http://queenofpentaclesconjure.blogs...rror-work.htmlIf you've read my articles here or visited the website for my conjure practice, you'll know that I'm a tender-hearted spiritual worker who doesn't deal in crossing work. My personal moral ethic is based in Eastern systems where one tries to take into account the ripples our actions cause on the fabric of Life, and cause as few waves as possible - living lightly and balanced in a compassionate and dispassionate way. I've spent many years working very hard to master my mental/emotional self by being mindful of my reactions and making conscious choices about how to respond without letting myself get drawn into the drama of my (or anyone else's) maya. I'm certainly no Vulcan, and it's an ongoing practice that one never truly masters...unless you attain sainthood. And I'm no saint either. It has helped me gain new levels of health and healing, and I do my best to let it inform every area of my life. For that reason, I simply don't consult on - and certainly do not work - in the realms of Revenge, Crossing, Break-Up, or other such actions.
That fact does NOT mean that I believe in turning the other cheek, or shying away from offensive action when under attack! Karma at it's very core is cause-and-effect. If you cause harm, then you open yourself up for an equally unpleasant effect. I strive for balance in my life and in my magical practice, so I don't desire to call up any additional negativity than what is already going around. (Really - does the world need any more violence and anger??) But sending that mess wheeling right back at the person who sent it...that is right up my alley!
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
How Big Data Enables Economic Harm to Low-Income Consumers
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan...b_5820202.html
How much money do youtubers make
How much do Youtubers get paid
Pewdiepie (Playing video games) - $12 million - 40 million subscribers
Smosh (comedy sketches) - $8.5 million - 21 million subscribers
Fine brothers entertainment (reacting to things) ARE YOU KIDDING ME! - $8.5 million - 13 million subscribers
Lindsey Stirling (Playing Violin) - $6 million - 7 million subscribers
Rhett and link (comedy sketches) - $4.5 million - 3 million subscribers
KSI (Hip-Hop) - $4.5 million - 10 million subscribers
Michelle Phan (Makeup tutorials) SERIOUSLY?! - $3 million - 8 million subscribers
The photos in this article are incredible:
c. 1890 Venice in Photochrom
http://www.euractiv.com/section/just...cting-nutjobs/
Could the recent attacks in Germany have an impact on the country’s asylum policy?
There is a perception that the attacks are linked to the welcoming of refugees to Germany. But it is the job of policymakers and the media to help the population understand the difference. If there are 500,000 Syrian refugees and one of them stabs someone that is not something that policy should be dealing with. It is a crime and it should be investigated by the police. And, by the way, the average Syrian refugee commits fewer crimes than the average German citizen.
10 historians nominate the 'worst' year in history
People react near flowers placed on the road in tribute to victims, two days after an attack by the driver of a heavy truck who ran into a crowd on Bastille Day killing scores and injuring as many on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice, France, July 16, 2016.REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol
When news of the truck killings in Nice, France, broke last week, I started seeing variations of the same sentiment on Twitter and Facebook: Is this the worst year ever, or what? Terror attacks, Zika, Brexit, police shootings, Syria, Trump, record-hot temperatures, the losses of Prince and David Bowie—this has been one unrelenting turn around the calendar.
Have terrifying events truly piled up on each other in 2016, in a way they didn’t in any other year in human history? Or is it impossible to judge the awfulness of a year while it’s still unfolding? Do we just notice negative happenings more these days because of our high levels of connectivity? And what does “worst year” even mean—“worst year” for Americans, for humanity, for the planet?
The question of how to determine a “worst year” in history piqued my interest. So I decided to ask a group of historians to nominate their own “worst years” and to reflect on what constitutes a “really bad year.” Ten brave souls agreed to play this parlor game with me. Here are their picks.
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1348
Anna Hoffman/Flickr
People talk about 2016 being a particularly disastrous year, but for a historian, there’s nothing new about people fighting for power or useless leaders with bad ideas gathering widespread support. All the current political upheaval is nothing compared with 1348, when the Black Death took hold.
The disease spread quickly along the Silk Roads and then across the trade routes crisscrossing the Mediterranean. In the space of 18 months, it killed at least a third of the population of Europe. “Our hopes for the future have been buried alongside our friends,” wrote the great Petrarch. It seemed like the end of the world was coming.
Some advised avoiding “every fleshly lust with women,” others that marching barefoot while self-flagellating would help. One writer in Damascus recorded that plague “sat like a king on a throne and swayed with power,” killing thousands every day. Dogs tore at the bodies of the dead that lay unburied in the streets.
