Archive for the ‘Social Fear’ Category
Neptune Sextile Pluto
March 8th, 2010 | 
Author: The planets Neptune and Pluto entered orb of a sextile (* = 60 degrees apart) aspect in the mid-1940’s; and they will remain there until the 2030’s. Normally aspects between Neptune and Pluto are within orb for only a dozen or so years at a time. However, Pluto is presently at a fast place in its orbit so that it is moving at about the same speed as Neptune, at the same time that the two planets are roughly 60 degrees apart, so they are both in the sextile pattern for about a century. Thus, there will come a moment in time when there is no one on earth who doesn’t have Neptune and Pluto sextile in their natal horoscope. What does this mean?
In the first place, where aspects between the faster, inner planets symbolize relationships and roles to be played in everyday life; the aspects of the slower, outer planets – of which Neptune and Pluto are the slowest – symbolize people’s adaptation to the social order of their times. Aspects of slow planets refer to the assumptions, activities, and beliefs which identify people with their generation, and which change but slowly over the course of a lifetime.
Neptune is the planet of intuition and instinct, the receptor for all the impressions that hover just at the fringes of rational consciousness. It is the planet of belief, since anything which Neptune intuits has the appearance of truth (you believe what your intuition tells you).
Pluto is the planet of analysis and discrimination, the sense of what is fit, just, and meet – in a word, the morality. If Neptune deludes because it makes its beliefs seems true, Pluto obsesses because it makes its judgments seem right.
Aspects between Neptune and Pluto produce generations for whom belief must be the instrument of morality. They are rather more idealistic and even revolutionary in pursuing their particular visions of utopia than are generations lacking Neptune-Pluto aspects, who basically just conform to the social codes instituted by the preceding Neptune-Pluto aspect generation. These generations are not necessarily more moral or spiritual than generations lacking Neptune-Pluto contacts, but they are more self-consciously moral and spiritual. They need to believe that the human race is progressing towards a goal, and that there is something which each individual must do in order to help it along. They demand that the social contract reflect and uphold universal principles. They feel a need to justify their actions before the throne of history. They need to believe that they were chosen, willy-nilly, to bring light to mankind.
The “hard” aspects between Neptune and Pluto (the conjunction, square, and opposition) tend to produce generations which are stern, disciplined, and controlled. People born under these aspects are constrained by their society to repress their own personal desires for the sake of the common weal. On the other hand, the “soft” aspects between Neptune and Pluto (the sextile and trine) produce generations of individualists, for whom the only purpose society serves is to facilitate the happiness of its individual members.
The generation born with Neptune square Pluto (1809-1825) needed to believe in the better instincts of the great mass of humanity. The statesmen of this generation brought about the sweeping destruction of old social orders and class distinctions and the reorganization of society along vaster and more inclusive lines. Bismarck in Germany and Cavour in Italy welded clusters of small states into unified nations. Lincoln freed the slaves in America, and Alexander II emancipated the serfs in Russia.
The current of these times was toward unification, broadening the social contract to bring more and more people into the governing process. In the vanguard were the suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone; and on the more violent and revolutionary side, Marx, Engels and Bakunin. There was an intellectual tendency to view humanity en masse and to exalt the poor and downtrodden. Of the few notable painters of this generation, Courbet and Millet stand out with their realistic paintings of workers and peasants.
The literature of this generation also exhibited great compassion for the suffering of the common man in a world indifferent to him. The writing of Dickens, Melville, Dostoevsky, Poe, the Brontes tended to be dramatic, with an undercurrent of violence and an obsession with questions of morality and immorality. The sense of the time was that the cosmos, if not actually hostile, was at least disinterested in the fate of humanity. The theories of Darwin, Mendel, and Pasteur posited mechanistic models of nature which implied that the.human condition was the product of largely impersonal forces.
The square aspect is forever trying to make sense out of the senseless and to rationalize the irrational. Dr. Marc Edmund Jones’ keyword for the square is CONSTRUCTION. With Neptune square Pluto, objective, analytical mind was ever at war with intuition, so this generation – the generation of Queen Victoria – never really could trust its own personal instincts. Its morality had to be certified by the experience of humanity as a whole. Its only hope was that the entire human race would accept the responsibility for guiding its collective destiny.
The generation born with Neptune conjunct Pluto (1886-1898) needed to believe in the inspiration of the outstanding personality. Statesmanship in this generation often approached Caesar-worship. Its highly charismatic leaders governed by sheer force of personality, coupled with direct and absolute methods: Hitler, Mao, Franco, de Gaulle, Peron, and Tito are examples. When each leader passed on, his work was largely dismantled by his successors.
The cult of personality even pervaded the sciences. The theories of Immanuel Velikovsky, Norbert Weiner, Wilhelm Reich, and T.D. Lysenko created storms of controversy with rabid partisans and opponents. Rather than building onto existing bodies of knowledge, the thinkers of this generation were lone visionaries off on their own personal tangents and out of the scientific mainstream.
The conjunction is the most subjective of aspects, and the Neptune conjunct Pluto generation took more stock in feelings than in reason or logic. The writers of this generation produced a highly subjective and stylized body of literature. Brecht, Faulkner, O’Neill and Wilder had intensely introspective and personalized slants on life, and their writing and characters tended to be artless and amoral.
Artless and amoral is also a good description of the art and morals of the Dadaist and Surrealist painters. The art of Duchamps, Arp, de Chirico, Ernst, Chagall, Miro was highly personal and idiosyncratic, a revolt against conventional aesthetic sensibilities and a glorification of unbridled imagination.
The Neptune-Pluto conjunction tended to bring out the delusional side of Neptune and the obsessive side of Pluto because there was no separation of analytical mind from intuition, so anything imaginable was justifiable, and conscience could not be brought in as an outside check upon morality. Dr. Jones’ keyword for the conjunction aspect is ACTIVITY: this generation was too often eager to destroy all that had gone before in the name of a fanatical search for ideological purity. It was a generation of extremists with a narrow and intense focus, and it centered its hopes in certain personalities of severe morals and vivid imagination. It needed to believe in the inspiration of its prophets.
The previous generation born with Neptune sextile Pluto (l837-1851) needed to believe in the individual, and in a cosmos both sympathetic and infinitely pliable. It believed that it was the function of the state to serve the individual rather than vice versa, and as a result its statesmen were neither great innovators nor inspired leaders. Clemenceau, Cleveland, Hindenburg, McKinley were noted for their sterile conservatism and their defense of profit and privilege.
This generation was less interested in ultimate ends and meanings than in ways of getting things done. It loved to tinker, and it produced the great experimentors Bell, Edison and Burbank. Its scientists were not so much theoreticians as experimentalists: Michelson, Cantor, Pavlov, Krafft-Ebing made great contributions to the methodologies of their respective disciplines but they are most notable for the questions which their new techniques stirred up, but left unanswered.
Even the literature of this generation was marked by technical refinement and scientific precision. Zola, Henry James, Strindberg, Maupassant wrote about human behavior from the standpoint of objective psychology, reporting even life’s sordid and seamy side with clinical detachment.
In art Neptune sextile Pluto represents technique rather than content, such as the transient light effects of the Impressionists Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Gauguin; or in an earlier Neptune sextile Pluto generation, the balance and geometrical perfection of High Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. Impressionism is considered the beginning of modernism in art because these painters were the first to regard the act of painting as a technical process more important than an accurate depiction of subject matter.
Neptune sextile Pluto was usually more interested in form than in substance. It believed that form was substance, that technique was an end in itself. It loved to objectively analyze intuitive impressions, to give its instinctive feelings a whirl. The sextile is the most pragmatic and opportunistic of the aspects, and with Neptune sextile Pluto, anything realizable was justifiable: whatever seemed to work was considered good. This generation regarded the world as a laboratory in which to tinker, and it identified human progress with efficiency and technical advancement.
For the most part, it was. The previous Neptune sextile Pluto generation came of age in the 1860s through 1880s, a time of unprecedented economic and social expansion. In Europe, imperialism was the vogue, and vast colonial empires were carved out of Africa and Asia. In America, the West was won. Everywhere western technological civilization gained undisputed hegemony over native peoples and cultures. Not only did this civilization spread out, it also began to assume a more and more complex character.
