27. March 2010 by admin.

Perhaps the most obvious sentiments in our hearts, as we look nostalgically to the past, is that life, was simpler, less congested. We weren’t so intimately involved with each other’s wastefulness, breathing each other’s polluted water or stressed at being stuck in traffic.As we quietly desire less congestion and simpler times in our hearts, almost every community has economic development and growth as its stated vision and action. We are splitting the human experience where we do with our hands what we don’t want in our hearts. Economic development corporations are our economic brainchilds. The theory they put forth is that citizens, of the congested area, benefit economically from more growth and congestion.

Even if the theory has partial merit, is economic growth more important than the risks congestion brings — serious pollution, increased risk of accidents and a growing economic inability to provide basic infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers, in their recent report card on America’s infrastructure, reveals that the nation has an infrastructure deficit of $1.6 trillion. So if we are risking the quality of life, and in many cases life itself, the economic rewards should be large.

It’s almost as though growth is a distraction, trying to ignore a more fundamental economic flaw. Growth has elements which work against our ability to eat, have a home, or enjoy a vacation.

Growth economists, using the carrot of economic benefits, have helped create a sea of congestion out of which growing numbers wish to escape — if they economically could.

With a three-fold increase in the country’s population over the last 100 years, the economic prosperity from the corresponding increase in the consumer base should be material. Where is it?

If economic well being is predicated upon growth, why are many first-world countries experiencing increases in homelessness, food insecurity and failure at alleviating poverty? Does growth have us loosing twice — environmentally and economically?

With all due respect to economic theories of every conceivable notion, the driving engine of the economy is the amount and movement of bank credit. Currency is the credit of the Federal Reserve Bank and bank deposits are the credit of the commercial banks. The economy rises and falls with the amount of bank credit in circulation and secondary lending (capital markets), which move bank credit around within the economy.

As we pay off our loans, bank credit shrinks and the economy cries for more bank credit. Growth is the foundation of a new bank credit. And bank credit is the grease that everyone depends upon to finance their needs.

In essence, we are on a treadmill to acquire bank credit to finance our needs and bank credit is on a treadmill needing more growth to justify its repayment. Is our means of exchanging becoming obsolete?

Bank credit is born out of and moves around by the debt markets. In the united States these include bond debt, national debt, bank debt, thrift institution debt and credit union debt. As these debt markets gear up for more growth, the natural result is more conversion of natural resources and open space into congestion. This is particularly true as these debt markets rely heavily on real estate collateral.

A surprising discovery about these debt markets is that they are growing much faster than the economy. This might explain why growth is not generating the kinds of economic wellbeing we expect.

Financing growth moves us exponentially further into debt. Instead of having more money from growth, we have more debts working to take money out of circulation and out of our pockets.

While population growth is a major contributor to congestion, the contribution philosophically and in the actualization of that growth by debt markets is significant. All growth — directly or indirectly — is financed by the debt markets. So while it appears the economy is growing by all the things financed, these things are rarely paid for and have tremendous claims on individual, corporate and governmental cash flows.

Growth is broadly accomplished with highly depreciable products and real property improvements. These physical manifestations of growth often wear out, needing more debt to maintain them before the original debt is paid.

The economic drag of the debt and depreciation that comes from growth is contributing to homelessness and food insecurity in modern nations. There is already broad agreement that debt is a major contributor to poverty in third-world countries. Its effects at home are no different.

With gargantuan amounts of bank credit being thrown at real estate, appreciation or inflation of real estate values is a logical outcome. While there are beneficiaries of appreciation, the losers represent large segments of the population that cannot afford housing. The California Association of Realtors disclosed that currently only 23 percent of first-time home buyers could afford a median-priced home. And that’s with 90 percent financing.

As congestion continues, social, economic and psychological stresses will also increase.

Certainly this all sounds austere. However, if the study of congestion and the study of debt markets growing faster than the economy becomes more mainstream, there is hope.

The carrot of personal economic well-being, as promised by proponents of growth, fails to factor in the geometric growth of debt and the highly depreciable products created out of that growth.

Hope lies not in growth, but establishment of an economic science that analyzes the economic ramifications of the means of exchange we use and explores corrections in its flaws.

Present and future generations are searching for ways to avoid getting stuck in traffic, ways to avoid paving the best farmland and how to avoid debt that is growing faster than the paychecks of their governments, the paychecks of the companies they work for or own, and the paychecks they take home.