That, I think, is what hell on Earth really looks like—and I’d rather be alive in 2016 than 1348.
If there’s one consolation, incidentally, it’s that the Black Death spurred one of the most golden of golden ages in history. Plague led to sharply reduced inequality, a spending boom, and a flowering of the arts. Storms do sometimes give way to sunshine.
Peter Frankopan is author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World.
1492
Christopher Columbus is shown landing in the West IndiesWikimedia Commons
Ought we measure the “worst year in human history” by some calculus of human suffering? By sheer number of deaths? By the geographical extent of misery? Any of these metrics provide ready candidates. I will suggest, however, that the worst year ought to be the beginning of a world-historical process that once started, offered little chance for reversal. I nominate 1492.
That year, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella completed their conquest of Moorish Granada. Within a few years, the roughly half-million Muslim inhabitants of the territory would be killed, converted, enslaved, or expelled. The kingdom also expelled its Jewish population, resident since Roman times, providing a blueprint for similar persecutions and expulsions in years to follow. Spanish actions helped create the idea of a geographically distinct “Christian Europe,” replacing the more than two millennia of political and religious identities that connected different Mediterranean shores.
The most significant event of that year, however, was the first American voyage of Christopher Columbus. Columbus wasn’t the first European to reach the western continents, but his voyages were the first to become widely known. As a result, Spain and its rival powers accelerated their overseas contest for trade and territory.
By the early 16th century, Old World diseases made their inevitable drift to the Americas, beginning the series of plagues that ultimately caused the demographic collapse of some 90 percent of the indigenous population by the mid-19th century, and for many groups, the utter obliteration of society itself. Worse still, as the indigenous labor force disintegrated, Europeans turned to Africa for new sources for New World enslaved labor.
Few years in human history are so freighted with catastrophic consequences.
Peter Shulman is author of Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America.
1836
War on two fronts, in Florida against the Seminoles and in Alabama against the Creeks. One Georgia volunteer was toasted on July 4 for taking “an Indian’s scalp.” Toward the end of the year, the United States began preparations to invade the Cherokee Nation and forcibly remove its residents. After the state-sponsored mass deportations—the first in the modern era—who would cultivate the land?
The 1830s, if not precisely 1836, represented the peak of the interstate slave trade, with a quarter of a million enslaved people marched or shipped west to labor on fields that only a few years earlier had belonged to Native Americans. In Congress, pro-slavery politicians refused to hear anti-slavery petitions, passing the first gag rule in May 1836. In the words of one white Southerner, these were “flush times,” rife with speculation in Native American land and black slaves.
The year marks a high-water mark in the confluence of the nation’s darkest legacies: racism and reckless capitalism. The speculative bubble would collapse the following year, leaving behind hundreds of ruined banks and millions of dollars of worthless debt. The financial system would recover, but there was no second chance for the dispossessed.
Claudio Saunt is the author of West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776(Norton, 2014) and is at work on Aboriginia: Mass Deportation and the Road to Indian Territory.
1837
NPR
My nod for the “worst year ever” goes to 1837, mostly because it was dreadful for nearly everyone in the United States. Andrew Jackson left office, and even though Martin Van Buren had been elected to replace him without much difficulty, within months of his taking office the nation was plunged into what was then the worst economic depression it had ever seen. Van Buren acquired the nickname “Martin Van Ruin,” and the impact of the Panic of 1837 was devastating.
The financial prospects of millions of white citizens were crushed, and the panic significantly escalated the ongoing dislocation of black peoples’ lives as whites sold them in untold numbers, often at a discount, in desperate efforts to pay off debts. Alternatively, whites dragged enslaved people off to Texas, where the influx of Americans only increased pressures on Native Americans in the region.
Almost no one got out of 1837 unscathed.
Native Americans, of course, had been suffering from white incursions for years, but they saw their dispossession continue in 1837 thanks to the ongoing Seminole War (itself unpopular among whites) and the beginning of forced removal of the Chickasaws from the southeast to Oklahoma.
The Cherokee Trail of Tears would take place the following year. Meanwhile, in the Midwest a mob of whites in Illinois lynched the abolitionist minister and editor Elijah Lovejoy, escalating what was already widespread harassment and abuse of anti-slavery activists from routine violence to murder and keeping the politics of slavery aflame. Almost no one got out of 1837 unscathed. Certainly there are other fine candidates for the worst year ever, but that one was pretty darn terrible.
Joshua Rothman is the author of Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson.
