I've been using a DIY treadmill workstation for about five years. I agree about the value of vitamin D. I think having a treadmill workstation contributed to vitamin D deficiency because with it I would then spend less time exercising outdoors.
I used to believe stuff like that about vitamin D and minimal sun exposure of hands in the winter, which I was taught in grade school. It turns out to be wrong. You may want to do some more research on this topic before making such confident (and incorrect) pronouncements on this topic in the future. See for example: http://gizmodo.com/5823058/tanning-can-cause-cancer-but-not-tanning-could-cause-a-lot-worse
Or from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2839537 "Sunlight has long been recognized as a major provider of vitamin D for humans; radiation in the UVB (290-315 nm) portion of the solar spectrum photolyzes 7-dehydrocholesterol in the skin to previtamin D3, which, in turn, is converted by a thermal process to vitamin D3. Latitude and season affect both the quantity and quality of solar radiation reaching the earth's surface, especially in the UVB region of the spectrum, but little is known about how these influence the ability of sunlight to synthesize vitamin D3 in skin. A model has been developed to evaluate the effect of seasonal and latitudinal changes on the potential of sunlight to initiate cutaneous production of vitamin D3. Human skin or [3 alpha-3H]7-dehydrocholesterol exposed to sunlight on cloudless days in Boston (42.2 degrees N) from November through February produced no previtamin D3. In Edmonton (52 degrees N) this ineffective winter period extended from October through March. Further south (34 degrees N and 18 degrees N), sunlight effectively photoconverted 7-dehydrocholesterol to previtamin D3 in the middle of winter. These results quantify the dramatic influence of changes in solar UVB radiation on cutaneous vitamin D3 synthesis and indicate the latitudinal increase in the length of the "vitamin D winter" during which dietary supplementation of the vitamin may be advisable."
A fair-skinned person in a skimpy bathing suit under noon-day near-equatorial summer sun can produce on the order of 20,000 IU vitamin D (which self-limits in the skin when from UV) in about twenty minutes. A dark-skinned person will take a couple of hours to reach that level under those conditions. As the above paper suggests, in winter father from the equator, your skin will produce essentially no vitamin D. Reference: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-us/our-staff0/john-j-cannell-md/
Given the above, the US RDA of about 600 IU D3 per day for an adult of any size is just bad medicine, as is setting a tolerable upper limit of 4000 IU D3 daily (when that "limit" is closer to what the avergae adult needs). That is why you won't get enough vitamin D from food, because the RDA is about 10X too low for most people. A better recommendation: http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
With our increasing indoors lifestyle, people became more and more vitamin D deficient -- even living in sunny places like Arizona or Texas. That was made worse by the fear mongering by the dermatology profession (with dermatologists as whole causing on the order of 10X the cancer they prevented plus a host of other health issues like autism with their well-meant but terrible advice).
Studies have shown a link between nutrition and depression. See, as one example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/ "Few people are aware of the connection between nutrition and depression while they easily understand the connection between nutritional deficiencies and physical illness. Depression is more typically thought of as strictly biochemical-based or emotionally-rooted. On the contrary, nutrition can play a key role in the onset as well as severity and duration of depression. Many of the easily noticeable food patterns that p
So their tax-exempt status could possibly be revoked. From a decade ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-dealing "Self-dealing is the conduct of a trustee, an attorney, a corporate officer, or other fiduciary that consists of taking advantage of his position in a transaction and acting for his own interests rather than for the interests of the beneficiaries of the trust, corporate shareholders, or his clients. Self-dealing may involve misappropriation or usurpation of corporate assets or opportunities. Self-dealing is a form of conflict of interest.[1]"
The self-dealing happens because the non-profit could make its digital resources available to the world for essentially free these days. But instead MIT and JSTOR impose artificial scarcity to extract a revenue stream for its staff in order so it may then create new resources which it also sells access to make more such resources etc.. That model may have made some sense in the 20th century, but it makes no sense in the 21st. The argument that access to digital resources today should be restricted to support making more digital resources tomorrow is not one that a tax-exempt organization should legally be able to make these days IMHO. And in order to sustain their self-dealing, they contributed to the death of an idealistic young man, Aaron Swartz to sustain their obsolete and now essentially corrupt business models, which just highlights how evil what they (and many other non-profits) are doing has become bit-by-bit year-by-year if artificial scarcity ever made sense for a non-profit.
So, perhaps a way forward here is to make an example of both MIT and JSTOR by getting their IRS tax exempt status and also corporate charters revoked (a corporate "death sentence") for the act of self-dealing? That might serve as an example to other tax-exempt non-profits to shape up and make their digital works freely available before they get the same treatment? See also: http://www.ratical.org/corporations/ "In most states a lot of the language from the early days, that reflected the subordinate nature of corporations is still on the books
"Well they are just wrong and it's easy to demonstrate that."
Whether it may be easy to demonstrate that, getting people in the USA to change their minds about that is another issue... Otherwise, how do we end up with group think like this? http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-06-poll-iraq_x.htm "Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, says a poll out almost two years after the terrorists' strike against this country. "
When it should have been obvious there was essentially no connection? Something deep is wrong with the USA to have such a survey result. What produced that information bubble which then translated into support for invading Iraq (a country that posed the USA no immediate danger and cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives)?
The fact that there are worse aspects in NK than the USA does not invalidate the point of TFA talking about the NK bubble without considering similar processes in the USA (or any country for that matter). Look at what just happened to Aaron Swartz for trying to make publicly available publicly funded research as a form of civil disobedience by engaging in a form of freedom of speech that has been criminalized in the USA (granted with various other complexities): http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/01/20/1823256/edward-tuftes-defense-of-aaron-swartz-and-the-marvelously-different
So, there are clear criminal limits to freedom of speech in the USA when commercial interests are involved... And those limits did not exist when Tufte was a boy (back then most copyright violation was a civil issue not a criminal issue). And now Aaron Swartz is dead in part because of them (although I can think he might have gotten caught in US group think about avoiding the sun and so became vitamin D deficient, or perhaps ate the hacker way and became phytonutrient or omega-3 deficient which may have contributed to a depressed mental state, so a couple types of group think may have converged to cause a terrible thing to happen).
BTW, just for contrast: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-good-side-to-life-in-north-korea-2012-10 "One of the most interesting phenomenons about North Korea isn't the extraordinary lengths that some citizens make to escape the country â" it's the extraordinary lengths a minority of refugees make to get back into the country.... As part of their series "Ask a North Korean", NK News asked North Korean Jae-young about the good things about life in the hermit state, and the recent refugee is easily able to find something to miss. Jay-young says that her life in North Korea was "mentally rich -- even if it was materially insufficient" and that affection between neighbors was "very pure and deep". She writes about the joyful side of life in North Korea: "On major holidays, we invited our neighbors (we used to call my mother's friends "aunt"), shared food and stories with them. My mom was really good at making 'Jong-Pyun rice cake' and I can still remember my aunts exclaiming how good they tasted. During nights, we gathered together, turned music on and danced. On days when electricity went out, we used to play the accordion, sing, dance and have fun. I used to have so much fun and danced so hard that my socks had holes when I checked them in morning. My father used to be respected as a gagman (comedian).""
