even Martin Luther King - can or ever has by themselves changed anything.

But the entire piece is infused with these standard personality caricatures that offer the reader an easy means of mocking, deriding and scorning Chomsky without having to confront a single fact he presents. And that's the point: as this 9-minute Guardian excerpt about Iran and the Middle East from Chomsky's London speech demonstrates, he rationally but aggressively debunks destructive mainstream falsehoods that huge numbers of people are taught to tacitly embrace. But all of that can be, and is, ignored in favor of hating his "style", ridiculing his personality, and smearing him with horrible slurs ("self-hating Jew").

What's particularly strange about this set of personality and style attacks is what little relationship they bear to reality. Far from being some sort of brutal, domineering, and angry "alpha-male" savage, Chomsky - no matter your views of him - is one of the most soft-spoken and unfailingly civil and polite political advocates on the planet. It's true that his critiques of those who wield power and influence can be withering - that's the central function of an effective critic or just a human being with a conscience - but one would be hard-pressed to find someone as prominent as he who is as steadfastly polite and considerate and eager to listen when it comes to interacting with those who are powerless and voiceless. His humanism is legion. And far from being devoid of hope, it's almost impossible to find an establishment critic more passionate and animated when talking about the ability of people to join together to create real social and political change.

Then there's Edemariam's statement, offered with no citation, that Chomsky has been called "America's most prominent self-hating Jew" by the left-wing Nation magazine. This claim, though often repeated and obviously very serious, is inaccurate.

The Nation article which she seems to be referencing is not available online except by subscription. But what is freely available online is a 1993 article on Chomsky from the Chicago Tribune that makes clear that this did not come from the Nation itself, but from a single writer who, more importantly, was not himself calling Chomsky a "self-hating" Jew but was simply noting that this is how he is often attacked ("one critic observed that Chomsky has 'acquired the reputation as America's most prominent self-hating Jew.'"). In 2010, the scholarly website 3 Quarks Daily noted an article on Chomsky from The Telegraph that also claimed without citation that "the Left-wing Nation magazine, meanwhile, called him 'America's most prominent self-hating Jew'". Inquiries in the comment section for the source citation for this quote prompted this reply:

"I know this is a few years old, but the citation for the 'most prominent self-hating Jew' quote is: Morton, Brian. 'Chomsky Then and Now.' Nation 246, no. 18 (May 7, 1988): 646-652.

"With access to a full-text archive of The Nation, it took me only a few minutes to locate this. The full quote in context is 'If Chomsky has acquired the reputation of being America's most prominent self-hating Jew, this is because, in the United States, discussion about the Middle East has until recently taken place within very narrow bounds.'

"As you can see the point was quite the opposite of how it was presented. The Nation often includes different perspectives so attributing one reviewer's comment to 'The Nation' as a whole would be dishonest anyway.

"Regardless of that however, the reviewer was actually making the point that Chomsky's views only seem far out because the spectrum is so limited. . . . .This is just another example of the kind of lazy, dishonest way in which Chomsky's views are generally reported."

Having myself retrieved a full copy of Morton's 1988 article, I can say with certainty that that comment is indeed 100% accurate. It is wildly inaccurate to claim that the Nation labelled Chomsky a "self-hating Jew":

morton chomsky

The oft-repeated claim that Chomsky has "been called, by the Nation,
'America's most prominent self-hating Jew'" is simply false. If anything, that Nation article, written by someone not on the Nation staff, debunked that accusation, and certainly did not embrace it.

But the strangest attack on Chomsky is the insinuation that he has changed nothing. Aside from the metrics demonstrating that he has more reach and influence than virtually any public intellectual on the planet, some of which Edemariam cites, I'd say that there is no living political writer who has more radically changed how more people think in more parts of the world about political issues than he. If you accept the premise (as I do) that the key to political change is to convince people of pervasive injustice and the need to act, then it's virtually laughable to depict him as inconsequential. Washington power-brokers and their media courtiers do not discuss him, and he does not make frequent (or any) appearances on US cable news outlets, but outside of those narrow and insular corridors - meaning around the world - few if any political thinkers are as well-known, influential or admired (to its credit, the Guardian, like some US liberal outlets, does periodically publish Chomsky's essays).

Like any person with a significant political platform, Chomsky is fair game for all sorts of criticisms. Like anyone else, he should be subjected to intense critical and adversarial scrutiny. Even admirers should listen to his (and everyone else's) pronouncements with a critical ear. Like anyone who makes prolific political arguments over the course of many years, he's made mistakes.

But what is at play here is this destructive dynamic that the more one dissents from political orthodoxies, the more personalized, style-focused and substance-free the attacks become. That's because once someone become sufficiently critical of establishment pieties, the goal is not merely to dispute their claims but to silence them. That's accomplished by demonizing the person to the extent that huge numbers of people decide that nothing they say should even be considered, let alone accepted. It's a sorry and anti-intellectual tactic, to be sure, but a brutally effective one.

Climate Change Is Here; Why Aren’t We Doing Anything About It?

Climate Change Is Here; Why Aren’t We Doing Anything About It?

Posted on Mar 21, 2013
mariopiperni

Regarding the impending climate crisis, Yale scientist Anthony Leiserowitz tells Bill Moyers: “You almost couldn’t design a problem that is a worse fit with our underlying psychology.” The solution? Part of it involves turning the issue into talking points for conservatives.

How about describing global warming as a threat to Americans’ freedoms? “If you’re a rancher or a farmer in the Great Plains today,” Leiserowitz says, “your freedom is enormously constrained by the fact that you’re in the midst of a two-year severe drought, OK. You don’t get to choose what you’re going to plant. You don’t get to choose what cows you’re going to slaughter. In fact, we’ve just seen in Texas in the past year 2 million head of cow, cattle are no longer in Texas; they had to move them out because they couldn’t provide the food and forage and water for them because of that drought. That’s not freedom, OK. You are literally not able to do the thing that you were raised and that you believe in as part of your culture because the climate has changed.”

Another approach Leiserowitz recommends, however difficult it is to imagine gaining traction among the Republican Party’s entrenched corporate backers, is to cast support for climate change legislation as an opportunity to win more votes from the American public.

Read a transcript of their conversation here.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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There’s Such a Thing as “Human Nature,” Right?

Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way human behavior and culture is understood.

February 26, 2013  |  

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This article first appeared at Pacific Standard

In the Summer of 1995, a young graduate student in anthropology at UCLA named  Joe Henrich traveled to Peru to carry out some fieldwork among the Machiguenga, an indigenous people who live north of Machu Picchu in the Amazon basin. The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of clusters of extended families. For sustenance, they relied on local game and produce from small-scale farming. They shared with their kin but rarely traded with outside groups.

While the setting was fairly typical for an anthropologist, Henrich’s research was not. Rather than practice traditional ethnography, he decided to run a behavioral experiment that had been developed by economists. Henrich used a “game”—along the lines of  the famous prisoner’s dilemma—to see whether isolated cultures shared with the West the same basic instinct for fairness. In doing so, Henrich expected to confirm one of the foundational assumptions underlying such experiments, and indeed underpinning the entire fields of economics and psychology: that humans all share the same cognitive machinery—the same evolved rational and psychological hardwiring.

The test that Henrich introduced to the Machiguenga was called the ultimatum game. The rules are simple: in each game there are two players who remain anonymous to each other. The first player is given an amount of money, say $100, and told that he has to offer some of the cash, in an amount of his choosing, to the other subject. The second player can accept or refuse the split. But there’s a hitch: players know that if the recipient refuses the offer, both leave empty-handed. North Americans, who are the most common subjects for such experiments, usually offer a 50-50 split when on the giving end. When on the receiving end, they show an eagerness to punish the other player for uneven splits at their own expense. In short, Americans show the tendency to be equitable with strangers—and to punish those who are not.

Among the Machiguenga, word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor from America giving away money. The stakes Henrich used in the game with the Machiguenga were not insubstantial—roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies. So Henrich had no problem finding volunteers. What he had great difficulty with, however, was explaining the rules, as the game struck the Machiguenga as deeply odd.

When he began to run the game it became immediately clear that Machiguengan behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American. To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”

Henrich had thought he would be adding a small branch to an established tree of knowledge. It turned out he was sawing at the very trunk. He began to wonder: What other certainties about “human nature” in social science research would need to be reconsidered when tested across diverse populations?The potential implications of the unexpected results were quickly apparent to Henrich. He knew that a vast amount of scholarly literature in the social sciences—particularly in economics and psychology—relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West. Henrich realized that if the Machiguenga results stood up, and if similar differences could be measured across other populations, this assumption of universality would have to be challenged.

What Led Chris Dorner to Go Off the Edge: Workplace Abuse, Racism, and Unfair...

The media as usual is looking at all the wrong clues to get to the bottom of what set Chris Dorner's rampage.

February 21, 2013  |  

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This article first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation.

In the days after his lethal rebellion and violent death, Christopher Dorner has become many things to many different people: a one-man Alamo hero who died fighting the police state; a crazy black man who started murdering cops because that’s what crazy black men do; or a symbol of government oppression and the militarization of America’s police forces. For some conspiracy theorists, Dorner even became a Manchurian candidate in an elaborate Big Brother plot to sow chaos and fear, so that Government Marxists could fill America’s skies with armed drones, assassinating gun-owners and freedom-lovers at will.

But all this focus on Dorner’s spectacular ending has obscured the real story about what sent Chris Dorner over the edge: workplace abuse, racial discrimination, and a legitimate claim of wrongful termination. In a nation where workers have fewer legal protections than workers in many developing nations, low-level employees like Dorner have few rights, little power and almost nowhere to turn. Ever since the Reagan Revolution of the 80s, popular culture has neglected labor problems in favor of violent epic fantasies, even though more and more Americans suffered worsening labor conditions in their own lives, privately and alone. Wrongful termination and workplace discrimination are devastating problems for each and every victim, yet collectively we’re infinitely more worried about police state fascism and getting assassinated by armed drones, thanks to media and pop culture conditioning. Labor and workplace problems are considered boring, even embarrassing.

Ever since “going postal” massacres first appeared in the public sector, in US post offices in the mid-1980s, they have tended to follow a familiar script. The murderer “snaps” for no apparent reason; official culture blames it all on Hollywood or guns, never explaining why these workplace massacres only appeared in the mid-late 80s; and later, as it turns out, there were a lot of reasons for the gunman to snap. If you profile the workplace that created the murderer, rather profiling the murderer’s psychology, you will often find a pattern of shocking workplace abuse and of top-down mistreatment of employees, culminating in the “going postal” rampage. The consequent killing spree will target supervisors, fellow employees, and anyone associated with the institution that the abused employee blames for having crushed him (or her).

The LAPD is a textbook example of one of the most abusive public sector employers in America today — and this context, along with the details of Dorner’s firing and his appeals, are the real missing pieces in the puzzle.

Noted civil rights attorney Dan Stormer, who has sued the LAPD on numerous occasions over wrongful terminations, discrimination and civil rights abuses, tells me, “Dorner’s case looks like a garden variety example of these types of cases.”

Dorner’s problems began with race, and escalated to his firing over his allegations against a fellow police officer of kicking a suspect in the face. “They don’t like it when you report abuse,” Stormer says. “If you complain, they punish you.”

Just over a decade ago, 109 serving and former LAPD officers filed a class action lawsuit accusing the police department of retaliating against whistleblowers and employees who dared to report police abuse.

An article in the LA Times headlined  “More Than 60 Officers Join Lawsuit Against LAPD”, dated October 10, 2000, begins:

More than 60 current and former officers are joining a class-action lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department that alleges retaliation against whistle-blowers, bringing the total number of plaintiffs to more than 100, an attorney said Monday.

The original lawsuit, filed Aug. 24 in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of 41 former and current employees, most of them officers, claims that the LAPD has a culture that enforces a "code of silence" that leads to a pattern of discrimination, harassment and retaliation against those who report misconduct by other officers.

Full-Body Pat-Downs in America’s Schools: How the War on Drugs Is a War on...

A young woman lights a marijuana joint in May 2012.

On a warm spring afternoon at American colleges, the intoxicating aroma of surely medicinal marijuana will be floating like a soft caress in the breeze, and hard-working students will be stocking up on amphetamine cocktails to sharpen their overstressed young minds for the coming exams.

On a warm spring afternoon at the nation’s poorer public schools, children (and I mean children) will endure a daily police presence, including drug-sniffing dogs, full-body pat-downs, searches of backpacks and lockers, stops in the hallways—all in the name of searching for contraband. 

Drugs are ubiquitous in this country, and yet we know that some people have the privilege of doctor-prescribed intoxication, while others are thrown into dungeons for seeking the same relief. We know that the war on drugs is heavily inflected with Jim Crow–ism, economic inequality, gun culture myths and political opportunism. We know that Adam Lanza’s unfortunate mother was not the sole Newtown resident stocking up on military-style weapons; plenty of suburban gun owners keep similar weapons to protect their well-kept homes against darkly imagined, drug-addled marauders from places like Bridgeport. We divert resources from mental health or rehab, and allocate millions to militarize schools.

The result: the war on drugs has metastasized into a war on children.

Best publicized, perhaps, is the plight of young people in Meridian, Mississippi, where a federal investigation is probing into why children as young as 10 are routinely taken to jail for wearing the wrong color socks or flatulence in class. Bob Herbert wrote of a situation in Florida in 2007, where police found themselves faced with the great challenge of placing a 6-year-old girl in handcuffs too big for her wrists. The child was being arrested for throwing a tantrum in her kindergarten class; the solution was to cuff her biceps, after which she was dragged to the precinct house for mug shots and charged with a felony and two misdemeanors. 

In New York City, kids who make trouble are routinely removed from school altogether and placed in suspension centers, holding cells or juvenile detention lockups. In the old days, you got a detention slip for scrawling your initials on a desk. Now a student can be given a summons by a school police officer. If the kid loses it or doesn’t want to tell his parents, it becomes a warrant—and a basis for arrest.

According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, some 
77 percent of New York’s school police interventions are for noncriminal matters like having food outside the cafeteria, having a cellphone or being late. Other minor offenses like shouting, getting into petty scuffles or being on school grounds after hours fall into the category of “disruptive behavior”—an offense that can get a student suspended. Just 4 percent of police interventions are in response to “major crimes against persons.”

But what’s a teacher to do? In New York City, police officers outnumber guidance counselors by more than 2,000.

Yet as Newtown should teach us, we love our guns as much as we love our drugs. We know that even our best efforts at gun control will not undo a simultaneous and enthusiastic installation of armed overseers in our public schools. As such forces grow exponentially across the country, we keep them busy by installing zero-tolerance policies that take disciplinary discretion out of teachers’ hands and put it in the hands of law enforcement officers with little to no training in child psychology, mediation or anger management. Indeed, the NYCLU recently filed a complaint after the NYPD arrested Mark Federman, the principal of East Side Community High School, for intervening as the in-school officers hauled away an honor student. 

The International Literary Festival: A New Front in the War on Terror

The International Literary Festival: A New Front in the War on Terror

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Posted on Feb 16, 2013
Zaheer Chauhan

The Dalai Lama at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

By Cherilyn Parsons

JAIPUR, INDIA—So into a bar walk a Palestinian-British novelist, a famous Jewish humorist and an Indian cricket star. On nearby barstools are an Academy Award-winning Pakistani filmmaker and a gay writer on psychology. Add a Bollywood celebrity, an Argentine dissident, the Dalai Lama and—what the hell—a few Bhutanese literary pioneers. Ready to break a brawl is a crusading Indian investigative journalist who has written one of the sexiest novels of all time. Of course there’s a guy from Google, helping to underwrite the scene.

This is way too complicated for a bar joke and unfortunately, at least in the opinion of some of the writers, the scene wasn’t a bar. The Jaipur Literature Festival held from Jan. 24-28, 2013 at Diggi Palace, was alcoholically as dry as a bone. But it was extraordinarily rich in ideas, not to mention in chai, peddled by wallahs pouring milky sweet caffeine into clay cups, 20 rupees, madam.

There is a new front on the war against terrorism: the international literary festival. The Jaipur festival presented 260 authors, many from nations that are enemies more than drinking buddies—or are, as speaker Reza Aslan said about the United States toward Pakistan, in “incredibly schizophrenic” relationships. The authors spoke to 130,000 attendees, about half local Rajasthanis (Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan state), a quarter from greater India, and the rest from the wider world, as estimated by co-director and author William Dalrymple. There was no brawl, other than one perceived insult over caste that was quickly forgiven. For five sunny days, people came together for a remarkable single purpose, to share ideas, listen and delve into the written word across national, religious and cultural borders.

International literary festivals are mushrooming around the globe. In imitation of Jaipur, which is now in its sixth year, 30 fairs have started throughout India alone. Other festivals have launched in Rangoon (last week saw the first Irrawaddy Literary Festival), Lahore (in late February 2013) and Dhaka. These new gatherings add to the well-established festivals in Edinburgh, Hay-on-Wye (Wales), Vancouver, Guadalajara, Jerusalem, Brisbane and various U.S. cities such as Washington, D.C., Miami and Los Angeles, just to name a few locales.