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17. March 2010 by admin.

One of the great tragedies of humanity is that the human psyche is so easily deceived leading to an inability to raise the world’s collective consciousness level to one of power, rather than force. Exceptional, subjective experiences of truth simply are not presently understandable to the majority of human beings on Earth, and therefore are of limited meaning except to the consciously awakened.Unconscious humanity, the great majority, misidentifies its own intellectual artifacts as reality. But these artificial suppositions are merely the products of an arbitrary point of perception. The inadequacy of the answers it receives is a direct consequence of the limitations implicit in the viewpoints of the question itself, allowing unconscious humanity to think they have solved the problems of the economy, crime, national health, or politics. But so far, they haven’t solved any of these problems at all. They’ve just immersed themselves in an arena for angry minds, sometimes referred to as politics.

In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the “tea party” movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a maniacal mind set that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. It evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.

Look at our current political psychology through our political rhetoric and you’ll see this maniacally is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been the foundation of frequently linked movements of suspicious discontent.

There has been the long familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than several generations, that the country is infused with a network of Communist and Socialist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans. And now of campaigning to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, to pave the way for socialism or communism, all climaxed, of course, with the President’s determination to reel in the health profit industry.

The maniacal mind set sitting behind the microform and camera broadcast the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—trafficking in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. They are always manning the barricades of civilization. They constantly live at a turning point. Like religious millenialists they express the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and they are sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, this angry one is a militant leader. He or she does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, it must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the unconscious direct their attention.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to it. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the manical mind set will outdo it in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry.

When recently in the Idaho panhandle, sixty or so “Tea Party” activists were bracing themselves for a “violent counter-revolution,” several people have asked me why these people are so angry. I am tempted to say that that is what age and a steady diet of Fox News does to people, however, many people in the U.S. reach adulthood with a set of values and sense of self-identity that is historically inaccurate and potentially dangerous. If you have it banged into your head from the cradle to adolescence that your country is the chosen nation—a country built by a rugged and God-fearing band of Anglo-Saxon individualists armed with picks and long guns—you are less likely to embrace other important features of the your heritage, such as the church-state divide, mass immigration, and the essential role of the federal government in the country’s economic and political development. When things are going well, and Team USA is squashing its rivals, this cognitive dissonance is kept in check. But when “the Homeland” encounters a rough patch and its manifest destiny is called into question, the underlying tensions and contradictions in the so easily deceived USA’s psyche come to the fore, and people rail against the government.

Not all of us are subject to this unfortunate condition, of course. Many of our citizens are pragmatic, open-minded, and justifiably proud of the nation’s cultural and ethnic diversity. But at any period of time, there is a certain segment of the population—a fourth, perhaps—that provides fertile ground for the unconscious angriness of U.S. politics.

All countries have some disaffected folk, of course. But the real danger to any democracy comes when military conflict or economic dislocation swells the ranks of the permanently alienated with legions of people who are temporarily disadvantaged or angry. And that is happening now in this country. This strongly suggests that when people’s incomes are rising they are more likely to have trust in the government; when their incomes are stalled, they lose faith in Washington.

We make our own history, but we do not make it as we please; we do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already; like a deep recession; like a country immersed in a “doomsday cycle” wherein banks use borrowed money to take massive risks in an attempt to pay big dividends to shareholders and big bonuses to management — and when risks go wrong, the banks receive taxpayer bailouts from the government. Risk-taking at banks will soon be larger than ever. Like the financial industry that has perfected the art of offering mortgages, credit cards and check overdrafts laden with hidden terms that obscure price and risk. Good products are mixed with dangerous products, and consumers are left on their own to try to sort which is which; like millions of uninsured and impoverished families in this country becoming victims because a confused society that’s lost the capacity for discernment necessary to protect its own consciousness can hardly hope to protect its young.

And given this, the president was always going to have a tough first couple of years…..and this is, of course, exactly what the maniacal mind set are counting on as they sip their tea.

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7. March 2010 by admin.

Stressed pregnant women very likely put their infants at risk for cognitive problems later in life. But a mother’s nurture could protect against this risk, not surprisingly yet another study finds. So that stress hormones levels could be measured, samples of their amniotic fluid were taken of 125 pregnant women, who were at 17 weeks gestation on average.

