Societal stressors can drive a rat to substance abuse

 The nexus between poverty and crime/violence

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02G6YxqQHiGKzvWwa8QQ43i4GnCwoAuidQguysJizgaAAcjAt7PLpKxbk2CPRX535Kl&id=516732729&mibextid=Nif5oz

“Put a rat in a cage and give it 2 water bottles. One is just water and one is water laced with heroin or cocaine. The rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself in a couple of weeks. That is our theory of addiction.

Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It has nothing to do. Let’s try this a bit differently.” So he built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything a rat could want is in Rat Park. Lovely food. Lots of sex. Other rats to befriend. Colored balls. Plus both water bottles, one with water and one with drugged water. But here’s what's fascinating: In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use it. None of them overdose. None of them use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. What Bruce did shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. The right-wing theory is that it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is that it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.

Now, we created a society where significant numbers of us can't bear to be present in our lives without being on something, drink, drugs, sex, shopping... We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for many of us, more like the first cage than the bonded, connected cages we need.

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of it, is geared toward making us connect with things not people. You are not a good consumer citizen if you spend your time bonding with the people around you and not stuff. In fact, we are trained from a young age to focus our hopes, dreams, and ambitions on things to buy and consume. Drug addiction is a subset of that."

Credit: Johann Hari 

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Societal stressors have triggered a mental health crisis! Incapacity to cope with life stressors is the root cause of substance abuse addiction

"Cost-of-living" crisis.  

 Overall inflation has increased the cost of food and shelter ,and made the cost of living unaffordable...

Young people are feeling disillusioned,alienated, and defeated...and nihilistic!  You do what you have to to provide for yourself ---to survive.

Impoverished persons cannot pursue/access justice through the courts

The challenge is not increasing  economic growth, but one of distribution-- of  redistributing the abundance acrued by the economy more equitably .(basic minimum income) ---reinvesting in /re-enforcing the social safety net.  Instead of addressing the root cause of the alienation, (denying access to resources),society chooses the punitive option(criminalization of poverty  /incarceration)

You can provide a person with the resources to flourish (guaranteed basic income),, or you can cage them at the cost of $115,000./person/year

Oppression,injustice,disenfranchisement is achieved through the legal /court system. The legal institution is designed to maintaining the hierarchy, to favour the interests of the elite (the wealthy and the powerful)

When people realize the system is rigged, they opt out of it and resort to other options for settling their grievances and getting what they need, such as illegal behavior. The social contract is no longer binding.   .They are no longer a stakeholder. 

"You do what you have to to provide for yourself ---to survive."

When people are denied access to education,employment,housing,basic income ...they become nihilistic. 

Denied a share in any of it...they just want to burn it all down!

How paranoid nationalism corrupts

 from The Economist, Sept 2 ,2023/

Humanity is "unhinged"

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2023/sep/19/world-is-becoming-unhinged-un-chief-antonio-guterres-tells-general-assembly-video?ref=upstract.com

UN secretary-general warns of ‘Great Fracture’ as world leaders begin debate

Caitlin Hu, CNN

Tue, September 19, 2023 at 7:35 AM PDT·3 min re

Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned of a looming “Great Fracture” in the world, describing existing global governance structures as failing to serve a changing world.

Speaking before world leaders in the United Nations Assembly Hall on Tuesday, Guterres called for sweeping changes to multilateral institutions, including reforming the powerful Security Council at the heart of the United Nations, and redesigning global financial systems.

“The alternative to reform is not the status quo. The alternative to reform is further fragmentation,” he said. “It’s reform or rupture.

“We are inching ever closer to a Great Fracture in economic and financial systems and trade relations,” he said. “One that threatens a single open Internet, with diverging strategies on technology and artificial intelligence, and potentially clashing security frameworks.”

Guterres described increasing global multipolarity as heralding “new opportunities for justice and balance in international relations” – an acknowledgment of the rise of new powers in the world like India and China, and growing negotiating power of regional blocs. But to ensure peace between nations in a multipolar order, new and strengthened multilateral institutions are all the more important, he added.

The United Nations Security Council and Bretton Woods agreement still reflect the unequal power relations of 1945, Guterres said, “when many countries in this Assembly Hall were still under colonial domination.”

The Security Council is made up of five permanent members – the US, the UK, France, China, Russia – and 10 rotating members. Only one leader from the permanent five members – US President Joe Biden – chose to attend the UN General Assembly this year.

More than 50 UN countries have never been members of the Security Council.