Perhaps the most unusual of the upstarts is the Palestine Festival of Literature, or PalFest, which mounted its fifth annual festival in 2012. Because checkpoints make it so difficult for residents to travel, the writers go out to the readers, each day speaking at a different site, not only taking their work to Palestinians but hearing locals’ stories in return. The brainchild of Egyptian-born novelist Ahdaf Soueif, PalFest is inherently political but says it pushes “the power of culture” over “the culture of power,” quoting Edward Said.

The Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) is overt about promoting international understanding. It fights against “the terrorism of the mind,” said the event producer, Sanjoy Roy, a friendly middle-aged guy sporting True Religion jeans and long gray-white locks. Novelist and co-director Namita Gokhale likes to describe the festival as a Mahakumbh of the mind, referring to the Kumbh Mela, the annual gathering of tens of millions of Hindus in one city to bathe in a sacred river. Gokhale said she aims to foster “understanding ourselves through literature, through words, through ideas, at a time when people are getting, at one level, more and more entrenched in their own set of prejudices.”
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Radio or Not Presents ‘Fools on the Hill’

Every Monday morning, C&L's own Nicole Belle joins me on my Radio or Not show for a segment we call "Fools on the Hill". We watch the Sunday shows so you don't have to, and we two Nicoles bring you the best of the best (or as is often the case, the worst of the worst).

There’s a famous phenomena in psychology known as “Flashed Face Distortion”. When a pair of perfectly attractive faces are flashed in front of a viewer, aligned at the eye level, all their dissimilarities are heightened and distorted to the point of being perceived as grotesque.

There’s a similar parallel in politics. When liberal ideas are merely flashed out to audiences, they appear distorted and unnatural, because we never get a good look at them. I blame the media in this, because for all their talk of “both sides doing it,” they rarely give us any more than a cursory glance at liberal ideas, thus distorting them completely to their viewers. I’m convinced that if most Americans got to take a nice long look at them, they wouldn’t find them grotesque at all.

But there is no shortage of conservative ideas given full coverage on the Sunday shows. Would that they appear as distorted as the short shrift they give liberal ideas.

Speaking of liberal ideas, Paul Krugman was on Up with Chris Hayes, which is enough for a liberal fangirl to start squealing in delight. But as if to reiterate the point I made above, Krugman reminds Hayes that nothing that he advocates is that radical. It is literally Macroeconomics 101. But they are completely alien concepts to the insulated Beltway Bubble.

On the other end of the spectrum, Eric Cantor tells David Gregory that he doesn’t know what the DREAM Act is any more, but he thinks we need to work on a pathway to citizenship for children. Psst….Cantor, that is *exactly* what the DREAM Act addresses.

To hear Republicans talk about immigration at all is an exercise of “Who do you want to believe? Me or your lying eyes?” Case in point: John “Build the dang wall” McCain challenging Republicans to not block giving undocumented workers a pathway to citizenship: “What do you want to do with them?

McCain’s BFF Lindsey Graham never misses an opportunity (or a Sunday, come to that) to play partisan politics and criticize the president. Ignoring completely the infamous 7 minutes that George W. Bush read “My Pet Goat” while the worst terrorist act on our shores occurred, Graham accuses President Obama of being “disengaged” on the anniversary of 9/11 and therefore, personally responsible for the deaths in Benghazi.

And finally, the Rand family is feeling quite testy of late. While Daddy Ron is now appealing to the UN (which he doesn’t believe in) to help him take away the RonPaul.com domain name from his supporters, baby Rand is feeling that Ashley Judd hasn’t got the gravitas of a self-certified ophthalmologist to run for the Senate for the state of Kentucky.

The Nicole Sandler Show airs live Monday through Thursday mornings from 10-noon ET and is always available for listening via podcast at RadioOrNot.com. Nicole Belle joins in for Fools on the Hill every Monday morning at around 11:20 ET.

6 Secrets to Happiness (According to Science)

February 11, 2013  |  

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Science has all the answers, right? Wrong. But it has a pretty good sense of things, a lot of the time. So what does science have to say about the pursuit of happiness? A lot. Like,  build-an-entire-industry-around-it, even-the-pseudo-scientific-stuff a lot.

So let's look at some of the more recent things science has had to say about happiness and how you can score some for yourself — including one tip that might actually work (and you won't even have to pay us to hear it).

1. Surround yourself with happy people
Or, at the very least, surround yourself with people who surround themselves with happy people. A longitudinal investigation conducted over 20 years in collaboration with the Framingham Heart Study revealed that shifts in individual happiness can cascade through social networks like an emotional contagion. That's right, happiness is kind of like a disease. (The researchers don't mean Facebook, btw, but physical, old-school networks — like live-in friends, partners and spouses; and siblings, friends and neighbors who live close by.)

"Most important from our perspective is the recognition that people are embedded in social networks and that the health and wellbeing of one person affects the health and wellbeing of others,"  conclude the researchers, noting that the relationship between people's happiness was found to extend up to three degrees of separation (i.e. all the way to friends of friends of friends). "This fundamental fact of existence provides a fundamental conceptual justification for the specialty of public health. Human happiness is not merely the province of isolated individuals."

Also worth noting: the researchers found sadness to be nowhere near as "infectious" as happiness.

2. Master a skill
This one is kind of a tradeoff: a study published in a 2009 issue of the 100% real Journal of Happiness Studies found that people who dedicate themselves to mastering a skill or ability tend to experience more stress in the moment, but reported greater happiness and satisfaction on an hourly, daily, and longterm basis as a result of their investment.

"No pain, no gain is the rule when it comes to gaining happiness from increasing our competence at something," said Ryan Howell, assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University in a statement. "People often give up their goals because they are stressful, but we found that there is benefit at the end of the day from learning to do something well."

3. Self-government is key
The same study that found mastering a skill could bolster overall, longterm happiness found that the minute-to-minute stresses of mastering a skill could be lessened by self-direction and a sense of fellowship. "Our results suggest that you can decrease the momentary stress associated with improving your skill or ability by ensuring you are also meeting the need for autonomy and connectedness," explains Howell. "For example, performing the activity alongside other people or making sure it is something you have chosen to do and is true to who you are."

4. Smile for once
Darwin laid it out for us all the way back in 1872: "The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it," he wrote. And recent studies — involving botox, of all things — suggest he was onto something. SciAm's Melinda Wenner explains:

Psychologists at the University of Cardiff in Wales found that people whose ability to frown is comp­romised by cosmetic botox inject­ions are happier, on average, than people who can frown. The researchers administered an anxiety and depression questionnaire to 25 females, half of whom had received frown-inhibiting botox injections. The botox recipients reported feeling happier and less anxious in general; more important, they did not report feeling any more attractive, which suggests that the emotional effects were not driven by a psychological boost that could come from the treatment's cosmetic nature.

Sunday Morning Bobblehead Thread

In psychology and politics, perception is key. Perception is reality. But perception lies to us all the time. There's a phenomenom well known in psychology circles called the "Flashed Face Distortion." If you look at a pair of flashed faces aligned at the eyeline, suddenly the rest of their features look grotesque. Attractive people now look cartoonish and scary.

There's a little bit of that in politics now too. Sadly, it's often the liberal ideas that only get those flashes of exposure. And correspondingly, they're perceived as distorted by the traditional media, who rarely get anything outside of their comfy conservative framing in which they're surrounded. But if you got to take a good, long uninterrupted look at any one of those ideas, I bet you wouldn't find them bizarre or scary at all, but beautiful and sensible and intelligent.

The question is how we get that opportunity for a good, long look.

ABC's "This Week" -- Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla.; Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn.; Republican strategist and ABC News political analyst and contributor Nicolle Wallace; and Obama 2012 deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl and ABC News Chief Global Affairs Correspondent Martha Raddatz. Author George Saunders

NBC's "Meet the Press" -- Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va.; Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; Panel: Democratic Mayor of Atlanta Kasim Reed, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush now columnist for the Washington Post, Michael Gerson; GOP strategist Mike Murphy and the BBC's Katty Kay. NBC’s Michael Isikoff.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" -- Joe Klein, TIME; David Ignatius, The Washington Post; Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times; Gloria Borger, CNN.

CBS' "Face the Nation" -- Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich. Woodrow Wilson Center International Center for Scholars director Jane Harman, a former Democratic representative from California, Center for Strategic and International Studies expert Jim Lewis and CBS News Justice and Homeland Security Correspondent Bob Orr. The New York Times' David Leonhardt and The Washington Post's Kevin Merida.

MSNBC's "UP with Chris Hayes" -- Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize Winner and New York Times Op-Ed Columnist; Jeremy Scahill, National Security Correspondent for The Nation magazine, author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army”; Richard Epstein, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, professor of law at New York University Law School; Greg Johnsen, author of “The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia.”; Heather McGhee, vice-president of Demos; Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project for the ACLU; Dean Baker, co-director Center for Economic & Policy Research, author of “The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive;” Alexis Goldstein, a former vice president of information technology at Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank, now an Occupy Wall Street activist.

MSNBC's "Melissa Harris-Perry" -- Laura Flanders, Author of Blue Grit / Host & Founder of GritTV.org; Vicki DeFrancesco Soto, NBC Latino; Tara Wall, Writer and Founder, PTP Foundation for Media Arts; Richard Kim, Executive Editor at The Nation Magazine; Richard Kim, Executive Editor at The Nation Magazine; L.Y. Marlow, Domestic Violence Survivor and Advocate.

CNN's "State of the Union" -- Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Angus King, I-Maine; former Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Rep. Jan Schakowsky, (D-Illinois); Kay Bailey Hutchison, former Republican Senator from Texas; Amy Walter, the National Editor of the Cook Political Report, and CNN National Political Correspondent Jim Acosta.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" -- New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, columnist Arianna Huffington, businessman Ed Conard, and Boston Properties co-founder Mort Zuckerman; India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani; the prime ministers of Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, the Palestinian Authority and Morocco's chief of government from Davos, Switzerland.
" _ Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.; Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Panel: Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard/Fox News Contributor; Liz Marlantes, The Christian Science Monitor; Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR); Juan Williams, Fox News Contributor.

So what's catching your eye this morning?

Weekly Bull/Bear Recap: Feb. 4-8, 2013

From Rodrigo Serrano of Rational Capitalist Speculator,

This objective report concisely summarizes important macro events over the past week.  It is not geared to push an agenda.  Impartiality is necessary to avoid costly psychological traps, which all investors are prone to, such as confirmation, conservatism, and endowment biases.

Bull:

+ The service sector, which accounts for almost 80% of the U.S. economy, remains in growth mode.  The Institute of Supply Management’s Non-Manufacturing survey reports a healthy 55.2 composite reading and an extremely bullish Employment subindicator of 57.5, its strongest reading since February 2006.  Furthermore, Export New Orders crossed into expansion territory and imply improving global trade conditions.  Indeed, today’s U.S. International Trade report “suggests exports — a key engine of the U.S. recovery — are finding their footing after stalling last year…

+ The global expansion thesis is further boosted by Singaporean manufacturing ending its spell of contraction, German Factory Orders showing signs of bottoming (mirroring improvement in recent Ifo surveys), and Japanese Machinery Orders increasing for the 3rd consecutive month

+ The bears have severely erred on their assumption that China wouldn’t be able to execute a soft landing.  In addition to improving manufacturing surveys, HSBC’s Services PMI survey is now solidly in expansion territory, notching a reading of 54 from 51.7 in December.  China is in position to lead the global recovery again.

+ The U.S. consumer remains quite resilient.  Chain Store sales surge the most since September 2011 and are much better than expected, while Gallup’s Consumer Spending report shows a 4-week average YoY gain of almost 30%.

+ Fed officials are optimistic that a positive wealth effect has taken hold and Q4 GDP numbers reflect only a transitory blip (due to weather-related events) towards continued recovery (Q4 GDP will be positive when the second revision is published).  Rising home values as well as gains in U.S. stock markets have improved consumer psychology.  Furthermore, investors can take solace that the FOMC won’t be backtracking on its promise to continue providing monetary stimulus even in the face of improving economic conditions.

+  The U.K. has seen a string of improving economic numbers this week: the Services Purchasing Manager’s Index swings into expansion in January; Same Store Sales improve 1.9% as well; and Industrial Production for December prints better than expected.  In addition, investors are nodding at recent economic improvement in Europe.      

Bear:

The European political and economic storm looks to pick up strength in the months ahead: 

Inter-market trends are deteriorating.  A look at the XLF/XLU ratio indicates that deflation fears may resurface soon and would be a negative for equity markets and bullish for Treasury bonds.  In fact, 10-yr Treasury yields are showing a negative divergence vs. equity markets and is a red flag.  Furthermore, equity markets are at long-term resistance, all the while investor sentiment is very bullish.  The stage is set for a correction over the coming weeks. 

- U.S. Weekly sales metrics (Goldman ICSC and Redbook) show continued weakening consumption trends.  Tepid growth readings over the course of January, in addition to a third consecutive weak reading from Discover’s U.S. Spending Monitor, are a shot across the bow for a subpar January Retail Sales report, due on Feb. 13.  Perhaps this is because job creation has stalled according to Gallup’s Job Creation indicator, which just slumped to an 11-month low.  Or perhaps it’s because the nation’s average gas price has risen 17 cents from a week ago.  

- Q4’s Productivity and Unit Labor Cost report portends deteriorating earnings trends for corporations.  Productivity (output per worker) declined  2.0% and was more than expected; meanwhile, unit labor costs surged 4.5% vs. market expectations of a 3.1% increase.  Real wages, vs. nominal, continue to shrink.  ”Hourly pay for American workers fell for the second straight year after factoring out inflation, marking the worst two-year stretch in the U.S. since World War Two.”  

- Does Canada have a popping housing bubble?  Canadian building permits in December plunged 11.2%, after a 17.9% drubbing the month before.  Meanwhile housing starts crater 18.5%.  

Your rating: None

The Old South’s Last, Desperate Stand

In understanding the polarization and paralysis that afflict national politics in the United States, it is a mistake to think in terms of left and right. The appropriate directions are North and South. To be specific, the long, drawn-out, agonizing identity crisis of white Southerners is having effects that reverberate throughout our federal union. The transmission mechanism is the Republican Party, an originally Northern party that has now replaced the Southern wing of the Democratic Party as the vehicle for the dwindling white Southern tribe.

As someone whose white Southern ancestors go back to the 17th century in the Chesapeake Bay region, I have some insight into the psychology of the tribe. The salient fact to bear in mind is that the historical experience of the white South in many ways is the opposite of the experience of the rest of the country.

Mainstream American history, from the point of view of the white majority in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, is a story of military successes. The British are defeated, ensuring national independence. The Confederates are defeated, ensuring national unity. And in the 20th century the Axis and Soviet empires are defeated, ensuring (it is hoped) a free world.

The white Southern narrative — at least in the dominant Southern conservative version — is one of defeat after defeat. First the attempt of white Southerners to create a new nation in which they can be the majority was defeated by the U.S. Army during the Civil War. Doomed to be a perpetual minority in a continental American nation-state, white Southerners managed for a century to create their own state-within-a-state, in which they could collectively lord it over the other major group in the region, African-Americans. But Southern apartheid was shattered by the second defeat, the Civil Rights revolution, which like the Civil War and Reconstruction was symbolized by the dispatching of federal troops to the South. The American patriotism of the white Southerner is therefore deeply problematic. Some opt for jingoistic hyper-Americanism (the lady protesteth too much, methinks) while a shrinking but significant minority prefer the Stars and Bars to the Stars and Stripes.

The other great national narrative holds that the U.S. is a nation of immigration, a “new nation,” a melting pot made up of immigrants from many lands. While the melting pot story involves a good deal of idealization, it is based on demographic fact in the large areas of the North where old-stock Anglo-Americans are commingled with German-Americans, Polish-Americans and Irish-Americans, along with more recent immigrant diasporas from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

But even before the recent wave of immigration from sources other than Europe, the melting pot never included most of the white South. From the early 19th century until the late 20th, the South attracted relatively few immigrants. Who wanted to move to a backward, rural, apartheid society dominated by an oligarchy of a few rich families? Apart from several encapsulated minorities — Cajuns in Louisiana, Germans in central Texas — most white Southerners remained descendants of colonial-era immigrants from the British Isles, chiefly English and Scots-Irish. And while Irish and German Catholics and Jews diversified the religious landscape of the North, the South was dominated by British-derived Protestant sects like the Episcopalians, Baptists and Methodists from Virginia to Oklahoma and Texas.

Two maps illustrate the demographic distinctiveness of the white South. The  first shows the close correlation of evangelical Protestantism with the states of the former Confederacy. The second map is even more revealing.  It shows the concentration of individuals who identified themselves to census takers as non-hyphenated “Americans.”

AL Teacher Rants About Michelle Obama’s ‘Big Butt’ and ‘Queers’

When the tea party gained prominence, my husband scoffed at my insistence that they were propelled by racism. But the more he saw of them, the harder it became for him to deny. All of the things that existed when George W. Bush was president suddenly became tyranny when an African American man occupied the White House. Ironically, I've come to re-evealuate that initial conclusion, thanks in no small part to my buddies Driftglass and Blue Gal and their weekly podcast. It would be far more accurate to say that these people are white supremists. Well, actually, to be totally accurate, Christian white heterosexual male supremists in the purest sense of the word. They may have friends who are women, blacks, gays or non-Christians, but they believe that by virtue of their inherent white Christian male existence, they are superior and by rights, deserve to be at the apex of that totem pole. They resent any challenge to their supremacy and will fight tooth and nail to keep perceived pretenders from their top spot.