The Industrial Revolution was in full swing in the advanced nations, especially in America. In the words of historians Nevins and Commager in A Pocket History of the US. (Washington Square Press, 1969), “No other generation in American history witnessed changes as swift or as revolutionary as those which transformed the rural republic of Lincoln and Lee into the urban industrial empire of McKinley and Roosevelt.” The telegraph and rail networks put every part of the country into communication with every other part, facilitating the rapid movement of information, raw materials manufactured goods and food stuffs.
Great opportunities opened up, and great fortunes were made. Morality was a matter of individual conscience, and often great wealth was taken to be the outward sign of great spiritual worth. This was the era of the robber barons Rockefeller, Morgan, Frick, Hill and of the trusts and monopolies. Big Business was born and it quickly seized the reins of power in America. Labor unions under leaders such as Gompers and Powderly arose as a counterbalance to the power of business combinations. For the first time, national and international factors were more important to the average person than local conditions.
Burgeoning industry tore at the earth and its resources with the same abandon with which it exploited labor. Pollution began to be recognized as a widespread problem, and wilderness disappeared at a fantastic rate before the onslaught of loggers, homesteaders, miners and railroaders. American civilization in the late 19th Century exhibited a limitless optimism predicated upon a system of limitless expansion.
All generations born with Neptune Sextile Pluto are particularly pragmatic and utilitarian; their watchword is practicality – “if it works, do it!” (and don’t worry about traditional wisdom). Neptune Sextile Pluto, like all sextiles, is poised to seize opportunities as they arise. Dr. Jones’ keyword for the sextile aspect is PRODUCTION. Sextiles are technocratic rather than philosophical, pragmatic rather than theoretical. In contrast to the other aspects between Neptune and Pluto, the sextile generations produce few exceptional statesmen or social leaders because the emphasis here is on individual interpretations rather than reliance on societal fiat. These generations are not particularly interested in doing what they’re told unless they can see how their own needs are directly served thereby, and they tend to be suspicious of leaders and authority. Thus in religion they tend towards individualism, such as the “priesthood of all believers” of Luther and Zwingli in an earlier Neptune sextile Pluto generation, which R.H. Tawney (in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism) characterized as “the triumph of the commercial spirit over the traditional social ethics of Christendom. If the reformer did not explicitly teach a conscienceless individualism, individualism was, at least, the natural corollary of their teaching.”
If the sextile resembles Neptune conjunct Pluto in its “end justifies the means” amorality, it also inclines to the Neptune trine Pluto faith in common sense standards of justice and fair play. The two faces of Neptune sextile Pluto are exemplified in an earlier generation by Niccolo Machiavelli (amoral practicality) on the one hand, and Sir Thomas Moore (Utopian Humanism) on the other. In Neptune sextile Pluto generations each individual is expected to come up with his or her own answers, rather than to rely on experts or interpreters to intercede for them; to find purpose and meaning for themselves within the bounds of natural courtesy and respect for other individuals.
The manner in which each individual Neptune sextile Pluto native adapts him or herself to their generation’s ideal of taking personal responsibility for making one’s own choices is shown by the value of the Neptune sextile Pluto aspect in their birth horoscope. The value is simply the orb of inexactitude: if Neptune and Pluto are within one degree of exact sextile, then the value is one; if greater than one and less than or equal to two degrees from exactitude, the value is two, and so on. This technique was devised by Dr. Marc Edmund Jones in his Lecture – Lesson on Pythagorean Astrology, Sabian Publishing, 1929, from which the keywords for the aspects were also taken.
DR. JONES’ KEYWORDS FOR THE VALUES (Aspect Orbs)
1= EMPHASIS (Doing) 4 = HABIT (Limitation)
2 = CHANGE (Thinking) 5 = EXPRESSION (Skill)
3 = GROWTH (Relating) 6 = EXPANSION (Self-enlargement)
1. EMPHASIS (Doing) All aspects within one degree of exactitude reveal their meaning in its purest, knee-jerk-responsive form – “as near impersonal as it is possible for them to be and yet be individual experiences.” Thus natives with Neptune sextile Pluto within one degree of exactness are the most compulsively pragmatic and individualistic – not in the sense of being rebellious or flaunting their independence of spirit, but rather they are self-contained lone wolves. They are idealists off on their own tangents, hence they are not especially successful in mundane affairs unless the rest of the chart is dynamic. They have considerable self-discipline, are self motivated and self-starting, and are conscientious and dedicated. On the negative side they lack perspective: they are too focused on the path beneath their feet and easily become mired in their thinking. Their individualism manifests as a naive doggedness and scrupulosity which inspires others with its unassuming honesty and integrity. Examples: Dan Aykroyd, Mikhail Baryishnikov, John Belushi, Alice Cooper, Farrah Fawcett, Bill Gates, Michael Jackson, Magic Johnson, Jay Leno, Madonna, Maria Shriver, Stevie Wonder.
2. CHANGE (Thinking). All aspects between one and two degrees of exactness indicate flexibility, the ability to adapt oneself to changing conditions – “universals are only to be perceived in terms of constant flux.” This means that natives with Neptune sextile Pluto greater than one but less than two degrees from exactitude are the most experimentally pragmatic and individualistic: eager to learn new things and to examine situations and other people’s ideas and motivations from different points of view. Like the one’s, the two’s are hardworking and competent (all Neptune sextile Pluto natives are – Dr. Jones’ keyword for the sextile is PRODUCTION), but the reach here is more towards understanding than psychological independence. They are thoughtful, introspective, and arrive at solutions to problems by thinking them through rather than bulldozing ahead. On the negative side, lacking the single-mindedness of the one’s, they can come across as being indecisive, bland, and wishy-washy: too lacking in firmness to be masterful (unless the rest of the chart cooperates). Their individualism manifests as a naive intellectual curiosity which inspires others with its unpretentious open-mindedness. Examples: David Bowie, Albert Gore, Kevin Costner, Whitney Houston, Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, Elton John, Dan Quayle, Steven Spielberg, Howard Stern, Robin Williams, Oprah Winfrey.
3. GROWTH (Relating). All aspects between two and three degrees of exactitude symbolize friendliness – “the expanding element of simple co-operation in being. It is the basis of pure social relationship, the emanation of … self to the point of fellowship with other selves.” Accordingly, natives with Neptune sextile Pluto between two and three degrees of exactitude are the most socially pragmatic and individualistic: outgoing, gregarious, eager to please; yet still original – fun-loving and mischievous, with a true sense of irony. They are cheerfully optimistic, and enjoy other people instead of analyzing them (two’s) or ignoring them (one’s). They live and let live, and try to turn aside from conflict and unpleasantness. On the negative side they are inclined to sidestep or slough off problems, to let things slide until they build to a crisis (rather than tackling them directly or thinking them through). Their individualism manifests in a detached, light, unconcerned manner which inspires others with its graciousness and buoyant hopefulness. Examples: Princess Anne, Prince Charles, Princess Diana, Prince, Tom Cruise, Mia Farrow, Arsenio Hall, Diane Keaton Liza Minelli, Bill Murray, John Travolta, Jann Wenner.
4. HABIT (Limitation). All aspects between three and four degrees of exactitude symbolize a tenacity and sagacity which must “observe and classify and understand.” Natives with Neptune sextile Pluto between three and four degrees of exactness are the most eccentrically pragmatic and individualistic – highly self-attuned and self-assured, with great depth and delicacy of feeling. They march to the beat of a distant drum and have a spirit of errant adventure. They are calm and knowing, with good intuition and the ability to stop to listen to what their hearts are telling them. Where the two’s reach out for intellectual comprehension, the outreach of the four’s is less cerebral, more a passionate (and compassionate) lust for life. For the four’s understanding is not so much a matter of formulating ideals as it is living one’s ideals to the fullest, of drinking life to the dregs. On the negative side they are stubborn, self-willed, convinced of their invincibility and rectitude, and inclined to go to the extremes of human experience (and endurance). Their individualism manifests in their ability to stand up for themselves with utter disregard for the social consequence, and they inspire others with their nobility of spirit and their can-do Quixotism. Examples: Cher Bono, Eric Clapton, Hillary Clinton, John Denver, Goldie Hawn, Steve Martin, Bette Midler, Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart, Alice Walker.
