What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

This book explains the mind better than most. The spiritual event can be created with manipulating the brain with chemicals. Each individual has a perception of reality and forms shortcuts to evaluate experiences so the body can survive and comprehend the information the senses are providing. Drugs fog the learned shortcuts and open the mind to more imagination that seems so real.

We have much to learn about the brain and its functions. Let the scientists do the testing and leave the Tim Leary’s to manipulating politics.

From the news: “DNC chairman Tom Perez said in the statement, “we recognize that America’s founding promise remains out of reach for too many families.”

Adding that “everywhere we look, our most fundamental values are under attack,” Perez referred to problems surrounding low-paying jobs, health care, immigration, injustice to people of color and members or the LGBTQ community, a recent Supreme Court decision on public unions, and the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy.”

Nature never made everyone equal as each has unique DNA and human body. Each has strengths and weaknesses. Some are enhanced with modern ingenuity, hard work, knowledge, abilities, environment and some luck. The government can not give you the life you dreamed of but it can treat you equal when applying the laws. Has this happened in reality, not exactly. Bias, selective enforcement, personality, connections, values, contributions, etc. make each life different and are treated differently. Government can not, and will not fix these differences. The more people expect government to make up for each person’s deficiency, the more corruption we will experience. The democratic republic will fall apart.

The best first step is expect nothing, everything you do to make things happen depends on yourself. Next be responsible for your own actions which lead to your experience in life. No one has control of luck.

Trying to predict what happened in the past is like finding a puddle of water and trying to determine the shape of the ice chunk it came from.

From Tupelo Talks Facebook;Tuesday night the City Council passed by a 4-3 vote legislation to make the Tupelo Transit system a reality. Factual research paid for by Toyota, thank you Toyota, shows 42% of Tupelo’s population are potential users of this service.

Do we believe that 16,000 people in Tupelo would take a bus up and down Main street and or up and down Gloster? Exactly how did a consultant arrive at this figure? What interest does Toyota have in the project? If the project does not turn a profit who is going to fund the shortfall? What is the benefit value the average taxpayer who the City Council spent their tax money on.

I understand much of Tupelo is in poverty and have a difficult time traveling to and from work. But this system is not going to do any better than those people riding a bicycle. By the way the taxpayer paid for bike lanes. The disabled, elderly, etc. would benefit better from rezoning residential areas to provide the food stores and services they need, in walking distance like most cities have.

Perhaps the City council and or the Newspaper need better information before spending money they did not earn. It must be nice to not have any skin in the game.

There are several drivers for the mammal declines. The introduction of invasive species that outcompete or spread disease to native animals is a big problem. Road deaths also take a toll as does pesticide use. According to previous studies, hedgehogs are suffering because people in urban and suburban areas keep their lawns and gardens too tidy—the animals need overgrown bushes, leaf litter and other habitat to survive. In rural areas, increased use of pesticides is killing off the insects the hedgies nibble on. “We are concerned about the lack of food in sterile fields where lots of pesticides and chemicals are used – there are also larger scale farms so there are less hedgerows for hedgehogs to use,”
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com

In 1900 world population was 1.3 billion. The North American continent had 100 million natives before the white man brought disease. In 1964 the U.S. population was 200 million.

Most of the world has a pecking order based on different factors. Wars have killed millions of people as clashes between values and cultures reached boiling points.

In today’s modern world we have almost 8 billion fighting for a better quality life and who gets to populate the world with their genes, values and culture. As the better educated realize that a better life depends on quality health and a limit to our ability to provide our children with the best chance for survival, we try to be more efficient in our use of resources and our ability to create those resources. Today a child costs $250,000 to raise to end of high school not counting the parent time spending with that child to provide the knowledge needed by them for a future. Add college and you have a sum few people in the world can provide their children much less 5-10 children.

The U.S. tax payer simply does not have the resources to provide these services to the billions of refugees who want a better life. How would you solve the problem?

It is getting more and more difficult to be a father in modern society. Being the head of a family responsible for raising children and supporting the family in so many ways have drove some men to an early grave. It costs $250,000 just to get a child through high school and much more through college. Then we have coping with the changing morals and ethics or challenging income skills. Hardest of all is finding time for the love and attention all children need. Forget being a pawn manipulated consumer by buying cards or presents and focus on how valuable time is being together.

Life is not easy and requires sifting through lots of information and experience which is filtered through our perceptions. Then we have self generated feelings, emotions, senses, memory, unconscious, imagination, unknowns, etc. Much of the brain’s activity is formed by neuron connections formed by habits.