With that in mind, perhaps the ravings of Alabama high school football coach and teacher of psychology Bob Grisham isn't that surprising. Certainly, that Grisham is still blissfully ignorant that students now regularly carry these recording devices called cell phones should be your first clue that the man is not operating with a full deck. But nonetheless, it's still jarring to hear what passes for acceptable classroom discussion in Grisham's mind:

School district officials are investigating allegations that a Lauderdale County High School teacher made slurs in the presence of students regarding first lady Michelle Obama and gays.

Superintendent Jennifer Gray confirmed the investigation concerns the school’s head football coach, Bob Grisham, who also teaches driver’s education and psychology.

The investigation includes a 1-minute, 24-second audiotape of Grisham asking who knows who is behind the 600-calorie school lunch.

“Fat butt Michelle Obama,” he said. “Look at her. She looks like she weighs 185 or 190. She’s overweight.”

Male voices interject comments during the discussion, at one point referring to Michelle Obama as a “fat gorilla.”

Later in the tape, Grisham referred to the U.S. as going in the “wrong direction” and tells the students they can “get pissed off at me or not. You can go tell the principal, call the superintendent and tell her. I don’t believe in queers. I don’t like queers, I don’t hate them as a person, but what they do is wrong and an abomination against God.” The tape was reportedly recorded by a student Monday and took place on school campus during the school day.

When the recording came to light, Grisham immediately claimed he misspoke:

“I misspoke in a debate-type situation,” he said. “I have no hatred toward anyone or any group. People that know my heart, they know that.”

And exactly my point at the beginning of this post. I'm sure that Grisham doesn't think what was said by him or by other people in the room with his tacit endorsement was racist. He doesn't hate Michelle Obama or gays. He just finds it unacceptable that they should be accorded as much respect as him.

By the way, as a woman, I would like it to be known that effective immediately, any man who comments in a derogatory fashion about a woman's looks, especially as a value judgment of her person, has to immediately offer forward a picture of his own unassailable looks for the evaluation of women in a similar fashion, or simply STFU. Suggesting (not mandating or legislating, for crying out loud) that Americans make mindful and healthy eating choices does not invite anyone to comment on the size or weight of any portion of Michelle Obama's body.

2 Years in Jail for Sitting on a Milk Crate? The Shocking Ways America...

Laws all over the country are designed solely to target the homeless, a glaring example of the criminalization of poverty in America. There are better solutions.

February 2, 2013  |  

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Editor's note: There are more than one million homeless people in America and 138 million people who live paycheck to paycheck. Many more are struggling, wondering how they'll make rent or get enough food. Those numbers are astounding. This is America. Many proudly think our society is fair, but the evidence overwhelmingly shows that fairness in America is a myth. In the weeks and months ahead, AlterNet will shine more light on America's economic injustice in an ongoing series, Hard Times USA. Since many have chosen to look aside, or think the traditional ways of doing politics will fix things, there is still much to learn about how this problem will be solved, or not solved.

We are launching our ongoing series with two articles today: Part 1, below, looks at how America punishes poor people living on the street, part of a larger pattern of dealing with poverty through criminalization rather than social and policy fixes that have been shown to work better. Part 2  addresses the growing apathy toward the plight of the poor, after decades of conservative demonization. As the gap between the wealthy and the poor keeps growing, there is a sense that more and more people don't want to deal with the poor. Is that how you want our society to be? What's your role? It's time to rethink poverty. Part 3 in our series, running on Wednesday, looks at copper theft as a means of survival in California's poorest city. Part 4 will look into the psychology of how people react when they encounter street homeless. Much more to come. -- Don Hazen, executive editor of AlterNet

In 2008, Atlanta police orchestrated an unusual sting: officers shed their uniforms to go undercover as tourists and office workers, a stunt designed to entrap beggars in the city's tourist areas. Forty-four people were arrested for panhandling in one month. The best part about the sting, police officials said at the time, according to the  Atlanta Journal Constitution, was that while actual tourists rarely bothered to come back to testify about their terrible abuse at the hands of the city's beggars, the undercover cops would make for enthusiastic witnesses. At the time, Atlanta had banned panhandling within 15 feet of an ATM, bus stop, taxi stand, payphone, public toilet -- and anywhere after dark. 

Laws that restrict panhandling are designed to target poor people living on the street. Other examples of laws that apply almost exclusively to the unhoused include bans on sitting or lying down on the sidewalk, eating in public, setting up camp or sleeping in a park or other public places. Advocates say these laws are used as a tool to drive the homeless out of sight. 

Take the case of Gary Williams. Williams just spent 30 days in jail, because on two occasions a San Francisco police officer found him slumped over, asleep, on a milk crate. He did not have any camping gear with him -- not even a blanket -- yet he found himself charged with public nuisance, unauthorized lodging, and obstructing the sidewalk, his lawyer, Andrea Lindsay, tells AlterNet. The first two are misdemeanors, which carry up to a year of jail time each. On Monday, Williams pled guilty to one count of unauthorized lodging after the judge warned him that he could end up in jail for two years. The plea deal Williams opted for means he's banned from the two blocks where he used to reside and will be on probation for three years. 

"This is a dude who ended up in jail for the heinous crime of sitting," Paul Boden, organizing director for the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) tells AlterNet. "When poor people stand for their rights, they sit in jail." 

2 Years in Jail for Sitting on a Milk Crate? The Shocking Ways America...

Laws all over the country are designed solely to target the homeless, a glaring example of the criminalization of poverty in America. There are better solutions.

February 2, 2013  |  

Like this article?

Join our email list:

Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email.

Editor's note: There are more than one million homeless people in America and 138 million people who live paycheck to paycheck. Many more are struggling, wondering how they'll make rent or get enough food. Those numbers are astounding. This is America. Many proudly think our society is fair, but the evidence overwhelmingly shows that fairness in America is a myth. In the weeks and months ahead, AlterNet will shine more light on America's economic injustice in an ongoing series, Hard Times USA. Since many have chosen to look aside, or think the traditional ways of doing politics will fix things, there is still much to learn about how this problem will be solved, or not solved.

We are launching our ongoing series with two articles today: Part 1, below, looks at how America punishes poor people living on the street, part of a larger pattern of dealing with poverty through criminalization rather than social and policy fixes that have been shown to work better. Part 2  addresses the growing apathy toward the plight of the poor, after decades of conservative demonization. As the gap between the wealthy and the poor keeps growing, there is a sense that more and more people don't want to deal with the poor. Is that how you want our society to be? What's your role? It's time to rethink poverty. Part 3 in our series, running on Wednesday, looks at copper theft as a means of survival in California's poorest city. Part 4 will look into the psychology of how people react when they encounter street homeless. Much more to come. -- Don Hazen, executive editor of AlterNet

In 2008, Atlanta police orchestrated an unusual sting: officers shed their uniforms to go undercover as tourists and office workers, a stunt designed to entrap beggars in the city's tourist areas. Forty-four people were arrested for panhandling in one month. The best part about the sting, police officials said at the time, according to the  Atlanta Journal Constitution, was that while actual tourists rarely bothered to come back to testify about their terrible abuse at the hands of the city's beggars, the undercover cops would make for enthusiastic witnesses. At the time, Atlanta had banned panhandling within 15 feet of an ATM, bus stop, taxi stand, payphone, public toilet -- and anywhere after dark. 

Laws that restrict panhandling are designed to target poor people living on the street. Other examples of laws that apply almost exclusively to the unhoused include bans on sitting or lying down on the sidewalk, eating in public, setting up camp or sleeping in a park or other public places. Advocates say these laws are used as a tool to drive the homeless out of sight. 

Take the case of Gary Williams. Williams just spent 30 days in jail, because on two occasions a San Francisco police officer found him slumped over, asleep, on a milk crate. He did not have any camping gear with him -- not even a blanket -- yet he found himself charged with public nuisance, unauthorized lodging, and obstructing the sidewalk, his lawyer, Andrea Lindsay, tells AlterNet. The first two are misdemeanors, which carry up to a year of jail time each. On Monday, Williams pled guilty to one count of unauthorized lodging after the judge warned him that he could end up in jail for two years. The plea deal Williams opted for means he's banned from the two blocks where he used to reside and will be on probation for three years. 

"This is a dude who ended up in jail for the heinous crime of sitting," Paul Boden, organizing director for the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) tells AlterNet. "When poor people stand for their rights, they sit in jail." 

Take Ecstasy, Save Your Relationship

An Oxford ethicist argues taking "love-enhancing" drugs could be a moral imperative for modern parents.

Photo Credit: © Peter Bernik/ Shutterstock.com

February 1, 2013  |  

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The divorce rate is high. Internet dating has  killed romance. And we are all  going to die alone.

But it might not have to be that way, says Oxford ethicist Brian Earp and colleagues Anders Sandberg and Julian Savulescu. Not if couples start taking ecstasy, that is. So-called love-inducing drugs like oxytocin and MDMA could be the answer to a commitment-averse culture, Earp  tells Ross Andersen at the Atlantic:

If you look at this in the context of evolutionary biology, you realize that in order to maximize the survival of their genes, parents need to have emotional systems that keep them together until their children are sufficiently grown… [but] since we now outlive our ancestors by decades, the evolved pair-bonding instincts upon which modern relationships are built often break down or dissolve long before “death do us part.”

We see this in the high divorce rates and long term relationship break up rates in countries where both partners enjoy freedom — especially economic freedom. We are simply not built to pull off decades-long relationships in the modern world.

If a lasting, drug-induced commitment to a lackluster partner doesn’t sound personally appealing, do it for the kids, Earp argues. Despite  ample evidence that suggests couples who separate amicably can go on to raise healthy, happy kids in single-parent households, Earp still favors the two-parent model:

Imagine a couple that is thinking about breaking up or getting a divorce, but they have young children who would likely be harmed by their parents’ separation. In this situation, there are vulnerable third parties involved, and we have argued that parents have a responsibility — all else being equal — to preserve and enhance their relationships for the sake of their children, at least until the children have matured and can take care of themselves…

If love drugs ever become safely and cheaply available; if they could be shown to improve love, commitment, and marital well-being — and thereby lessen the chance (or the need) for divorce; if other interventions had been tried and failed; and if side-effects or other complications could be minimized, then we think that some couples might have an obligation to give them a try.

And if propping up an otherwise failing relationship through pharmacology sounds ethically  dubious to you, Earp has an answer ready. He is an ethicist, after all:

As it is the parent taking the drug, voluntarily and under conditions of informed consent, and so long as this drug-based treatment had a reasonable chance of improving her ability to care for her own offspring, there would seem to be little to worry about in terms of ethics. Some people might be concerned that this drug-induced “love” would be inauthentic in some way – but it depends on what you take as your baseline. Perhaps the authentic situation is the one in which feelings of love and contentment occur naturally between the parent and the child, and it is only a disordered biochemical state that brought about the apathy actually felt by the mother…

It’s often said that you don’t have an obligation to love someone, usually based on the idea that it is impossible to voluntarily control our emotions. But if love drugs make such control more possible, then there might be some loves that should be felt.

Weekly Bull/Bear Recap: Jan. 28-Feb. 1, 2013

From Rodrigo Serrano of Rational Capitalist Speculator,

This objective report concisely summarizes important macro events over the past week.  It is not geared to push an agenda.  Impartiality is necessary to avoid costly psychological traps, which all investors are prone to, such as confirmation, conservatism, and endowment biases.

Bull

U.S. Economic Activity is beginning to reaccelerate:

+  The global economy is set to reaccelerate in the coming months according to JP Morgan’s Global Manufacturing PMI, led by a reacceleration in China (due to domestic demand) and firming U.S. activity.  Improvement in these countries is spilling over into Europe…

+  …Germany’s Markit Manufacturing PMI is now just a smidgen below 50, which delineates between contraction and expansion, at 49.8 (an 11-month high).  Furthermore, Consumer climate, reported by the Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (Gfk) group, reveals an improving state of confidence.  Perhaps this is due to a recovering job market.  Meanwhile, while still contracting, the majority of country-specific PMIs (Spain, Italy, Hungary, and Czech Republic) indicate the worse is over of the region’s recession.  The improvement in the global economy can also be seen in Brazil, where the unemployment rate has fallen to a record low.

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(Source: Markit Economics

 

Bear

- Investors have piled into bullish bets (but earnings have flatlined since Q2 2011), economists all agree that the economy is poised to expand, the VIX is at 2007 levels before the crisis struck, and the bears are capitulating.  All are signs of extreme complacency in the face of festering bearish macro trends……  

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(Weekly Readings —— Solid Line = 32-week average)

- …..and why are investors giddy?  Because stocks keep on rising.  But smart investors know to use REAL, not Nominal gains to correctly value wealth.  “Zimbabwe’s stock market was the best performer this decade — but your entire portfolio now buys you 3 eggs.” — Kyle Bass

- The U.S. Economy is extremely vulnerable and is on the cusp of recession: 

  • Bull are doused with a bucket of cold water as 4th quarter U.S. GDPprints negative for the first time since Q2 2009.  The negative print is a crystal clear indication of how weak and vulnerable this recovery is.  Curtailing government expenditures, higher taxes, and rising gas prices as the summer approaches will be too much for the economy to bear.
  • U.S. Consumer confidence, as per the Conference Board Consumer Confidence survey, plunges again in January, erasing all of 2012’s gains.  Furthermore, the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index falls for the fourth straight week.  Weekly sales metrics, such as Goldman ICSCand Redbook, reveal weakening consumption trends.  This ongoing trend casts a cloud over the direction of consumer spending as worries over reduced incomes due to the expiring 2-yr payroll tax holiday ferment.
  • The Household Survey, embedded beneath the widely touted headline jobs number this morning, has not confirmed the improving job market for the third successive month.  
  • The FOMC meeting reveals that Fed officials are worried about a stalling economy (confirmed by Q4 numbers) as well as creeping disinflation.  Monetary policy is powerless to arrest continued sluggish in the economy; worse, as investors appreciate the negative impact of reduced consumer incomes, there will be a crisis of confidence.  ”Don’t Fight the Fed” will be a maxim of the past.  

- Europe’s troubles lurk in the background, receiving very little press.  The budget scandal in Spain is quietly picking steam and Retail Sales in the country fell for the 30th consecutive month in December.  Spanish 10-yr borrowing costs advance roughly 5% this week.  Looking at a 3-month view, we now see a higher high.  Meanwhile, car sales throughout the periphery remain in a distinguishable downtrend and retail sales throughout the region signal consumer retrenchment.  Moreover, Italian Consumer Confidence slumps to a 17-yr low and Business Confidence unexpectedly falls.

- If China has really bottomed and is on the brink of a sustainable recovery, try telling that to the Australians.  Straya’s mining-based economy is signaling a red flag for global recovery enthusiasts.

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Salinger and Harper to be replaced by Invasive Plant Inventory in US school curriculum

A new curriculum for public schools across the United States will soon make it mandatory for at least 70 percent of all assigned books to be works of non-fiction, eliminating classic works that have influenced great thinkers for centuries.

By 2014, schools in 46 out of 50 states will have adopted this new curriculum, which favors “informational texts” approved by the Common Core State Standards to prepare students for the workplace.

Suggested books included works by the Environmental Protection Agency, like the Recommended Levels of Insulation, as well as the Invasive Plant Inventory by California’s Invasive Plant Council.

While the new curriculum might provide practical information, it would also deprive students of classic literary works that have long been a part of the American culture. In studying the role of fiction in education, scientists have recently learned that fictional narratives develop human social and emotional life, giving students the ability to better understand people, the New York Times reports. 

Dr. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, said that reading provides a vivid stimulation of reality that “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up on myriad interacting instances of cause and effect.”

But books such as JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rue and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird will no longer be the preferred reading assigned in US schools. Classic novels by authors including Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoyevksy, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway could soon be forgotten and replaced with textbook-style history books and other works of nonfiction put together by government departments or research groups.

“I’m afraid we are taking out all imaginative reading and creativity in our English classes,” Jamie Highfill, a teacher at Woodland Junior High School in Arkansas, told The Telegraph. “In the end, education has to be about more than simply ensuring that kids can get a job. Isn’t it supposed to be about making well-rounded citizens?”

Supporters of the new curriculum claim that informational texts would make students better prepared for both college and the workplace at a time when millions of high school students drop out of school each year. The nonfiction could teach them to write factually and concisely. 

So many kids, often as many as 50 percent, graduate high school … demonstrably not ready for the demands of a first-year college course or job-training program,” David Coleman, president of the College Board, told NPR.

The new curriculum has stirred a heated debate among academics, with some teachers and professors employed in English departments hesitant about giving up their favorite literary works.

“English is the only compulsory class where students are encouraged to think differently, to be imaginative and creative, and if we take fiction out of the English curriculum, where are our kids going to get that?” said curriculum and instruction graduate research assistant Shea Kerkhoff in an interview with Technician Online.

The 46 US states who will implement the new curriculum have already signed onto the Common Core standards and some have already adopted the new guidelines.

This Time Is Different

Authored by Dr. Tim Morgan, Tullet Prebon,

The 2008 crash resulted from the bursting of the biggest bubble in financial history, a ‘credit super-cycle’ that spanned more than three decades. How did this happen?