1876
Shutterstock
A true stinker that will resonate for decades in bad race relations and head trauma.
1876 was the worst year ever. The split presidential election set the stage for the bargain that ended Reconstruction. I would have nominated the highest casualty year of the Civil War as the worst, but the failure to defend racial equality in the South after so many lives were sacrificed seems far more tragic.
Also, in ’76 you have the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the destruction of the great human experiment of bison-hunting equestrianism on the Great Plains. The fall of Reconstruction and the rise of Plains reservations are enough for a really bad year, and then you add race riots in South Carolina, and Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia forming the Intercollegiate Football Association, and you have a true stinker that will resonate for decades in bad race relations and head trauma.
Jon T. Coleman is the author of Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, a Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation.
1877
As a historian, I am wary of the #worstyearever, which of course may vary depending on one’s personal misfortunes or world historical catastrophic events. A quick Twitter poll conducted by @Evankindley declared the not-yet-over 2016 the worst year of the 2000s. I suspect its victory has a lot to do with the unending spate of terrorist attacks all over the world and the current state of presidential politics and police killings and retaliatory cop assassinations in the United States. If Donald Trump is elected president, 2016 may well become the uncontested winner until the end of the century.
The year Radical Reconstruction was overthrown.
But before that cataclysmic hopefully nonevent, we might consider the worst year ever in the historical longue durée: perhaps the year of the Black Death in Europe, famines in Asia and Africa, the start of the extermination of native populations in the Americas or the trans-Atlantic trade in African slaves, the rise of European imperialism and ******?
A 19th-century U.S. historian might even posit 1877, the year Radical Reconstruction was overthrown and set back the creation of an interracial democracy by more than 100 years. Our present woes have a lot to do with that fateful year.
Manisha Sinha is the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition.
1919
Shrapnel bursts over a reserve trench above Canadian lines during the Battle of the Somme, in France, 1916.W.I. Castle/Library and Archives Canada/Handout via REUTERS
America had won the First World War but effectively lost the peace. An isolationist Senate refused to ratify the League of Nations treaty while President Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke. Meanwhile, as the government ended wartime spending and regulations, inflation skyrocketed and unemployment shot up to 20 percent. An influenza epidemic, one of the worst in history, killed a half-million Americans.
The 18th Amendment introduced Prohibition and a decade of lawlessness. More immediately, the infamous “bloody summer of 1919” saw race riots in cities across the country: Chicago erupted in five days of brutal violence that left 500 wounded and 38 dead. Meanwhile, lynchings continued to rise, with 76 black Americans killed, including 10 veterans.
The fall of 1919 featured massive labor strikes: 350,000 steelworkers in Indiana, 425,000 miners in coal country, most of the Boston police force, etc. To many, such strikes signaled that America was poised for a revolution like the Bolsheviks had just pulled off in Russia. Fear turned to panic with mail bombs sent to prominent Americans like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and John D. Rockefeller. In November, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, himself the target of a bomb, launched the first Red Scare, a massive series of arrest raids against suspected radicals, anarchists, and communists that turned into the biggest violation of civil liberties in a half-century.
All told, 1919 was a year of political chaos, social unrest, economic disasters, health epidemics, bloody race riots, giant labor strikes, and brutal government overreach. Definitely a contender.
Kevin Kruse is the author of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America.
1943
Getty Images/Chris Furlong
Amid a world at war, 1943 stood out as an awful year. The Holocaust grew more deadly by the week, and Nazis had systematically deported and killed more than 1.3 million Jews by spring 1943. News of these atrocities circulated internationally, but the Allies lacked the political will and military capacity to rescue European Jews. Szmul Zygielbojm, a Jewish-Polish politician who took his own life after his wife and son were killed in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, wrote in his suicide letter, “By my death I wish to make my final protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the annihilation of the Jewish people.”
A depressing account of the capacity of humans to stop or prevent cruelty.
WWII also prompted an increase in food exports from British India to feed British soldiers and citizens, which produced amassive famine in the Bengal province, which killed an estimated 3 million people.
In the United States, racial violence raged across the country. During the summer of 1943 there were more than 240 reports of interracial battles in cities and at military bases, including the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles and riots in Harlem and Detroit. Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP chief counsel who went on to become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, penned a report titled “The Gestapo in Detroit” that castigated city officials for not addressing decades of police violence against blacks. “Much of the blood spilled is on the hands of the Detroit police department,” Marshall wrote.
