A fresh college degree used to come with a quiet edge in the job market. New grads had better odds of landing work than the average worker, and that edge held for as long as anyone tracked it. Not anymore. They now face higher unemployment than the workforce as a whole, and the gap is the widest on record.
What makes this strange is the timing. The reversal did not start with ChatGPT, and it did not start with the pandemic. It started in early 2019, before either one was on the radar.
The chart tracks a single number, a recent grad’s unemployment rate minus the rate for all workers. Below the zero line grads come out ahead of the typical worker, and above it they fall behind.
The comparison is worth pinning down. “All workers” is the whole U.S. labor force, and most of them are older and more experienced than a new graduate, so a fresh grad starts at a natural disadvantage. For decades the degree more than canceled that disadvantage out. Now it does not.
Children raised by narcissists are characterized by an inner vacuum of unrequited instinctuality.
This happens due to the narcissistic parent or parents being incapable of requiting their child’s innate instincts to depend on them in almost every way.
Narcissistic parents are an extreme example of unrequited childhood instincts. My guess is all people have some version of unrequited childhood instincts with ramifications still present in the grown-up child, now an adult.
Since this condition is so common, all cultures deal with it one way or another, most commonly through some sort of authoritarian model for everyone, Confucianism, Catholicism, bougie values, woke, etc.
All cultures are lowest-common-denominator congregations with specific applications limited to specific situations.
One way to go beyond these limitations is use your vacuum of unrequited childhood (and beyond) instincts to leverage a deeper understanding of your mind.
To be clear, we are largely talking about wholesome instincts for communication, bonding, safety, affection, creativity, etc.
When these unrequited instincts leave a vacuum in you—a sense of deep emptiness—leverage it by resting in it completely.
No words, no images, just the vacuous state of pure emptiness you may remember from early childhood.
That is an important conscious state.
It too is you. It too is an instinct.
Stated negatively it is and was a child’s act of ‘all that’s left’, ‘nothing you can do’, ‘that’s how it was and still is’.
Stated positively, that state, all by its lonesome, is a samadhi state or right next door to one.
With a wholesome dispassionate mind, study that state.
Receive the reward life offers all of us — natural instinctual samadhi, the ‘one taste’ of all things.
Donald Trump has ordered his incoming director of national intelligence (DNI) to start purging officials from the Obama and Biden administrations.
The President told Tulsi Gabbard’s replacement, Bill Pulte, that the 18 agencies, including the CIA and FBI, that he now oversees are ‘unnecessary and/or too big.’
Trump told the Wall Street Journal: ‘I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there.’
The President told reporters he wants Pulte, a former Florida real estate executive, to ‘start the process’ of firing people, even though he is only serving on an acting basis.
The Nuremberg Code of ethics is laudable, but the trials themselves today appear dubious at best and a travesty of justice at worst. I mention this because of the video’s title, and also because it should be mentioned frequently enough to remind us that history, too, is highly susceptible to fraudulent revisions which support deeply impactful falsehoods in the present. The entire downfall of the West today is largely explainable by historical lies which have inculcated the vast majority of Westerners with self-destructive ideas of who they are and what they can become. Covid itself was a lie as are its dominant prescribed treatments, or prescribed lack thereof. ABN
Europe isn’t anything like the USA. Europe still has a feudal social organization. Civilians are hopelessly obedient to authority. Job security depends on blind obedience. They don’t revolt because for a 1000 years, their their lineages have been bred for unthinking servitude. A small elite exploits this. The courts enforce it. The TV glamorizes it.