As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have demonstrated in their magisterial book This Time Is Different, asset bubbles are almost as old as money itself. The Reinhart and Rogoff book tracks financial excess over eight centuries, but it would be no surprise at all if the Hittites, the Medes, the Persians and the Romans, too, had bubbles of their own. All you need for a bubble is ready credit and collective gullibility.

Some might draw comfort from the observation that bubbles are a long established aberration, arguing that the boom-and-bust cycle of recent years is nothing abnormal. Any such comfort would be misplaced, for two main reasons: first, the excesses of recent years have reached a scale which exceeds anything that has been experienced before; and second, and more disturbing still, the developments which led to the financial crisis of 2008 amounted to a process of sequential bubbles, a process in which the bursting of each bubble was followed by the immediate creation of another.

Though the sequential nature of the pre-2008 process marks this as something that really is different, we can, nevertheless, learn important lessons from the bubbles of the past.

  • First, bubbles follow an approximately symmetrical track, in which the spike in asset values is followed by a collapse of roughly similar scale and duration. If this holds true now, we are in for a very long and nasty period of retreat.
  • Second, easy access to leverage is critical, as bubbles cannot happen if investors are limited to equity.
  • Third, most bubbles look idiotic when seen with hindsight.
  • Fourth – and although institutional arrangements are critical – the real driving dynamic of bubbles is a psychological process which combines greed, the willing suspension of disbelief and the development of a herd mentality.

“tulips from Amsterdam”

One of the most famous historical bubbles is the tulip mania which gripped the United Provinces (the Netherlands) during the winter of 1636-37. Tulip bulbs had been introduced to Europe from the Ottoman Empire by Obier de Busbeq in 1554, and found particular favour in the United Provinces after 1593, when Carolus Closius proved that these exotic plants could thrive in the harsher Dutch climate.

The tulip was a plant whose beauty and novelty had a particular appeal, but tulip mania would not have occurred without favourable social and economic conditions. The Dutch had been engaged in a long war for independence from Spain since 1568 and, though final victory was still some years away, the original Republic of the Seven Provinces of the Netherlands declared independence from Spain in 1581. This was the beginning of the great Dutch Golden Age. In this remarkable period, the Netherlands underwent some fundamental and pioneering changes which included the establishment of trading dominance, great progress in science and invention, and the creation of corporate finance, as well as the accumulation of vast wealth, the accession of the Netherlands to global power status, and great expansion of industry.

This was a period in which huge economic, business, scientific, trading and naval progress was partnered by remarkable achievements in art (Rembrandt and Vermeer), architecture and literature. The prosperity of this period created a wealthy bourgeoisie which displayed its affluence in grand houses with exquisite gardens. Enter the tulip.

For the newly-emergent Dutch bourgeoisie, the tulip was the “must have” consumer symbol of the 1630s, particularly since selective breeding had produced some remarkably exotic new plants. Tulips cannot be grown overnight, but take between seven and twelve years to reach maturity. Moreover, tulips bloom for barely a week during the spring, meaning that bulbs can be uprooted and sold during the autumn and winter months. A thriving market in bulbs developed in the Netherlands even though short-selling was outlawed in 1610. Speculators seem to have entered the tulip market in 1634, setting the scene for tulip mania.

The tulip bubble did not revolve around a physical trade in bulbs but, rather, involved a paper market in which people could participate with no margin at all. Indeed, the tulip bubble followed immediately upon the heels of the creation by the Dutch of the first futures market. Bulbs could change hands as often as ten times each day but, because of the abrupt collapse of the paper market, no physical deliveries were ever made.

Price escalation was remarkable, with single bulbs reaching values that exceeded the price of a large house. A Viceroy bulb was sold for 2,500 florins at a time when a skilled worker might earn 150 florins a year. Putting these absurd values into modern terms is almost impossible because of scant data, but the comparison with skilled earnings suggests values of around £500,0003, which also makes some sense in relation to property prices. In any event, a bubble which began in mid-November 1636 was over by the end of February 1637.

Though tulip mania was extremely brief, and available data is very limited, we can learn some pertinent lessons from this strange event.

For a start, this bubble looks idiotic from any rational perspective – how on earth could a humble bulb become as valuable as a mansion, or equivalent to 17 years of skilled wages? Second, trading in these ludicrously overvalued items took place in then novel forms (such as futures), and were conducted on unregulated fringe markets rather than in the recognised exchanges.

Third, participants in the mania lost the use of their critical faculties. Many people – not just speculators and the wealthy, but individuals as diverse as farmers, mechanics, shopkeepers, maidservants and chimney-sweeps – saw bulb investment as a one-way street to overnight prosperity. Huge paper fortunes were made by people whose euphoria turned to despair as they were wiped out financially.

The story that a sailor ate a hugely valuable bulb, which he mistook for an onion, is probably apocryphal (because it would have poisoned him), but there can be little doubt that this was a period of a bizarre mass psychology verging on collective insanity.

all at sea

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 commands a special place in the litany of lunacy that is the history of bubbles.

The South Sea Company was established in 1711 as a joint government and private entity created to manage the national debt. Britain’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession was imposing heavy costs on the exchequer, and the Bank of England’s attempt to finance this through two successive lotteries had not been a success. The government therefore asked an unlicensed bank, the Hollow Sword Blade Company, to organise what became the first successful national lottery to be floated in Britain. The twist to this lottery was that prizes were paid out as annuities, thus leaving the bulk of the capital in government hands.

After this, government set up the South Sea Company, which took over £9m of national debt and issued shares to the same amount, receiving an annual payment from government equivalent to 6% of the outstanding debt (£540,000) plus operating costs of £28,000. As an added incentive, government granted the company a monopoly of trade with South America, a monopoly which would be without value unless Britain could break the Spanish hegemony in the Americas, an event which, at that time, was wildly implausible.

The potentially-huge profits from this monopoly grabbed speculator attention even though the real likelihood of any returns ever actually accruing was extremely remote. Despite very limited concessions secured in 1713 at the end of the war, the trading monopoly remained all but worthless, and company shares remained below their issue price, a situation not helped by the resumption of war with Spain in 1718.

Even so, shares in the company, effectively backed by the national debt, began to rise in price, a process characterised by insider dealing and boosted by the spreading of rumours.

Between January and May 1720, the share price rose from £128 to £550 as rumours of lucrative returns from the monopoly spread amongst speculators. What, many argued, could be better than a government-backed company with enormous leverage to monopolistic profits in the fabled Americas? Legislation, passed under the auspices of Company insiders and banning the creation of unlicensed joint stock enterprises, spurred the share price to a peak of £890 in early June. This was bolstered by Company directors, who bought stock at inflated prices to protect the value of investments acquired at much lower levels. The share price peaked at £1,000 in August 1720, but the shares then lost 85% of their inflated market value in a matter of weeks.

Like the Dutch tulip mania, the South Sea Bubble was an example which fused greed and crowd psychology with novel market practices, albeit compounded by rampant corruption in high places. Even Sir Isaac Newton, presumably a man of common sense, lost £20,000 (equivalent to perhaps £2.5m today) in the pursuit of the chimera of vast, but nebulous, unearned riches.

Any rational observer, even if unaware of the insider dealing and other forms of corruption in which the shares were mired, should surely have realised that an eight-fold escalation in the stock price based entirely on implausible speculation was, quite literally, ‘too good to be true’.

In his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay ranked the South Sea Company and other bubbles with alchemy, witch-hunts and fortune-telling as instances of collective insanity. Whilst other such foibles have tended to retreat in the face of science, financial credulity remains alive and well, which means that we need to know how and why these instances of collective insanity seem to be hard-wired into human financial behaviour.

made in Japan

In some respects, the Japanese asset bubble of the 1980s provided a ‘dry run’ for the compounded bubbles of the super-cycle. Japan’s post-war economic miracle was founded on comparatively straightforward policies. Saving was encouraged, and was channelled into domestic rather than foreign capital markets, which meant that investment capital was available very cheaply indeed. Exports were encouraged, imports were deterred by tariff barriers, and consumption at home was discouraged. The economic transformation of Japan in the four decades after 1945 was thus export-driven, and led by firms which had access to abundant, low-cost capital.

By the early 1980s, Japan’s economic success was beginning to lead to unrealistic expectations about future prosperity. Many commentators, abroad as well as at home, used the ‘fool’s guideline’ of extrapolation to contend that Japan would, in the foreseeable future, oust America as the world’s biggest economy. The international expansion of Japanese banks and securities houses was reflected in the proliferation of sushi bars in New York and London. Boosted by the diversion of still-cheap capital from industry into real estate, property values in Japan soared, peaking at $215,000 per square metre in the prized Ginza district of Tokyo.

Comforted by inflated property values, banks made loans which the borrowers were in no position to repay. The theoretical value of the grounds of the Imperial Palace came to exceed the paper value of the entire state of California. Meanwhile, a soaring yen was pricing Japanese exports out of world markets.

Though comparatively gradual – mirroring, in true bubble fashion, the relatively slow build-up of asset values – the bursting of the bubble was devastating. Properties lost more than 90% of their peak values, and the government’s policy of propping up insolvent banks and corporations created “zombie companies” of the type that exist today in many countries. Having peaked at almost 39,000 at the end of 1989, the Nikkei 225 index of leading industrial stocks deteriorated relentlessly, bottoming at 7,055 in March 2009.

The Japanese economy was plunged into the “lost decade” which, in reality, could now be called the ‘lost two decades’. In 2011, Japanese government debt stood at 208% of GDP, a number regarded as sustainable only because of the country’s historic high savings ratio (though this ratio is, in fact, subject to ongoing deterioration as the population ages).

2008 – the biggest bust

With hindsight, we now know that the Japanese asset bust was an early manifestation of the ‘credit supercycle’, which can be regarded as ‘the biggest bubble in history’. The general outlines of the super-cycle bubble are reasonably well understood, even if the underlying dynamic is not. To understand this enormous boom-bust event, we need to distinguish between the tangible components of the bubble and its underlying psychological and cultural dimensions.

Conventional analysis argues that tangible problems began with the proliferation of subprime lending in the United States. Perhaps the single biggest contributory factor to the subprime fiasco was the breaking of the link between borrower and lender. Whereas, traditionally, banks assessed the viability of the borrower in terms of long-term repayment, the creation of bundled MBSs (mortgage-backed securities) severed this link.

Astute operators could now strip risk from return, pocketing high returns whilst unloading the associated high risk. The securitisation of mortgages was a major innovative failing in the system, as was the reliance mistakenly placed on credit-rating agencies which, of course, were paid by the issuers of the bundled securities. Another contributory innovation was the use of ARM (adjustable rate mortgage) products, designed to keep the borrower solvent just long enough for the originators of the mortgages to divest the packaged loans.

The authorities (and, in particular, the Federal Reserve) must bear a big share of culpability for failing to spot the mispricing of risk which resulted from the on-sale of mortgage debt. The way in which banks were keeping the true scale of potential liabilities off their balance sheets completely eluded regulators, and Alan Greenspan’s belief that banks would always act in the best interests of shareholders was breathtakingly naive. In America, as for that matter in Britain and elsewhere, central banks’ monetary policies were concentrated on retail inflation (which had for some years been depressed both by benign commodity markets and by the influx of ever-cheaper goods from Asia), and ignored asset price escalation.

Meanwhile, banks’ capital ratios had expanded, in part because of ever-looser definitions of capital and assets and in part because of sheer regulatory negligence. Just as Greenspan’s Fed believed that bankers were the best people to determine their shareholders’ interests, British chancellor Gordon Brown took pride in a “light touch” regulatory system which saw British banks’ total risk assets surge to more than £3,900bn on the back of just £120bn of pure loss-absorbing capital or TCE (tangible common equity).

It does not seem to have occurred to anyone – least of all to the American, British and other regulatory authorities – that a genuine capital reserve of less than 2% of assets could be overwhelmed by even a relatively modest correction in asset prices.

Both sides of the reserves ratio equation were distorted by regulatory negligence. On the assets side, banks were allowed to risk-weight their assets, which turned out to be a disastrous mistake. Triple-A rated government bonds were, not unnaturally, regarded as AFS (‘available for sale’) and accorded a zero-risk rating, but so, too, in practice, were the AAA portions that banks, with the assistance of the rating agencies, managed to slice out of MBSs (mortgage-backed securities) and CDOs (collateralised debt obligations).

Mortgages of all types were allowed to be risk-weighted downwards to 50% of their book value which, at best, reflected a nostalgic, pre-subprime understanding of mortgage risk on the part of the regulators. In the US, banks were allowed to net-off their derivatives exposures, such that J.P. Morgan Chase, for example, carried derivatives of $80bn on its balance sheet even though the gross value of securities and derivatives was close to $1.5 trillion. The widespread assumption that potential losses on debt instruments were covered by insurance overlooked the fact that all such insurances were placed with a small group of insurers (most notably AIG) which were not remotely capable of bearing system-wide risk.

Meanwhile, innovative definitions allowed banks’ reported capital to expand from genuine TCE to include book gains on equities, and provisions for deferred tax and impairment. Even some forms of loan capital were allowed to be included in banks’ reported equity.

Together, the risk-weighting of assets, and the use of ever-looser definitions of capital, combined to produce seemingly-reassuring reserves ratios which turned out to be wildly misleading. Lehman Brothers, for example, reported a capital adequacy ratio of 16.1% shortly before it collapsed, whilst the reported pre-crash ratios for Northern Rock and Kaupthing were 17.5% and 11.2% respectively.

Well before 2007, the escalation in the scale of indebtedness had rendered a crash inevitable. Moreover, the two triggers that would bring the edifice crashing down could hardly have been more obvious. First, the resetting of ARM mortgage interest rates made huge subprime default losses inevitable unless property prices rose indefinitely, which was a logical impossibility. Subprime defaults would in turn undermine the asset bases of banks holding the toxic assets that the sliced-and-diced mortgage-based instruments were bound to become as soon as property price escalation ceased.

The second obvious trigger was a seizure in liquidity. The escalation in the scale of debt had far exceeded domestic depositor funds, not least because savings ratios had plunged as borrowing and consumption had displaced saving and prudence in the Western public psyche. Unlike depositors – a stable source of funding, in the absence of bank runs – the wholesale funding markets which had provided the bulk of escalating leverage were perfectly capable of seizing up virtually overnight. For this reason, a liquidity seizure crystallised what was essentially a leverage problem.

At this point, three compounding problems kicked in.

  • The first was the termination of a long-standing ‘monetary ratchet’ process – low rates created bubbles, and the authorities countered each ensuing downturn by cutting rates still further, but, this time around, prior rate reductions left little scope for further relaxation.
  • Second, economies had become dependent upon debt-fuelled consumption, and any reversal in debt availability was bound to unwind the earlier (and largely illusory) ‘growth’ created by debt-fuelled consumer spending. As figs. 2.2 and 2.3 show, the relationship between borrowing and associated growth had been worsening for some years, such that the $4.1 trillion expansion in nominal US economic output between 2001 and 2007 had been far exceeded by an increase of $6.7 trillion in consumer debt, and the growth/borrowing equation had slumped.
  • Third, some countries – most notably the United Kingdom – had compounded consumer debt dependency by mistaking illusory (debt-fuelled) economic expansion for ‘real’ growth, and had expanded public spending accordingly, a process which created huge fiscal deficits as soon as leverage expansion ceased. Ultimately, the leverage-driven ‘great bubble’ in pan-Western property values had created the conditions for a deleveraging downturn, something for which governments’ previous experience of destocking recessions had provided no realistic appreciation.

familiar features

Though, as we shall see, the bursting of the super-cycle in 2008 had some novel aspects, the process nevertheless embraced many features of past bubbles.

A number of points are common to these past bubbles, factors which include easy credit, low borrowing costs, financial innovation (in the form of activities which take place outside established markets, and/or are unregulated, and/or are outright illegal), weak institutional structures, opportunism by some market participants, and the emergence of some form of mass psychology in which fear is wholly ousted by greed.

Often, the objects of speculation are items which can seem wholly irrational with the benefit of hindsight (how on earth could tulip bulbs, for instance, have become so absurdly over-valued?) A further important point about bubbles is that they can inflate apparent prosperity, but the post-burst effects include the destruction of value and the impairment of economic output for an extended period. In reality, though, the bursting of a bubble does not destroy capital, but simply exposes the extent to which value has already been destroyed by rash investment.

Of course, the characteristics of earlier excesses have not been absent in contemporary events. As with tulip bulbs, South Sea stock and Victorian railways, recent years have witnessed the operation of mass psychologies in which rational judgement has been suspended as greed has triumphed over fear. Innovative practices, often lying outside established markets, have abounded. Examples of such innovations have included subprime and adjustable-rate mortgages, and the proliferation of an ‘alphabet soup’ of the derivatives that Warren Buffett famously described as “financial weapons of mass destruction”. Credit became available in excessive amounts, and the price of credit was far too low (a factor which, we believe, may have been exacerbated by a widespread under-reporting of inflation).

why this time is different

Whilst it shared many of the characteristics of previous such events, the credit super-cycle bubble which burst in 2008 differed from them in at least two respects, and arguably differed in a third dimension as well.

The first big difference was that the scale and scope of the 2008 crash far exceeded anything that had gone before. Though it began in America (with parallel events taking place in a number of other Western countries), globalisation ensured that the crash was transmitted around the world. The total losses resulting from the crash are almost impossible to estimate, not least because of notional losses created by falling asset prices, but even a minimal estimate of $4 trillion equates to about 5.7% of global GDP, with every possibility that eventual losses will turn out to have been far greater than this.

