Federal Budget Deficit Falls to Smallest Level Since 2008 - New York Times

“Thanks to the tenacity of the American people and the determination of the private sector we are moving in the right direction,” Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said in the report. “The United States has recovered faster than any other advanced economy, and our deficit today is less than half of what it was when President Obama first took office.” ~ Jacob Lew, Treasury Secretary

CLICK HERE TO READ!

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/business/economy/federal-deficit-falls-to-smallest-level-since-2008.html?_r=0

Watch (Official Trailer) of "THRIVE: What On Earth Will It Take?"

WATCH FULL MOVIE ON YOU TUBE!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEV5AFFcZ-s

"Fatherhood Adventures" - Michael Gurian - One of the leading Authorities on "Being Male"

What Could He Be Thinking?: How a Man's Mind Really Works

This is the essential primer for wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of our men, in my view.


CLICK HERE TO READ!! "What Could He Be Thinking?: How a Man's Mind Really Works"

Michael Gurian says boys need societal nurturing, too! - USATODAY.com

While this article is a few years old, the statistics regarding the education of our boys, soon to be men, have dropped even more significantly.  Thus, this article is even more relevant.  It is my privilege to know moms who understand that, and still remain a "protector" of their male child.  That protection often requires sacrifice (even more, yes) from these moms..............

CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT OUR MALE CHILDREN!

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-04-08-gurian-boys_N.htm

"If You Want Kids to Fail, Stop Making Failure So Horrible" - The Week

I post this with a caveat to parents.  We have all observed the punitive, narcissistic parent who publicly excoriates 

their child(ten) at a game, meet, or other competition.  It is utterly humiliating and scarring to the child.

This type of parental behavior is NOT being encouraged here.  This is a deeper, more reflective look at the reason 

why all children need not win a ribbon in the same event (for example).

http://theweek.com/article/index/256927/if-you-want-kids-to-fail-stop-making-failure-so-horrible

 

Matt Bruenig

 

Matt Bruenig writes about poverty, inequality, and economic justice at Demos, Salon, The Atlantic, The American Prospect, and The Week. He is a Texas native and graduate of the University of Oklahoma.

U.S.

If you want kids to fail, stop making failure so horrible

Children can't be expected to take risks when the societal consequences are so crushing

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 26, 2014, AT 10:06 AM

Much as we like to pretend otherwise, failure is likely.   Photo: (Thinkstock)

It is important that people take risks. Innovation depends on it.
That's the generic sentiment that sloshes around the cult of entrepreneurship and small business, a cult that has managed to seep into so much of our mainstream economic discourse. According to this sentiment, we need people out there doing novel things that will mostly fail but occasionally lead to significant breakthroughs that generate new goods, services, and processes that improve our lives.
In this vein, Megan McArdle has been pushing the importance of failure, and bemoaning cultural shifts away from taking failure-prone risks. In her estimation, children are being drilled into total conformity from a young age, steered by overly concerned parents toward high-success paths that leave little room for creative deviations from the norm. In the long run, McArdle suggests, this is bad for society because it will reduce innovation and the social benefits that flow from it.
But while McArdle somewhat glibly celebrates failure, the reality of deep failure in America is stark. Unlike elsewhere in the developed world, being at or near the bottom of American society entails extraordinary misery. Poverty, food insecurity, homelessness, instability, and a general lack of a livable social floor means that the consequences of truly failing in the U.S. are rather horrific.
Curiously, the problem of failure's harshness gets scarce attention from supposedly risk-loving conservatives. Instead, we are usually treated to lectures about how important it is that we deliver massive rewards to the handful of people who take the failure-prone risk and manage to make it through successfully. Such rewards must be on offer, we are told, to incentivize people to bear such extreme risks.
This policy advice ignores a huge part of the puzzle. To incentivize people to try out a failure-prone innovative path, you can either increase the rewards to doing so or decrease the risks associated with doing so. You can increase the jackpot that winners get, or decrease the misery losers suffer. To the extent that people and parents are reasonably averse to risking the possibility of winding up on the bottom of our society, the solution to the problem of conformist drilling lies in reducing inequality, poverty, and economic insecurity so that the economic bottom is a much more comfortable place to be.
Despite the attractive logic of this pro-innovation argument for egalitarianism, we are often told the exact opposite is true. The most sophisticated version of this argument admits that the relatively egalitarian social democracies of Europe do have respectable levels of economic growth, but insists that it is because they are piggybacking off of the innovation of less egalitarian countries like the U.S. That is, cutthroat capitalism in the U.S. is where the real innovation is, while cuddly capitalism in Scandanavian countries just rides on America's coattails.
As clever as this all sounds, respected indices of competitiveness and innovation do not support it. For instance, as Lane Kenworthy points out, the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index ranked Sweden and Finland the two most innovative nations from 2012-2013. Innovation is an extremely difficult thing to perfectly measure, but these studies suggest that innovation is indeed compatible with the kind of egalitarian social systems popular in the Nordic countries.
If fear of failure is causing parents and children to cut out socially necessary doses of innovation-generating risk, then we should act to make that fear less potent. Cajoling parents to sacrifice their kids into the maw of poverty for the greater good won't do. Instead, we should construct high economic floors, low inequality, and iron-clad economic security.