Now, the same might be said about many more traditional societies including the Amish. But however they found a life with more community of some sorts and less technological addictions, maybe the good points is still something to be considered against the bad?
The US may be farther from 1984 than NK (debatable given what US credit card information and internet communications reveals), but the USA sure is a lot closer to "Brave New World": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World "Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes: "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the *rgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.""
Overall, what you say is true and reflects what the point I am trying to make. That said, I also think most people, even in the USA, have little understanding of what most political thinking is like outside major US-Left-leaning US urban areas. GW Bush was re-selected after launching a ruinous illegal war. What does that say about the country? Of course, the UK went along with it... And even within "progressive" areas of the USA, there is another sort of totalitarianism the US Right is correct in pointing out (expanding government intervention in all areas of life). So, the deeper point is that there are similar social forces at work both in the US and NK (or most any country for that matter), they just play out differently based on history and circumstances. Egypt had "god kings" for thousands of years and did very well -- but it was on much more fertile ground than North Korea with an easier climate, and also it was not surrounded by vastly more technologically advanced countries for much of that time with radically different political forms. But no doubt thousands of years of culture in Egypt may have selected for a sort of personality receptive to the god king idea -- or cult of personality which is a lesser manifestation of it.
See also: "Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets" by Roland Benabou http://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/Groupthink%20IOM%202012_07_02%20paper.pdf "This paper investigates collective denial and willful blindness in groups, organizations and markets. Agents with anticipatory preferences, linked through an interaction structure, choose how to interpret and recall public signals about future prospects. Wishful thinking (denial of bad news) is shown to be contagious when it is harmful to others, and self-limiting when it is beneficial. Similarly, with Kreps-Porteus preferences, willful blindness (information avoidance) spreads when it increases the risks borne by others. This general mechanism can generate multiple social cognitions of reality, and in hierarchies it implies that realism and delu
"Lemme guess, you're a HS dropout and you're bitter because nobody will buy your homemade shit, right?"
Ah, if only I had been smarter and more courageous in High School and indeed completely dropped out and focused on making "homemade" stuff. Probably I might indeed have been more successful and happier? But no, instead I left high school early for college and then blew all the money I earned from writing "homemade" computer software on Princeton, graduating the same year as Michelle Obama. And that was even after having read this awesome essay saying why spending money on Princeton was stupid: "College is a Waste of Time and Money" http://www.tarleton.edu/Faculty/anewsome/Bird%20Article.pdf
So, just an example of how I was deeply in a bubble back then (and probably still am now in various ways).
But, turning the points around to focus on the presenter generally shows you don't have much to say about the points presented? What is your point? That I am "bitter"? See also: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science "This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."
Anyway, compared to what I was told about the USA in public school growing up, yes, I am disappointed with where this country has gone in the last thirty years. But there is not just one specific thing I could point to (although neoliberal economics is perhaps a big part of it, which just continues to get worse as we automate jobs away and wealth continues to concentrate).
And I'm not saying all the changes are for the worse though. There is less air pollution in NYC, for example (reflective of an emerging environmental ethic). There is easy access to a wealth of information via the internet. Example: "The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization" http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC We know a lot more about material science. We know a lot more about the science of nutrition and health. There sure are a lot of people trying to make a positive difference in the world. There is much goodness in the USA and abroad.
There remain reasons for optimism as historian Howard Zinn points out: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm " Looking at this catalog of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience-whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just. I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), bu
Interesting points, thanks. I replied to another of your replies suggesting it is harder to globally escape the US ideological influence than the NK ideological influence, so I won't repeat that here.
But I am curious, what do people in the USA you know think about your move? Do they understand it? Do they accept that the day-to-day quality of life (overall happiness) is better for most people in Sweden than the USA? When you talk about the Swedish policies about work or health care, do they accept that the USA is messed up in those areas? Or do they just politely not understand what you are talking about (perhaps because they are in a US ideological bubble)? And if, for some reason they do understand what you are saying, what do they think of the prospects for similar proven successful policies in the USA?
Still, there are fundamental demographic differences between Sweden and the USA, so no doubt there are arguments for differences. BTW, look into supplemental vitamin D living so far north of the equator: http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
Actually, while it may be physically easier to leave the USA than to leave North Korea, it is harder to get away ideologically from the US ideological bubble than the North Korean ideological bubble because the US culture is more pervasive. See the ending of "The Prisoner" for a symbolic example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner
You mention elsewhere you are in Sweden. Do you really feel that much safer in Sweden from global nuclear war or biological war or widespread killer robots that might result from US-driven policy and technology? Stuff that results from an economic imperative that Major General Smedley Butler wrote about in the 1930s and has only grown since? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
If not, then I'd suggest in general you have not gotten very far away from the US ideological bubble, even if your day-to-day life may (for you) have improved as you indicated in another post.
That kind of exercise of US physical power abroad is only going to get easier technologically over that next twenty to thirty years. This violation of constitutional rights of US citizens (even abroad) was unimaginable when I was growing up. (Granted, other countries may develop anti-drone countermeasures, like Iran allegedly did.)
Or, on a more mundane level, US economic practices probably still are shaping big chunks of the Swedish economy too, not to mention the pop culture landscape.
My point is not that the USA is North Korea. My point is that there are some similar social processes at work in both places (and probably in Sweden as well for that matter).
That the USA is radically different from NK is the unstated assumption in TFA. I'm just pointing out some uncomfortable conceptual similarities as well as suggestions for moving beyond them. If you want a great example of that, see James P. Hogan's 1982 novel "Voyage from Yesteryear": http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary "In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?"
There is some truth to what you say, unquestionably. Still, what I am saying reflects actual US policy and the behavior of most US Americans, whatever adages remain around from older generations... Most people in the USA may have heard "you are what you eat", yet most people still eat a lot of empty calories from refined starches and sugars and cruelly-raised nutrient-poor meat. That disconnect seems symptomatic of a bubble to me. And it is reflected in US corporate-shaped policy: http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html "The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramidsâ"subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
If a lot of people in the country accept such behaviors (similar to accepting pictures of the "Great Leader" everywhere in North Korea and various paranoid and repressive NK policies), then what difference is there? No doubt a lot of North Koreans talk about how free and well-off they are... A lot of TFA is about how North Koreans probably don't know what is really going on... And those who do feel they have little power to act. How is that very different from, say, how people working at Walmart, the USA's biggest private employer, do not unionize because people there fear for their jobs if they do and have been taught that collective social action is bad etc. etc. (or at least not taught that it is good and had most independent initiative schooled out of them)? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart#Labor_union_opposition
Working inside a corporation is how many adults in the US spend most of their waking hours. http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html "Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as F
http://www.escapingnorthkorea.com/ "During his time in China, he learned of the hundreds of thousands of North Koreans fleeing to China through a 6,000-mile modern-day underground railroad, which runs from Pyongyang to Bangkok, in search of food and freedom."
