The psychology of ritual
 
Psychologists and anthropologists have typically turned to faith healers, tribal cultures or New Age spiritualists to study the underpinnings of belief in superstition or magical powers. Yet they could just as well have examined their own neighbors, lab assistants or even some fellow scientists. New research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking — the belief, for instance, that wishing harm on a loathed colleague or relative might make him sick — are far more common than people acknowledge.
 
These habits have little to do with religious faith, which is much more complex because it involves large questions of morality, community and history. But magical thinking underlies a vast, often unseen universe of small rituals that accompany people through every waking hour of a day.
 
The appetite for such beliefs appears to be rooted in the circuitry of the brain, and for good reason. The sense of having special powers buoys people in threatening situations, and helps soothe everyday fears and ward off mental distress. In excess, it can lead to compulsive or delusional behavior. This emerging portrait of magical thinking helps explain why people who fashion themselves skeptics cling to odd rituals that seem to make no sense, and how apparently harmless superstition may become disabling.
 
It is no coincidence, some social scientists believe, that youngsters begin learning about faith around the time they begin to give up on wishing. “The point at which the culture withdraws support for belief in Santa and the Tooth Fairy is about the same time it introduces children to prayer,” said Jacqueline Woolley, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. “The mechanism is already there, kids have already spent time believing that wishing can make things come true, and they’re just losing faith in the efficacy of that.”
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/health...magic.html
 
The Role of Ritual in the Evolution of Social Complexity: Five predictions and a drum roll
 
Prediction 1. Dysphoric rituals produce more tribal warfare, intra-elite conflicts, military revolts, and separatist rebellions.
 
Prediction 2. Routinized rituals enabled the emergence of larger polities.
 
Prediction 3. Intensification of agriculture leads to routinization and orthopraxy.
 
Prediction 4. Widespread orthopraxy makes polities more stable and long-lived.
 
In the study of religion, orthopraxy is correct conduct, both ethical and liturgical, as opposed to faith or grace etc. This contrasts with orthodoxy, which emphasizes correct belief, and ritualism, the use of rituals. The word is a neoclassical compound—ὀρθοπραξία (orthopraxia) meaning 'correct practice'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthopraxy
 
Prediction 5. Routinization and orthopraxy lead to the expansion of political dominion and trade.
 
The process of inferring general patterns in human history has usually meant cunningly plucking out facts to fit your argument—for instance ‘cherry picking’ historical events to lend credence to your judgments about the ‘errors’ of the past and your favoured ‘prescriptions’ for the future. However flawed this methodology, alternative options were limited. Anybody seeking to use our accumulated experience of the past to predict likely patterns of history-making in the future has been limited by how much knowledge they could personally command, given the difficulties of accessing information, the limitations of brains (especially memory and processing power), and the shortness of scholars’ lifespans. To overcome these very human frailties, what has long been needed is a computerized database of global history in which patterns of correlations across space and time between variables of interest could be reliably tracked using statistical tools. Seshat: Global History Databank, a vast collection of information gleaned from the work of scholars who study the human past, will provide a new way of addressing this challenge.
 
DMR theory posits two clusters of features pertaining to collective ritual and social morphology in the world’s religious traditions (Whitehouse 1995, 2000, 2004, 2012). One cluster—the imagistic mode of religiosity—is characterized by low-frequency (i.e., rarely performed), high-arousal (typically painful or frightening) rituals and small but intensely cohesive communities. The other cluster—the doctrinal mode of religiosity—is characterized by high-frequency (i.e., routinized) low-arousal (often tedious and repetitive) rituals and large-scale, hierarchical, but more diffusely cohesive communities. The imagistic mode is thought to be adaptive for groups that need to stick together in the face of strong temptations to defect—for example, when engaging enemies on the battlefield or large prey on the hunting ground. The doctrinal mode is thought to be adaptive for groups seeking to pool small amounts of resource from individuals in a much larger population so as to create a large, centralised resource in the form of charitable donations, legacies, tax or tribute – for example, when competing coalitions are organized via categorical ties of caste, race, ethnicity, or belief.
 
https://evolution-institute.org/focus-ar...drum-roll/
 
 
 
 

In the down economy, the beloved American pastime of unloading crap in your front yard or driveway has become increasingly popular. And so have local laws regulating garage sales of the 'extreme' variety.
 