I chose 1943 not just because bad things happened but also because these histories are a depressing account of the capacity of humans to stop or prevent cruelty. 1943 shows that public awareness of atrocities does not necessarily prevent them from continuing and that there is no golden era of race relations in the United States.
Matt Delmont is the author of Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation.
1968
AP
By Dec. 31, I was literally too pessimistic to say “Happy New Year.”
I don’t know about the worst year ever, and I’m answering as an old person, not as a historian, but I give you 1968. By Dec. 31, I was literally too pessimistic to say “Happy New Year.”
We had to grapple with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, urban insurrections in many American cities, the occupation of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring, the demise of the Paris student revolt, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the many deaths and injuries that each of these phrases represents.
Oh, and Richard Nixon was elected. All this against the background of news every day about the horrors in Vietnam. In retrospect, I’ll add the My Lai Massacre, though we didn’t learn about it until the next year. And while social media has its own way of making everything feel immediate, so did the network news when there were only three channels and everyone was watching the death and destruction with their dinners.
Susan Strasser is the author of Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market.
2003
In this March 20, 2009, file photo, U.S. Army soldiers stroll past two bronze busts of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq.AP Photo/Hadi Mizban
My vote is for 2003, as measured by long-term consequences for democracy.
In February of that year, as the Bush administration and its allies geared up for war, protesters eager to speak out against the mobilizations swamped cities around the world in the largest global demonstration for peace in world history. In Manhattan, more than 100,000 protestors from all walks of life swamped the city, stopping traffic in the middle of the street, and assembling in a vast throng near the U.N. building. European cities saw even larger protests.
The U.S media, still dominated by major networks, barely covered the event. In New York, the nightly news showed images, instead, of a sympathy protest in Baghdad—a damning substitution. The failure of the captive media to cover the protest—and, more broadly, to aggressively question the Bush administration on the lies and half-truths used to rationalize the war—was catastrophic. And the quiescence of both political parties when confronted with the even-then very dubious link between 9/11 and the war in Iraq revealed the power of macho patriotism to sweep away partisan dissent and intelligent thinking, and to cow the news into submission, a power that has proved durable and dangerous.
The war went on as planned. And the terrible world we live in—jingoistic, bomb-scarred, drone-addled, and armor-clad—is the consequence.
Matthew Pratt Guterl is the author of Seeing Race in Modern America.
Read the original article on Slate.
@yeves I saw a list recently which must have been a different attempt, as it had the eruption of the volcano Toba (in Sumatra) about 75,000 years ago as one of the contenders. If, as has been argued, it was responsible for a massive decline in the human population, I would agree that was the worst event in human terms.
If you consider history (as a subject) as being only the time period covered by the written record, I would agree that 1348 was the worst year (presuming that was the worst year of the Black Death), as the period of the Black Death was probably the only time in the last few thousand years where there was a prolonged declined in the worldwide human population.
What Do Women Want?
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/to-boldly-go
Your Brain Does Not Process Information and it is Not a Computer
Worse still, even if we had the ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion neurons and then to simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that produced it. This is perhaps the most egregious way in which the IP metaphor has distorted our thinking about human functioning. Whereas computers do store exact copies of data – copies that can persist unchanged for long periods of time, even if the power has been turned off – the brain maintains our intellect only as long as it remains alive. There is no on-off switch. Either the brain keeps functioning, or we disappear. What’s more, as the neurobiologist Steven Rose pointed out in The Future of the Brain (2005), a snapshot of the brain’s current state might also be meaningless unless we knew the entire life history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social context in which he or she was raised.
Think how difficult this problem is. To understand even the basics of how the brain maintains the human intellect, we might need to know not just the current state of all 86 billion neurons and their 100 trillion interconnections, not just the varying strengths with which they are connected, and not just the states of more than 1,000 proteins that exist at each connection point, but how the moment-to-moment activity of the brain contributes to the integrity of the system. Add to this the uniqueness of each brain, brought about in part because of the uniqueness of each person’s life history, and Kandel’s prediction starts to sound overly optimistic. (In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, the neuroscientist Kenneth Miller suggested it will take ‘centuries’ just to figure out basic neuronal connectivity.)
Meanwhile, vast sums of money are being raised for brain research, based in some cases on faulty ideas and promises that cannot be kept. The most blatant instance of neuroscience gone awry, documented recently in a report in Scientific American, concerns the $1.3 billion Human Brain Project launched by the European Union in 2013. Convinced by the charismatic Henry Markram that he could create a simulation of the entire human brain on a supercomputer by the year 2023, and that such a model would revolutionise the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders, EU officials funded his project with virtually no restrictions. Less than two years into it, the project turned into a ‘brain wreck’, and Markram was asked to step down.