Guterres’ speech hit on long list of smoldering global issues, including bloody violence in Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Haiti; oppression in Myanmar and Afghanistan; and the potential threats of unfettered new technologies, including artificial intelligence.

It also devoted significant attention to climate change, a central issue for Guterres, with the secretary-general taking aim at G20 countries for producing the majority of global emissions amid rising global temperatures, and calling on wealthy nations to deliver billions in promised funding to strengthen developing nations against climate-related threats.

In a notable aside to environmental activists around the world – and on the streets of New York this week – Guterres said, “To all those working, marching and championing real climate action, I want you to know: You are on the right side of history. I’m with you.”

The secretary-general’s address echoed criticisms that he has previously aired of division in the world. In 2021, with parts of the world still gripped by Covid-19, Guterres said the world was “getting an F in ethics.” In 2022, the secretary-general warned the international community was “gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction” – though he pointed to the Black Sea Grain Initiative that opened delivery paths for Ukrainian grain to countries in need as a vital point of hope.

One year later, however, the grain deal has collapsed. And as Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds on, the geopolitical conditions for joint action to stave off humanitarian and environmental disasters can seem further away than ever.

“We have a level of division among superpowers that has no precedent since the Second World War,” Guterres observed in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday, ahead of his speech.

All he has to bridge that division, he told Amanpour, is a voice.

“The secretary-general of the United Nations has no power and there’s no money. What we have is a voice. And that voice can be loud. And I have the obligation to make it be loud.”

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Scientists Observe The Creation Of Matter From Light

https://blog.physics-astronomy.com/physics/for-the-first-time-scientists-observe-the-creation-of-matter-from-light/#:~:text=Now%2C%20a%20team%20of%20scientists%20from%20Brookhaven%20National,heavy%20ions%20at%20nearly%20the%20speed%20of%20light.

For The First Time Scientists Observe The Creation Of Matter From Light | Physics-Astronomy Blog

March 31, 2023


One of the most fascinating implications of Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is that matter and energy are interchangeable.


In other words, it should be possible to create matter from pure energy, such as light. This process, known as matter creation or pair production, was first proposed by physicists Gregory Breit and John Wheeler in 1934. However, it has remained elusive for decades, as it requires extremely high-energy photons to collide with each other and produce electron-positron pairs.

Now, a team of scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York has reported the first direct observation of matter creation from light in a single step. They used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a powerful particle accelerator that can smash together heavy ions at nearly the speed of light. By doing so, they created intense electromagnetic fields that contained virtual photons, which are short-lived disturbances in the fields that behave like real photons.

When two ions passed by each other without colliding, some of their virtual photons interacted and turned into real photons with very high energy. These photons then collided with each other and produced electron-positron pairs, which were detected by the STAR detector at RHIC. The scientists analyzed more than 6,000 such pairs and found that their angular distribution matched the theoretical prediction for matter creation from light.

This experiment not only confirms a long-standing prediction of quantum electrodynamics, but also demonstrates a new way of studying the properties of matter and antimatter in extreme conditions. The scientists hope to further explore this phenomenon and its implications for fundamental physics and cosmology.

Do you use a lithium battery powered devices?

The push to electrify our vehicles is driving a scramble for cobalt, which is almost exclusively mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

All truthseekers (and anyone still open to hearing the truth) needs to hear this interview with  Siddharth Kara, author of Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives.

Aired: March 3, 2023 on CBCcradio/the current

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current/clip/15969899-the-human-cost-cobalt-element-powers-devices

Why has the oldest known city on earth been ignored by archaeologists?

The City of Eridu is the Oldest on Earth, It's Largely Unexplored


By Michael Chary |
January 20, 2022 |
Seeking Truth, Ancient Origins, Ancient Civilizations Decoded


The Ruins Of Eridu, oldest city in the world
Over the past decade, there have been a number of archeological revelations pushing back the timeline of human evolution and our ancient ancestors' various diasporas. Initially, these discoveries elicit some resistance as archeologists bemoan the daunting prospect of rewriting the history books, though once enough evidence is presented to established institutions, a new chronology becomes accepted.

But this really only pertains to the era of human development that predates civilization — the epochs of our past in which we were merely hunter-gatherers and nomads roaming the savannahs. Try challenging the consensus timeline of human civilization and it's likely you'll be met with derision and rigidity.

