- The Borg are an alien group that appear as recurring antagonists in the Star Trek franchise. The Borg are cybernetic organisms linked in a hive mind called "the Collective". The Borg co-opt the technology and knowledge of other alien species to the Collective through the process of "assimilation": forcibly transforming individual beings into "drones" by injecting nanoprobes into their bodies and surgically augmenting them with cybernetic components. The Borg's ultimate goal is "achieving perfection"...

- SOURCE

You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

- The Borg

In an article last month, I mentioned virus expert Geert Vanden Bossche and his prediction of mass deaths soon going "exponential" in highly Covid-vaccinated countries.

Since posting that article, I've learned through one of my part-time jobs that two younger-aged people died within a day of each other. One was age 37 and the other was in their low forties. The younger of the two died of a heart attack and the 40ish person's death was, supposedly, according to the doctor, the result of a previously unknown congenital heart defect.

Although a positive mindset is often associated with success, a new study suggests that excessive optimism often leads to poor decision-making, especially when it comes to finances.

The study, conducted by the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, sought to determine whether people with an optimistic mindset had worse decision-making cognition than people who were more realistic. The researchers found that people with lower cognitive function tended to be more optimistic, which led them to make poor financial decisions.

Study Findings Explained

The study examined more than 36,000 individuals and found that people with realistic expectations and planning processes tend to make wiser decisions than people with a more optimistic mindset.

Researchers discovered that people with the highest cognitive ability were 22 percent more likely to be realists (or pessimists) when it came to financial planning. They also had a 34.8 percent decrease in optimistic tendencies compared with people with lower cognitive ability. Cognitive ability was measured based on various cognitive skills, including verbal fluency, numerical reasoning, and memory. The results suggest that optimism bias causes people to expect unrealistically positive outcomes in life decisions, especially regarding their finances.

We perceive our civic challenge as some vast, insoluble Rubik's Cube. Behind each problem lies another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another, ad infinitum. To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can't do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that's impossible unless we fix crime. There's no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever. People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before the gloom can be lifted - but that's an awareness we suppress. As a nation, we're in deep denial.

- Straus and Howe (1997): "The Fourth Turning", FIRST EDITION page 2

The books "Generations" (1992) and "The Fourth Turning" (1997) by historians William Strauss and Neil Howe identified and categorized recorded cycles of history across multiple cultures and eras. Both books analyzed the timelines of historical events and correlated them to specific life cycles identified as generational "types". Strauss and Howe addressed the concept of time in the context of both circular and linear perspectives. In so doing, they described the "saeculum" as a "long human life" measuring approximately 80 to 90 years and comprised of four turnings, each lasting around 20 to 22 years.

Just as there are four seasons consisting of spring, summer, fall and winter, there are also four phases of a human life experienced in childhood, young adulthood, middle age and elderhood.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices are still deeply entrenched at our institutions — but the retrenchment is well under way.

When he took office in 2021, Utah governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, made advancing "diversity, equity, and inclusion" a key priority. He appointed a high-level diversity officer to his administration. His senior leadership was put through a "21-Day Equity Challenge," which instructed them in microaggressions and antiracism.

The universities were on board. Utah State's annual diversity symposium featured talks such as "Decentering Whiteness." The university also required DEI statements from applicants to the faculty, explaining how they infused diversity and equity — a focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories of "marginalization" — into their work. Even for positions in fields such as insect ecology and lithospheric evolution.

Then, in December, Cox announced a different priority: reversing the excesses of DEI. At a press conference he said,

"We're using identitarianism to force people into boxes, and into victimhood, and I just don't think that's helpful at all. In fact, I think it's harmful." So harmful that he announced his intention to bar the use of diversity statements in faculty hiring, condemning the practice as "bordering on evil."

The train wasn't scheduled for another 20 minutes, so I had a chance to contemplate the official sign on the door of the huge elevator leading to the platform. It said that only four people are allowed in because we must all practice social distancing. There was a helpful map of the interior of the elevator with stick figures telling people exactly where to stand.

Yes, these stickers are still everywhere. I recall when they first went up, sometime in April 2020. They seemed oddly uniform and appeared even permanent. At the time I thought, oh, this is a huge error because within a few weeks, the error of the whole of this idiocy is going to be known by all. Sadly, my worst fears came true: it was designed to be a permanent feature of our lives.