To be clear, yard sale crackdowns exist mainly to curb those of the “extreme” variety, i.e. disruptive, rubberneck-inducing roadside retail operations that are held every weekend and involve multiple junked cars, large appliances, and ungodly amounts of crap ... we're not necessarily talking about a couple of card tables set out on a Sunday afternoon that have been topped with the remnants of a seasonal closet cleanout. That’s totally understandable — I wouldn’t want to live next door to a perma yard sale. But still, in many areas of the country where garage sale limits, permits, rules, and fees are being imposed, it doesn’t really matter if you’re unloading a washer and dryer set or a box of old baby clothes. 
 
http://www.mnn.com/your-home/at-home/blo...n-the-rise

Soviet scientists tried for decades to network their nation. What stalemated them is now fracturing the global internet 
 
After the Soviet Union’s leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s personality cult in 1956, a sense of possibility swept the country. Onto this scene entered a host of socialist projects to wire the national economy with networks, among them the first proposal anywhere in the world to create a national computer network for civilians. The idea was the brainchild of the military researcher Anatoly Ivanovich Kitov.
 
In 1959, as the director of a secret military computer research centre, Kitov turned his attention to devoting ‘unlimited quantities of reliable calculating processing power’ to better planning the national economy, which was the most persistent information-coordination problem besetting the Soviet socialist project. (It was discovered in 1962, for example, that a handmade calculation error in the 1959 census goofed the population prediction by 4 million people.) Kitov wrote his thoughts down in the ‘Red Book letter’, which he sent to Khrushchev. He proposed allowing ‘civilian organisations’ to use functioning military computer ‘complexes’ for economic planning in the nighttime hours, when most military men were sleeping. Here, he thought, economic planners could harness the military’s computational surplus to adjust for census problems in real-time, tweaking the economic plan nightly if needed. He named his military-civilian national computer network the Economic Automated Management System.
 
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-i...idn-t-work
 
 

Freemasonry's Animal House 
 
Documentary about the Royal Order of Jesters, an invitation only Order of Shriners. Features hundreds of examples of Jester artwork from dozens of Courts over decades, plus news articles detailing a forgotten but major debacle from 25 years ago, as well as a host of other topics, including a segment on SOBIB.
 
Using extensive documentation, the film asks the question: Why does a "gentlemen's club" reside at the heart of American Freemasonry?
 
 
https://youtu.be/VtgBdUtw26c
 
http://https://youtu.be/VtgBdUtw26c
 
The Shriners' Dirty Little Secret
 
There is a bigger problem, however, that the Shriners should address. It is one that leaders will never acknowledge and one that members will never be allowed to discuss and that is the Shriners secret sub-group, the Royal Order of Jesters and their prostitution/sex crime scandals.
 
On the link below is a list of 35 Jester related articles, beginning with "Jesters Exposed," the first article ever written about the ROJ. It was published on February 15, 2008 and was mostly about nonprofit tax technicalities and how the nonprofit group's leaders ordered that the internet be scrubbed of ROJ information to "minimize to the extent possible, our public exposure or its access to Jesters information" because it had been alleged that their weekend meetings were nothing more than prostitution parties where they drank and played high stakes poker.
 
A few days after that, I learned about how 19 Jesters were named on a witness list for the defense in a defamation action between two fishing tour operators who took groups to fish the Amazon in Brazil. "'Jesters' To Testify about Illegal Drugs, Child Prostitution?" was published about three weeks later, on March 6, 2008, and reported how these Jesters were expected to testify about "their first hand knowledge of prostitution, minor prostitution, use of illegal drugs and/or the alleged illegal entry of one of the tour operators into Indian reservations by the plaintiff and his customers."
 
http://www.freezonemediacenternews.com/2...royal.html
 

 
 

The holiday of Thanksgiving is an American tradition and one of the biggest behind Christmas each year. Gratitude and giving thanks is something all people should be making part of their lives. The following video from the Corbett Report is an excellent dive into this increasingly rare thing.

Topics covered on the video link below are:

Gratitude is positively related to increased subjective well-being
Is Gratitude Good for Your Health?
Ben Franklin Grand-Mason
Thnx4.org
Research on gratitude by Sonja Lyubomirsky
Ben Stein Quote
Albert Schweitzer quote
Epicurus Quote


Video Link:

https://www.bitchute.com/video/1kKNvJAaI8FW/

Visit the Corbett Report website for the show notes in the video here

More Re-Writing Of History: The Aftermath Of The First American "Thanksgiving" 
 
This is the time of the year when we are inundated with propaganda about the U.S. holiday, Thanksgiving. Recently, the History Channel showed its rendition. The same old story: weary Pilgrims were taught how to plant crops in the new land of America by some savvy Native Americans. Then, to thank the Indians and God, the Pilgrims held a celebration in Plymouth,Massachusetts. Everybody had a great time. This was brotherhood among human beings at its best. Then, the documentary went forward in time to the 18th century. What happened between 1621 and 1675 was completely ignored. Most U.S. history books rarely mention the fate of the Indians who helped the Pilgrims survive.
 