The second big difference between the super-cycle and previous bubbles lay in timing. A gap of more than 80 years elapsed between the tulip mania of 1636-37 and the South Sea bubble of 1720, though the latter had an overseas corollary in the Mississippi bubble of the same year. The next major bubble, the British railway mania of the 1840s, followed an even longer time-gap, and a further interval of about seven decades separated the dethroning of the crooked “railway king” (George Hudson) in 1846 from the onset of the ‘roaring twenties’ bubble which culminated in the Wall Street Crash. Though smaller bubbles (such as Poseidon) occurred in between, the next really big bubble did not occur until the 1980s, when Japanese asset values lost contact with reality.

In recent years, however, intervals between bubbles have virtually disappeared, such that the decade prior to the 2008 crash was characterised by a series of events which overlapped in time. Property price bubbles were the greatest single cause of the financial crisis, but there were complementary bubbles in a variety of other asset categories.

The dot-com bubble (1995-2000) reflected a willing suspension of critical faculties where the potential for supposedly ‘high tech’ equities were concerned, and historians of the future are likely to marvel at the idiocy which attached huge values to companies which lacked earnings, cash flow or a proven track record, and were often measured by the bizarre metric of “cash-burn”. Other bubbles occurred in property markets in the United States, Britain, Ireland, Spain, China, Romania and other countries, as well as in commodities such as uranium and rhodium. Economy-wide bubbles developed in countries such as Iceland, Ireland and Dubai. Perhaps the most significant bubble of the lot – for reasons which will become apparent later – was that which carried the price of oil from an average of $25/b in 2002 to a peak of almost $150/b in 2008.

This rash of bubbles suggests that recent years have witnessed the emergence of a distinctive new trend, which is described here as a credit super-cycle, a mechanism which compounds individual bubbles into a broader pattern.

This report argues that a third big difference may be that the super-cycle bubble coincided with a weakening in the fundamental growth dynamic. What we need to establish is the ‘underlying narrative’ that has compressed the well-spaced bubble-forming processes of the past into the single, compounded-bubble dynamic of the credit super-cycle.

It is suggested here that this narrative must include:

  • A mass psychological change which has elevated the importance of immediate consumption whilst weakening perceptions both of risks and of longer-term consequences.
  • Institutional weaknesses which have undermined regulatory oversight whilst simultaneously facilitating the provision of excessive credit through the creation of high-risk instruments.
  • Mispricing of risk, compounded by false appreciation of economic prospects and by the distortion of essential data.
  • A political, business and consumer mind-set which elevates the importance of the immediate whilst under-emphasising the longer term.
  • A distortion of the capitalist model which has created a widening chasm between ‘capitalism in principle’ and ‘capitalism in practice’.

Before we can put the credit super-cycle into its proper context, however, we need to appreciate three critical issues, each of which is grossly misunderstood.

  1. The first of these is the vast folly of globalisation. This has impoverished and weakened the West whilst ensuring that few countries are immune from the consequences of the unwinding of a world economy which has become a hostage to future growth assumptions at precisely the same time that the scope for generating real growth is deteriorating.
  2. The second critical issue is the undermining of official economic and fiscal data, a process which has disguised many of the most alarming features of the super-cycle.
  3. Third, there has been a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamic which really drives the economy. Often regarded as a monetary construct, the economy is, in the final analysis, an energy system, and the critical supply of surplus energy has been in seemingly-inexorable decline for at least three decades.

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Texas college shootout: three people injured

A shootout at a Texas community college has left three people wounded, including the two suspects.

Harris County Sheriff's spokesman Armando Tello said the shooting at  the Lone Star College in north Houston was the result of an altercation between two people.

Carlton Berry, aged 22, has been charged with aggravated assault.

Berry and a 24-year-old student, identified as Jody Neal, were both wounded and taken to hospital.

A college maintenance man was also injured after getting caught in the crossfire, and a female student was treated for a medical complication.

Neal's relatives said he was taken to Harris Health Ben Taub Hospital Emergency Centre.

"All I know he got shot three times. That's all I know," Reginald Neal, who identified himself as Jody Neal's uncle, told KPRC-TV. "He got shot in one of his arms, in the stomach and the leg."

Stacy Neal, Jody Neal's sister, said: "He was sitting in the study room. There (were) three people on the computer and a guy walked up the stairs and opened fire on him. They said it was just one guy that came in with a gun."

Aerial footage from local television stations showed police cars and ambulances parked on the Lone Star College System campus about 20 miles north of downtown Houston.

Emergency personnel could be seen tending to people on stretchers, while others ran from a building led by officers.

The college issued an alert on its website telling students and staff to take immediate shelter or avoid the campus. The school later announced the campus had been evacuated and would remain closed for the rest of the day.

Cody Harris, 20, said he was in a classroom with about six or seven other students waiting for a psychology class to start when he heard eight shots. He and other students looked at each other, said "I guess we should get out of here," and fled.

"I was just worried about getting out," Mr Harris said. "I called my grandmother and asked her to pick me up."

The Lone Star College System has an enrolment of 90,000 students and six college campuses, according to its website.

Along with the college, four nearby schools in the Aldine Independent School District went into lockdown, a district spokesman said.

Lone Star student Daniel Flores, 19, said he was in a tutoring lab on the second floor doing homework when he heard six to seven shots.

"I didn't think they were shots," he said. "It sounded like someone was kicking a door."

About 60 people were in the lab, and they began running out of the room once they realised the sound was gunfire, he said. They fled to a nearby student services centre, where authorities kept them there for about 30 minutes before letting them go.

The One Chart That Explains the Massive Risk of Investing in Gold & Gold...

chart of S&P performance v. gold & gold stocks from 2001 to 2012

Viewing the chart above, a six-year old child could tell you that investing in physical gold and gold mining stocks (as indicated by the AMEX HUI gold bugs index) yielded returns from 2001 to 2012 far superior to the returns of the US S&P 500 Index over the same time period. In fact, the truth of this statement is so self-evident, that if this same child was asked what asset classes he should have been invested in over the past decade by viewing the above chart, the simplicity of that question might lead him to think that one is asking a trick question. So why is it that all the leading Wall Street investment firms stated during the visible onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 (versus the real onset of the global financial crisis quite a few years earlier) that gold was one of the riskiest assets in which one could possibly invest? The simple answer, of course, is that if they were the ones involved in the scam to take gold and silver prices down, then certainly they would not tell you that the steep, rapid (but short-lived) drop in gold/silver prices was a massive buying opportunity. However, if a six-year old can see what is so obvious, then why should a man of Warren Buffet’s prominence continue to slander gold and why does his right-hand man, Charlie Munger, make idiotic statements like “gold is a great thing to sew in your garments if you’re a Jewish family in 1939” but not to own, instead of just stating the truth that “physical gold (and physical silver) was one of the best assets to build wealth since 2001”? And if a six-year old can look at the above chart and immediately know that he or she should have beeen invested in gold and gold assets, why, according to the World Gold Council, is still only 1%, or $146 billion of the $146 trillion investable global assets, invested in gold, and 9.1% invested in money markets, 48.7% in fixed income, 37.2% in equities and 4.0% in alternative investments? (though these most recent statistics are from the end of 2010, it is doubtful that these statistics have changed much in the past two years.)

One of the main reasons why it is still likely that only 1% of all global invested assets are invested in gold is the psychological hatchet job that Wall Street and the global banking industry has performed on gold and gold stocks. For decades, bankers have repeated their false mantra that “gold and silver are incredibly risky”, using the strategy that if you tell a lie often enough, it may just be accepted as truth by the masses. The fact that millions of investors today still won’t even consider buying the top performing asset classes for more than the past decade (physical gold and physical silver, NOT the GLD and SLV), serves as testimony to the success of the bankers’ anti-gold, anti-silver propaganda campaign. Thus, the reason why just a piddling amount of investors around the world have allocated a substantial amount of their resources to gold, silver and PM stocks as of today is due to, quite simply, investor psychology. The commercial banking industry spends billions of dollars every year in marketing campaigns (exclusive of their investor relations budget), influencing and shaping investors’ beliefs into accepting a heaping pile of false beliefs. For example, according to Forbes Magazine, Bank of America spent $2 billion and Citigroup spent $1.6 billion in 2010 marketing expenses, and the biggest banks spent even far more for their annual advertising budget in recent years. As a result, bankers have been able to convince their clients that what is right for them (physical gold, silver and PM stocks) is wrong, and what is wrong for them (investing in global developed stock markets) is right.

Why else would anyone stay invested in the US S&P 500, an index, that from 2001 to the start of 2012, was still in the red (not even accounting for the effects of inflation), but for one’s blind obedience to one’s investment adviser that sells his clients on that moronic 100-year chart of US stock returns that shows an upward progression of US stocks over an entirely irrelevant 100-year period, and keeps telling his clients to be patient, because the “US market, in the long-run, has always returned a phenomenal yield”? So here is how investment advisers, all over the world, convince their clients to ignore a chart, that in plain sight, tells them that being invested in gold & gold stocks (and silver & silver stocks) for the last 12 years over any of the developed broad stock market indexes in the world was clearly the unequivocal correct decision.

Below are the four methods global investment bank investment advisers employ to convince their clients to keep doing what is best for himself and his firm (earning the firm management fees) and what is worst for themselves (degrading their investment portfolios and wealth):

(1) Frame stock market and PM stock volatility in a biased, skewed and unforthcoming manner that sells their mission while ignoring reality.

For example, when the S&P 500 index crashed, US investment advisers used the bounce from 666.79 in March, 2009 to a high of 1219.80 in April, 2010 to falsely promote the “soundness” of the US stock market like ravenous hyenas that had stumbled upon an abandoned lion kill. In other words, they ignored the “bad” volatility of a 57.69% crash to take the S&P500 down to 666.79 level and repeatedly promoted the fact that the 82.94% increase in the S&P500 was “one of the best in history” over and over and over again on television, radio and newspapers, even though the S&P 500 has still failed to regain its previous high of 1576.09 prior to the crash in October of 2007. Furthermore, though gold stocks had crashed too during this time, all global bank advisers absolutely ignored the much more significant 343% increase of the HUI gold mining index between October 24, 2008 from 150.27 to a high of 516.16 on December 2, 2009. Forget that over this same time period, gold stocks outperformed the US S&P 500 index by 313%. How many people knew that gold stocks rose 343% during this time? Probably less than 1% of all investors. The focus of global investment advisers is to bury statistics like this that compete with their precious legalized casinos called stock markets and to keep their clients invested in their legalized casinos that are stacked against their clients even when far better opportunities exist.

(2) Frame performance in a manner that again sells only their desire to keep their clients invested in global stock markets and keeps the management fees rolling in.

For example, there have been tons of articles written over the last 3-years that have titles like “What’s Wrong With Gold and Gold Stocks?” and “Why You Should Not Invest in Gold or Gold Stocks”. Commercial investment advisers are amazingly keen to talk about holding on to stocks for a long period of time because they state that one can’t judge performance over a 2-3 year period when stocks are not performing. Yet when broad stock markets go through flat periods, as the US stock market has been trapped in a 12-year period now with virtually no gains, you will never ever, not once in a blue moon, not in a million years, see a blizzard of articles shouting, “What’s Wrong With the US Stock Market!" Yet, bankers ensure that the mass media is flooded with articles about flat or poor performance of gold and silver stocks during the past three years to keep their clients away from PM stocks and they harp incessantly about this matter while completely ignoring multi-year trends in gold and silver mining stocks and keeping this information buried as well. So let’s look at both asset classes and compare performance over a reasonable 12-year investment period, not the ridiculous 100-year chart investment advisers are so keen to use. If one looks at a reasonable 12-year period between 2001 and 2013, the S&P 500 has not even returned a piddling 9% during this period, while gold has returned a whopping +524.77% (silver also returned a phenomenal yield over this same period as well). And what about gold stocks even when including the very flat last three years of performance? An almost unfathomable +1009.86% return when compared to the US S&P 500’s anemic return of 8% and change.

(3) Sell rubbish diversification strategies as “expert” advice when it is the worst advice in the world.

A great many people are afraid to concentrate their assets in gold and silver, among the best performing assets of the last 12 years, because for decades, the commercial investment industry has pounded into their brains that anything but diversification when it comes to investing is unsafe, unsound and risky. Yet diversification is a rubbish strategy used by all commercial investment advisers precisely because they lack the expertise and knowledge to know how to concentrate a portfolio properly without excessive amounts of risk. If you have the expertise, you can utilize concentration without increasing the risk of a portfolio. That’s why for years, we’ve been advocating our clients to invest very substantial amounts of their portfolio into physical gold and physical silver because frankly, despite the notorious volatility of gold and silver, we just didn’t consider gold and silver risky when they were respectively $560 a troy ounce and $9 a troy ounce. In fact, every year for the past 12 years, gold and silver has fallen, at some point during each year, to price ranges that marked solid entry prices that were low-risk, high-reward. The artificial banker-created volatility through manipulation of gold and silver prices ensured this.

A recent study by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman tracked a group of 25 wealth advisers/portfolio managers and the variance of their portfolio yields over an 8-year period. At the end of his study, Kahneman stated that he was “shocked” to discover almost no variance in the portfolio performance over the group of managers, simply because he believed that portfolio management was a task that depended upon skill and expertise. Consequently, Kahneman expected wide-variance among the managers as far as performance yields over an 8-year period were concerned. Instead, he discovered that the variances among the performance yields suggested that portfolio management was not a skilled job but one that nearly entirely revolved around blind luck. My first reaction to Kahneman’s study was that he should have started his study by sitting in an office of Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan for 3-months and he would have learned within 3-months what it took him 8-years to conclude - that Portfolio Managers have no skill and that they all use the terrible strategy of diversification to cover up their severe skill deficiencies rather than diversification being a strategy that allows them to demonstrate their skill. How many US clients were protected by the strategy of diversification in 2008 when US markets collapsed by 38.50%? By the anecdotal information I gathered, all my contacts at the big US global investment firms told me that nearly all their clients were down the same 35% to 40% that year as the S&P 500 Index. Therefore, diversification did nothing but assure that nearly all clients suffered the same uniform losses as the major global developed indexes that year. In fact, diversification is a protective strategy embraced by the global investment industry as insurance against "client flight". In other words, if all client portfolios show remarkably similar losses across multiple commerical investment firms during poor years of stock performance, the risk of client flight is small.

On the contrary, we at SmartKnowledgeU, have always taken the strategy of concentration over diversification, and in 2008, though it was a nominal gain, we still managed to yield nominal positive returns in our newsletter investment portfolio despite massive losses in all developed global stock markets. Massive outperformance can, and often, will be the result when skill and expertise, instead of luck, is applied to investment strategies. If concentration is so dangerous, and if diversification is a far superior strategy as nearly all investment advisers claim, then it may be possible for one fluke year to occur. But it is near impossible for five fluke years to occur. However, we at SmartKnowledgeU have been concentrating our Crisis Investment Opportunities portfolio since mid-2007 when we first launched, every year now for more than five years. Over that 5-½ year period, we’ve outperformed the S&P 500 by +161.95% and even outperformed the HUI gold bugs index by +120.80% due to the strategies we use to take advantage of the banker-induced volatilty in gold and silver markets. So much for diversification and buy & hold being wise investment strategies.

(4) Sell “volatility” as “dangerous & risky” even though this simply is not true.

The reason some of you may be shocked by the chart I’ve presented above is not only due to the tactics of #1 to #3 employed by the global investment industry, but also because of one additional key factor. Many of you may think that gold & gold stocks are way more volatile than my chart above shows, and you would be correct. I’ve only plotted the beginning price level of each asset above at the beginning of each year to smooth out all the interim volatility, so that everyone can clearly see the trends of each asset, even in the notoriously volatile gold (& silver) mining stocks. The reason I’ve stripped out the volatility in the above chart is because anyone that has studied the price behavior of gold & silver assets knows that Central Banks and bullion banks deliberately introduce volatility into gold & silver assets to intimidate gold & silver newbie investors into terrible decisions of selling all their gold & silver assets, or to scare off potentially new gold & silver buyers from ever buying. Though a commercial investment adviser would never tell you this secret, the evidence of this is overwhelming and since I’ve blogged many times about this very topic over the past 7 years, I’m not going to go into detail about the mechanisms by which the banking industry deliberately creates volatile prices in gold and silver assets in this article. However, since the banking industry has already sold the masses of the very false mantra that “volatility = risk”, by artificially and deliberately causing short-term volatility every year in gold and silver assets, commercial investment advisers can show their clients charts of gold, silver and mining stocks with all intra-day, intra-month or intra-year volatility, and keep convincing their clients that gold and silver are the riskiest assets in the entire investment universe while convincing them that broad stock market indexes are the safest arenas in which to invest, when indeed, the exact opposite has been true for 12 years, and will likely be true for the next decade as well.