5.. EXPRESSION (Skill). All aspects between four and five degrees of exactitude are ingenious and straightforward – “the clue to a man’s heart lies in his artlessness – simplicity, smooth functioning in little things.” Natives with Neptune sextile Pluto between four and five degrees of exactness are the most candidly pragmatic and individualistic: they are not particularly humble or self-effacing, but rather waste little energy in affectation or posturing – they are plain vanilla with no frills, and just get down to the real business at hand. The striving here is towards reasonableness, fairness, and clear communication with others. They possess a good-natured bonhomie, which on the negative side inclines them towards talking rather than doing; they can be noncommittal or hedging when what is needed is fairness and taking a stand. Their individualism manifests in their unvarnished outspokenness – saying what they think without fear. They inspire others with their optimism, frankness, and impartiality. Examples: Danny DiVito, Michael Eisner, George Harrison, Janis Joplin, Stephen King, George Lucas, Jim Morrison, Eddie Murphy, Donald Trump, O.J. Simpson, Sylvester Stallone, George W. Bush.
6. EXPANSION (Self-enlargement). All aspects between five and six degrees of exactitude show a no-nonsense practicality: “bending of outer factors to inner convenience; smoothness in the accomplishment of things.” Natives with Neptune sextile Pluto between five and six degrees of exactness are the most dispassionately pragmatic and individualistic: they are cool, down-to-earth, purposeful and realistic – ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work. They are deft at processing, whether this be people or problems, and they are willing to take on more than their fair share of responsibility, which on the negative side can lead them to deliberately multiply their burdens and then feel put upon; or to push into areas where their counsel is neither needed nor appreciated. Their individualism is manifested in their ability to meet and even exceed their own (rather than society’s) expectations; and they inspire others with their thoroughness and selfless dedication. Examples: Connie Chung, Bill Clinton, Michael Douglas, Jose Feliciano, Aretha Franklin, Stephen Hawking, Jimi Hendrix, Calvin Klein, Martin Scoroese, Barbara Streisand, Marlo Thomas.
For everyone born in this Neptune sextile Pluto generation there comes a point in time when transiting Pluto arrives at the point that Neptune occupied in the natal horoscope (for those born in the twentieth century, this occurs at some time during one’s twenties); and because of Pluto’s retrograde (back-and-forth) motion the effect lasts for almost a year. The specific events triggered by transiting Pluto conjunct Neptune can occur anytime during that period; but the general tendency is for them to occur at the beginning or at the end (rather than in the middle). A lot of what might be expected to happen depends on what else is going on at the same time in other transit and progressions. Generally speaking, however, transiting Pluto conjunct Neptune presents a major challenge: important new responsibilities or commitments. At first you may doubt your ability to handle them; there’s a question of whether you’re really up to it. Since it’s transiting Pluto, it tends to extremes: thus transiting Pluto conjunct Neptune is either extremely joyous and fulfilling (the usual case, since the planets are natally sextile); or else it’s an extreme bummer (if concurrent transit and progressions are unfavorable); but it’s rarely in-between. Thus Pluto means extreme something: you have to push something to the limits. What is required is acting (and reacting) according to your gut-level intuition (Neptune) to go with how you feel rather than what society has told you (the natal Neptune sextile Pluto influence). This is a year of maturation, of putting aside your rose-tinted illusions (Neptune) and coming to grips with life directly (Pluto).
More of Bob Makransky’s articles are posted at: http://www.dearbrutus.com. To subscribe to Bob’s free monthly Astro-Magical e-zine, send an e-mail to: MagicalAlmanac-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Bob Makransky
http://www.articlesbase.com/astrology-articles/neptune-sextile-pluto-117377.html
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Love And Marriage (And Why The Former Is Not Enough For The Latter)
“To the unmarried and to the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do.”?
(1 Corinthians 7:8)
The immortal words of St. Paul, who quite possibly had experienced the pain of separation and divorce first hand prior to penning these words, and who certainly dealt with relationship breakdowns in every church he pastored.
I seem to be at that stage of life now where all my friends are getting divorced. I’ve long passed that stage where all my friends are having their 21st’s. And I’ve passed the stage where they are all getting married, and even the one where my friends are all having children. Now I’m up to the ‘all my friends are getting divorced’ stage. I suppose the only one left after this is the ‘all my friends are dying’ stage. Not much to look forward to really.
Of course in terms of divorce I led the way. I managed to stuff up my marriage long before almost any of my peers. It’s nothing to be proud of, but at least it means that no one needs fear that I’m going to judge them. Who me? I don’t think so.
The disturbing thing for me at the moment is that it seems to be all the couples that I’ve most looked up to as couples that are now falling apart as couples!
When it come to some of the couples I know – such as where the guy deliberately gets the girl pregnant because he figures that having a child will give him the motivation to give up is heroin habit – I sort of expect those marriages to last only a couple of years at best. And yet it’s not those couples that are falling apart. It’s the marriages made up of men I admire for their integrity and courage, who are married to women who are loyal, nurturing and understanding. And most of these people are good, solid, church-going Christian folk. It’s not supposed to happen this way!
I was talking to a girl recently whose relationship had only just broken up after some 20 years of marriage. She was not a part of the church and said that she’d never be. For her the final proof of the non-existence of God was the way in which men and women had evolved with an in-built incompatibility. Her analysis was simple but profound. Men have evolved as creatures that need only to eat and mate. Women have evolved as creatures that need to nurture and nestle. Hence, not surprisingly, we find that men can’t handle monogamy and that women can’t live without it. Marriages are thus biologically doomed to failure from the outset, and the statistics on modern marriages would seem to bear her out. How could a loving God have created men and women in such a way that they were genetically geared towards their mutual destruction?
It’s a good question. Every male knows that his biological drives are not geared towards monogamy ? not lifelong monogamy at any rate. Conversely, it is unrealistic to expect women to settle for anything less than monogamy in today’s society. Does this mean that God is cruel, or is there something in the whole marriage concept that we’ve missed?
I wonder if at the heart of the problem is the assumption that we all make? That marriage is supposed to make us happy. Indeed, I suspect that most of us believe that the institution of marriage was brought into being for the very purpose of making us happy.
Weren’t we all brought up to believe that love and marriage go together like horse and carriage, and that the phrase ‘they got married’ should generally be followed by the accompanying phrase ‘and they lived happily ever after’? Perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps we need to look beyond musicals and fairy tales to find a basis for our adult relationships.
I don’t think any of us seriously imagines that our institution of marriage came about because some individual had a ‘bright idea’ one day about how he could make everybody happy. Marriage is a social institution, and social institutions are developed because they serve a social purpose, not because they bring personal fulfillment to certain individuals within the community. Whether or not you believe God created marriage makes no difference. If He did, God did it for the sake of the community as a whole and not for the sake satisfying every individual’s social, emotional and sexual needs.
It makes sense when you think about it. What is the purpose of marriage? To create a stronger society. Strong marriages create strong families who build a stronger community. Marriages contribute stability. They contribute structure. And most importantly, marriages contribute children.
Read through your Old Testament and you’ll get the feel for what marriage is all about. Marriage is all-important because without marriages there are no children and without children there is no army. This is why baby boys are more valued than are baby girls. This is why gays get such a hard time. This is why childlessness is such a curse, and why polygamy is a far better alternative than singleness. It’s not because the individuals involved prefer it that way. Marriages are there for the sake of the community first and foremost. If an individual finds satisfaction in his or her marriage, then that’s a bonus.
So how come every time someone says ‘I’m not happy in my marriage’ we treat it as if something is horribly wrong? If someone expresses dissatisfaction with other social institutions, such as the government or the taxation system.. we don’t normally get too worked up. Maybe it should be the other way round? Maybe when we hear someone speak of their joy in marriage we should react as if they were speaking of their love of Queen and country.. giving them a sort of quizzical smile that expresses admiration without empathy.
I suppose the truth is somewhere between these extremes. Nobody would deny that the institution of marriage can be of some assistance in helping us to satisfy our individual social, emotional, and sexual needs. The truth is though that no marriage is ever going to satisfy all of those needs and desires. We human beings just weren’t created to have all our needs for companionship, security and intimacy met by one other solitary individual. We need a community.