Why dont; more peopel leave North Korea or revolt? Psychology and culture... (which includes things like "quorum sensing").
See also: http://anwot.org/ "Mental Wealth is the skillful thinking we require to create a wonderful fantastic lifeâ(TM)s experience. Not everyone can accumulate and give their loved ones a sizeable monetary inheritance. Each of us can accumulate mental wealth and experience the joy of giving it away! The wisdom embodied in mental skills enriches us, even more than the benefits money may provide.
I recommend taking The Short Course to Mental Wealth prior to undertaking the fuller course, A Newer Way of Thinking. The short course provides mental skills that equip us to become our own best friend, lifelong. It introduces the vocabulary that frees our will to act using reason and wisdom, replacing instinct and habit; directing and producing our own destiny rather than remaining a servant to fate and circumstance.
The more complete course, A Newer Way of Thinking, explains why we must upgrade our thinking to survive and thrive in the Nuclear Age. Of greater importance, it offers the practical steps to create global peace through our collective efforts. Learn what others have found works and have gladly shared for our benefit. Help make the world a kinder gentler place. Begin with The Short Course to Mental Wealth."
Or, a top Google search result on mental chains: http://www.calresco.org/lucas/breaking.htm "Our world of today creates many barriers, walls built of prejudice, of monetary difference, of national boundaries, of belief systems. All these self-created divisions are arbitrary and abstract ideas which often act to avoid growth, to prevent humanity exploring those areas of state space so far not understood. What is possible in our world is unknown by anyone, despite the arrogant assurances with which pronouncements (e.g. "there are no other options") are made by leaders in all fields. No leader, of any type, can possibly deal with all the available information on any subject, so the centralised (undemocratic!) decision making so beloved of corporate, political and bureaucratic systems alike is fundamentally flawed, and increasingly is becoming destructively unsustainable in both social and planetary terms. Every scientific (or political) assumed certainty is now questionable however within our new science. We need not fear to question, only by so doing can we go beyond the errors of the past, those dogmas of static truth and conformity.
It is far too easy to assume that what we already know is all there is to know. This delusion of perfection, the 'authority knows best' syndrome, is endemic to many of our political leaders, academics and experts. Yet throughout history the bullying 'conform or die' certainty of one time or group has been overturned by the discoveries of the next. Today's reality will become tomorrow's stupidity. Transcending what we believe today may be the essential step in taking humanity onwards into a new millenium based upon a better understanding of complex systems. Our essays and papers further explore these themes."
Yes, I guess Morris Berman is saying the USA is worse than China in that regard, and much worse than parts of Europe: "How, then, can excess be curbed in a free democratic system? For we can be sure that the intelligent frogs, who are really quite exceptional, are not going to be listened to, and certainly have no power to enforce their insights. True, there are certain countries -- the Scandanavian nations come to mind -- where for some reason the concentration of intelligent frogs is unusually high, resulting in decisions designed to protect the commons. But on a world scale, this is not very typical. More typical, and (sad to say) a model for many other countries, is the United States, where proposed "changes" are in fact cosmetic, and where the reality is business as usual. In the context of 315 million highly addicted frogs, the voices of the smart ones -- Bateson, Frank, Posner, Hardin, et al. -- aren't going to have much impact or, truth be told, even get heard."
So yes, Berman is saying the USA is worse than China in that sense (fascist in a corporatist sense, but more disorganized), but he is not the only one. For example here is something by Thomas L. Friedman in the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html "Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China's leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying "no." Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he's a centrist. But if he's forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions."
Good point. Or, ten or twenty trillion US$ in paper wealth disappeared as an externality of banking risk that some bankers made billions from and caused suffering for tens of millions of people: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/18/the-parable-of-the-frogs/ "What does it take to produce large-scale social change? Most historians, if you catch them in an honest moment, will admit that the popular levers of social change, such as education or legislation, are bogus; they don't really amount to very much. What does make a difference -- and then only potentially -- is massive systemic breakdown, such as occurred in the United States in the fall of 2008. It was the greatest market crash since 1929, leading to widespread unemployment (something like 18% of the population, in real -- as opposed to official -- statistics*) and the loss of billions of dollars in retirement savings. In fact, the crash wiped out $11.1 trillion in household wealth, and this is not counting the several trillion lost in stock market investments. It had been many decades since the middle class found itself in soup kitchens, and yet there they were. In the face of all this, however, very little seems to have changed. Americans are still committed to the dream of unlimited abundance as a "reasonable" goal, when in reality it is (and always has been) the dream of an addict. President Obama's upwards of $19 trillion bailout and stimulus plan funneled money into the very banking establishment that gave us the disaster; it rescued the wealthy, not those who really needed the money. And while he could have appointed economic advisers such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz (both Nobel laureates), who would have attempted to put the nation on a different economic path, he chose instead two traditional neoliberal ideologues, Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, who believe in the very policies that led to the crash. "Change we can believe in" never sounded more hollow."
I'm not saying the average US citizen is as bad off as most people in North Korea in material ways -- just that there remains a lot of unnecessary suffering in the USA which is being justified by a crazy ideological bubble. For example, if the USA redistributed half of the US GDP equally as a "basic income", then every citizen would have US$2000 a month, and the other half could be competed over. It's only a cultural mythological bubble that keeps most of the USA from seeing this: http://web.archive.org/web/20120102011454/http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402 "That rationalization came in the form of a brand new science known as economics, which included a brand new mythology."
Despite books like this by Moshe Adler: "Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science that Makes Life Dismal" http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Rest-Us-Debunking-Science/dp/B007F7WKV8 "Why do contemporary economists consider food subsidies in starving countries, rent control in rich cities, and health insurance every
What does that prove? Getting beyond a pervasive cultural way of thinking is also something other than learning a few tidbits of information... And most ex-pats will never have the quality of life abroad that native born citizens will in there host countries (with natives embedded in family and community and stories for generations, and with expats facing security risks if anti-Americanism rises). An extreme example of that (Michael Ruppert): http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110706_mcr_evolution.shtml
"...it's also like a combination of the Truman Show and They Live. One massive reality distortion bubble that nobody is aware of. And the whole discussion, just as the voting choices, always revolves around two options that are only differing in something entirely beside the point, giving the citizens choices for all aspects of their life, except those that aren't meaningless. Everything is condensed down from picking a fuzzy varying area in a multi-dimensional gradient space to a one-dimensional binary choice. With you being called at least "Hitler" for picking the "wrong" one. Let alone trying to think outside that box. It's ludicrous."
See my comment posted earlier above, or also this by Morris Berman: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/18/the-parable-of-the-frogs/ "In the case of the United States, the imposition of rules and limits on individual behavior to protect the commons is not, at present, a realistic prospect; the population is simply not having it. But how much longer before this freedom of choice is regarded as an impossible luxury? In fact, no crystal ball is required to predict the future here. The tragedy of the commons -- what Hardin called "the remorseless working of things" -- is that a society such as that of the United States won't undertake serious changes even when it is sitting on the edge of an abyss. It has to actually be in the abyss before it will entertain such changes; i.e., it has to be faced with no choice at all. It seems unlikely now, but things are probably moving faster than we realize. In terms of population, energy, food, resources, water, social inequality, public health, and environmental degradation, a crunch of the type I am referring to may be only twenty years away."