6 Psychological Insights about Solitude | Single at Heart ~ Psych Central

".....People who are single-at-heart love the time they have to themselves. In fact, when thinking about spending time alone, just about all of them react with something like, “Ah, sweet solitude,” and almost none of them react with, “Oh, no, I might be lonely!”......

CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE

"Where Have All the Lobbyists Gone?" (with excellent graphic)| The Nation

On paper, the influence-peddling business is drying up. But lobbying money is flooding Washington, DC like never before. What’s going on?.....
CLICK TO SEE EXCELLENT GRAPHIC: Where Have All the Lobbyists Gone? | The Nation

"Did Cavemen Have it Right? A Dietitian Examines the Paleo Diet"| Fooducate

The Paleo approach to eating offers much to be desired from a health standpoint. Indeed, it would be a very good thing if a few of the fundamentals were to rub off on the American public.   CLICK HERE TO READ THE GOOD, BAD AND UGLY FACTS

The Truth About "Macho" Men - Alternet

"Latinos and other men from traditionally “sexist cultures” don't have a monopoly on machismo, so why is it that they're so often scapegoated for backwards attitudes when it comes to gender? How can entire continents and counties be compromised of completely chauvinistic men? And where does this “macho” the media insists on perpetuating come from?".....CLICK TO CONTINUE READING: The Truth About "Macho" Men

"Rand Paul's Deluded Fantasy that Marriage Magically Fixes Poverty" - Alternet

"Conservatives are obsessed with the notion that marriage is solution - here's why that is simplistic and ridiculous..."  CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE

The Sun Magazine | Learning To Sleep

..."Only eyewitnesses believed me after a while, because everyone who has brought a newborn home has experienced nights in which the baby wakes constantly in need of soothing or feeding. But Henry didn’t wake up, because he didn’t go to sleep. Neither Jon nor I could believe that a human could live with so little rest. It couldn’t be good for him; could it?"...  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: "How to Really Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer: Why the Paleo Diet Is Half-Baked" [Interactive & Infographic]

The human body is not simply a collection of adaptations to life in the Paleolithic—its legacy is far greater. Each of us is a dynamic assemblage of inherited traits that have been tweaked, transformed, lost and regained since the beginning of life itself. Such changes have not ceased in the past 10,000 years.

Ultimately—regardless of one's intentions—the Paleo diet is founded more on privilege than on logic. Hunter–gatherers in the Paleolithic hunted and gathered because they had to. Paleo dieters attempt to eat like hunter–gatherers because they want to.  CLICK HERE TO READ THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE!

Why Do Grandmothers Exist? It's an Evolutionary Mystery - A "Paleo" View of Grandmothers...but much healthier! - New Republic

In a happy coincidence, the grandmother hypothesis comes along just as Americans enter what might be called the Age of Old Age. America's biggest generation, the baby-boomers, began retiring in 2011. This gerontocracy is expected to drain our wealth. By 2060, more than 20 percent of all Americans will be 65 or older, up from 13 percent in 2010. More than 92 million oldsters will roam the land, if roaming is within their power. People who fret about the federal budget point out that, by 2011, Social Security and Medicare were already eating up a third of it. Looming in the near future is the prospect that both programs' trust funds will vanish as the number of workers paying into the system goes down.

But are senior citizens really "greedy geezers" (a term made popular by this magazine in 1988) about to bankrupt us? The grandmother hypothesis suggests not......CLICK HERE TO READ!