Sure, one has to understand how and why the bankers create volatility in gold and silver assets to ensure that one enters these assets at low-risk, high-reward price points instead of high-risk, low-reward price points in order to be successful, but anyone that has studied gold and silver price behavior and understands how bankers manipulate gold and silver prices should now have the expertise to do provide this guidance. If one doesn't understand what drives gold and silver prices and one enters at a high-risk, low-reward entry price, then certainly, one could have been taken to the cleaners after banker conducted raids against gold and silver executed in the paper markets, despite what the above chart illustrates. In addition, bankers also attempt to keep people out of buying physical gold and silver and PM mining stocks by painting charts to drive and intensify fear of gold and silver collapses during their multiple, annual banker raids on gold and silver prices. Every year, after there is intense short-term volatility in gold & silver in the form of a 3-5% drop in gold and/or silver in just a couple days, more than a handful of technical chartists will come out of the woodwork to predict massive collapses of silver and gold. Last year, when these situations occurred, more than a few chartists unnecessarily stoked fires of panic by predicting imminent collapses of silver to $20 an ounce and gold back to $1200 an ounce (or even lower). And every year, these predicted collapses of a gold “bubble” and silver “bubble” never materialize. But these false predictions gain enough publicity to keep many too scared from buying their first ounce of physical gold, physical silver or their first PM mining stock. Again, remember that bankers deliberately paint these gold and silver charts to give the appearance of an imminent collapse in prices even though the underlying, undiscussed fundamentals of the physical bullion world often directly contradict the price action of gold and silver during banker-executed raids on the PMs. This is why I have maintained for many years that technical analysis in gold and silver (and even in the highly rigged stock markets) is quite useless if conducted in a vacuum. However, if one uses technical analysis in conjunction with analyzing the underlying fraudulent mechanisms of what is causing great volatility in gold & silver markets, then one is much more likely to accurately assess these rapid declines in gold and silver price as buying opportunities as opposed to fostering clients to panic sell their PMs like fleeing lemmings off a cliff's edge.

As Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman recently discovered, and as we’ve been stating at SmartKnowledgeU for nearly a decade now, the entire financial industry is built upon deception and rigging of markets. Their entire existence as ongoing, viable entities is based upon the creation and maintenance of an illusion among all their clients that they know what they are doing even though they do not, and even though they have recommended the same course of action for the past 12-years that has greatly failed. As long as the commercial investment industry can keep this illusion going, they can keep convincing their clients that gold and gold stocks (as well as silver) are the riskiest investments ever and simultaneously prevent their clients from realizing the simple truth self-evident in my one chart above and escaping the inertia of their poor advice.

Furthermore, since the conditions that launched this present gold & silver bull are even stronger and more favorable today than at the start of this PM bull, the reasons to be invested in gold (silver) and gold stocks (& silver stocks) are even stronger today than they were 12 years ago. In conclusion, ignore the simplicity of the above chart at grave risk to your own future financial health and security.

About the author: JS Kim is the Founder & Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU, a fiercely independent investment research & consulting firm with a mission of education and helping Main Street beat the corruption of Wall Street. SmartKnowledgeU was the first company in the west to move to a gold standard of pricing, a pricing mechanism to which the firm has remained firmly committed, even when gold prices have been moved lower by bankers as in recent times. Currently, we are offering a 5% to 10% discount on all SmartKnowledgeU services until the end of January only, a discount that when combined with our significant discount in prices due to current lower gold prices, will almost assuredly mark our lowest prices of the year for 2013. Follow us on twitter @smartknowledgeu.

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Psychotronic and Electromagnetic Weapons: Remote Control of the Human Nervous System

We can only stress again that the world media avoid publishing the full scale of the progress in the research of the remote control of human nervous system.

Treat Depression … Naturally. Little-Known Secrets to Boosting Mood

mind

Little-Known Secrets to Boosting Mood …

If you’re depressed, you might consider asking your doctor to prescribe anti-depressants.

But as best-selling author Christiane Northrup, MD, notes:

In 2008, we learned that the benefits of antidepressants had been greatly overstated. Former FDA psychiatrist Erick H. Turner, M.D. uncovered some startling information about Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), including Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft, the most commonly prescribed antidepressants. In reviewing all the medical literature, he learned that 94 percent of the reports showing the therapeutic benefits of SSRIs were published compared to only 14 percent of the reports showing either no benefits or inconclusive results (of taking SSRIs were published). When he weighed all the literature, Dr. Turner determined that SSRIs were no more effective than a placebo for treating most depressive patients. Those with severe depression were helped, sometimes greatly, but those with mild to moderate depression, the majority of cases, received little relief. British researchers using the Freedom of Information Act uncovered identical findings.

In January 2010, another study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) confirms these findings. The newest study also evaluated another class of antidepressants, tricyclic antidepressants. Again, researchers determined that the typical patient, one with mild to moderate depression, gets the same amount of relief from a placebo as from an antidepressant.  The first author of the study, Jay C. Fournier, MA, told Medscape, “I think the most surprising part of the findings was how severe depression has to be in order to see this clinically meaningful difference emerge between medication and placebo, and that the majority of depressed patients presenting for treatment do not fall into that very severe category.”

The New York Times reported that the co-author of the study, Robert J. DeRubeis, shared this important insight: “The message for patients with mild to moderate depression is ‘Look, medications are always an option, but there’s little evidence that they add to other efforts to shake depression–whether it’s exercise, seeing the doctor, reading about the disorder or going for psychotherapy.’”

(In addition, modern SSRI anti-depressants have been shown to increase violent and suicidal behavior in a certain percent of the population.)

So what can those with depressive tendencies do?

Secret of Human Evolution

Getting enough Omega 3 fatty acids in your diet is also crucial in preventing depression. As Science Daily notes:

Researchers from Inserm and INRA and their collaborators in Spain collaboration, have studied mice fed on a diet low in omega-3 fatty acid. They discovered that reduced levels of omega-3 had deleterious consequences on synaptic functions and emotional behaviours.

Details of this work are available in the online version of the journal Nature Neuroscience.

***

The researchers studied mice fed a life-long diet imbalanced in omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. They found that omega-3 deficiency disturbed neuronal communication specifically ….This neuronal dysfunction was accompanied by depressive behaviours among the malnourished mice.

***

Consequently, the researchers discovered that among mice subjected to an omega-3 deficient dietary regime, synaptic plasticity … is disturbed in at least two structures involved with reward, motivation and emotional regulation: the prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens.

***

“Our results can now corroborate clinical and epidemiological studies which have revealed associations between an omega-3/omega-6 imbalance and mood disorders,” explain Olivier Manzoni and Sophie Layé. “To determine if the omega-3 deficiency is responsible for these neuropsychiatric disorders additional studies are, of course, required.”

In conclusion, the authors estimate that their results provide the first biological components of an explanation for the observed correlation between omega-3 poor diets, which are very widespread in the industrialized world, and mood disorders such as depression.

Dr. Northrup writes:

One of the best ways to support health brain chemistry is by taking fish oil. Fish oil has been shown time an again to relieve mild to moderate depression. The omega-3 fatty acids are essential to brain health and, according to Capt. Joe Hibbeln, M.D., these important fats support the serotonin system, may help reduce stress and lower your risk of all kinds of mental illness. Dr. Hibbeln, Chief of Outpatient Services for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), is one of the world’s leading researchers on omega-3 fats. His findings have been compelling and encouraging.

***

Also encouraging is the largest ever clinical trial presenting in 2009 showing that fish oil may benefit half of all people with moderate to severe depression.

How could something as obscure as Omega 3s be so critical in preventing depression?

We’ve previously explained that humans evolved to eat a lot of Omega 3s:

Wild game animals have much higher levels of essential Omega 3 fatty acids than domesticated animals. Indeed, leading nutritionists say that humans evolved to consume a lot of Omega 3 fatty acids in the wild game and fish which they ate (more), and that a low Omega 3 diet is a very new trend within the last 100 years or so.

In other words, while omega 3s have just now been discovered by modern science, we evolved to get a lot of omega 3s … and if we just eat a modern, fast food diet without getting enough omega 3s, it can cause all sorts of health problems.

So something just discovered by science can be a central fuel which our bodies evolved to use.

Here’s further detail focusing on beef:

For all of human history – until the last couple of decades – people ate beef from cows (or buffalo or bison) which grazed on grass. The cows were usually strong and healthy. Their meat was lean, with very little saturated fat, as the critters ate well and got outdoor exercise. Their meat was high in good Omega 3 fats. See this and this, and humans evolved to consume a lot of Omega 3 fatty acids in the wild game and fish which they ate (more).

Today, on the other hand, beef is laden with saturated fat and almost entirely lacking healthy fats like Omega 3s, because the cows are force-fed food which makes them sick. Specifically, instead of their natural menu – grass – they are force-fed corn, which makes them sick. Because their diet makes them ill, they are given massive amounts of antibiotics.  Even with the antibiotics, the diet and living conditions would kill them pretty quickly if they aren’t slaughtered.

Science Daily explains:

In industrialized nations, diets have been impoverished in essential fatty acids since the beginning of the 20th century. The dietary ratio between omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acid and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid omega-3 increased continuously over the course of the 20th century. These fatty acids are “essential” lipids because the body cannot synthesize them from new. They must therefore be provided through food and their dietary balance is essential to maintain optimal brain functions.

So insufficient Omega 3s is a major source of depression in modern industrialized countries.

The flip side of getting enough healthy Omega 3s is to stay away from the kind of fats which cause depression: trans fats.

(Contrary to what you’ve heard, getting enough of the right kind of healthy cholesterol also decreases depression.)

Vitamins, Minerals and Antioxidants …

Antioxidants also help to prevent depression.  Specifically, oxidative stress has been correlated with depression (and see here).

On the other hand, antioxidants reduce depression. See this, this and thisHere are the tricks for finding the least expensive, most powerful antioxidants.

Moreover, a multivitamin might be smart.  Specifically, Hugh D. Riordan, M.D., argues:

It is possible to become depressed because of the lack of a sufficient amount of a single trace element.

And as we’ve previously noted, modern foods can be nutritionally depleted:

We evolved eating foods which were high in vitamins and minerals ….

But as the Journal Current Opinion in Obstetrics and Gynecology notes:

With soil depletion, overfarming and transportation of foods over hundreds of miles with loss of nutrients en route, together with the increased use of convenience and fast foods, women can be over-fed, but under-nourished in our modern society.

The Nutrition Journal points out:

In 1927 a study at King’s College, University of London, of the chemical composition of foods was initiated … to assist with diabetic dietary guidance. The study evolved and was then broadened to determine all the important organic and mineral constituents of foods, it was financed by the Medical Research Council and eventually published in 1940. Over the next 51 years subsequent editions reflected changing national dietary habits and food laws as well as advances in analytical procedures. The most recent (5th Edition) published in 1991 has comprehensively analysed 14 different categories of foods and beverages. In order to provide some insight into any variation in the quality of the foods available to us as a nation between 1940 and 1991 it was possible to compare and contrast the mineral content of 27 varieties of vegetable, 17 varieties of fruit, 10 cuts of meat and some milk and cheese products. The results demonstrate that there has been a significant loss of minerals and trace elements in these foods over that period of time.

Scripps Howard News Service noted in 2006:

The nutritional content of America’s vegetables and fruits has declined during the past 50 years — in some cases dramatically.

Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas, said that of 13 major nutrients in fruits and vegetables tracked by the Agriculture Department from 1950 to 1999, six showed noticeable declines — protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and vitamin C. The declines ranged from 6 percent for protein, 15 percent for iron, 20 percent for vitamin C, and 38 percent for riboflavin.

“It’s an amazing thing,” said Davis, adding that the decline in nutrient content has not been widely noticed.

Many other studies have reported ongoing soil depletion around the world.

***

And many people eat highly processed foods in which most antioxidants have been destroyed.

So – just as with the low levels of omega 3s – there might be less antioxidants like vitamin C in the modern diet than the levels we evolved to run on.

Good Bugs

Live Science reports:

Researchers have increasingly begun to suspect the gut was somehow linked with the brain. For instance, bowel disorders seem linked with stress-related psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and depression in people.

To learn more, scientists experimented with mice by feeding them a broth containing Lactobacillus rhamnosus JB-1. This species naturally lives in our gut, and scientists are exploring whether strains of it can be used as “probiotics” to improve our health. They discovered these rodents displayed significantly less behavior linked with stress, anxiety and depression than mice fed plain broth. Bacteria-fed mice also had significantly lower levels of the stress hormone corticosterone in response to stressful situations such as mazes.

“By affecting gut bacteria, you can have very robust and quite broad-spectrum effects on brain chemistry and behavior,” researcher John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland, told LiveScience.

“Without overstating things, this does open up the concept that we could develop therapies that can treat psychiatric disorders by targeting the gut,” Cryan added. “You could take a yogurt with a probiotic in it instead of an antidepressant.”

***

The investigators found that one GABA receptor component was present in higher levels in bacteria-fed mice in parts of the brain where it is normally lowered during depression. In addition, several GABA receptor components were reduced in parts of the brain where they are normally increased in stressed or anxious animals.

Next, the researchers severed the vagus nerve, which helps alert the central nervous system to changes in the gastrointestinal tract. They found the bacteria-induced effects on behavior and GABA receptors were diminished, suggesting this nerve is the pathway by which changes in the gut can influence the brain.

Vagal nerve stimulations have been used at times to treat depression resistant to other therapies, but “that’s a surgical technique,” Cryan said. “By targeting the gut with probiotics, we could indirectly target the vagus nerve without surgery.”

And see this.

As with Omega 3s, this sounds strange until you realize how humans evolved.

As NPR notes, our bodies are largely made up of – and supported by – bacteria:

Jeffrey Gordon, a professor at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, who studies the microbes that live on and in us, offers this factoid: “We think that there are 10 times more microbial cells on and in our bodies than there are human cells. That means that we’re 90 percent microbial and 10 percent human. There’s also an estimated 100 times more microbial genes than the genes in our human genome. So we’re really a compendium [and] an amalgamation of human and microbial parts.”

***

Gordon’s research shows that these microbes living in our bodies aren’t just there for the ride — they’re actively contributing to the normal physiology of the human body. He points to the trillions of microbes that live in our gut, doing everything from encoding enzymes to serving as pathways for vitamin production to digesting the parts of food we can’t digest on our own.

Many native cultures ate a lot of fermented foods containing healthy bacteria.  Think yogurt, miso and Inuit fermented seal blubber (gross, we know …)

In addition, antibiotics kill a lot of the healthy bacteria in our gut.  (The over-use of antibiotics has also been linked to obesity and other health problems. See this and this.  Indeed, the prestigious journal Nature suggests that antiobiotics may permanently kill off healthy gut bacteria.).

Given that the modern diet contains less fermented foods, and that antibiotics have killed off some of our healthy intestinal flora, probiotics – sold in health food stores – are an important preventative measure against depression.

Sunshine …

The New York Times points out:

A new, carefully designed randomized controlled trial— of the kind considered the gold standard in medicine — suggests bright light therapy deserves a closer look.

The study was small, involving only 89 patients ages 60 and older, but the results were remarkable. Compared with a placebo, light therapy improved mood just as well as conventional antidepressant medications, said Dr. Ritsaert Lieverse, the paper’s lead author and a psychiatrist at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam.

The effect sizes we found in this study are comparable to those reported for antidepressants, so I think efficacy is of comparable magnitude,” Dr. Lieverse said in an e-mail.

***

Since depression is often accompanied by poor sleep and other symptoms suggestive of circadian rhythm disruption, the scientists also examined markers of circadian function. The theory is that bright light therapy may act to elevate mood by activating the brain’s so-called circadian pacemaker, a structure called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. As part of the study, researchers assessed sleep quality and measured patients’ melatonin, a hormone critical for sleep-wake cycles, and urinary cortisol and salivary cortisol levels, measures of stress.

Dr. Lieverse said bright light therapy may also work by targeting depression-associated neurotransmitter systems that regulate serotonin and dopamine.

Sunshine has many if not all of these properties.  So getting some sun will help with depression.

Exercise and Sex

Many studies show that exercise reduces depression.   For example, see these reports by the Mayo Clinic, New York Times and WebMD.

Sex also helps to prevent depression.

Testosterone

And naturally boosting your testosterone level also wards off depression.

Mindfulness Meditation

Last – but not least – meditation can prevent depression.  Psychology Today reports:

Imagine if you could cure depression with a therapy that was more effective and long-lasting than expensive drugs, and which did not have any side effects. These are the claims being made for a form of Mindfulness meditation.

Psychologists from the University of Exeter recently published a study into “mindfulness-based cognitive therapy” (MBCT), finding it to be better than drugs or counseling for depression. Four months after starting, three quarters of the patients felt well enough to stop taking antidepressants.

***

MBCT was developed in the mid-Nineties by psychologists at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Toronto to help stabilize patients’ moods during and after use of antidepressants. About half of patients relapse into depression – even if they continue taking the medication. One common reason for a relapse is when a normal period of sadness turns into obsessive brooding.

***

The MBCT technique is simple, and revolves around “mindfulness meditation”. In this, you sit with your eyes closed and focus on your breathing. (See box for details). Concentrating on the rhythm of the breath helps produce a feeling of detachment. The idea is that you come to realize that thoughts come and go of their own accord, and that your conscious self is distinct from your thoughts. This realization is encouraged by gentle question-and-answer sessions modeled on those in cognitive therapy.

In the University of Exeter study, funded by the UK’s Medical Research Council, 47 per cent of patients with long-term depression suffered a relapse; the figure was 60 per cent among those taking medication alone. Other studies, including two published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, had comparable outcomes. As a result, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has recommended MBCT since 2004. Availability is still patchy though, with many sufferers seeking courses at Buddhist centers.

