10 foods to avoid

http://eatlocalgrown.com/article/12131-top-10-inflammatory-foods-to-avoid-like-the-plague.html

James Flynn: Why our IQ levels are higher than our Grandparents

James Flynn argues that thinking in terms of the hypothetical has profound implications on education, employment, and ethics (including some very real contemporary issues such as racism).




"and it's a world where we've had to develop new mental habits, new habits of mind. And these include things like clothing that concrete world with classification, introducing abstractions that we try to make logically consistent, and also taking the hypothetical seriously, that is, wondering about what might have been rather than what is."

"Now, this dramatic change was drawn to my attention through massive I.Q. gains over time,and these have been truly massive. That is, we don't just get a few more questions right on I.Q. tests. We get far more questions right on I.Q. tests than each succeeding generationback to the time that they were invented. Indeed, if you score the people a century agoagainst modern norms, they would have an average I.Q. of 70. If you score us against their norms, we would have an average I.Q. of 130. Now this has raised all sorts of questions.Were our immediate ancestors on the verge of mental retardation? Because 70 is normally the score for mental retardation. Or are we on the verge of all being gifted? Because 130 is the cutting line for giftedness.
.....Now I'm going to try and argue for a third alternative that's much more illuminating than either of those"

 "[Luria] found that [people before the scientific age] were resistant to deducing the hypothetical, to speculating about what might be, and he found finally that they didn't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions."

"So the tenor of education has changed. We are educating people to take the hypothetical seriously, to use abstractions, and to link them logically."

"In other words, they were fixed in the concrete mores and attitudes they had inherited. They would not take the hypothetical seriously, and without the hypothetical, it's very difficult to get moral argument off the ground." 

"you can get moral argument off the ground, then, because you're not treating moral principles as concrete entities. You're treating them as universals, to be rendered consistent by logic."

"Now, I should say one thing that's very disheartening. We haven't made progress on all fronts. One of the ways in which we would like to deal with the sophistication of the modern world is through politics, and sadly you can have humane moral principles, you can classify, you can use logic on abstractions, and if you're ignorant of history and of other countries,you can't do politics. We've noticed, in a trend among young Americans, that they read less history and less literature and less material about foreign lands, and they're essentially ahistorical. They live in the bubble of the present. They don't know the Korean War from the war in Vietnam. They don't know who was an ally of America in World War II. Think how different America would be if every American knew that this is the fifth time Western armies have gone to Afghanistan to put its house in order, and if they had some idea of exactly what had happened on those four previous occasions. (Laughter) And that is, they had barely left, and there wasn't a trace in the sand. Or imagine how different things would be if most Americans knew that we had been lied into four of our last six wars. You know, the Spanish didn't sink the battleship Maine, the Lusitania was not an innocent vessel but was loaded with munitions, the North Vietnamese did not attack the Seventh Fleet, and, of course, Saddam Hussein hated al Qaeda and had nothing to do with it, and yet the administration convinced 45 percent of the people that they were brothers in arms, when he would hang one from the nearest lamppost."

40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World

40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World

40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World

IPCC climate report: humans 'dominant cause' of warming

A landmark report says scientists are 95% certain that humans are the "dominant cause" of global warming since the 1950s.

Read the BBC article HERE

Read the Full report: Working Group I Contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis Summary for Policymakers

Iran’s Leader, Denouncing Holocaust, Stirs Dispute

complex political crosscurrents

"The complex political crosscurrents were on display in the Iranian news media’s coverage of Mr. Rouhani’s day at the United Nations. A reformist newspaper, Shargh, published pictures of Mr. Rouhani and Mr. Obama during their speeches, with the headline “Perhaps Another Time” — a reflection of the letdown among average Iranians about the missed opportunity for a handshake.

But another paper, Kayhan, which is close to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei expressed horror over the possibility that “the clean hand of our president would for moments be in the bloody clench” of Mr. Obama."

Click here to view the article

Poverty in Nepal, Exploitation in Qatar, World Cup

lack of SLEEP and its connections (cancer, stress, OBESITY, poor memory)

So let's now look at sleep deprivation. Huge sectors of society are sleep-deprived, and let's look at our sleep-o-meter. So in the 1950s, good data suggests that most of us were getting around about eight hours of sleep a night. Nowadays, we sleep one and a half to two hours less every night, so we're in the six-and-a-half-hours-every-night league. For teenagers, it's worse, much worse. They need nine hours for full brain performance, and many of them, on a school night, are only getting five hours of sleep

One of the things that the brain does is indulge in micro-sleeps, this involuntary falling asleep, and you have essentially no control over it. Now, micro-sleeps can be sort of somewhat embarrassing, but they can also be deadly. It's been estimated that 31 percent of drivers will fall asleep at the wheel at least once in their life, and in the U.S., the statistics are pretty good: 100,000 accidents on the freeway have been associated with tiredness,loss of vigilance, and falling asleep. A hundred thousand a year. It's extraordinary. At another level of terror, we dip into the tragic accidents at Chernobyl and indeed the space shuttle Challenger, which was so tragically lost. And in the investigations that followed those disasters, poor judgment as a result of extended shift work and loss of vigilance and tiredness was attributed to a big chunk of those disasters.

If you are a tired brain, the brain is craving things to wake it up. So drugs, stimulants. Caffeine represents the stimulant of choice across much of the Western world. Much of the day is fueled by caffeine, and if you're a really naughty tired brain, nicotine. And of course, you're fueling the waking state with these stimulants, and then of course it gets to 11 o'clock at night, and the brain says to itself, "Ah, well actually, I need to be asleep fairly shortly. What do we do about that when I'm feeling completely wired?" Well, of course, you then resort to alcohol. 

Another connection between loss of sleep is weight gain. If you sleep around about five hours or less every night, then you have a 50 percent likelihood of being obese. What's the connection here? Well, sleep loss seems to give rise to the release of the hormone ghrelin, the hunger hormone. Ghrelin is released. It gets to the brain. The brain says, "I need carbohydrates," and what it does is seek out carbohydrates and particularly sugars. So there's a link between tiredness and the metabolic predisposition for weight gain.

Stress. Tired people are massively stressed. And one of the things of stress, of course, is loss of memory, which is what I sort of just then had a little lapse of. But stress is so much more. So if you're acutely stressed, not a great problem, but it's sustained stressassociated with sleep loss that's the problem. So sustained stress leads to suppressed immunity, and so tired people tend to have higher rates of overall infection, and there's some very good studies showing that shift workers, for example, have higher rates of cancer.Increased levels of stress throw glucose into the circulation. Glucose becomes a dominant part of the vasculature and essentially you become glucose intolerant. Therefore, diabetes 2. Stress increases cardiovascular disease as a result of raising blood pressure. So there's a whole raft of things associated with sleep loss that are more than just a mildly impaired brain, which is where I think most people think that sleep loss resides.