This brings us to the positive side of the marriage-community equation. Marriages exist for the sake of the community as a whole. That’s the bad news if you thought that your marriage existed for the sake of your individual happiness. On the other hand though, the community exists to meet those needs we all have as individuals. That’s the good news.
Our individual needs for companionship, security and intimacy can be met. They just can’t be met by one solitary person. We have to learn to draw upon the group for our sustenance, and find support and affection from a variety of people within the community. I think that’s a large part of what church is supposed to be about.
So where does this leave us? Is there any hope for the modern marriage? Not so long as people look to marriage as a means to making all their dreams come true. Not so long as individual men and women look to their partners to satisfy all of their social, emotional and sexual needs. Not so long as we demand that our marriages make us happy.
Yet what would happen if we all began to approach marriage in an entirely different way. What if we began to look at our marriages as being the most significant contribution we could make to the broader community?
What if we saw the importance of our roles as parents in terms of the great good that could be achieved in the community if we bring up our children to be strong and capable? What if we stopped assessing our partners and our children in terms of the amount of satisfaction they bring us, and were able to see those relationships as being our gifts to humanity? Perhaps then we’d find ourselves saying things like ‘well, I don’t get on brilliantly with my wife, but I think we’ve managed to achieve some fine things together and that the world is a better place for our union, and perhaps that’s more important than my individual happiness’.
OK. That’s a long way from where we’re currently at in this society, but I have a feeling that it would be a better place to be.
Dave Smith
http://www.articlesbase.com/marriage-articles/love-and-marriage-and-why-the-former-is-not-enough-for-the-latter-96908.html
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Conspiracies
Proving the conspiracy.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/Story?id=6443988&page=1
I was just thinking about the ABC.com article that came out recently asking what is behind the Internet Conspiracy Empires? I think it’s a good question, and so I thought I would take you back through some of the conspiracies that we have looked at over the last couple of years. They will not all be conspiracies, but they will help to show why I have drawn my conclusion about our current conspiracy, and what is behind Gang Stalking.
The Snitching System.
http://www.thejusticeproject.org/wp-content/uploads/snitchsystembooklet1.pdf
[quote]“The history of the snitch is long and inglorious, dating to the common law. In old England, snitches were ubiquitous.Their motives, then as now, were unholy. In the 18th Century, Parliament prescribed monetary rewards—blood money—for snitches, who were turned back onto the streets where they were, in the words of one contemporary commentator,“the contempt and terror of society.”
“The system produced a cycle of betrayal in which each snitch knew he might find himself soon in the dock confronted by another snitch.”
“If all cases ended so poetically, perhaps informant dependent prosecutions would be more humorous than objectionable. In real life, however, O. Henry endings are rare.”
“The snitch system probably arrived in the New World with the Pilgrims.The first documented wrongful conviction case in the United States involved a snitch.The case arose in Manchester, Vermont, in 1819. Brothers Jesse and Stephen Boorn were suspected of killing their brother-in-law, Russell Colvin. Jesse was put into a cell with a forger, Silas Merrill, who would testify that Jesse confessed. Merrill was rewarded with freedom.
The Boorn brothers were convicted and sentenced to death but saved from the gallows when Colvin turned up alive in New Jersey.”[/quote]
With the advent of modern day society can we assume that the Snitching System became obsolete, or would it be better to rightfully conclude that it was and still is an integral part of society and as relevant today as it was yesterday? It is also just as much a concern for this time period as it has been in others?
The Secret Persuaders
During WWII before America agreed to join the war, the United Kingdom set up a secret agency inside of America, designed to convince the entire nation it was a good idea to join the war. This was back in 1940 and this agency had almost 3000 operatives. They sent out false media stories, via newspapers and other mediums they had set up within America. To the individuals that were anti-war they had a game that they played called VIK.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/aug/19/military.secondworldwar
[quote]BSC invented a game called “Vik“, described as “a fascinating new pastime for lovers of democracy”. Printed booklets described up to 500 ways of harassing and annoying Nazi sympathisers. Players of Vik were encouraged to ring up their targets at all hours of the night and hang up. Dead rats could be put in water tanks, air could be let out of the subject’s car tyres, anonymous deliveries could be made to his house and so on. In the summer of 1941, BSC sent a sham Hungarian astrologer to the US called Louis de Wohl. At a press conference De Wohl said he had been studying Hitler’s astrological chart and could see nothing but disaster ahead for the German dictator. De Wohl became a minor celebrity and went on tour through the US, issuing similar dire prognostications about Hitler and his allies. De Wohl’s wholly bogus predictions were widely published.[/quote]
I have never been able to locate the booklet with the 500 ways of harassing those that were anti-war, but I am sure some of those methods survived to this time period.
Here are some more amazing details about this agency that was set up by a foreign body on U.S. soil for the sole purpose of manipulating the population intogoing to war. This would have continued, but conveniently ended when the Japanese hit pearl harbour, what a unique coincidence.
[quote]BSC was set up by a Canadian entrepreneur called William Stephenson, working on behalf of the British Secret Intelligence Services (SIS). An office was opened in the Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan with the discreet compliance of Roosevelt and J Edgar Hoover of the FBI. But nobody on the American side of the fence knew what BSC’s full agenda was nor, indeed, what would be the massive scale of its operations. What eventually occurred as 1940 became 1941 was that BSC became a huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation and black propaganda. Pro-British and anti-German stories were planted in American newspapers and broadcast on American radio stations, and simultaneously a campaign of harassment and denigration was set in motion against those organisations perceived to be pro-Nazi or virulently isolationist (such as the notoriously anti-British America First Committee – it had more than a million paid-up members).
Stephenson called his methods “political warfare”, but the remarkable fact about BSC was that no one had ever tried to achieve such a level of “spin”, as we would call it today, on such a vast and pervasive scale in another country. The aim was to change the minds of an entire population: to make the people of America think that joining the war in Europe was a “good thing” and thereby free Roosevelt to act without fear of censure from Congress or at the polls in an election.
BSC’s media reach was extensive: it included such eminent American columnists as Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, and influenced coverage in newspapers such as the Herald Tribune, the New York Post and the Baltimore Sun. BSC effectively ran its own radio station, WRUL, and a press agency, the Overseas News Agency (ONA), feeding stories to the media as they required from foreign datelines to disguise their provenance. WRUL would broadcast a story from ONA and it thus became a US “source” suitable for further dissemination, even though it had arrived there via BSC agents. It would then be legitimately picked up by other radio stations and newspapers, and relayed to listeners and readers as fact. The story would spread exponentially and nobody suspected this was all emanating from three floors of the Rockefeller Centre. BSC took enormous pains to ensure its propaganda was circulated and consumed as bona fide news reporting. To this degree its operations were 100% successful: they were never rumbled. [/quote]
That is an amazing conspiracy that very few knew anything about. Are branches of this program still operational in some capacity on foreign soil today? It’s hard to say.
Operation Gladio
An actual operation that hired agents and had them in keeping in such a time as when they were needed. This is another jewel that came to light while doing research into Gang Stalking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
[quote]Emblem of NATO’s “stay-behind” paramilitary organizations.After World War II, the UK and the US decided to create “stay-behind” paramilitary organizations, with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion through sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. Arms caches were hidden, escape routes prepared, and loyal members recruited: i.e. mainly hardline anticommunists, including many ex-Nazis or former fascists, whether in Italy or in other European countries. In Germany, for example, Gladio had as a central focus the Gehlen Org — also involved in ODESSA “ratlines” — named after Reinhard Gehlen who would become West Germany’s first head of intelligence, while the predominantly Italian P2 masonic lodge was composed of many members of the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), including Licio Gelli. Its clandestine “cells” were to stay behind (hence the name) in enemy controlled territory and to act as resistance movements, conducting sabotage, guerrilla warfare and assassinations.