_________
Whether this is true or not, it leaves out the ferocious culling of European peoples throughout the world by a clandestine army of anti-White and anti-Western actors, many of whom are Jewish Supremacists. The strongest and smartest Westerners are covertly maimed, especially while still young, by poison, sensory damage, psychosurgery and other softer means. This is a major cause of Western cultural weakness today. By writing about this I am aware it is a two-edged sword — it both warns and frightens. It both calls us to action and frightens us away from action. What to do? I think say it anyway. A problem must be identified before it can be solved. You can see for yourself the culling is real by noticing: 1) how easy it is to wage a multigenerational strategy of covert culling of the strongest; 2) how enormously profitable it is; 3) how savage military strategies can be; 4) by noticing how many promising young people you yourself have watched go crazy, as if they were being poisoned or had been lobotomized. Notice the massive ongoing poisoning of our people by opioids first, then fentanyl, then covid, then covid vaxxes. These are the techniques of deceptive unrestricted war, and they show at all levels — the micro level of the individual, the meso level of the school or institution, or the macro level of the whole society. ABN
Neurons accumulate vitamin C to approximately 10 mM intracellularly, roughly 200 times the concentration found in plasma. This gradient is maintained by SVCT2, a sodium-dependent transporter expressed almost exclusively in neurons in vivo. The brain is also the last organ to be depleted during deficiency. In guinea pigs (which, like humans, cannot synthesize vitamin C), the brain retained 24% of its vitamin C stores after 14 days of zero intake, while the adrenal glands dropped to 4% and the spleen to 3%. The body prioritizes the brain above everything else.
The adrenal glands are the other major site of accumulation. Vitamin C is a required cofactor for two enzymes central to the stress response: 11β-hydroxylase, which catalyzes the final step of cortisol synthesis in the adrenal cortex, and dopamine β-hydroxylase, which converts dopamine to norepinephrine in the adrenal medulla.
Padayatty et al. (2007) measured this directly in 26 human patients. After ACTH administration, adrenal vein vitamin C concentration surged from 39 to 162 μmol/L within 2 minutes, while cortisol did not peak until 15 minutes. The adrenals released vitamin C before they released cortisol. This sequence suggests ascorbate must be mobilized for steroidogenesis to proceed.
This doesn’t mean mega-dosing vitamin C will improve your stress response. Most of this work describes what happens during deficiency or acute demand, not supplementation above adequate intake. But it does reframe what vitamin C actually does in your body: it’s not primarily an antioxidant or immune molecule. It’s a required manufacturing input for cortisol and catecholamines, concentrated exactly where those hormones are made.
Harrison & May, Free Radic Biol Med, 2009. Padayatty et al., Am J Clin Nutr, 2007. Bornstein et al., Endocrine Research, 2004.
…The indictment stated that donor funds paid to field sources were used to purchase materials for cross burnings and making Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods, attending and hosting extremist group rallies nationwide, creating and growing chapters of extremist groups as well as recruiting new members, making “racist paraphernalia that extremist groups sold at rallies,” and paying the living expenses of field sources to allow them to “focus on their extremist groups rather than seeking other employment.”
“The SPLC actively led donors to believe that their donations would be used to ‘dismantle’ violent extremist groups. However, the SPLC hid from donors the fact that a portion of their donated funds was being secretly used to support extremist groups and to fund their violent, racist, and extremist activities,” the indictment stated. “These activities were of the same nature as the activities about which the SPLC published articles on its website and other forums in an effort to obtain donations.”
FIML is not perfect. Here are some of the problems or difficulties with it:
It takes at least two people to do it
These two people must care about each other deeply
It takes a good deal of time
It requires the formation of new mental skills
It is hard to learn without instruction
It requires that partners have at least some interest in language and how they communicate
It goes against much or most cultural conditioning
It requires high ethical standards
One or more of these difficulties will stop some people from doing FIML. There is not much we can do about that.
At the same time, these same difficulties can be an advantage. As is said in Buddhism, they may constitute “negative conditions that lead to progress.”
For example, FIML practice not only requires high ethical standards, it also shows us how to get those standards and why they work.
If you have at least some interest in language and communication, FIML practice will hone and increase it.
FIML does take time, but it is time well spent. You will enjoy many intriguing conversations with your partner that would not have been possible without FIML.
While FIML does require that we form some new mental skills, those skills are very beneficial and will work in many other situations.
FIML practice does pull partners away from subconscious cultural conditioning, but in doing that it also liberates them to form a subculture of their own, based on conscious choice.