“One of the key features of depression is that it hijacks your attention,” says Professor Williams. “We all tend to bring to the forefront of our minds the thoughts and feelings that reflect our current mood. If you are sad, depressed or anxious, then you tend to remember the bad things that have happened to you and not the good. This drives you into a downward spiral that leads from sadness into a deeper depression. MBCT prevents and breaks that spiral.”

Psychology Today provides an example of a typical MBCT meditation:

1. Sit upright in a straight-backed chair, with your spine about an inch from the back of the chair, and your feet flat on the floor.

2. Close your eyes. Use your mind to watch your breath as it flows in and out. Observe your sensations without judgment. Do not try to alter your breathing.

3. After a while your mind will wander. Gently bring your attention back to your breath. The act of realizing that your mind has wandered – and bringing your attention back – is the key thing.

4. Your mind will eventually become calm.

5. Repeat every day for 20-30 minutes.

Postscript:  If you are severely depressed and suicidal, contact a mental health professional. 

We are not health professionals, and this does not constitute mental health or medical advice.

Treat Depression … Naturally

If you’re depressed, you might consider asking your doctor to prescribe anti-depressants.

But as best-selling author Christiane Northrup, MD, notes:

In 2008, we learned that the benefits of antidepressants had been greatly overstated. Former FDA psychiatrist Erick H. Turner, M.D. uncovered some startling information about Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), including Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft, the most commonly prescribed antidepressants. In reviewing all the medical literature, he learned that 94 percent of the reports showing the therapeutic benefits of SSRIs were published compared to only 14 percent of the reports showing either no benefits or inconclusive results (of taking SSRIs were published). When he weighed all the literature, Dr. Turner determined that SSRIs were no more effective than a placebo for treating most depressive patients. Those with severe depression were helped, sometimes greatly, but those with mild to moderate depression, the majority of cases, received little relief. British researchers using the Freedom of Information Act uncovered identical findings.

In January 2010, another study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) confirms these findings. The newest study also evaluated another class of antidepressants, tricyclic antidepressants. Again, researchers determined that the typical patient, one with mild to moderate depression, gets the same amount of relief from a placebo as from an antidepressant.  The first author of the study, Jay C. Fournier, MA, told Medscape, “I think the most surprising part of the findings was how severe depression has to be in order to see this clinically meaningful difference emerge between medication and placebo, and that the majority of depressed patients presenting for treatment do not fall into that very severe category.”

The New York Times reported that the co-author of the study, Robert J. DeRubeis, shared this important insight: “The message for patients with mild to moderate depression is ‘Look, medications are always an option, but there’s little evidence that they add to other efforts to shake depression–whether it’s exercise, seeing the doctor, reading about the disorder or going for psychotherapy.’”

(In addition, modern SSRI anti-depressants have been shown to increase violent and suicidal behavior in a certain percent of the population.)

So what can those with depressive tendencies do?

Secret of Human Evolution

Getting enough Omega 3 fatty acids in your diet is also crucial in preventing depression. As Science Daily notes:

Researchers from Inserm and INRA and their collaborators in Spain collaboration, have studied mice fed on a diet low in omega-3 fatty acid. They discovered that reduced levels of omega-3 had deleterious consequences on synaptic functions and emotional behaviours.

Details of this work are available in the online version of the journal Nature Neuroscience.

***

The researchers studied mice fed a life-long diet imbalanced in omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. They found that omega-3 deficiency disturbed neuronal communication specifically ….This neuronal dysfunction was accompanied by depressive behaviours among the malnourished mice.

***

Consequently, the researchers discovered that among mice subjected to an omega-3 deficient dietary regime, synaptic plasticity … is disturbed in at least two structures involved with reward, motivation and emotional regulation: the prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens.

***

“Our results can now corroborate clinical and epidemiological studies which have revealed associations between an omega-3/omega-6 imbalance and mood disorders,” explain Olivier Manzoni and Sophie Layé. “To determine if the omega-3 deficiency is responsible for these neuropsychiatric disorders additional studies are, of course, required.”

In conclusion, the authors estimate that their results provide the first biological components of an explanation for the observed correlation between omega-3 poor diets, which are very widespread in the industrialized world, and mood disorders such as depression.

Dr. Northrup writes:

One of the best ways to support health brain chemistry is by taking fish oil. Fish oil has been shown time an again to relieve mild to moderate depression. The omega-3 fatty acids are essential to brain health and, according to Capt. Joe Hibbeln, M.D., these important fats support the serotonin system, may help reduce stress and lower your risk of all kinds of mental illness. Dr. Hibbeln, Chief of Outpatient Services for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), is one of the world’s leading researchers on omega-3 fats. His findings have been compelling and encouraging.

***

Also encouraging is the largest ever clinical trial presenting in 2009 showing that fish oil may benefit half of all people with moderate to severe depression.

How could something as obscure as Omega 3s be so critical in preventing depression?

We’ve previously explained that humans evolved to eat a lot of Omega 3s:

Wild game animals have much higher levels of essential Omega 3 fatty acids than domesticated animals. Indeed, leading nutritionists say that humans evolved to consume a lot of Omega 3 fatty acids in the wild game and fish which they ate (more), and that a low Omega 3 diet is a very new trend within the last 100 years or so.

In other words, while omega 3s have just now been discovered by modern science, we evolved to get a lot of omega 3s … and if we just eat a modern, fast food diet without getting enough omega 3s, it can cause all sorts of health problems.

So something just discovered by science can be a central fuel which our bodies evolved to use.

Here’s further detail focusing on beef:

For all of human history – until the last couple of decades – people ate beef from cows (or buffalo or bison) which grazed on grass. The cows were usually strong and healthy. Their meat was lean, with very little saturated fat, as the critters ate well and got outdoor exercise. Their meat was high in good Omega 3 fats. See this and this, and humans evolved to consume a lot of Omega 3 fatty acids in the wild game and fish which they ate (more).

Today, on the other hand, beef is laden with saturated fat and almost entirely lacking healthy fats like Omega 3s, because the cows are force-fed food which makes them sick. Specifically, instead of their natural menu – grass – they are force-fed corn, which makes them sick. Because their diet makes them ill, they are given massive amounts of antibiotics.  Even with the antibiotics, the diet and living conditions would kill them pretty quickly if they aren’t slaughtered.

Science Daily explains:

In industrialized nations, diets have been impoverished in essential fatty acids since the beginning of the 20th century. The dietary ratio between omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acid and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid omega-3 increased continuously over the course of the 20th century. These fatty acids are “essential” lipids because the body cannot synthesize them from new. They must therefore be provided through food and their dietary balance is essential to maintain optimal brain functions.

So insufficient Omega 3s is a major source of depression in modern industrialized countries.

The flip side of getting enough healthy Omega 3s is to stay away from the kind of fats which cause depression: trans fats.

(Contrary to what you’ve heard, getting enough of the right kind of healthy cholesterol also decreases depression.)

Vitamins, Minerals and Antioxidants …

Antioxidants also help to prevent depression.  Specifically, oxidative stress has been correlated with depression (and see here).

On the other hand, antioxidants reduce depression. See this, this and thisHere are the tricks for finding the least expensive, most powerful antioxidants.

Moreover, a multivitamin might be smart.  Specifically, Hugh D. Riordan, M.D., argues:

It is possible to become depressed because of the lack of a sufficient amount of a single trace element.

And as we’ve previously noted, modern foods can be nutritionally depleted:

We evolved eating foods which were high in vitamins and minerals ….

But as the Journal Current Opinion in Obstetrics and Gynecology notes:

With soil depletion, overfarming and transportation of foods over hundreds of miles with loss of nutrients en route, together with the increased use of convenience and fast foods, women can be over-fed, but under-nourished in our modern society.

The Nutrition Journal points out:

In 1927 a study at King’s College, University of London, of the chemical composition of foods was initiated … to assist with diabetic dietary guidance. The study evolved and was then broadened to determine all the important organic and mineral constituents of foods, it was financed by the Medical Research Council and eventually published in 1940. Over the next 51 years subsequent editions reflected changing national dietary habits and food laws as well as advances in analytical procedures. The most recent (5th Edition) published in 1991 has comprehensively analysed 14 different categories of foods and beverages. In order to provide some insight into any variation in the quality of the foods available to us as a nation between 1940 and 1991 it was possible to compare and contrast the mineral content of 27 varieties of vegetable, 17 varieties of fruit, 10 cuts of meat and some milk and cheese products. The results demonstrate that there has been a significant loss of minerals and trace elements in these foods over that period of time.

Scripps Howard News Service noted in 2006:

The nutritional content of America’s vegetables and fruits has declined during the past 50 years — in some cases dramatically.

Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas, said that of 13 major nutrients in fruits and vegetables tracked by the Agriculture Department from 1950 to 1999, six showed noticeable declines — protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and vitamin C. The declines ranged from 6 percent for protein, 15 percent for iron, 20 percent for vitamin C, and 38 percent for riboflavin.

“It’s an amazing thing,” said Davis, adding that the decline in nutrient content has not been widely noticed.

Many other studies have reported ongoing soil depletion around the world.

***

And many people eat highly processed foods in which most antioxidants have been destroyed.

So – just as with the low levels of omega 3s – there might be less antioxidants like vitamin C in the modern diet than the levels we evolved to run on.

Good Bugs

Live Science reports:

Researchers have increasingly begun to suspect the gut was somehow linked with the brain. For instance, bowel disorders seem linked with stress-related psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and depression in people.

To learn more, scientists experimented with mice by feeding them a broth containing Lactobacillus rhamnosus JB-1. This species naturally lives in our gut, and scientists are exploring whether strains of it can be used as “probiotics” to improve our health. They discovered these rodents displayed significantly less behavior linked with stress, anxiety and depression than mice fed plain broth. Bacteria-fed mice also had significantly lower levels of the stress hormone corticosterone in response to stressful situations such as mazes.

“By affecting gut bacteria, you can have very robust and quite broad-spectrum effects on brain chemistry and behavior,” researcher John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland, told LiveScience.

“Without overstating things, this does open up the concept that we could develop therapies that can treat psychiatric disorders by targeting the gut,” Cryan added. “You could take a yogurt with a probiotic in it instead of an antidepressant.”

***

The investigators found that one GABA receptor component was present in higher levels in bacteria-fed mice in parts of the brain where it is normally lowered during depression. In addition, several GABA receptor components were reduced in parts of the brain where they are normally increased in stressed or anxious animals.

Next, the researchers severed the vagus nerve, which helps alert the central nervous system to changes in the gastrointestinal tract. They found the bacteria-induced effects on behavior and GABA receptors were diminished, suggesting this nerve is the pathway by which changes in the gut can influence the brain.

Vagal nerve stimulations have been used at times to treat depression resistant to other therapies, but “that’s a surgical technique,” Cryan said. “By targeting the gut with probiotics, we could indirectly target the vagus nerve without surgery.”

And see this.

As with Omega 3s, this sounds strange until you realize how humans evolved.

As NPR notes, our bodies are largely made up of – and supported by – bacteria:

Jeffrey Gordon, a professor at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, who studies the microbes that live on and in us, offers this factoid: “We think that there are 10 times more microbial cells on and in our bodies than there are human cells. That means that we’re 90 percent microbial and 10 percent human. There’s also an estimated 100 times more microbial genes than the genes in our human genome. So we’re really a compendium [and] an amalgamation of human and microbial parts.”

***

Gordon’s research shows that these microbes living in our bodies aren’t just there for the ride — they’re actively contributing to the normal physiology of the human body. He points to the trillions of microbes that live in our gut, doing everything from encoding enzymes to serving as pathways for vitamin production to digesting the parts of food we can’t digest on our own.

Many native cultures ate a lot of fermented foods containing healthy bacteria.  Think yogurt, miso and Inuit fermented seal blubber (gross, we know …)

In addition, antibiotics kill a lot of the healthy bacteria in our gut.  (The healthy bacteria-killing property of antibiotics has also been linked to obesity and other health problems. See this and this.).

Given that the modern diet contains less fermented foods, and that antibiotics have killed off some of our intestinal flora, probiotics are an important preventative measure against depression.

Sunshine …

The New York Times points out:

A new, carefully designed randomized controlled trial— of the kind considered the gold standard in medicine — suggests bright light therapy deserves a closer look.

The study was small, involving only 89 patients ages 60 and older, but the results were remarkable. Compared with a placebo, light therapy improved mood just as well as conventional antidepressant medications, said Dr. Ritsaert Lieverse, the paper’s lead author and a psychiatrist at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam.

The effect sizes we found in this study are comparable to those reported for antidepressants, so I think efficacy is of comparable magnitude,” Dr. Lieverse said in an e-mail.

***

Since depression is often accompanied by poor sleep and other symptoms suggestive of circadian rhythm disruption, the scientists also examined markers of circadian function. The theory is that bright light therapy may act to elevate mood by activating the brain’s so-called circadian pacemaker, a structure called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. As part of the study, researchers assessed sleep quality and measured patients’ melatonin, a hormone critical for sleep-wake cycles, and urinary cortisol and salivary cortisol levels, measures of stress.

Dr. Lieverse said bright light therapy may also work by targeting depression-associated neurotransmitter systems that regulate serotonin and dopamine.

Sunshine has many if not all of these properties.  So getting some sun will help with depression.

Exercise and Sex

Many studies show that exercise reduces depression.   For example, see these reports by the Mayo Clinic, New York Times and WebMD.

Sex also helps to prevent depression.

Testosterone

And naturally boosting your testosterone level also wards off depression.

Mindfulness Meditation

Last – but not least – meditation can prevent depression.  Psychology Today reports:

Imagine if you could cure depression with a therapy that was more effective and long-lasting than expensive drugs, and which did not have any side effects. These are the claims being made for a form of Mindfulness meditation.

Psychologists from the University of Exeter recently published a study into “mindfulness-based cognitive therapy” (MBCT), finding it to be better than drugs or counseling for depression. Four months after starting, three quarters of the patients felt well enough to stop taking antidepressants.

***

MBCT was developed in the mid-Nineties by psychologists at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Toronto to help stabilize patients’ moods during and after use of antidepressants. About half of patients relapse into depression – even if they continue taking the medication. One common reason for a relapse is when a normal period of sadness turns into obsessive brooding.

***

The MBCT technique is simple, and revolves around “mindfulness meditation”. In this, you sit with your eyes closed and focus on your breathing. (See box for details). Concentrating on the rhythm of the breath helps produce a feeling of detachment. The idea is that you come to realize that thoughts come and go of their own accord, and that your conscious self is distinct from your thoughts. This realization is encouraged by gentle question-and-answer sessions modeled on those in cognitive therapy.

In the University of Exeter study, funded by the UK’s Medical Research Council, 47 per cent of patients with long-term depression suffered a relapse; the figure was 60 per cent among those taking medication alone. Other studies, including two published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, had comparable outcomes. As a result, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has recommended MBCT since 2004. Availability is still patchy though, with many sufferers seeking courses at Buddhist centers.

“One of the key features of depression is that it hijacks your attention,” says Professor Williams. “We all tend to bring to the forefront of our minds the thoughts and feelings that reflect our current mood. If you are sad, depressed or anxious, then you tend to remember the bad things that have happened to you and not the good. This drives you into a downward spiral that leads from sadness into a deeper depression. MBCT prevents and breaks that spiral.”

Psychology Today provides an example of a typical MBCT meditation:

1. Sit upright in a straight-backed chair, with your spine about an inch from the back of the chair, and your feet flat on the floor.

2. Close your eyes. Use your mind to watch your breath as it flows in and out. Observe your sensations without judgment. Do not try to alter your breathing.

3. After a while your mind will wander. Gently bring your attention back to your breath. The act of realizing that your mind has wandered – and bringing your attention back – is the key thing.

4. Your mind will eventually become calm.

5. Repeat every day for 20-30 minutes.

Postscript:  If you are severely depressed and suicidal, contact a mental health professional. 

We are not health professionals, and this does not constitute mental health or medical advice.

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Debt Ceiling 2011 Vs 2013 Compare And Contrast

The last few months have seen US equity markets swinging from confidence to grave concerns (briefly) and back to exuberance even as the looming 'debt ceiling' and sequester remains dead ahead. The pattern is eerily similar in price (and volatility) te...

The Grime Behind the Crime

It seemed, at first, preposterous. The hypothesis was so exotic that I laughed. The rise and fall of violent crime during the second half of the 20th century and first years of the 21st were caused, it proposed, not by changes in policing or imprisonment, single parenthood, recession, crack cocaine or the legalisation of abortion, but mainly by … lead.

I don’t mean bullets. The crime waves that afflicted many parts of the world and then, against all predictions, collapsed, were ascribed, in an article published by Mother Jones last week, to the rise and fall in the use of lead-based paint and leaded petrol(1).

It’s ridiculous – until you see the evidence. Studies between cities, states and nations show that the rise and fall in crime follows, with a roughly 20-year lag, the rise and fall in the exposure of infants to trace quantities of lead(2,3,4). But all that gives us is correlation: an association that could be coincidental. The Mother Jones article, based on several scientific papers, claimed causation.