However, Italian Gladio was more far reaching. “A briefing minute of June 1, 1959, reveals Gladio was built around ‘internal subversion’. It was to play ‘a determining role… not only on the general policy level of warfare, but also in the politics of emergency’. In the 1970s, with communist electoral support growing and other leftists looking menacing, the establishment turned to the ‘Strategy of Tension’ … with Gladio eager to be involved.”[
[/quote]
A secret paramilitary army that exists in many European countries and has since the end of WWII, set up by the U.S. and the U.K.? Kept secret all the way up to 1990 when the Italian wing was exposed, and then the other branches were exposed as well. This secret army might have remained secret to this day, except for the extreme involvement of the Italian wing in local policy.
[quote]“Coordinated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), {the secret armies} were run by the European military secret services in close cooperation with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British foreign secret service Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also MI6). Trained together with US Green Berets and British Special Air Service (SAS), these clandestine NATO soldiers, armed with underground arms-caches, prepared against a potential Soviet invasion and occupation of Western Europe, as well as the coming to power of communist parties. The clandestine international network covered the European NATO membership, including Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey, as well as the neutral European countries of Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland.
‘The existence of these clandestine NATO armies remained a closely guarded secret throughout the Cold War until 1990, when the first branch of the international network was discovered in Italy. It was code-named Gladio, the Latin word for a short double-edged sword [gladius]. While the press said the NATO secret armies were ‘the best-kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II’, the Italian government, amidst sharp public criticism, promised to close down the secret army. Italy insisted identical clandestine armies had also existed in all other countries of Western Europe. This allegation proved correct and subsequent research found that in Belgium, the secret NATO army was code-named SDRA8, in Denmark Absalon, in Germany TD BJD, in Greece LOK, in Luxemburg Stay-Behind, in the Netherlands I&O, in Norway ROC, in Portugal Aginter, in Switzerland P26, in Turkey Counter-Guerrilla, In Sweden AGAG (Aktions Gruppen Arla Gryning, and in Austria OWSGV. However, the code names of the secret armies in France, Finland and Spain remain unknown.
[/quote]
The promised that they would close down these secret armies. We however know that with other similar programs they are never shut down, they are just repackaged and start up again. That is one heck of a conspiracy. Secret armies in many European countries set up by the U.S. and the U.K.
Red Squads
Not so much a conspiracy, but a little known wing of the police that exists in many countries around the world. Set up for the sole purpose of destroying dissidence. During Cointelpro and the Canadian VIP program they worked closely with the government to neutralize dissidence.
http://www.amazon.com/Protectors-Privilege-Squads-Repression-America/dp/0520080351/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229548302&sr=1-1
[quote] The cops love these free-wheeling, elite units. They were ostensibly created to combat terrorism, but have been used mostly to infiltrate and suppress liberal and radical political organizations and civil rights groups. They lift their members out of the routine of police work into something of a James Bond life. As Frank Donner points out in this excellently researched, thoughtful and well-detailed study of police spying, their excesses have been many. But Donner, who directed the American Civil Liberties Project on Political Surveillance, concludes with the chilling thought that the Red squads will be around long after there are any Reds.[/quote]
These groups go back over a hundred years, as each new wave of immigrant population introduced themselves Red Squads were there, using informants to infiltrate, get information and help to disrupt these groups, movements, and unions. With other infiltration programs the idea is to try to get the corportion of members of the infiltrated groups, by asking some of them to become informants. Once you are an informant for the system, you are always considered an informant for the system.
[quote]Worse yet, the information, and misinformation, gathered by these sleuths is fed into the growing number of intelligence networks maintained by federal, state and local law-enforcement organizations. In the computer age, if you attend a left-wing meeting in Echo Park, your name is likely to be spread as far as New York.
As Donner points out, the squads are not a recent invention. One of his most important contributions is tracing the history of the Red squads, showing how deeply rooted they are in American political, social and economic life….
…That set the pattern for the Red squads, a pattern that continues today. Whatever the city, said Donner, the goal and tactics are much the same: “police behavior motivated or influenced in whole or in part by hostility to protest, dissent and related activities perceived as a threat to the status quo.”
[/quote]
Elite branches of the police designed to squash dissident and protect against perceived threats to the status quo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_squad
[quote]In New York, former City Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy traced their origin there to an “Italian Squad” formed in 1904 to monitor a group of Italian immigrants under suspicion[1]. However, it is their association with fighting communism which provides the basis for the name “Red Squad.” They became more commonplace in the 1930s, often conceived of as a countermeasure to Communist organizers who were charged with executing a policy of dual unionism – namely, building a revolutionary movement in parallel with membership in above-ground labor organizations. Similar units were established in Canada in this period, although only the Toronto police used the name.
In the late 1960s, as the protests against Vietnam and the general domestic upheaval intensified, the Red Squads augmented their focus, to include dissidents largely outside the labor movement, including therein not just war resisters, but protest movements of all political stripes, including Neonazis, Native American movements, the women’s movement, environmentalists, the civil rights movement, and others. The methods employed ranged from simple surveillance to isolated incidents of assassination. Anti-activist police operations were expanded under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, particularly in concert with, and within the cadre of the FBI’s COINTELPRO surveillance program, but also including domestic spying by the CIA.
[/quote]
This very rarely discussed unit of the police apparently were in and still are in existence in many cities, some going by different names, but the same concept applies, squash dissidence.
Alexandra Natapoff
http://www.aclu.org/images/asset_upload_file744_30623.pdf
[quote]
The use of criminal informants in the U.S. justice system has become a flourishing socio-legal institution. Every year, tens of thousands of criminal suspects, many of them drug offenders concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods, informally negotiate away liability in exchange for promised cooperation, while law enforcement at the local, state and federal levels rely on ever greater numbers of criminal actors in making basic decisions about investigations and prosecutions. While this marriage of convenience is fraught with peril, it is nearly devoid of judicial or public scrutiny as to the propriety, fairness, or utility of the deals being struck. At the same time, it is a quintessential expression of some of the most contentious characteristics of the modern criminal system: law enforcement discretion, secrecy, and the increasing informality of the adjudication process.
The informant institution is also an under-appreciated social force in low-income, high-crime, urban communities in which a high percentage of residents – as many as fifty percent of African American males in some cities – are in contact with the criminal justice system and therefore potentially under pressure to snitch. By relying heavily on snitching, particularly in drug-related cases, law enforcement officials create large numbers of informants who remain at large in the community, engaging in criminal activities while under pressure to provide information about others. These snitches are a communal liability: they increase crime and threaten social organization, interpersonal relationships, and socio-legal norms in their home communities, even as they are tolerated or under-punished by law enforcement because they are useful.
The Article also hypothesizes the harms imposed by the informant institution on socially disadvantaged, high-crime communities in which snitching is common. These harms may include increased crime, the erosion of trust in interpersonal, familial and community relationships and other psychological damage created by pervasive informing, the communal loss of faith in the state, and the undermining of law-abiding norms flowing from law enforcement’s rewarding of and complicity in snitch wrongdoing.
[/quote]
Many people see this article and assume it’s an inner city problem, but it’s not. This is a societal problem. These informant programs are not just going after African American males, they are going after the females, and they are going after other communities. They started in these communities, and these communities currently have higher ratios of Informants, but then it branches out.
Imagine a society where over 50% of your community is a potential snitch? Imagine what that does to the heart and soul of a society? Some people don’t have to imagine because they have already been through something very similar.
[quote]
http://www.november.org/razorwire/2005-02/art/RazorWire-V8N3a.pdf
“As summer travel ebbed, I dove into the study of
the informant system, as pertains to those whom the police arrest, then pressure to go back into their
places of home and work and set others up for arrest.”
How many informants do we have in communities? We can’t measure it because of this secret system, but experts have some guesses.
“Because researchers know what is behind the search warrants granted, they know that almost 98% of the time the police don’t have any goods on anyone, just a confidential informant. A lot of informing is going on, and it’s escalating.”
“So they squeeze these people into rolling on their mother. Our family involved my brother’s girlfriend; it was her brother who turned her in, and so we went through this ourselves. And it is hard to try to explain to people this part — people do 20, 30 years and they get through it. Somehow, I don’t know how.
I’ve never been to prison, but they get through
it, and what dogs them all of the time is this —
how could my sister do that to me? How could my friend do this to me? That stays with them.
That psychological damage never goes away.
And it spreads to everyone in the family, just like anything traumatic does, and you get a bunch of sick people.”