By that author: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1118061810/ "During the final century of the Roman Empire, it was common for emperors to deny that their civilization was in decline. Only with the perspective of history can we see that the emperors were wrong, that the empire was failing, and that the Roman people were unwilling or unable to change their way of life before it was too late. The same, says Morris Berman, is true of twenty-first century America. The nation and its empire are in decline and nothing can be done to reverse their course. How did this come to be? In Why America Failed, Berman examines the development of American culture from the earliest colonies to the present, shows that the seeds of the nation's "hustler" culture were sown from the very beginning, and reveals how the very tools that enabled the country's expansion have become the instruments of its demise. "
BTW, Germany is a legacy of what the USA used to be: http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/ "How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place?
The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans...."
Yet we in the USA should not lose hope: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm "In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played.
From the article: "Ordinary North Koreans [US Citizens?] live in a near-total information bubble, without any true frame of reference. I can't think of any reaction to that except absolute sympathy. My understanding is that North Koreans [US Americans?] are taught to believe they are lucky to be in North Korea [the USA?], so why would they ever want to leave? They're hostages in their own country, without any real consciousness of it. And the opacity of the country's inner workings--down to the basics of its economy--further serves to reinforce the state's control. The best description we could come up with: it's like The Truman Show, at country scale. "
How true is that for the USA? I still hear people talking about how the USA has the best health care in the world, the healthiest population, the most upward mobility for its population, the best food supply, the highest level of democracy, the lowest taxes, the best education system, the most productive workers, and so on... And many US Americans still believe that creating artificial scarcity through copyrights, patents, and perpetual warfare is the path to abundance, and that draconian drug laws and draconian computer crime laws are the path to security... And many US Americans think there is little relation between what they eat and how they feel... Most US Americans have been taught to be afraid of sunlight when outdoor workers get less melanomas than indoor office workers... Many US Americans think we should reduce the US government debt when that is (unfortunatley) what creates the US money supply... Etc... Etc...
Contrast with what John Taylor Gatto says about schooling: http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates -- these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put
Things to be aware of that he would mention: * vitamin D deficiency * iodine deficiency * B-complex deficiency * omega-3s deficiency * eat a lot of vegetables, fruits, and beans, and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains * avoid refined sugars and grains * avoid food additives (artificial colors, artificial flavors, most preservatives)
Many vegans and vegetarians eat a refined starch-heavy diet with too little vegetables and so are sicker than meat-eaters who also eat a lot of veggies.
In the case of influenza, a lot of it is probably due to vitamin D deficiency in the winter, whether from the Earth's tilt relative to the sun or from cloudy weather and stay indoors in rainy season near the Equator. People probably generally eat less vegetables in winter, too.
It includes stuff about supporting copyright reform and creating more freely licensed works. And it talks a lot about how the institution could support everyone in the related community to be healthier and less prone to destructive acts.
Is that title going to bring up echoes of this controversy?
"Automaker agrees to changes after meeting with suicide prevention group that objected to spot showing fired robot jumping off bridge." http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/09/news/companies/gm_robotad/
The robot is shown forced to take a number of menial jobs, including holding a speaker at a fast-food drive through and becoming upset enough [by repeated failure at them] to throw itself off a bridge.
(I won't link to the video, which contains a graphic image of leaping from a bridge.)
On behalf of our family, we are so deeply sorry for the devastation my brother has caused. No words can express our sadness that 32 innocent people lost their lives this week in such a terrible, senseless tragedy. We are heartbroken. We grieve alongside the families, the Virginia Tech community, our State of Virginia, and the rest of the nation. And, the world.... We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person.... There is much justified anger and disbelief at what my brother did, and a lot of questions are left unanswered. Our family will continue to cooperate fully and do whatever we can to help authorities understand why these senseless acts happened. We have many unanswered questions as well.
With Princeton-praising articles titled "Jumping From the Ivory Tower", it seems like PAW is not helping answer these deep questions. If anything, PAW is helping bury them under inappropriate humor. This essay is not intended in any way to condone violence or the abdication of personal responsibility. But it is intended to help understand some of these issues of suicide and alienation in a university context, and to make suggestions for improvements to the social part of these issues. It even tries to use humor in relation to suicide and morbid themes a bit more appropriately (satirically about PU in this case, discussing options like its voluntary peaceful self-dissolution to help a billion poor children get an education, or its metaphorical death and rebirth as an agent of global economic transcendence to a post-scarcity society of abundance for all). It is always easier to destroy than to create, so this essay includes some specific suggestions for improving the situation at Princeton University, which is a mythologically troubled institution (even as it is filled with many wonderful and caring people).
Like how the Cho family describes Virginia Tech, PU also is filled with people with "so much love, talent and gifts to offer". Even the brother of Sun-Kyung Cho '04, Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech,
Slashdot Mirror
Watch out for too much vitamin A from cod liver oil...
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/12/23/important-cod-liver-oil-update.aspx
Best to get vitamin A from vegetables like carrots or carrot juice.
See also: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
Related by me: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
By others:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
http://www.anwot.org/
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/
http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/
Look into books by Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Joel Fuhrman.
See also a list of other stuff I put together on health and happiness: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/
"Now if I could just get off my fat ass and exercise to fix the rest of me..."
http://www.squidoo.com/walkingwhileworking
I've been using a DIY treadmill workstation for about five years. I agree about the value of vitamin D. I think having a treadmill workstation contributed to vitamin D deficiency because with it I would then spend less time exercising outdoors.
I used to believe stuff like that about vitamin D and minimal sun exposure of hands in the winter, which I was taught in grade school. It turns out to be wrong. You may want to do some more research on this topic before making such confident (and incorrect) pronouncements on this topic in the future. See for example: http://gizmodo.com/5823058/tanning-can-cause-cancer-but-not-tanning-could-cause-a-lot-worse
Or from:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2839537
"Sunlight has long been recognized as a major provider of vitamin D for humans; radiation in the UVB (290-315 nm) portion of the solar spectrum photolyzes 7-dehydrocholesterol in the skin to previtamin D3, which, in turn, is converted by a thermal process to vitamin D3. Latitude and season affect both the quantity and quality of solar radiation reaching the earth's surface, especially in the UVB region of the spectrum, but little is known about how these influence the ability of sunlight to synthesize vitamin D3 in skin. A model has been developed to evaluate the effect of seasonal and latitudinal changes on the potential of sunlight to initiate cutaneous production of vitamin D3. Human skin or [3 alpha-3H]7-dehydrocholesterol exposed to sunlight on cloudless days in Boston (42.2 degrees N) from November through February produced no previtamin D3. In Edmonton (52 degrees N) this ineffective winter period extended from October through March. Further south (34 degrees N and 18 degrees N), sunlight effectively photoconverted 7-dehydrocholesterol to previtamin D3 in the middle of winter. These results quantify the dramatic influence of changes in solar UVB radiation on cutaneous vitamin D3 synthesis and indicate the latitudinal increase in the length of the "vitamin D winter" during which dietary supplementation of the vitamin may be advisable."