I began by reading the papers. Do they say what the article claims? They do. Then I looked up the citations: the discussion of those papers in the scientific literature. The three whose citations I checked have been mentioned, between them, 301 times(5). I went through all these papers (except the handful in foreign languages), as well as dozens of others. To my astonishment, I could find just one study attacking the thesis(6), and this was sponsored by the Ethyl Corporation, which happens to have been a major manufacturer of the petrol additive tetraethyl lead. I found many more supporting it. Crazy as this seems, it really does look as if lead poisoning could be the major cause of the rise and fall of violent crime.

The curve is much the same in all the countries these papers have studied. Lead was withdrawn first from paint and then from petrol at different times in different places (beginning in the 1970s in the US in the case of petrol and the 1990s in many parts of Europe), yet, despite these different times and different circumstances, the pattern is the same: violent crime peaks around 20 years after lead pollution peaks(7,8,9). The crime rates in big and small cities in the US, once wildly different, have now converged, also some 20 years after the phase-out(10).

(US Bureau of Justice)

Nothing else seems to explain these trends. The researchers have taken great pains to correct for the obvious complicating variables: social, economic and legal factors. One paper found, after 15 variables had been taken into account, a four-fold increase in homicides in US counties with the highest lead pollution(11). Another discovered that lead levels appeared to explain 90% of the difference in rates of aggravated assault between US cities(12).

A study in Cincinnati finds that young people prosecuted for delinquency are four times more likely than the general population to have high levels of lead in their bones(13). A meta-analysis (a study of studies) of 19 papers found no evidence that other factors could explain the correlation between exposure to lead and conduct problems among young people(14).

Is it really so surprising that a highly potent nerve toxin causes behavioural change? The devastating and permanent impacts of even very low levels of lead on IQ have been known for many decades. Behavioural effects were first documented in 1943: infants who had tragically chewed the leaded paint off the railings of their cots were found, years after they had recovered from acute poisoning, to be highly disposed to aggression and violence(15).

Lead poisoning in infancy, even at very low levels, impairs the development of those parts of the brain (the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex) which regulate behaviour and mood(16). The effect is stronger in boys than in girls. Lead poisoning is associated with attention deficit disorder(17,18), impulsiveness, aggression and, according to one paper, psychopathy(19). Lead is so toxic that it is unsafe at any level(21,22).

Because they were more likely to live in inner cities, in unrenovated housing whose lead paint was peeling and beside busy roads, African Americans have been subjected to higher average levels of lead poisoning than white Americans. One study, published in 1986, found that 18% of white children but 52% of black children in the US had over 20 milligrammes per decilitre of lead in their blood(23); another that, between 1976 and 1980, black infants were eight times more likely to be carrying the horrendous load of 40mg/dl(24). This, two papers propose, could explain much of the difference in crime rates between black and white Americans(25), and the supposed difference in IQ trumpeted by the book The Bell Curve(26).

There is only one remaining manufacturer of tetraethyl lead on earth. It’s based in Ellesmere Port in Britain, and it’s called Innospec. The product has long been banned from general sale in the UK, but the company admits on its website that it’s still selling this poison to other countries(27). Innospec refuses to talk to me, but other reports claim that tetraethyl lead is being exported to Afghanistan, Algeria, Burma, Iraq, North Korea, Sierra Leone and Yemen(28,29), countries afflicted either by chaos or by governments who don’t give a damn about their people.

In 2010 the company admitted that, under the name Associated Octel, it had paid millions of dollars in bribes to officials in Iraq and Indonesia to be allowed to continue, at immense profit, selling tetratethyl lead(30). Through an agreement with the British and US courts, Innospec was let off so lightly that Lord Justice Thomas complained that “no such arrangement should be made again.”(31) God knows how many lives this firm has ruined.

The UK government tells me that because tetraethyl lead is not on the European list of controlled exports, there is nothing to prevent Innospec from selling to whoever it wants(32). There’s a term for this: environmental racism.

If it is true that lead pollution, whose wider impacts have been recognised for decades, has driven the rise and fall of violence, then there lies, behind the crimes that have destroyed so many lives and filled so many prisons, a much greater crime.

References:

1. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline

2. Rick Nevin, May 2000. How Lead Exposure Relates to Temporal Changes in IQ, Violent Crime, and Unwed Pregnancy. Environmental Research, Vol.83, Issue 1, pp1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/enrs.1999.4045

3. Rick Nevin, 2007. Understanding international crime trends: the legacy of preschool lead exposure. Environmental Research Vol. 104, pp315–336.
doi:10.1016/j.envres.2007.02.008

4. Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, May 2007. Environmental Policy as Social Policy? The Impact of Childhood Lead Exposure on Crime. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 13097. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13097

5. The three papers whose citations I checked were Rick Nevin, May 2000, as above;
Rick Nevin, 2007, as above and Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, May 2007, as above.

6. Patricia L. McCalla and Kenneth C. Land, 2004. Trends in environmental lead exposure and troubled youth, 1960–1995: an age-period-cohort-characteristic analysis. Social Science Research Vol.33, pp339–359.

7. PB Stretesky and MJ Lynch, May 2001. The relationship between lead exposure and homicide. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, vol.155, no.5, pp579-82.

8. Paul B. Stretesky and Michael J. Lynch, June 2004. The Relationship between Lead and Crime.Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol.45, no.2, pp214-229. doi: 10.1177/002214650404500207

9. Howard W. Mielke and Sammy Zahran, 2012. The urban rise and fall of air lead (Pb) and the latent surge and retreat of societal violence. Environment International Vol. 43, pp 48–55. doi:10.1016/j.envint.2012.03.005

10. Bureau of Justice, no date given. Homicide Trends in the U.S.http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/homicide/city.cfm

11. PB Stretesky and MJ Lynch, May 2001, as above.

12. Howard W. Mielke and Sammy Zahran, 2012, as above.

13. Herbert L. Needleman et al, 2002. Bone lead levels in adjudicated delinquents: a case control study. Neurotoxicology and Teratology, Vol. 24, pp711 –717.

14. David K. Marcus, Jessica J. Fulton and Erin J. Clarke, 2010. Lead and Conduct Problems: a Meta-Analysis. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, vol.39, no.2, pp234-241. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15374411003591455

15. R.K. Byers and E.E. Lord, 1943. Late effects of lead poisoning on mental development, American Journal of Diseases of Children, Vol. 66, pp. 471– 483.

16. Kim M Cecil et al, 2008. Decreased Brain Volume in Adults with Childhood Lead Exposure. Decreased Brain Volume in Adults with Childhood Lead Exposure. PLoS Medicine, vol. 5, no. 5. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050112

17. Joel T. Nigg et al, January 2010. Confirmation and Extension of Association of Blood Lead with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and ADHD
Symptom Domains at Population-Typical Exposure Levels. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. Vol. 51, no.1, pp.58–65. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2009.02135.x.

18. Joe M. Braun et al, 2006. Exposures to Environmental Toxicants and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in U.S. Children. Environmental Health Perspectives vol. 114, pp.1904–1909. doi:10.1289/ehp.9478

19. John Paul Wright, Danielle Boisvert and Jamie Vaske. July 2009. Blood Lead Levels in Early Childhood Predict Adulthood Psychopathy. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, vol.7, no.3, pp.208-222. doi: 10.1177/1541204009333827

20. Rick Nevin, 2007, as above, reports that “there is no lower blood lead threshold for IQ losses”.

21. David Bellinger concludes that “No level of lead exposure appears to be ‘safe’ and even the current ‘low’ levels of exposure in children are associated with neurodevelopmental deficits.”. April 2008. Very low lead exposures and children’s neurodevelopment. Current Opinion in Pediatrics, Vol.20, no.2, pp172-177. doi: 10.1097/MOP.0b013e3282f4f97b

23. Royal Society of Canada, 1986. Lead in the Canadian Environment. Science and Regulation. Cited by Rick Nevin, 2007, as above.

24. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, 1988. The Nature and Extent of Lead Poisoning in Children in the United States. US Department of Health and Human Services. Cited by Rick Nevin, 2007, as above.

25. Rick Nevin, 2007, as above.

26. Rick Nevin, February 2012. Lead Poisoning and The Bell Curve. Munich Personal RePEc Archive MPRA Paper No. 36569. http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/36569/

27. http://www.innospecinc.com/octane-additives.html

28. http://www.economist.com/news/21566385-lead-tantalisingly-close-death-2013-world-meant-stop-using-leaded-petrol-toxin

29. Anne Roberts and Elizabeth O’Brien, 2011. Supply Chain for the Lead in Leaded Petrol. LEAD Action News, vol.11, no.4.

30. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/mar/18/firm-bribes-banned-chemical-tetraethyl

31. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jun/30/octel-petrol-iraq-lead

32. I was passed by Defra to the Department for Transport, then by the DfT to the Department for Business, which told me it was all down to the European list. It was clear that none of them were remotely interested in the issue, or had considered it before.

The Danger of Secret Alcoholism

High-functioning alcoholics are often hiding in plain sight—and they're often more dangerous than drop-dead drunks.

January 8, 2013  |  

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Catalin Petolea

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“He was never drunk when I interviewed him,” the late writer Truman Capote’s biographer told me.

“It was just a mistake. He didn’t hurt anyone,” a friend said of an acquaintance who got a DUI last year.

“She doesn’t drink much,” my husband said of me when a therapist asked about our drinking habits. “Just a little white wine.”

Alcohol is confusing. For one thing, it is selectively addictive. Some people can drink safely; others can’t. For another thing, although alcohol is a depressant, especially in large doses, new research shows that in moderate doses it can also act as a happy stimulant. The first few drinks make the world a better place. The next few have the opposite effect: The drinker “may not be able to grasp the thread of a conversation; his reflexes will be somewhat delayed, his speech slurred, and his gait unsteady,” writes Dr. James Milam in his classic study Under the Influence.

Because ethanol, the active ingredient in alcohol, is a very simple and very tiny molecule, it is the Speedy Gonzales of addictive substances, zooming right through the protective blood/brain barrier and delivering
an immediate punch. Once alcohol enters the bloodstream, it triggers a series 
of responses that can last 24 hours. Many heavy drinkers are always in some 
stage of inebriation or withdrawal, and this changes the way they engage with
the world. There may be hours—entire mornings!—when they appear to be “normal,” but there is no "normal" in the body or brain of a heavy drinker.

Alcohol is metabolized at the approximate rate of one drink per hour. Someone who has two drinks before dinner, three beers with dinner and two nightcaps may pass out and wake up six hours late still drunk. If
 they sleep longer, they wake up with more alcohol out of their system but often in a painful state of withdrawal (along with dehydration and other nasty symptoms caused by the toxins that your body churns out as it processes the ethanol). Hangovers, which arguably have a greater effect on mood than alcohol itself, are the body’s scream for more. Soon enough, driven by a cellular level craving, the heavy drinker with a hangover will have that beer or that brandy in the coffee that quiets the disturbance, at least for a while.

Someone in withdrawal is even less likely to seem drunk than someone who has had a few drinks. But the effects can be deadly. “The strange truth that alcoholics are often in worse shape when their blood alcohol content is descending than when it is at its highest level is an extremely difficult point to grasp,” write Catherine Ketchum in her book Beyond the Influence. “The withdrawal syndrome represents a state of hyperexcitability, or extreme agitation in the nervous system. “ Ketcham uses the tragic example of Henri Paul, the driver of the car in which Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed were killed in 1997. Paul, who had a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit when his body was tested after the accident, had been waiting around the Ritz for two hours to drive during which he had little to drink. “Paul was drunk and he was in withdrawal,” Ketchum writes. “Both facts sealed his doom and the fate of his passengers.”

In Understanding the High-Functioning Alcoholic, Sarah Allen Benton makes the case that the image of the archetypal alcoholic—the stumbling Bowery bum—has obscured a much more common and infrequently treated type of alcoholic—the alcoholic who can function in the world and appear to be fine. Perhaps because high-functioning alcoholics do not tax government systems and cause social problems, they get far less attention than more dramatic drinkers. Although these high-functioning boozers sometimes do not 
meet the diagnostic criteria for alcoholism, they are desperately in need of help. Examples abound: from former First Lady Betty Ford to actor Robin Williams and musician Eric Clapton. Dr. Mark Willenbring, an addiction specialist, told Benton, “[High-functioning alcoholics] are successful students. They’re good parents, good workers. They watch their weight. They go to the gym. Then they go home and have four martinis and two bottle of wine. Are they alcoholics? You bet.”

Alabama teenager faces prison for plot to blow up high school

(Reuters / Lucy Nicholson)

(Reuters / Lucy Nicholson)

A 17-year old Alabama teen was arrested for allegedly planning to bomb his high school using homemade explosives. The boy wrote about his planned ‘terrorist attack’ in a journal that a teacher found left behind in a classroom.

Derek Shrout, a student at Russell County High School, used bomb-making information that he found on the Internet to construct a device that Russell County Sheriff Heath Taylor says was “a step or two away from being ready to explode.”

Shrout had prepared his bombs using several dozen small tobacco cans and two large cans, which he drilled holes into and filled with pellets. Investigators did not find black powder, butane and fuses, which are necessary to complete the explosives. But Taylor knew what he was doing: in his journal, the teen correctly outlined the necessary steps to complete the deadly grenades.

The teenager apparently had sketched out two large cans labeled “Fat Boy” and “Little Man,” the code names of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

“It would have been serious,” Taylor said in an interview with the Columbus Ledger-Inquirer.

The teen’s plot was foiled when a teacher found his journal left behind in her class, in which he outlined the plan for his attack. The teacher came across the plans while searching for a name in the journal.

“The teacher could have just discarded the journal but didn’t,” Taylor said. The book was given to a school administrator, who eventually handed it to the sheriff’s office. Shrout was immediately arrested and is now facing a felony charge for attempted assault.

While detained and interrogated, the teen denied that he was planning out a terrorist attack, claiming that his journal was simply a work of fiction. The earliest entries were written down just three days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which left 26 people dead.

Shrout’s plot has been called a hate crime, since the teen self-identified as a white supremacist and “has a lot of pent up anger toward blacks,” Taylor says.

Senior class president David Kelly told WTVM-TV that the boy frequently gave Nazi salutes at the school and made other students feel uncomfortable.

“In the hallway, at breakfast, at the lunch tables, after school where we have our bus parking lot, he’d have this big old group of friends and they’d go around doing the whole white power crazy stuff,” he said.

Shrout isn’t the first high school student to plan out a bomb attack in recent time. In 2011, 16-year-old Hared Cono of Tampa, Florida plotted to bomb his high school after being expelled. Investigators discovered a minute-to-minute attack plan mapped out in the boy’s bedroom.

While the two students had different motives behind their plots, the most recent case sheds further light on the issue of violence and mental health in the US, which have been fiercely debated in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting. Many of America’s mass murderers are described as quiet, lonely individuals, which Charles A. Williams, a Drexel University psychology professor, finds troubling.

“The more isolated they are, the more socially castigated they are, the more they’re cut off, they start to stew and their evil and sinister thoughts metastasize in their minds like a cancer” he said after the foiled plot in Tampa, Fl. “The signs were all there. It was textbook.”

U.S. Government Using Terrorism Against the American People

policestate

We’ve documented that – by any measure – America is the largest sponsor of terrorism in the world.

But remember, terrorism is defined as:

The use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.

The American government has also been using violence and threats to intimidate and coerce the American public for political purposes.

For example, the U.S. government is doing the following things to terrorize the American public into docility and compliance:

U.S. constitutional law has taught for hundreds of years that chilling the exercise of our liberties is as dangerous to freedom than directly suppressing them.

Freda Sna U.S. Government Using Terrorism Against the American People

Year of the Snake(s) by Anthony Freda

For example, as we’ve previously noted, reporters censor themselves:

Initially, there is tremendous self-censorship by journalists.

For example, several months after 9/11, famed news anchor Dan Rather told the BBC that American reporters were practicing “a form of self-censorship”:

There was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around peoples’ necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions…. And again, I am humbled to say, I do not except myself from this criticism.

What we are talking about here – whether one wants to recognise it or not, or call it by its proper name or not – is a form of self-censorship.

Keith Olbermann agreed that there is self-censorship in the American media, and that:

You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble …. You cannot say: By the way, there’s something wrong with our …. system.

As former Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin wrote in 2006:

Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do. . . .

There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.

If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bullshit more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.

I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bullshit-calling than a well-informed beat reporter – whatever their beat. We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship – or whatever it is – out of the way.

Former Fox News reporters say the same thing.

Any reporters who don’t censor themselves are harassed. Whistleblowers are prosecuted … or even tortured by the government.

The fact that the government is spying on all Americans – and using the information to launch political witch hunts – makes us all watch what we say, and makes us careful about who we talk to. As the ACLU notes:

Peaceful protesters should not be treated as potential terrorists nor spied upon by federal government agents. Not only is this a misuse of public funds that could be used to find real terrorists, it chills free speech activities and inhibits the public debate on important issues.

A federal judge found that the NDAA’s provision allowing indefinite detention of Americans without due process has a “chilling effect” on free speech. And see this and this.

The threat of being labeled a terrorist certainly dissuades and chills our willingness to exercise our rights.

Especially when power has become so concentrated that the same agency which spies on all Americans also decides who should be assassinated.

The bottom line is that the U.S. government is using violence and threats to intimidate and coerce its own people for political purposes … to consolidate power and suppress dissent.

Postscript: fear of terror makes people docile and stupid … and the government has also intentionally whipped up an exaggerated hysteria of terror by “others” in order to scare the people. This is another form of terrorism.

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