When I grew up, the Russians were doing it a lot, the informant system throughout all the communities. A person could be hauled off and interrogated and taken off to the ice fields. It terrified me, those Russian people. We studied these communities in
Russia after that period because there was a lot of
mental illness. Our country went over there to help them with all their crazy people. And do you know what our country found out? Our scientists and
doctors went over there and came back and said, “It was all those informants. It made them crazy to live
among people, and nobody knew who was going to rip them off, or who needed to ‘get in good,’ or some favor. And so turn someone in, and that person gets hauled off to Siberia. It made people crazy. <b>Well, that’s what is happening in our communities now.”</b>
[/quote]
The new face of snitching might surprise you. As mentioned they started in ethnic communities, but they have branched out so much further then this.
http://www.mapinc.org/images/Hoffman.jpg
Meet Rachel Hoffman she was a 23-year-old Florida State psychology graduate, she is also the face of snitching. Rachel earlier this year agreed to become an Informant to lower her sentence for a drug conviction. She was killed while making a drug purchase for the police to help reduce her drug sentence. Informants come from a variety of social and economical backgrounds and once caught up in the system, many will do anything to escape prison sentences normally offered for much more severe crimes.
http://november.org/stayinfo/breaking08/FinalNight.html
[quote]Immediately after Tallahassee police raided her apartment April 17, Hoffman went to her boyfriend’s house and told him about the deal she’d cut. Over the next three weeks, she would tell him and Liza all about her work as a confidential informant.
“They wanted her to turn in her friends, and she wouldn’t do that,” said Liza, a 24-year-old FSU graduate student. “She said she wanted to get some grimy people off the street. She wanted to get bad guys.”
At first she agreed to give up a guy she knew who dealt drugs and sometimes bought pot from her, her friends said. But after one controlled call from the police station, she confessed to him she was working for the police and asked him to help her find someone else to turn in.[/quote]
She was killed during a sting that went wrong. She was an inexperienced 23 year old, who didn’t want to go to jail, didn’t want her parents to find out, and thought this would be a cool way to work off her sentence. She paid the ultimate price for it. This story is not that uncommon in today’s modern society, but many of us, like myself, were previously unaware of the extent to which citizen informants are being used in society.
She should no more have been turned into an Informant than many of these young urban men and woman, who also don’t want to spend years in jail, vs living outside for minor drug possessions, these people exchange their freedoms for a type of slavery and servitude to the system that is unimaginable. These situations are becoming too common, and they are contributing to the detriment and moral fiber of our societies.
Fusion Centers and TLO
The informant system is not just using paid informants. They are also using an army of volunteer Informants. The Citizen Informants who are parts of various community programs, or who were inducted via their place of employment.
http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/privacy/fusion_update_20080729.pdf
The ACLU has released a report on Fusion Centers. 800,000 operatives will be dispersed throughout every American city and town. Set to report on even the most common everyday behaviors which will go into state, local and regional, linked data bases.
This number of 800,000 is outside of other Informant programs that are already in place within America. Informants working via Citizen Corps, and other sub programs.
There are informant programs for local businesses, informant programs for truckers, boats, and so many others.
http://blog.t1production.com/utility-workers-hired-as-stasi-informants-in-colorado-california-arizona
T.I.P.S. officially died, but lived on in many other forms.
Spying101
The Canadian Government spying on it’s own citizens? Canada that friendly and peaceful nation? The very one.
http://www.spying101.com/
http://www.gangstalkingunited.com/forum/books/spying-101/
[quote]If you attended a Canadian university in the past eighty years, it’s possible that, unbeknownst to you, Canadian security agents were surveying you, your fellow students, and your professors for ’subversive’ tendencies and behaviour. Since the end of the First World War, members of the RCMP have infiltrated the campuses of Canada’s universities and colleges to spy, meet informants, gather information, and on occasion, to attend classes. [/quote]
[quote]RCMP spies kept secret files on hundreds of Canadian Politicians and bureaucrats at all three levels of government as part of a project known as the “VIP program,”[/quote]
[quote]The book, a thorough examination of RCMP surveillance of the academic world, also discusses the Mounties’ efforts to keep tabs on other
elements of society, including government, the media and women’s groups.
The RCMP created security files on 800,000 Canadians, and it has long been known the force took an active interest in politicians and public
servantswith links to Communist organizations or other pursuits deemed subversive.[/quote]
Talk about conspiracy. The Canadian government for over 80 years spied on it’s citizens and opened files on many of it’s citizens just because they attended a university or college? If the Canadian government was willing to do this, what about other nations?
This program after 80 years of operation within Canadian Universities and Colleges, when exposed supposedly formally ended. That is the official story that the public is suppose to believe.
These spying programs were not content to just watch the universities, the research shows that they branched out into the community, because after graduating, these people might still have subversive ideas.
Within the last 10 years since the program supposedly ended, it’s hard to imagine how many new files might have been opened on unsuspecting students.
Stasis- What happened to these people who were former spies for the East German state?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,540771,00.html
[quote]More East Germans were spying on their neighbors, colleagues, family and friends when the Berlin Wall fell than had previously been thought. According to a report published Monday, 189,000 people were informers for the Stasi — the former Communist secret police — when East Germany collapsed in 1989 — 15,000 more than previous studies had suggested.[/quote]
The C.I.A. were handed the list of these names after the Berlin Wall fell. How many went to other countries and were asked to continue with their domestic spying is unclear.
The above scenarios are just a few of the conspiracies, intrigues, and surprising information I have come across when researching Gang Stalking.
what I am seeing is a continual and consistent pattern of something that is systemic, with many absorption points. This means that citizens are being incorporated into these programs through many different venues, some via their families. Other through educational institutions, others via their places of employment, other through religious institutions, etc.
I am also seeing a link to some people that are being mobbed and bullied out of this system. I am also seeing the same patterns of collusion that has been reported elsewhere, by others.
http://www.bullyonline.org/action/obstruct.htm
http://www.targetedindividuals.com/System.html
That’s part of the conspiracy that I am seeing, and this conspiracy has been ongoing within society for some time now. Many communities have been affected by this and some are very aware of the level of snitching and informing that is ongoing in society, paid and unpaid. Others have had very limited or no exposure to these concepts, and therefore are not aware of what is ongoing in society.
gangstalking
http://www.articlesbase.com/news-and-society-articles/conspiracies-695384.html
Breakthrough mind technology that helps you to eliminate the worry of what people think of you. Just sign in below to get TWO complimentary videos that give a taste of this brand new exciting course along with some very useful exercises.
Be as Healthy as the Wealthy
Social class is simply the best predictor of health. If you could know only one thing about a person and predict that person’s health and longevity, you’d ask about social class. It’s even more important than family history.
In cases where someone has bothered asking poor people about their health, research confirms the trend: the poorer you are, the less healthy you’re likely to feel. That’s the finding of a recent Columbia University study. And results of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health Interview Survey make the case even stronger. In 2006, nearly nine times as many lower-income adults reported being in fair or poor health as affluent adults. Wealth and health go hand in hand.
Here’s epidemiologist and author of The Status Syndrome Dr Michael Marmot’s way of thinking about it: our society is a gigantic Titanic. First-class passengers on that ship disproportionately survived. In second class, fewer did. Third-class passengers… yikes. Many died before their time. And many of their modern counterparts still do.
The connections between status and health are hugely complex and only partly understood. No matter where you are, money and status make it easier for you to live in a restful place, go out for a Saturday morning jog and buy lean protein instead of fast food. It’s more likely you’ll enjoy a wide circle of friends, more job opportunities and more control over your schedule. And there’s more social pressure to stay away from blood-sucking vices like alcohol, tobacco and drugs.
If socio-economic status tells us so much about health, why didn’t we know this? In the past, many researchers felt obliged to avoid questions about socio-economic status when they designed public-health surveys. As a result, they had very little data until about a decade ago. Then the field exploded.
Adler recalls the study that got her hooked. It was one of Marmot’s, a landmark British study that scientists refer to by its shorthand, Whitehall I. Whitehall is the wide street in London where many key government departments are located, and the name is synonymous with the British civil service. In 1967, Marmot’s team began a huge survey of 18 000 male civil servants. The men were grouped into quadrants based on office hierarchy, with administrators who set policy at the top, followed by executives, clerical workers and finally office messengers at the bottom. All the workers had safe office jobs and high job security. The most surprising finding of the study was that not much about the disparity in health outcomes could be explained away by nasty habits or access to care. And in a follow-up study 25 years later in the Nineties, the men at the bottom were found to be not only unhealthier as a group, but three times as likely to die an early death as the men at the top.