A fair-skinned person in a skimpy bathing suit under noon-day near-equatorial summer sun can produce on the order of 20,000 IU vitamin D (which self-limits in the skin when from UV) in about twenty minutes. A dark-skinned person will take a couple of hours to reach that level under those conditions. As the above paper suggests, in winter father from the equator, your skin will produce essentially no vitamin D. Reference:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-us/our-staff0/john-j-cannell-md/
Given the above, the US RDA of about 600 IU D3 per day for an adult of any size is just bad medicine, as is setting a tolerable upper limit of 4000 IU D3 daily (when that "limit" is closer to what the avergae adult needs). That is why you won't get enough vitamin D from food, because the RDA is about 10X too low for most people. A better recommendation:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
With our increasing indoors lifestyle, people became more and more vitamin D deficient -- even living in sunny places like Arizona or Texas. That was made worse by the fear mongering by the dermatology profession (with dermatologists as whole causing on the order of 10X the cancer they prevented plus a host of other health issues like autism with their well-meant but terrible advice).
Studies have shown a link between nutrition and depression. See, as one example:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/
"Few people are aware of the connection between nutrition and depression while they easily understand the connection between nutritional deficiencies and physical illness. Depression is more typically thought of as strictly biochemical-based or emotionally-rooted. On the contrary, nutrition can play a key role in the onset as well as severity and duration of depression. Many of the easily noticeable food patterns that p
So their tax-exempt status could possibly be revoked. From a decade ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-dealing
"Self-dealing is the conduct of a trustee, an attorney, a corporate officer, or other fiduciary that consists of taking advantage of his position in a transaction and acting for his own interests rather than for the interests of the beneficiaries of the trust, corporate shareholders, or his clients. Self-dealing may involve misappropriation or usurpation of corporate assets or opportunities. Self-dealing is a form of conflict of interest.[1]"
The self-dealing happens because the non-profit could make its digital resources available to the world for essentially free these days. But instead MIT and JSTOR impose artificial scarcity to extract a revenue stream for its staff in order so it may then create new resources which it also sells access to make more such resources etc.. That model may have made some sense in the 20th century, but it makes no sense in the 21st. The argument that access to digital resources today should be restricted to support making more digital resources tomorrow is not one that a tax-exempt organization should legally be able to make these days IMHO. And in order to sustain their self-dealing, they contributed to the death of an idealistic young man, Aaron Swartz to sustain their obsolete and now essentially corrupt business models, which just highlights how evil what they (and many other non-profits) are doing has become bit-by-bit year-by-year if artificial scarcity ever made sense for a non-profit.
So, perhaps a way forward here is to make an example of both MIT and JSTOR by getting their IRS tax exempt status and also corporate charters revoked (a corporate "death sentence") for the act of self-dealing? That might serve as an example to other tax-exempt non-profits to shape up and make their digital works freely available before they get the same treatment? See also:
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/
"In most states a lot of the language from the early days, that reflected the subordinate nature of corporations is still on the books
"Well they are just wrong and it's easy to demonstrate that."
Whether it may be easy to demonstrate that, getting people in the USA to change their minds about that is another issue... Otherwise, how do we end up with group think like this?
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-06-poll-iraq_x.htm
"Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, says a poll out almost two years after the terrorists' strike against this country. "
When it should have been obvious there was essentially no connection? Something deep is wrong with the USA to have such a survey result. What produced that information bubble which then translated into support for invading Iraq (a country that posed the USA no immediate danger and cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives)?
The fact that there are worse aspects in NK than the USA does not invalidate the point of TFA talking about the NK bubble without considering similar processes in the USA (or any country for that matter). Look at what just happened to Aaron Swartz for trying to make publicly available publicly funded research as a form of civil disobedience by engaging in a form of freedom of speech that has been criminalized in the USA (granted with various other complexities):
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/01/20/1823256/edward-tuftes-defense-of-aaron-swartz-and-the-marvelously-different
So, there are clear criminal limits to freedom of speech in the USA when commercial interests are involved... And those limits did not exist when Tufte was a boy (back then most copyright violation was a civil issue not a criminal issue). And now Aaron Swartz is dead in part because of them (although I can think he might have gotten caught in US group think about avoiding the sun and so became vitamin D deficient, or perhaps ate the hacker way and became phytonutrient or omega-3 deficient which may have contributed to a depressed mental state, so a couple types of group think may have converged to cause a terrible thing to happen).
BTW, just for contrast: ... As part of their series "Ask a North Korean", NK News asked North Korean Jae-young about the good things about life in the hermit state, and the recent refugee is easily able to find something to miss. Jay-young says that her life in North Korea was "mentally rich -- even if it was materially insufficient" and that affection between neighbors was "very pure and deep". She writes about the joyful side of life in North Korea: "On major holidays, we invited our neighbors (we used to call my mother's friends "aunt"), shared food and stories with them. My mom was really good at making 'Jong-Pyun rice cake' and I can still remember my aunts exclaiming how good they tasted. During nights, we gathered together, turned music on and danced. On days when electricity went out, we used to play the accordion, sing, dance and have fun. I used to have so much fun and danced so hard that my socks had holes when I checked them in morning. My father used to be respected as a gagman (comedian).""
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-good-side-to-life-in-north-korea-2012-10
"One of the most interesting phenomenons about North Korea isn't the extraordinary lengths that some citizens make to escape the country â" it's the extraordinary lengths a minority of refugees make to get back into the country.
Now, the same might be said about many more traditional societies including the Amish. But however they found a life with more community of some sorts and less technological addictions, maybe the good points is still something to be considered against the bad?
The US may be farther from 1984 than NK (debatable given what US credit card information and internet communications reveals), but the USA sure is a lot closer to "Brave New World":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
"Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes: "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the *rgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.""
BTW, "How to escape The Pleasure Trap":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Overall, what you say is true and reflects what the point I am trying to make. That said, I also think most people, even in the USA, have little understanding of what most political thinking is like outside major US-Left-leaning US urban areas. GW Bush was re-selected after launching a ruinous illegal war. What does that say about the country? Of course, the UK went along with it... And even within "progressive" areas of the USA, there is another sort of totalitarianism the US Right is correct in pointing out (expanding government intervention in all areas of life). So, the deeper point is that there are similar social forces at work both in the US and NK (or most any country for that matter), they just play out differently based on history and circumstances. Egypt had "god kings" for thousands of years and did very well -- but it was on much more fertile ground than North Korea with an easier climate, and also it was not surrounded by vastly more technologically advanced countries for much of that time with radically different political forms. But no doubt thousands of years of culture in Egypt may have selected for a sort of personality receptive to the god king idea -- or cult of personality which is a lesser manifestation of it.