Same with the strange arrows on the ground telling us which way to walk. They are still everywhere, stuck on the floor, an integral part of the linoleum. If you walk this way, you will infect people, which is why you have to walk that way, which is safe. As for masks, the mandates keep popping up in strange places and strange ways. My inbox fills with pleas for how people can fight this stuff.

The word resilience can be perplexing. Does it mean remaining calm when faced with stress? Bouncing back quickly? Growing from adversity? Is resilience an attitude, a character trait or a skill set? And can misperceptions about resilience hurt people, rather than help?

To sum it up in a sentence: Resilience is the ability to manage stress in effective ways. It's not a static quality or attribute you're born with, or a choice of attitude. Instead, it's a set of skills that can be developed by repeating specific behaviors. As a clinical psychologist, researcher and educator specializing in training people to cope with stress more effectively, I know that resilience can be developed.

But as with physical fitness, you can't get stronger abs by just wanting them. Instead, you have to repeat specific exercises that make your abs stronger; intention alone just won't do it.

The ancient idea of spiritual gnosis has evolved and branched to reflect the time and place in which we live. Nowhere is this development more evident than in the writings and scholarship of author Arthur Versluis. In his groundbreaking new book American Gnosis: Political Religion and Transcendence, Versluis takes an in-depth look at the varieties of modern 'neo-gnosticism.' These include cosmological gnosticism - the worldly effort to escape from archons of darkness or hostile beings that would seek to subjugate the world through politics and other power structures. Another is metaphysical gnosis, or transcendence that is less a reaction to the perception of evil overlords than movement towards divine knowledge for its own sake.

Join us this week on MindMatters as we delve into the realm of cosmological gnosis with Arthur Versluis, and look at the plethora of ways in which some really old ideas have been reinvigorated (alongside some newer ones). How do these ideas present themselves in literature, TV and movies? Is there is a crossover between 'political awakening' and 'spiritual awakening'? And what, if anything, may this have to do with some developments we've been seeing with the so-called 'dissident right' in the US?


Running Time: 01:26:16

Download: MP3 — 118 MB

Mozart, the great and enduring musical genius, doesn't conform to our stereotypical notion of a musical prodigy.

Did he practice for hours per day? Nope. Was he well intentioned with his plans? Also no.

More of a partier than a conscientious adult, Mozart, as biographers have described him, was someone who was "much addicted to trifling amusement."

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that he also wasn't known for finishing compositions promptly. In fact, in late October of 1787, after having all but wrapped up the score for Don Giovanni, he decided to go out for a night of drinking with buddies. Toward the end of the evening, one friend nervously turned to Mozart and remarked that with the opera due to be performed for the first time the next day, he couldn't believe that the overture hadn't been written yet!

Mozart hurriedly returned home to start — and hopefully finish — this missing piece. But, because he kept nodding off due to the alcohol and the late hour, he asked his wife, Constanze, to help him stay awake by telling him stories.

New research, published in PLOS Biology, shows that tears from women contain chemicals that block aggression in men. The study led by Shani Agron at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, finds that sniffing tears leads to reduced brain activity related to aggression, which results in less aggressive behavior.

Male aggression in rodents is known to be blocked when they smell female tears. This is an example of social chemosignaling, a process that is common in animals but less common — or less understood — in humans.

To determine whether tears have the same effect in people, the researchers exposed a group of men to either women's emotional tears or saline while they played a two-person game. The game was designed to elicit aggressive behavior against the other player, whom the men were led to believe was cheating.

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits by many waters. With her the kings of the earth committed adultery, and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries.

... The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. The name written on her forehead was a mystery: Babylon the Great, the mother of prostitutes, and of the abominations of the earth.

- Revelation 17:1-5

I had been emotionally involved a few times with women with enough of a record of promiscuity to make me vaguely uneasy. It is difficult to put much value on something the lady has distributed all too generously. I have the feeling there is some mysterious quota, which varies with each woman. And whether she gives herself or sells herself, once she reaches her own number, once X pairs of hungry hands have been clamped rightly upon her rounded undersides, she suffers a sea change wherein her juices alter from honey to acid, her eyes change to glass, her heart becomes a stone, and her mouth a windy cave from whence, with each moisturous gasping, comes a tiny stink of death.

― MacDonald, John D. (1966). "Darker Than Amber", Travis McGee series, Random House LLC, 2013, pgs 56-57

We live in an age of wizards and whores where souls are sold in the pursuit of material pleasures. Time-honored principles have been traded for profit and power as lawlessness intensifies.