Those results started Adler thinking. What is it about higher social class that matters? How does class affect the body? With that, she switched her field from adolescent risk behavior to class and health. (As she notes, ‘I switched taboos from sex to money.’) In 1997 she gathered a dozen like-minded researchers together into the MacArthur Research Network on Socio-economic Status and Health, and became its chairwoman. Since that time, network members have used nearly $9-million in grant money to swop ideas, start pilot studies and tack their questions onto larger, longitudinal studies. Their collective research provides much of the scientific basis for the information you’re reading here.
Can you take enough action to save yourself from the ill effects of social class? The researchers can’t say for sure. But they’ll encourage you to try your damnedest. After all, small lifestyle changes accomplish a lot. A whole lot. They’re simple, they’re easy, they’re appallingly obvious – and they have a stunning impact on longevity and health.
The latest proof comes from a 2008 Cambridge study published in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine, which examined 20 244 men and women, ages 45 to 79, living in the same English county. The researchers gathered baseline data in the mid-Nineties, asking the participants if they engaged in any combination of four common healthy habits: exercise, moderate alcohol use, daily fruit and vegetable intake and abstention from tobacco. Eleven years later, they followed up to see who died in the interim. Result: the people who engaged in none of the healthy behaviors were four times as likely to have died as those who engaged in all four, regardless of social class.
Practicing four simple healthy habits, concluded the researchers, ‘was equivalent to being 14 years younger in chronological age’. Be mindful about one or two things you can’t do anything about – your parents, for instance. You can’t choose your mother’s social class. And low birth weight, which is more common on lower rungs of the ladder, increases the risk of slow cognitive development in early life and heart disease decades later. Socio-economic status even affects physical strength and function. In one British study, men born in 1946 were contacted at age 53 and presented with a few challenges, including this one: close your eyes and stand on one leg for 30 seconds. Sound easy? Less than half of the men were able to do this for longer than five seconds. Disproportionately, their fathers were working-class blokes.
One last caveat: money changes everything, but the trend has a limit. Not a single scientific study has shown that being ridiculously rich will make you ridiculously healthy. Wealth didn’t save Donald Trump’s hair, for instance. Extra money simply translates into a desire for more stuff, which leads to the need for more money. A golden treadmill, yes, but a treadmill all the same.
With less money and status, all aspects of a healthy lifestyle are harder to achieve – but not impossible. In essence, you can live the good life by acting rich. You don’t even have to wear a cravat. The seven lifestyle changes below will help you hit your marks.
Make your Mark
If you can’t be rich, settle for famous. In a very cool study out of the University of Toronto, researchers analyzed 72 years’ worth of Academy Award winners. They looked up the age at death of actors who won Oscars, and compared that with (1) co-stars of those Oscar winners and (2) actors who were nominated for but never won Oscars.
Amazingly, the Oscar winners lived four years longer than their co-stars and fellow nominees. Stars who won multiple Oscars enjoyed an extra two-year survival boost. That longevity isn’t due to a difference in wealth. It’s due purely to status.
Researchers are finding out that status is not measured by bread alone. Yes, there’s the objective ladder of socio-economic status, which ranks people by annual income, net worth and educational level. But there’s also a ladder of subjective social status, on which people rank themselves according to how much respect they are given by members of their peer group or community. And both ladders are valid indicators. Your health is predicted by a combination of the two, says Adler, who pioneered the idea of measuring subjective social status. In one of her studies, the subjective ladder did a better job of predicting heart rate, body-fat distribution and stress responses than the objective measures of socio-economic status did.
Her advice: ‘If you can pick your niche and succeed in that, that’s probably going to be good for your health.’
Yes, obesity is bad for you; it leads to type-2 diabetes. And yes, spreading wide is widespread. But like most things, obesity is not spread equally across social classes. The CDC’s National Health Interview Survey found the highest 2006 obesity rates in the groups with the lowest income and educational levels.
Let’s not blame the victims. It’s a sad fact that a proper diet is harder to maintain in poorer neighborhoods, which lack supermarkets and the wide variety of healthy choices they offer, but which have plenty of outlets providing cheap, fattening, fast food. And if you’re working two jobs, who has time to cook or schedule exercise sessions?
But your neighborhood isn’t the only problem. In one of the most bizarre findings of 2007, Harvard researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that obesity is ‘contagious’ – that your friends are making you fat. Indeed, your closest friends influence your weight more than your genes or your family members.
The researchers studied 12 067 interconnected people who had participated in the Framingham Heart Study from 1971 to 2003. They organized them by their social networks and found the big ‘whoa’: when a participant’s friend became obese, his or her chance of becoming obese increased by 57 percent. (Using data from men only, the risk nearly doubled.) If it’s a close friend, your chance of bursting your buttons increases by 171 percent.
Ensure Domestic Tranquility
Where you live shouldn’t predict the state of your health. But it does. In one study of 3 617 adults, simply living in a city increased the risk of premature death (by 62 percent) when compared with suburban or small-town life. And of course, living in a disadvantaged neighborhood within that city is really bad for you. What’s so bad about the big city? There’s more pollution, leading to an increase in respiratory diseases. Also, there’s more fear of crime, which results in chronic stress, social isolation, anxiety and depression.
We need to worry about the postmodern killers: jobs with a deadly combination of high demand and low control, high effort and low rewards. Crime-fearing participants in Britain’s late-Eighties sequel to the first Whitehall study, Whitehall II, were nearly twice as likely to be depressed as the less-fearful civil servants. And then there’s the noise. Noise exposure has been linked to poorer long-term memory, higher stress, sleep deprivation and even heart disease. In 2005, the World Health Organization estimated that long-term exposure to traffic noise in Europe might account for three percent of deaths from heart disease and strokes. Noise at night can create chronic stress, even while you’re sleeping because you continue to react to sounds; this can raise your levels of stress hormones.
What’s true for real estate investing is also true for your health: better to live in the worst house on a nice block than the nicest house on a bad block. You don’t need a mansion to get a good night’s sleep.
Back in the day, when Humphrey Bogart lit up on the big screen, everyone smoked. Tobacco use was spread evenly across all social classes. That’s no longer true. The class differences are dramatic: in 1995,40 percent of men who were not high-school graduates smoked. Only 14 percent of male varsity grads smoked. And here’s the sorry part: those people on the bottom rungs who try to quit are less successful at it than people at the top. It doesn’t mean they lack will power; it probably means they’re surrounded by more smokers in their daily lives.
Smoking is responsible for the most preventable deaths. And because it has become a low-status behavior, it is a major factor in explaining the different health outcomes of haves and have-nots. So, if by chance you get your hands on a box of good Cuban cigars, don’t smoke them. No, no, no. Send them along to us.
Find a Job that Fits
Even though we live in the twenty-I first century, we still carry around nineteenth-century images of workplace health. As in the physical hazards. But fewer of us are miners or shipyard workers or mill workers anymore. We don’t worry about black lung. What we need to worry about are the postmodern killers: jobs with a deadly combination of high demand and low control, jobs that require high effort and dole out low rewards. As Adler’s MacArthur Foundation report, Reaching For a Healthier Life, puts it:
Jobs that are plagued by time pressure, conflicting demands, low control over how and when tasks get done, worker/management conflict, threats of pay cuts or job loss, and conflicts between family obligations and work requirements can create damaging levels of stress that surface in disease.
The biggest proof of that came from the first Whitehall study, which found that a greater incidence of heart disease at the bottom of the bureaucratic pecking order was due mainly to a lack of job control – that is, limited permission to solve problems and make decisions. Other diseases associated with low job control cited by both Whitehall studies are type-2 diabetes and alcohol dependence. That’s no surprise. Men who have a hard time coping with stress tend to turn to alcohol.