So much of our day-to-day reality is socially constructed base on group norms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(social)
See also:
"Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets" by Roland Benabou
http://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/Groupthink%20IOM%202012_07_02%20paper.pdf
"This paper investigates collective denial and willful blindness in groups, organizations and markets. Agents with anticipatory preferences, linked through an interaction structure, choose how to interpret and recall public signals about future prospects. Wishful thinking (denial of bad news) is shown to be contagious when it is harmful to others, and self-limiting when it is beneficial. Similarly, with Kreps-Porteus preferences, willful blindness (information avoidance) spreads when it increases the risks borne by others. This general mechanism can generate multiple social cognitions of reality, and in hierarchies it implies that realism and delu
"Lemme guess, you're a HS dropout and you're bitter because nobody will buy your homemade shit, right?"
Ah, if only I had been smarter and more courageous in High School and indeed completely dropped out and focused on making "homemade" stuff. Probably I might indeed have been more successful and happier? But no, instead I left high school early for college and then blew all the money I earned from writing "homemade" computer software on Princeton, graduating the same year as Michelle Obama. And that was even after having read this awesome essay saying why spending money on Princeton was stupid:
"College is a Waste of Time and Money"
http://www.tarleton.edu/Faculty/anewsome/Bird%20Article.pdf
So, just an example of how I was deeply in a bubble back then (and probably still am now in various ways).
But, turning the points around to focus on the presenter generally shows you don't have much to say about the points presented? What is your point? That I am "bitter"? See also:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."
See also:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
Anyway, compared to what I was told about the USA in public school growing up, yes, I am disappointed with where this country has gone in the last thirty years. But there is not just one specific thing I could point to (although neoliberal economics is perhaps a big part of it, which just continues to get worse as we automate jobs away and wealth continues to concentrate).
And I'm not saying all the changes are for the worse though. There is less air pollution in NYC, for example (reflective of an emerging environmental ethic). There is easy access to a wealth of information via the internet. Example:
"The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization"
http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
We know a lot more about material science. We know a lot more about the science of nutrition and health. There sure are a lot of people trying to make a positive difference in the world. There is much goodness in the USA and abroad.
There remain reasons for optimism as historian Howard Zinn points out:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
" Looking at this catalog of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience-whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just. I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), bu
Interesting points, thanks. I replied to another of your replies suggesting it is harder to globally escape the US ideological influence than the NK ideological influence, so I won't repeat that here.
But I am curious, what do people in the USA you know think about your move? Do they understand it? Do they accept that the day-to-day quality of life (overall happiness) is better for most people in Sweden than the USA? When you talk about the Swedish policies about work or health care, do they accept that the USA is messed up in those areas? Or do they just politely not understand what you are talking about (perhaps because they are in a US ideological bubble)? And if, for some reason they do understand what you are saying, what do they think of the prospects for similar proven successful policies in the USA?
Still, there are fundamental demographic differences between Sweden and the USA, so no doubt there are arguments for differences. BTW, look into supplemental vitamin D living so far north of the equator:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
Actually, while it may be physically easier to leave the USA than to leave North Korea, it is harder to get away ideologically from the US ideological bubble than the North Korean ideological bubble because the US culture is more pervasive. See the ending of "The Prisoner" for a symbolic example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner
You mention elsewhere you are in Sweden. Do you really feel that much safer in Sweden from global nuclear war or biological war or widespread killer robots that might result from US-driven policy and technology? Stuff that results from an economic imperative that Major General Smedley Butler wrote about in the 1930s and has only grown since?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
If not, then I'd suggest in general you have not gotten very far away from the US ideological bubble, even if your day-to-day life may (for you) have improved as you indicated in another post.
BTW, a Russian spin on US politics as it affects US citizens abroad:
"White House wins fight to keep drone killings of Americans secret"
http://rt.com/usa/news/drone-kill-mcmahon-obama-245/
That kind of exercise of US physical power abroad is only going to get easier technologically over that next twenty to thirty years. This violation of constitutional rights of US citizens (even abroad) was unimaginable when I was growing up. (Granted, other countries may develop anti-drone countermeasures, like Iran allegedly did.)
Or, on a more mundane level, US economic practices probably still are shaping big chunks of the Swedish economy too, not to mention the pop culture landscape.
So, I question how far you have "escaped" the US zone of influence even if your life may have improved... See also, for Sweden's role in a recent US-related legal matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Allegations_of_sexual_assault_and_political_refugee
My point is not that the USA is North Korea. My point is that there are some similar social processes at work in both places (and probably in Sweden as well for that matter).
That the USA is radically different from NK is the unstated assumption in TFA. I'm just pointing out some uncomfortable conceptual similarities as well as suggestions for moving beyond them. If you want a great example of that, see James P. Hogan's 1982 novel "Voyage from Yesteryear":
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?"
There is some truth to what you say, unquestionably. Still, what I am saying reflects actual US policy and the behavior of most US Americans, whatever adages remain around from older generations... Most people in the USA may have heard "you are what you eat", yet most people still eat a lot of empty calories from refined starches and sugars and cruelly-raised nutrient-poor meat. That disconnect seems symptomatic of a bubble to me. And it is reflected in US corporate-shaped policy:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramidsâ"subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
There is a history there of decades of efforts by the meat and dairy industry to push the "four food groups" to the detriment of most US Americans, a legacy that still continues even with the USDA food pyramid and later efforts. Better pyramids:
http://www.cellinteractive.com/ucla/center_overview/pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.honestfoodguide.org/
Why doesn't every US American know about "the pleasure trap" as an aspect of "you are what you eat"?
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
If a lot of people in the country accept such behaviors (similar to accepting pictures of the "Great Leader" everywhere in North Korea and various paranoid and repressive NK policies), then what difference is there? No doubt a lot of North Koreans talk about how free and well-off they are... A lot of TFA is about how North Koreans probably don't know what is really going on... And those who do feel they have little power to act. How is that very different from, say, how people working at Walmart, the USA's biggest private employer, do not unionize because people there fear for their jobs if they do and have been taught that collective social action is bad etc. etc. (or at least not taught that it is good and had most independent initiative schooled out of them)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart#Labor_union_opposition
Working inside a corporation is how many adults in the US spend most of their waking hours.
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as F
http://www.escapingnorthkorea.com/
"During his time in China, he learned of the hundreds of thousands of North Koreans fleeing to China through a 6,000-mile modern-day underground railroad, which runs from Pyongyang to Bangkok, in search of food and freedom."
Why dont; more peopel leave North Korea or revolt? Psychology and culture... (which includes things like "quorum sensing").
See also:
http://anwot.org/
"Mental Wealth is the skillful thinking we require to create a wonderful fantastic lifeâ(TM)s experience. Not everyone can accumulate and give their loved ones a sizeable monetary inheritance. Each of us can accumulate mental wealth and experience the joy of giving it away! The wisdom embodied in mental skills enriches us, even more than the benefits money may provide.