This new research by the University of Rochester, provides the first direct human evidence that fetuses exposed to elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which probably gets released in the mother’s body when she’s stressed out, can have trouble paying attention or solving problems as they grow up. But what may be more intriguing is that this negative link disappears almost entirely if the mother forges a secure connection with her baby.

When their children reached 17 months of age, researchers tested cognitive abilities with puzzles, pretend play, and baby memory challenges. They also watched the baby and mother interact. Using the Ainsworth “Strange Situation” test, which judges childrearing quality, the researchers categorized these mom-baby pairs as either showing secure or insecure attachment to each other.

Secure children will be able to explore their surroundings while their mother is around, and will be sad if the mother leaves and happy when she comes back. Insecure children do not explore as much, and exhibit other insecure behaviors, such as showing no emotion when the mother leaves or returns, or becoming very anxious when she goes away, yet resisting her affection upon reunion.

For the insecure mom-baby pairs, the moms who had higher prenatal stress-hormone levels were more likely to have kids with shorter attention spans and weaker language and problem-solving skills. But for kids who had secure relationships with their moms, any negative link between high prenatal cortisol exposure and kids’ cognitive development was eliminated.

There is already so much for mothers to be careful of and concerned about during pregnancy that if sadly they didn’t know it already, by being good parents, they can ‘buffer’ their babies against potential setbacks.

The results agree with “fetal programming,” that events in the womb can prime the developing child for long-term health and developmental outcomes. Past studies, for instance, have found a pregnant mother’s diet can sway a child’s long-term risk for heart disease, diabetes and obesity.

Follow up tests with the children at age 6 will see the long-term effects of in-utero cortisol levels and the mothers’ bonding. And mothers with high levels of oxytocin during pregnancy bond better with their babies.

The hormone oxytocin is related to familial bonding in animals and is tied to love and friendship in humans. Species that have more of it tend to develop stronger bonds. Oxytocin is considered a key hormone for monogamy in the animal kingdom. One study of humans found that just sniffing a little oxytocin made people more trusting of others.

Recently, University of Israel researchers measured oxytocin levels in 62 pregnant women during the first trimester, third trimester and first month after delivery. Then they observed the mother and infant interact, defining levels of attachment based on gaze, touch, the use of “motherese” speech and other factors, including surveys filled out by the new mothers.

Mothers with a high level of the hormone in the first trimester engaged in more of the bonding behaviors after birth, the scientists found. Also, moms with lots of the hormone during the entire pregnancy and in the first postpartum month were more likely to sing special songs to infants and otherwise treat them special. They also worried more, checking on the infants more often than other mothers.

When mothers touch or hold their infants frequently, oxytocin is increased, and when mothers are prevented from touching, it decreases. This is part of the reason why mothers and premature infants have difficulty bonding. It is highly recommended that mothers engage in some form of touch after premature birth, such as kangaroo care or massage.

There are several theories about how oxytocin affects social affiliation. The hormone has been tied to sexual bonding in humans as well as intimate friendships, and oxytocin levels tend to be low in mothers suffering postpartum depression.

It seems today’s new moms and dads stubbornly refuse to look for advice from people in the know — their own parents. No, no, we want to be “better” parents than the previous generation, so why ask them? And so they turn to “experts,” that is, parenting advice books and pediatricians.

Those books are bestsellers written by doctors, nurses, child development researchers and parents. They all purport to know the “right” way to bring up children and they all exude confidence. But most of what comes between the covers is, well, folklore; these books are simply cultural documents that echo currently accepted ideas about bringing up children.

Parents go to the pediatrician begging for advice about sleep, feeding, toilet training and discipline, and they want the baby doctor to tell them how to bring up the baby. But a three-year pediatric residency is hospital-based and residents are trained to treat sick children, not normal kids who refuse to eat their peas. No pediatrician learns how to get a healthy baby to sleep, or what to do when a child cries, or what makes little kids smile. They don’t even learn how to diaper a baby.

Where, then, can they turn when faced with the challenge of being a parent?………They might simply look inward. If parents stay close to their kids, listen and pay attention, use common sense and stay flexible, chances are they’ll know what to do, even if they make a few mistakes along the way. Being a good parent isn’t that easy, but it’s also not that hard.

As Dr. Spock wrote 60 years ago, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”

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