Institute of Noetic Sciences

Research at IONS

From its inception, the Institute of Noetic Sciences has blazed new trails in exploring big questions: Who are we? What is consciousness, and how does it impact the physical world? What are our human potentials, and how can we achieve those potentials? What leads to personal and societal healing and transformation?

Because limitations in our human consciousness underlie many of the problems we face as a global community, research at IONS focuses on exploring the fundamental nature of consciousness, investigating how it interacts with the physical world, and studying how consciousness can dramatically transform in beneficial ways.

Our research focuses on three primary program areas.

Consciousness & Healing

What role does consciousness play
in health and healing?

Worldview Transformation

How does consciousness transform?
How can we support individual and
collective transformation?

Extended Human Capacities

The Science of Interconnectedness —
How does consciousness interact
with the physical world?

CLICK HERE TO READ!

Noetic Now Journal | Institute of Noetic Sciences

© ELENA RAY | BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM (ID 4953901)

This is the mysterious journey we all set out upon, whether we know it or not: to remember who we are, to get to the heart of our soul’s story, and to embrace our own process of soul-making.

About the Author

• 

  Robert Atkinson, PhD

  Atkinson is professor of human development and religious studies and director of the Life Story Center at the University of Southern Maine. An internationally known authority on life storytelling and the author of eight books, this essay was adapted from his most recent book, Mystic Journey: Getting to the Heart of Your Soul’s Story (Cosimo Books, 2012). His website iswww.robertatkinson.net.

CLICK HERE TO READ: Noetic Now Journal | Institute of Noetic Sciences

What I tell about “me” I tell about you
The walls between us long ago burned down
This voice seizing me is your voice
Burning to speak to us of us.
—Rumi

Mystics have a reputation for being mysterious. In the most basic sense, a mystic is one who seeks union, or unity. But don’t most of us have such a yearning? Whether what we seek is union with ourselves, with others, with creation, with the Creator, or with Reality, maybe we are all mystics at heart. The mystic traditions came into being to help people remember their true origin and destiny. Remembering where we came from and where we are going would certainly change us and transform our relationships into ones of authenticity, respect, and compassion.

Death threats against a 5-year-old: Our terrifying troll culture - SALON

"....and that apparently is what life, now, is. If you put yourself out there in public even the slightest way, this is what you’ll get. You can be Miss America and they’ll call you a “terrorist” for having dark skin. You can be a football star and they’ll call you a “monkey.”  You can be a critic with cancer and they’ll say they “can’t wait for you to die.”You can be an ordinary high school student who’s just come out, and you’ll get a letter that “You don’t deserve to live in this world.” And of course, if you’re a woman and if you’ve ever expressed an opinion anywhere in public, you can be pretty sure someone’s going to let you know you ought to be assaulted and mutilated. In my own past, I’ve had readers volunteer to come to my house to rape me with a knife, and express the wish that my own children smother me to death. Just this morning, because I’ve written about Woody Allen, I got an email from a reader sharing his hope that my two daughters be sexually abused..."  CLICK HERE TO READ HORRIFYING FACTS

Interactive: How Twitter responded during every moment of the SOTU speech

The folks over at Twitter have culled their massive data set of user reactions to the State of the Union and put together this nifty visualization of last night's speech. On top, you'll see a timeline of the speech with the volume of tweets at any particular moment reflected by the width of the color bar. The big spike in the middle is for Twitter users' apparent enthusiasm for the President's Mad Men reference.  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

"Are You a Mental Redneck?" - Take a test here and find out....

Karl Albrecht, Ph.D.

Dr. Karl Albrecht is an executive management consultant, futurist, lecturer, and author of more than 20 books on professional achievement, organizational performance, and business strategy. He is listed by Executive Excellence Magazine as one of the Top 100 Thought Leaders in the area of leadership. He is a recognized expert on cognitive styles and the development of advanced thinking skills. His books Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success,Practical Intelligence: The Art and Science of Common Sense, and his Mindex Thinking Style Profile are used in business and education. The Mensa society presented him with its lifetime achievement award, for significant contributions by a member to the understanding of intelligence. Originally a physicist, and having served as a military intelligence officer and business executive, he now consults, lectures, and writes about whatever he thinks would be fun. CLICK HERE TO READ

40% of World's Population of School Age Kids Can't Read, Report Says - Huffington Post

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — At least 250 million of the world's 650 million primary school age children are unable to read, write or do basic mathematics, according to a report Wednesday commissioned by the U.N. education agency.   CLICK HERE TO READ