I recommend taking The Short Course to Mental Wealth prior to undertaking the fuller course, A Newer Way of Thinking. The short course provides mental skills that equip us to become our own best friend, lifelong. It introduces the vocabulary that frees our will to act using reason and wisdom, replacing instinct and habit; directing and producing our own destiny rather than remaining a servant to fate and circumstance.
The more complete course, A Newer Way of Thinking, explains why we must upgrade our thinking to survive and thrive in the Nuclear Age. Of greater importance, it offers the practical steps to create global peace through our collective efforts. Learn what others have found works and have gladly shared for our benefit. Help make the world a kinder gentler place. Begin with The Short Course to Mental Wealth."
Or, a top Google search result on mental chains:
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/breaking.htm
"Our world of today creates many barriers, walls built of prejudice, of monetary difference, of national boundaries, of belief systems. All these self-created divisions are arbitrary and abstract ideas which often act to avoid growth, to prevent humanity exploring those areas of state space so far not understood. What is possible in our world is unknown by anyone, despite the arrogant assurances with which pronouncements (e.g. "there are no other options") are made by leaders in all fields. No leader, of any type, can possibly deal with all the available information on any subject, so the centralised (undemocratic!) decision making so beloved of corporate, political and bureaucratic systems alike is fundamentally flawed, and increasingly is becoming destructively unsustainable in both social and planetary terms. Every scientific (or political) assumed certainty is now questionable however within our new science. We need not fear to question, only by so doing can we go beyond the errors of the past, those dogmas of static truth and conformity.
It is far too easy to assume that what we already know is all there is to know. This delusion of perfection, the 'authority knows best' syndrome, is endemic to many of our political leaders, academics and experts. Yet throughout history the bullying 'conform or die' certainty of one time or group has been overturned by the discoveries of the next. Today's reality will become tomorrow's stupidity. Transcending what we believe today may be the essential step in taking humanity onwards into a new millenium based upon a better understanding of complex systems. Our essays and papers further explore these themes."
This extends to the core of "science" as a social entreprise:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
Yes, I guess Morris Berman is saying the USA is worse than China in that regard, and much worse than parts of Europe: "How, then, can excess be curbed in a free democratic system? For we can be sure that the intelligent frogs, who are really quite exceptional, are not going to be listened to, and certainly have no power to enforce their insights. True, there are certain countries -- the Scandanavian nations come to mind -- where for some reason the concentration of intelligent frogs is unusually high, resulting in decisions designed to protect the commons. But on a world scale, this is not very typical. More typical, and (sad to say) a model for many other countries, is the United States, where proposed "changes" are in fact cosmetic, and where the reality is business as usual. In the context of 315 million highly addicted frogs, the voices of the smart ones -- Bateson, Frank, Posner, Hardin, et al. -- aren't going to have much impact or, truth be told, even get heard."
So yes, Berman is saying the USA is worse than China in that sense (fascist in a corporatist sense, but more disorganized), but he is not the only one. For example here is something by Thomas L. Friedman in the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html
"Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China's leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying "no." Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he's a centrist. But if he's forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions."
Of course, like people, every country has its unique mix of characteristics that can be strengths or weaknesses depending on the context... North Koreans, for example, may face less "pleasure trap" issues?
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Sad to watch this all play out as so much of the USA suffers for crazy ideological reasons (such as justifies the denial of access of health care and vegetables to a lot of the population). Even sadder to be stuck in the middle of this crazy ideological bubble while it does... Not that I have not tried to help move things to a higher level of sense (as have many others):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
So little, so late... As Bucky Fuller said, wh
Good point. Or, ten or twenty trillion US$ in paper wealth disappeared as an externality of banking risk that some bankers made billions from and caused suffering for tens of millions of people:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/18/the-parable-of-the-frogs/
"What does it take to produce large-scale social change? Most historians, if you catch them in an honest moment, will admit that the popular levers of social change, such as education or legislation, are bogus; they don't really amount to very much. What does make a difference -- and then only potentially -- is massive systemic breakdown, such as occurred in the United States in the fall of 2008. It was the greatest market crash since 1929, leading to widespread unemployment (something like 18% of the population, in real -- as opposed to official -- statistics*) and the loss of billions of dollars in retirement savings. In fact, the crash wiped out $11.1 trillion in household wealth, and this is not counting the several trillion lost in stock market investments. It had been many decades since the middle class found itself in soup kitchens, and yet there they were. In the face of all this, however, very little seems to have changed. Americans are still committed to the dream of unlimited abundance as a "reasonable" goal, when in reality it is (and always has been) the dream of an addict. President Obama's upwards of $19 trillion bailout and stimulus plan funneled money into the very banking establishment that gave us the disaster; it rescued the wealthy, not those who really needed the money. And while he could have appointed economic advisers such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz (both Nobel laureates), who would have attempted to put the nation on a different economic path, he chose instead two traditional neoliberal ideologues, Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, who believe in the very policies that led to the crash. "Change we can believe in" never sounded more hollow."
No doubt some of this is spin, but there is some truth in here:
http://www.infowars.com/100-million-poor-people-in-america-and-39-other-facts-about-poverty-that-will-blow-your-mind/
One of the links there goes to:
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/12/15/9461848-dismal-prospects-1-in-2-americans-are-now-poor-or-low-income
"Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans -- nearly 1 in 2 -- have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income."
I'm not saying the average US citizen is as bad off as most people in North Korea in material ways -- just that there remains a lot of unnecessary suffering in the USA which is being justified by a crazy ideological bubble. For example, if the USA redistributed half of the US GDP equally as a "basic income", then every citizen would have US$2000 a month, and the other half could be competed over. It's only a cultural mythological bubble that keeps most of the USA from seeing this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120102011454/http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"That rationalization came in the form of a brand new science known as economics, which included a brand new mythology."
Despite books like this by Moshe Adler:
"Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science that Makes Life Dismal"
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Rest-Us-Debunking-Science/dp/B007F7WKV8
"Why do contemporary economists consider food subsidies in starving countries, rent control in rich cities, and health insurance every
Some North Koreans have escaped that bubble too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_defectors
What does that prove? Getting beyond a pervasive cultural way of thinking is also something other than learning a few tidbits of information... And most ex-pats will never have the quality of life abroad that native born citizens will in there host countries (with natives embedded in family and community and stories for generations, and with expats facing security risks if anti-Americanism rises). An extreme example of that (Michael Ruppert):
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110706_mcr_evolution.shtml
"...it's also like a combination of the Truman Show and They Live. One massive reality distortion bubble that nobody is aware of.
And the whole discussion, just as the voting choices, always revolves around two options that are only differing in something entirely beside the point, giving the citizens choices for all aspects of their life, except those that aren't meaningless. Everything is condensed down from picking a fuzzy varying area in a multi-dimensional gradient space to a one-dimensional binary choice. With you being called at least "Hitler" for picking the "wrong" one. Let alone trying to think outside that box.
It's ludicrous."