We view the world in these individual ways as the genetic code makes our unique combination of brain chemicals the skew brain operations. Life is only as we know it and practice behavior that encourages good subjective feelings.

On the other side we have reality that is cause and effect of some factors we are aware of and many factors that are unknown. Nature that uses laws both know and unknown to produce cause and effect does not have the human qualities each of us is endowed with. This means most all the perceptions of fairness, morality, equality, etc. are human constructs. Human constructs form both politics and religion. Some human constructs define intelligence.

Intelligence allows us to have better probability to affect things that happen. Keep all this in mind the next time you take an action of any kind including eating, voting, working, consuming, thinking, believing, and any other human activity that continues humanity.

Experts say algae is the food of the future.The average American male consumes 100 grams of protein daily — almost double the necessary amount. This overconsumption isn’t sustainable. The United Nations projects food production will need to increase as much as 70% by 2050 to feed an extra 2.5 billion people.To survive, we need to reinvent the way we farm and eat. Experts say algae could be a possible solution. Unlike most crops, it doesn’t require fresh water to flourish. That’s a big deal. About 70% of the planet’s available fresh water goes toward crops and raising livestock.
Calatayud said if the world’s population grows from 7.5 billion to 10 billion as expected, we’ll need to think more seriously about protein alternatives like algae.
“There will not be enough animal protein or other vegetable protein,” he said. “There won’t be enough arable land, and what’s even more important, there won’t be enough fresh water.”Other meat alternatives include bugs — especially crickets, largely considered the tastiest insects.More than 2,000 edible bug species are eaten by 2 billion people worldwide, and for good reason.Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before Western countries stop turning up our noses at plated insects and start chowing down.

I do not have to explain why I used the novel name Soylent Green.

The Iron Curtain, The Great Wall of China, or Trump’s vision of A wall? The American public should recognize the NYC metaphor language they see in marketing all day long but the media refuses to interrupt the same way of talking when it does not meet their purposes. Trumps wall is just saying that illegal immigration needs to stop and the wall will be the plan to stop it. Not a great wall of China or an iron curtain but a strategy of many integrated steps to encourage corrupt deficient leadership of other countries to fix their problems at home because the conditions the refugees find at the U.S. border will translate the reality to them that the grass is only green when you make it green. It does not come at the sacrifices of other people but at your own sacrifices.

People can not run away from problems at home and expect it to be any easier in the U.S. Citizens of the United States had to work much harder to earn freedom, liberty and rights than if they just stayed in the country of their ancestors. Being a citizen has many responsibilities to maintain the rights of a citizen. The uneducated refugees lack the knowledge and hard work that is required of them to be assimilated citizens.

The the socialist liberal groups that are in America right now lack the understanding of what a Wall means because they have very little experience being responsible for their own welfare.

In the aftermath of the mass shooting at Santa Fe High School, Gov. Greg Abbott has repeatedly stressed the vital role school counselors and mental health professionals play in identifying troubled students When I hear about another case of needless violence and carnage, I get upset. I have always liked to believe that the U.S. is a great nation. It’s hard to see things that way when there’s a mass shooting nearly every day in this country and it seems that our hands are tied as to how to deal with it.

One cause of this problem that is often cited pertains to mental health problems. Sure, a lot of these killers have histories of being mentally unstable. But mental health problems are on the rise in this country. So if we really think that the issue of mental health is the primary issue at hand here, then we are in big trouble moving forward. Just saying “be vigilant” is not going to solve the problem.

As school budgets shrink, school-based mental-health services are losing resources and support. Children spend the majority of their day in schools,” says Tammy Hughes, PhD, a professor of counseling, psychology and special education at Duquesne University. “Further, because school psychologists work with parents and teachers, they are uniquely situated to help children across multiple settings.”Students who can’t focus, or are dealing with difficult family problems, won’t succeed in schools no matter how many reforms are put in place by governors or presidents,” he says.
He and others point out that education reform has focused on increasing academic test scores without considering students’ emotional well-being. “And there’s a direct correlation between emotional health and academic success,”
Lazarus says. We focus so much on teaching teenagers’ facts and getting them to pass exams, but perhaps we ought to pay at least as much attention to helping nurture their personalities
Bottom line is a failure of parents and teachers to raise fully functioning human beings. Then we also have genetic differences where one size does not fit all.

Mice With 3D-Printed Ovaries Successfully Give Birth

The gelatin-scaffold ovary could one day help restore endocrine function in young cancer patients and treat infertility

The future does not aline with archaic religious interpretations of the metaphors written to live by. The rules to live by change with a changing environment.