We are organisms, not computers. Get over it. Let’s get on with the business of trying to understand ourselves, but without being encumbered by unnecessary intellectual baggage. The IP metaphor has had a half-century run, producing few, if any, insights along the way. The time has come to hit the DELETE key.
I love Victoria Smurfit's portrayal of Cruella Deville on Once Upon a Time.
http://www.skepticnorth.com/2010/08/...athetic-magic/
Ethan’s recent article on the best way for skeptics to dialogue with non-skeptics definitely hit home, and is something I’ve struggled with. Being confrontational is tempting — after all, who doesn’t love to prove how right they are? I am certainly sympathetic to the view presented in the comments by some readers that good manners is not of itself a moral imperative, and that even if it were, skeptics aren’t required qua skepticism to take up the battle for hearts and minds. If I care neither whether the ranks of skeptics swell, nor how I’m viewed by non-skeptics, then why should I be required to take an accommodating stance when engaging with non-skeptics?
I believe there is quite a good reason to do so, based on a very powerful idea found in cognitive psychology: that systematic errors in judgment are a natural side-effect of our native cognitive processes. If pseudo-scientific beliefs can be shown to be an example of such an error, and thus something innate to human thought, I would argue that there is a moral imperative to be accommodating and empathetic — something akin to the Golden Rule. After all, if someone’s only crime is to operate their cognitive machinery according to the manufacturer’s instructions, it’s hardly fair to vilify them for it. We skeptics all did the same thing once upon a time, before we found the sheet with all the cheat codes and Easter eggs.
Golden Rule, Golden Bough
A very large subset of pseudo-scientific belief falls under the heading of “sympathetic magic”, a system codified by the anthropologist Sir James Fraser around the turn of the last century in his opus, The Golden Bough. Fraser identifies two core principles of sympathetic magic. The first is the Law of Similarity, which says that “like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause”. The second is the Law of Contagion, which says the “things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.”
This isn’t just about tribal shamans and voodoo dolls, though those certainly loom large in the anthropological literature. For example, it’s pretty easy to see how homeopathy fits the bill, with like curing like and water having a memory even after the physical contact (i.e. with molecules of the original proved substance) has been severed. Similarly, those “toxins” we keep hearing about are a contagion, and the “cleanses” we’re exhorted to undertake are a form of purification ritual to remove that contagion, as is our bias toward things “natural”. Divination (e.g. astrology) is another large subset. Sympathetic magic isn’t the only form of magical thinking, but it’s one of the broadest, and indeed, Fraser acknowledges that there’s something in us that that makes sympathetic magic appear to be a sort of “natural law”:
For the same principles which the magician applies in the practice of his art are implicitly believed by him to regulate the operations of inanimate nature; in other words, he tacitly assumes that the Laws of Similarity and Contact are of universal application and are not limited to human actions.
There is, in fact, a reason for this, which a century later we’re finally starting to really understand. It’s rooted in recent research showing that human thought is reliant on a dual process:
System 1 is generally automatic, affective and heuristic-based, which means that it relies on mental “shortcuts.” It quickly proposes intuitive answers to problems as they arise. System 2, which corresponds closely with controlled processes, is slow, effortful, conscious, rule-based and also can be employed to monitor the quality of the answer provided by System 1. If it’s convinced that our intuition is wrong, then it’s capable of correcting or overriding the automatic judgments.
Although humans flip effortlessly (and for the most part unconsciously) between the two systems, much of our decision making is reliant on System 1 for the simple reason that it’s quick and broadly effective. Also, evolution has honed our thought processes to avoid certain mortal perils, which means such behaviours will seem intuitively and “affectively” (emotionally) correct, and exert a strong pull on us. System 2 can intervene, but often it has its work cut out for it when it tries.
While humans wouldn’t have gotten where we are as a species without System 1, it certainly has its flaws. The dark side of heuristic thinking is that it exposes us to systematic biases that can, under certain circumstances, lead us to make very bad assessments. And these bad assessments will seem just as intuitively and emotionally correct as the good ones that System 1 engenders...
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
LII-Ne with strong EII tendencies, 6w7-9w1-3w4 so/sp/sx, INxP
LII-Ne with strong EII tendencies, 6w7-9w1-3w4 so/sp/sx, INxP
LII-Ne with strong EII tendencies, 6w7-9w1-3w4 so/sp/sx, INxP
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