See my comment posted earlier above, or also this by Morris Berman:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/18/the-parable-of-the-frogs/
"In the case of the United States, the imposition of rules and limits on individual behavior to protect the commons is not, at present, a realistic prospect; the population is simply not having it. But how much longer before this freedom of choice is regarded as an impossible luxury? In fact, no crystal ball is required to predict the future here. The tragedy of the commons -- what Hardin called "the remorseless working of things" -- is that a society such as that of the United States won't undertake serious changes even when it is sitting on the edge of an abyss. It has to actually be in the abyss before it will entertain such changes; i.e., it has to be faced with no choice at all. It seems unlikely now, but things are probably moving faster than we realize. In terms of population, energy, food, resources, water, social inequality, public health, and environmental degradation, a crunch of the type I am referring to may be only twenty years away."
By that author:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1118061810/
"During the final century of the Roman Empire, it was common for emperors to deny that their civilization was in decline. Only with the perspective of history can we see that the emperors were wrong, that the empire was failing, and that the Roman people were unwilling or unable to change their way of life before it was too late. The same, says Morris Berman, is true of twenty-first century America. The nation and its empire are in decline and nothing can be done to reverse their course. How did this come to be? In Why America Failed, Berman examines the development of American culture from the earliest colonies to the present, shows that the seeds of the nation's "hustler" culture were sown from the very beginning, and reveals how the very tools that enabled the country's expansion have become the instruments of its demise. "
BTW, Germany is a legacy of what the USA used to be: ..."
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/
"How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place?
The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans.
Yet we in the USA should not lose hope:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played.
From the article: "Ordinary North Koreans [US Citizens?] live in a near-total information bubble, without any true frame of reference. I can't think of any reaction to that except absolute sympathy. My understanding is that North Koreans [US Americans?] are taught to believe they are lucky to be in North Korea [the USA?], so why would they ever want to leave? They're hostages in their own country, without any real consciousness of it. And the opacity of the country's inner workings--down to the basics of its economy--further serves to reinforce the state's control. The best description we could come up with: it's like The Truman Show, at country scale. "
How true is that for the USA? I still hear people talking about how the USA has the best health care in the world, the healthiest population, the most upward mobility for its population, the best food supply, the highest level of democracy, the lowest taxes, the best education system, the most productive workers, and so on... And many US Americans still believe that creating artificial scarcity through copyrights, patents, and perpetual warfare is the path to abundance, and that draconian drug laws and draconian computer crime laws are the path to security... And many US Americans think there is little relation between what they eat and how they feel... Most US Americans have been taught to be afraid of sunlight when outdoor workers get less melanomas than indoor office workers... Many US Americans think we should reduce the US government debt when that is (unfortunatley) what creates the US money supply... Etc... Etc...
Contrast with what John Taylor Gatto says about schooling:
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates -- these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put
http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/super_immunity_book.aspx
Things to be aware of that he would mention:
* vitamin D deficiency
* iodine deficiency
* B-complex deficiency
* omega-3s deficiency
* eat a lot of vegetables, fruits, and beans, and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains
* avoid refined sugars and grains
* avoid food additives (artificial colors, artificial flavors, most preservatives)
Many vegans and vegetarians eat a refined starch-heavy diet with too little vegetables and so are sicker than meat-eaters who also eat a lot of veggies.
In the case of influenza, a lot of it is probably due to vitamin D deficiency in the winter, whether from the Earth's tilt relative to the sun or from cloudy weather and stay indoors in rainy season near the Equator. People probably generally eat less vegetables in winter, too.
In winter, people make little to no vitamin D: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_and_influenza
Even in places near the equator, if people stay indoors to avoid rain, they will have lower vitamin D levels, unless they supplement.
"Rather than observing how unworkable ST:TNG is in our current situation we should find ways to make it workable."
From 2004: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
Maybe MIT could learn from this online book I wrote almost five years ago about getting Princeton University to adopt a post-scarcity worldview? http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
It includes stuff about supporting copyright reform and creating more freely licensed works. And it talks a lot about how the institution could support everyone in the related community to be healthier and less prone to destructive acts.
Here is essay I wrote four years ago about helping Princeton trancend to post-scarcity values: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
From two of the beginning sections on it that relate to this issue:
One motivation for writing (or reading) this essay
I have written on these post-scarcity topics before. The biggest single motivation for the organization of this specific essay is the PAW article on "Jumping From the Ivory Tower".
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/features_phd.html
Is that title going to bring up echoes of this controversy?
"Automaker agrees to changes after meeting with suicide prevention group that objected to spot showing fired robot jumping off bridge."
http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/09/news/companies/gm_robotad/
The robot is shown forced to take a number of menial jobs, including holding a speaker at a fast-food drive through and becoming upset enough [by repeated failure at them] to throw itself off a bridge.
(I won't link to the video, which contains a graphic image of leaping from a bridge.)
That PAW article title was selected only a little over a year after this statement by a recent Princeton University alumna on behalf of her family:
"Cho family statement"
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/04/20/shooting.family.statement/index.html
On behalf of our family, we are so deeply sorry for the devastation my brother has caused. No words can express our sadness that 32 innocent people lost their lives this week in such a terrible, senseless tragedy. We are heartbroken. We grieve alongside the families, the Virginia Tech community, our State of Virginia, and the rest of the nation. And, the world. ... We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person. ... There is much justified anger and disbelief at what my brother did, and a lot of questions are left unanswered. Our family will continue to cooperate fully and do whatever we can to help authorities understand why these senseless acts happened. We have many unanswered questions as well.
With Princeton-praising articles titled "Jumping From the Ivory Tower", it seems like PAW is not helping answer these deep questions. If anything, PAW is helping bury them under inappropriate humor. This essay is not intended in any way to condone violence or the abdication of personal responsibility. But it is intended to help understand some of these issues of suicide and alienation in a university context, and to make suggestions for improvements to the social part of these issues. It even tries to use humor in relation to suicide and morbid themes a bit more appropriately (satirically about PU in this case, discussing options like its voluntary peaceful self-dissolution to help a billion poor children get an education, or its metaphorical death and rebirth as an agent of global economic transcendence to a post-scarcity society of abundance for all). It is always easier to destroy than to create, so this essay includes some specific suggestions for improving the situation at Princeton University, which is a mythologically troubled institution (even as it is filled with many wonderful and caring people).
Like how the Cho family describes Virginia Tech, PU also is filled with people with "so much love, talent and gifts to offer". Even the brother of Sun-Kyung Cho '04, Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech,
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3370847&cid=42540575
As in this other slashdot article, it looks like a large number of nurses also believe that a flu shot leads to flu:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/01/08/0219201/indiana-nurses-fired-after-refusing-flu-shots-on-religious-grounds
Adequate Vitamin D helps prevent some flu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_and_influenza
http://blog.vitamindcouncil.org/2011/12/07/the-difference-between-a-prophet-and-a-madman/
Adequate iodine may help prevent infections, too:
http://www.jmbblog.com/2009/11/iodine-the-forgotten-weapon-against-influenza-viruses/
So may eating a lot more vegetables:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cold-flu-flu-and-nutrition-dr-fuhrman-responds-to-comments.html