Since it employs mindfulness, self-control, and rational analysis of thought and feeling, FIML practice greatly supports Buddhist practice and mental clarity in general.
The caves were built in two phases, the first starting around the second century BCE and the second occurring from 400 to 650 CE, according to older accounts, or in a brief period of 460–480 CE according to later scholarship.[7]
The Ajanta Caves constitute ancient monasteries (Viharas) and worship-halls (Chaityas) of different Buddhist traditions carved into a 75-metre (246 ft) wall of rock.[8][9] The caves also present paintings depicting the past lives [10] and rebirths of the Buddha, pictorial tales from Aryasura’s Jatakamala, and rock-cut sculptures of Buddhist deities.[8][11][12] Textual records suggest that these caves served as a monsoon retreat for monks, as well as a resting site for merchants and pilgrims in ancient India.[8] While vivid colours and mural wall paintings were abundant in Indian history as evidenced by historical records, Caves 1, 2, 16 and 17 of Ajanta form the largest corpus of surviving ancient Indian wall-paintings.[13]
This is a view of Cave 26, which is a Buddhist “Chaitya Griha” or prayer hall. Ajanta Caves in Maharashtra, India is a World Heritage Site.
The Ajanta Caves are mentioned in the memoirs of several medieval-era Chinese Buddhist travelers.[14] They were covered by jungle until accidentally “discovered” and brought to contemporary attention in 1819 by a colonial British officer Captain John Smith on a tiger-hunting party.[15] The caves are in the rocky northern wall of the U-shaped gorge of the River Waghur,[16] in the Deccan Plateau.[17][18] Within the gorge are a number of waterfalls, audible from outside the caves when the river is high.[19]
Speech proscriptions can be overt with legal ramifications.
Or they can be sort of covert, couched in ideas like good manners, respect, make no waves, maintain friendly relations, follow group norms, etc.
I believe the covert ones happen most basically because almost all people are terrible at speaking their own subjective truths. And this leads to being terrible at hearing others’ subjective truths, even if they are well-expressed which is rare.
This problem arises from the pervasive, inherent ambiguity of language in general but especially spoken language.
Speech flies by and we are required to extract coherent meaning from bits of it. We make stories out of it and judge people, including ourselves, based on bad evidence.
Ambiguity in speech also requires us to maintain the same personas and most of the same beliefs for decades. We travel in herds of ideological banality due to it.
Staying the same, conforming to the group, is a way of displaying a profoundly diminished species of unambiguous meaning, even though we may sense that deep down the whole thing is a bad game.
I used to be bothered by this, but stopped after I figured out FIML and practiced it with my partner for a few years.
After maybe five years, our speech started to become so much clearer it didn’t even feel like the same medium anymore. After ten years, it got so good it seems we may have transcended psychology as it is normally conceived.
This happened because psychology as normally conceived is massively based on speech ambiguity and the ways people react to it. Fact is, you probably should feel a bit crazy in most interpersonal situations because speech proscriptions mixed with compounding ambiguities cannot possibly allow the psychological freedom needed to be cognitively healthy.
The Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C., Cardinal Robert McElroy, on Wednesday removed a well-known priest as an exorcist of the archdiocese after he made public comments suggesting that UFO sightings were the work of demons.
McElroy said the archdiocese also was cutting ties with the St. Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal, a Washington-based nonprofit headed by the priest, Monsignor Stephen Rossetti.
The archbishop said Rossetti’s statements “linking UFOs to demonic presence and the Center’s recent use of social media gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism.”
“There’s a danger here,” Rossetti said in a May 29 video posted on his Facebook page addressing UFO sightings and the existence of aliens. “As an exorcist I wanted to raise that danger. And that is that demons like to hide. … They don’t want us to know what they’re doing because they’re more effective when we don’t realize it.”
“They can kind of get into your head, you know, and manipulate things in the world to influence us to do evil.”
“It’s my personal belief that probably many if not most of these UFO sightings are in fact demons,” Rossetti added.
American Buddhist Net 