http://northerntruthseeker.blogspot.ca/2...th-of.html
 
“Wait, we can not break bread with you. You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, and you will play golf. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They said do not trust the pilgrims. And especially do not trust Sarah Miller. For all these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.”
 
https://youtu.be/2VbYZDohsHk
 

Catholic Church launches 'Sindr': the phone app which helps you get a quick confession if you have sinned 
 
The Catholic App is being launched in Scotland aiming to boost numbers
 
Developers Musemantik have plotted an interactive church map for users
 
It's already being dubbed 'Sindr' in a play on words with dating app Tinder
 
Launched by the Catholic Church, app will go live in the early part of 2017 
 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...inned.html
 

A brilliant stroke of marketing genius by Elon Musk by posting a poll for the entire Twitter community to participate in simply asking "Should Donald Trump be reinstated on Twitter?'

After 24 hours of voting, 52% of said yes, 48% said no. Musk then reinstated Trump's account within hours of the results. Fascinating possibilities here. Was this pre-planned? Are we watching a movie? Time hopefully will reveal this and other questions.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/11...d-twitter/

What the future of marijuana legalization could look like under President Trump
 
Beau Kilmer, a drug policy expert at the nonprofit Rand Corp., said it's unlikely that any sort of changes to marijuana law will be a priority for incoming Trump administration officials. “In the grand scheme of top issues the new administration is going to be dealing with, marijuana is not going to be a top priority,” Kilmer said in an interview.
 
With 65 million people living in states that have given the green light to marijuana legalization, any federal crackdown “could have significant political costs associated with it,” Kilmer said. And the burgeoning marijuana industry is likely to step up its lobbying efforts at the state and local levels.
 
Hudak agrees that any effort to stop state-level legalization will depend on lawmakers' appetite for dealing with the potential political fallout from the move.
 
“This is a Congress that is about to repeal the Affordable Care Act,” Hudak said. “I think a Congress and an administration that are willing to do that are not going to worry about the optics of quashing the marijuana industry.”
 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk...ent-trump/
 
Trump’s pick for attorney general: 
 
President-elect Donald Trump plans to nominate Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to be attorney general of the United States, The Washington Post and other news outlets reported Friday. Sessions is a vocal opponent of marijuana legalization whose elevation to attorney general could deal a blow to state-level marijuana legalization efforts across the country.
 
Under Obama, the Justice Department explicitly adopted a hands-off approach to marijuana enforcement in states that have legalized the drug, allowing those laws to proceed without interference provided that a number of enforcement priorities, including keeping pot out of the hands of minors, were met. The announcement of that stance in 2013 played a key role in allowing Colorado and Washington to move forward with their marijuana markets.
 
“A lot of people forget that [recreational marijuana markets in] Colorado and Washington were pretty much on hold until the governors there received guidance from the Department of Justice,” John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said this month.
 
Even simply reversing that guidance could have a chilling effect in states like Maine and Massachusetts that recently approved legalization. Without a tacit green light from the federal government, governors in those states may be hesitant to move forward with legalization policies that remain at odds with federal laws on the books for more than 40 years.
 
“I’m still hopeful the new administration will realize that any crackdown against broadly popular laws in a growing number of states would create huge political problems they don’t need and will use lots of political capital they’d be better off spending on issues the new president cares a lot more about,” said Tom Angell of the pro-legalization group Marijuana Majority.
 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk...marijuana/
 
 

World Bank Luminary: Breed Smaller People To Increase “Metabolic Efficiency”
 
After prepping his argument with formulas the professor reveals his demonic side by stating that humans have long since bred plants and livestock, re-engineering them to larger size, so why not apply the same sort of engineering to human cattle. Here is the quote in full:
 
“(…) human organisms might be genetically redesigned to require less food, air, and water. Indeed smaller people would be the simplest way of increasing metabolic efficiency (measured as number of people maintained by a given resource throughput). To my knowledge no one has yet suggested breeding smaller people as a way to avoid limiting births, but that probably just reflects my ignorance. We have, however, been busy breeding and genetically engineering larger and faster-growing plants and livestock. So far, the latter dissipative structures have been complementary with populations of human bodies, but in a finite and full world, the relationship will soon become competitive.”
 
http://www.infowars.com/world-bank-lumin...fficiency/