Conversely, someone of an alternative persuasion may profess stories of ancient civilizations, such as Atlantis or Lemuria, with speculative mythology recounting a lost, golden age in human history that was surely responsible for building the pyramids and other wonders of the world. They point to the writings of Solon and Plato as evidence for these ancestors' existence, which is exciting but difficult to corroborate without physical proof.

Researcher Matt LaCroix seems to find himself somewhere in the middle of these two perspectives. While he says he's fascinated by the Athenian clues detailing the destruction of Atlantis, he finds more compelling evidence in ancient Mesopotamia, or what academia already acknowledges as "the cradle of civilization."

It's here we find the ruins of the most ancient city on Earth that we have physical proof of — the city of Eridu. This archaic metropolis is well-documented in historical texts covering ancient Sumer and the Babylonian empire, but there's also a mythological component to Eridu that may imply human civilization is far older than we believe — significant orders of magnitude older.

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That mythological component comes from the Sumerian King List; a record of ancient monarchs and demi-gods dating back more than 250,000 years to the time when "kingship first descended from heaven."

This royal chronicle ostensibly reads like mythology, with early kings said to have lived and ruled for tens of thousands of years, particularly during the antediluvian era. After the flood, however, the kings' reigns begin to shorten to hundreds of years — much like some of the patriarchs of the Old Testament — and eventually to lifespans matching our modern mortality. Not to mention, there's proof that the names of some of the more contemporary kings on the list did, in fact, exist.

The attempts to preserve documentation of this wildly ancient lineage trace back to the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, who ruled several thousand years ago. Thanks to his efforts compiling a massive library of Sumerian culture that was already ancient in his day, we have texts including the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enūma Eliš that survived into modernity. Millennia later, these texts outlining the Sumerian pantheon would be discovered and translated by Austen Henry Layard, before then being famously interpreted by Zecharia Sitchin.

Sitchin's translations inspired many to ascribe to the idea that the Anunnaki gods of Sumerian lore were an extraterrestrial race of humanity's progenitors. LaCroix says Sitchin's perspective intrigued him at first too, but as he dug deeper he found details the alternative scholar got wrong. Namely, the idea that humans were created as a slave species for an industrious race of alien overseers who used humans to mine precious earth minerals.

Instead, LaCroix says the texts describe an incredible effort by a subset of the Anunnaki known as the Igigi, to build infrastructure on Earth that would allow civilization to flourish before creating mankind as a perfect species with the potential to ascend to enormous power — maybe even more than the Anunnaki themselves.

According to LaCroix, there may have been a number of times we came close to reaching that potential throughout our history on this planet, but we've been set back by natural disasters and conflict. These setbacks have sadly continued over the past decade as the war in the Middle East has led to the destruction of precious artifacts that could give us more insight into, arguably, the most important period in human history. These artifacts, particularly the countless cuneiform tablets in places like Nineveh, have been looted and sold on black markets around the world.

And if these sites are not being destroyed by religious extremists, they're being largely ignored by archeologists. A prime example of this is Eridu and its iconic ziggurat, the temple of E-Abzu, which remains buried in the sands of southern Iraq. According to Sumerian legend, Eridu was established by, and home to the Annunaki god Enki, himself. Here, cuneiform tablets are literally sticking up out of the sand waiting for the right people to come along, preserve them, and unlock the lost secrets of humanity.

To learn more about LaCroix's work to help preserve these records watch Eridu: City of Gods on Open Minds with Regina Meredith.

About the Author
Image of Author
With a pedigree in journalism, Michael Chary quickly became disenchanted with its mainstream narratives, opting instead to delve into the alternative and esoteric. A fan of the works of Graham Hancock, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Howard Zinn, Chary has learned there is more to our reality than we've been told.

Can the US avoid default on its 30 trillion dollar debt?!

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-hits-31-4-trillion-234748493.html


US 30 trillion. debt is mostly borrowed from China.If China calls in its loan it would cause a default wch would trigger a global financial and economic collapse.
The global financial system is volatile and unstable and would topple like a house of cards.
America's. only response would be to keep raising its "debt ceiling" (allowing it to borrow more money),and for the central bank (federal reserve) to print more money (so-called "quantitative easing"!). But this action  devalues the currency (i.e.  decreases the buying power of the currency)as people lose trust in the value of. paper money. (the value of money is measured by how much you can buy with it!). This results in having to pay more and more for the same item(inflation).

Even at a modest interest rate of 5%, the debt service cost for 30 trillion dollars is 1.5 trillion.This is close to 100 % of US annual budget (1.45 trillion) and 5,370  % of its 2023 GDP.($26,695.58B)