But perhaps the most stunning finding from Whitehall II came from 6 000 civil servants who were asked to agree or disagree with this statement: ‘I often have the feeling that I am being treated unfairly’. Those who agreed moderately or strongly were clustered on the lower rungs of the British civil-service system. And by following this group for 11 years, researchers learnt that those who felt the most shabbily treated were 55 percent more likely to have had a heart attack in the interim.
Several small studies in various countries have all confirmed these findings to some extent, says Dr Mark Cullen, a professor of medicine at Yale University. But he thinks the real issue isn’t low control; it’s psychological stress. ‘It’s the burden that matters,’ he says. ‘How much they want from you, how fast they want it, how perfect it has to be.’ And in his opinion, the amount of stress you feel from your job has a lot to do with whether the job fits you – that is, whether it matches your personality and style and the other demands in your life. Some people actually like low-control jobs, after all – they just want to punch in and punch out. But if you come home at the end of the day feeling angry, alienated and exhausted, maybe you need more than a new job; you need a new line of work. ‘The biggest problems,’ says Cullen, ‘are with a misfit.’ If you’re a misfit, fix it – or you’ll die trying.
Call your Favs
Do this: in the next two weeks, call people in at least six of these categories: 1. wife; 2. parents; 3. in-laws; 4. children; 5. other family members; 6. neighbors; 7. friends; 8. colleagues; 9. school chums; 10. fellow volunteers; 11. members of your social or recreational group; 12. religious friends from your church, synagogue, mosque, ashram or cult hideout.
If you run low on minutes, face time is perfectly acceptable. Facebook is not. Do this, and you won’t catch a cold. Okay, that’s not a guarantee. Put it this way: if your social ties are so frayed that you regularly call three or fewer people on that list, you’re three times as likely to catch a cold as someone with a diverse set of social ties, someone who would regularly call or talk to people in at least six of those categories.
A man who is socially isolated has a relative risk of death between two and five times greater than one with better social connections. Why that is, scientists don’t know. Social isolation is deadly. In France, the leading cause of death among middle-aged men and women is cancer. In the Nineties, a Harvard study of social integration and mortality among French subjects found that the men who were most isolated were 3.6 times as likely to die of cancer as their well-connected peers.
And, like everything else, social class may play a role here, too. The higher yours is, the less vulnerable you are to loneliness.
Go Back to School
‘Socio-economic status’ is a big, squishy term with several components: the amount of money you earn, the amount of money you have (two different things), your job’s prestige and your level of education. But when push comes to shove, the most important predictor of health is your education.
The most convincing evidence comes from Sweden. One study based on the country’s 1990 census tracked 25- to 65-year-old adults who died in the ensuing six years and found that each and every step up the educational ladder conferred added longevity. For example: among men who were 64 in 1990, about 14 percent of those with the bare minimum of education had died by 1996. But just six percent of men with PhDs had died.
What was most intriguing was the difference between men with doctorates and the next step down – men who were slightly less schooled, but nonetheless were professionals like lawyers and engineers. The PhDs were surely no richer – but they had a 33 percent lower mortality rate.
The experts come away from these numbers with this conclusion: more education gives you more control over your life. And more control means less stress. So stop watching Law & Order reruns and start thinking about going to night school and earning your law degree, so you can kick butt for real, tough guy.
Sandra Prior
http://www.articlesbase.com/wellness-articles/be-as-healthy-as-the-wealthy-711445.html
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Did the African Union Get Ghana’s Message?
The recent elections in Ghana have been hailed as a successful African story. The praises, admirations and messages of commendations coming from all corners of the globe is an indication that the world is hoping for a change in Africa. It is also an indication that the world is expecting something different, different from the way things are done all the time on the continent.
Having experienced political instabilities for most of her modern existence Africa has often been described as a failed continent – a continent where everything is depressing. So it came as a surprise when Ghana managed to conduct one of the best successful elections on the continent. The successful elections in Ghana have indeed opened a different chapter for the continent. It has shown the rest of countries on the continent that there is the need for democracy to be given a chance in Africa. The elections have sent a powerful message to the continent that democracy as a form of government should be widely adopted and practiced by all the countries so that there will always be peaceful means of electing leaders and transferring power from one administration to the other.
I strongly believe that Ghana’s elections are sending the following message to the African Union and its members.
That the constitutions of the various African states should stipulate the number of years and number of terms one could occupy the office of president or prime minister. To alleviate the continent from political diarrhoea, poverty and economic melancholy the governments must as a matter of urgency embark on democratic reforms. The years where leaders rule till they die or are chased out of office should be a thing of the past. The leaders should allow free and fair elections to be held every 4 or 5 years depending on what the constitution says. Elected leaders must have fixed term of office and on no account should they try to manipulate the system in order to remain in power. The elections in Ghana which attracted a lot of international commendations around the world are indicating to the rest of Africa that the people want something different. Our image as a continent can improve considerably if we allow democracy to flourish, if we allow rule of law to work, if we embark on a new path-a path where it is possible for the incumbent to lose elections and hell does not break loose, a path where judges are free to dispense justice without fear or favour, a path where members of the opposition are not seen as enemy combatants but as contributors of our democracy and development, and a path where policies and ideas dominate political discussions and elections instead of the whipping of tribal and ethnic sentiments.
The leaders on the continent must realize that the existence of a vibrant democracy is in the best interest of the people and the continent as a whole. The politicians must know that vibrant democracy is a necessary condition if Africa is to come out of her current political and economic misery.
More often than not, lack or absence of democracy, corruption and abuse of power has often been cited by coup plotters as reasons for overthrowing governments in power. To prevent such incursions by the army political accountability on the continent must be nurtured strengthened. That means the three organs of government namely the executive, legislature and the judiciary must first be independent of each other and secondly they should powers that checks and balances each other so as to prevent one arm from amassing too much power. History has shown that a situation where one arm of government amasses power only breeds envy and instabilities. The Judiciary should be given enough powers to investigate allegations of corruption so as to prevent the repetition of corrupt practices that fuelled the wars on the continent.
Additionally, the fourth arm of government that is the media should be enshrined in the constitution and the AU Charter. The mushrooming of public and private media on the continent especially electronic media should be seen as an encouraging development and governments should be encouraged to allow such private stations to be established unconditionally. The freedom of the press must be safeguarded so as to prevent unscrupulous politicians from attacking them and subjecting them to all sorts of negative tactics. The media should be allowed to play its role as the watchdog of the state and every law that will intimidate them and undermine their ability to work should be repealed.
The various institutions of government such as police, military and the ministries should work to promote democracy and development. Rule of Law should be employed by the state. Everyone should be equal before the law. Instances where there are two separate laws for the rulers and the ruled is not only affront to rule of law but affront to democracy and justice. The office of the Ombudsman and other independent bodies should be established to protect the citizens from the state.
That brings us to one of the most important institutions of democracy .i.e. electoral commission. The role of the electoral commission must also be enshrined in the constitution. This office must be independent of the executive branch of government. It must be well resourced so that it can organise elections without any difficulties. The role played by Dr. Afari Gyan in conducting Ghana’s election can only be described as excellent. The electoral commission must be impartial so as to prevent the electoral disputes that characterised the elections in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria.
The constitutions of the various countries should guarantee the existence of opposition parties. This will prevent the one party state found in most countries from gaining root. Absence of official opposition not only prevents the people from having a choice but also discredit any advantage democracy or elections may have. Therefore, constitutional and electoral courts should be established in member countries so that matters of political and electoral disputes could be settled amicably. Corruption should be punished severely and every effort should be made track down every penny stolen from the countries.
The AU
The African Union as a continental body has a lot to learn from Ghana’s elections.
The AU Charter should be reformed, strengthened and implemented to the letter. All regional bodies such as ECOWAS, SADC and the rest should be streamlined to work within the broader framework of the AU. The AU must not be a talking shop anymore. It must not be a gathering of corrupt, despotic and kleptocratic rulers but rather a gathering of true democrats. The AU must be a platform of action and concrete decision making, a platform where issues affecting the people are addressed. This will require strong, determined and visionary leadership. A leadership who share the thoughts and ideas of Nkrumah, Lumumba, Seketuri and Nasser and who are committed to fighting poverty and improving the lots of the people. The AU must have a full time foreign policy chief who will be the mouthpiece of the continent and who will articulate the needs and concerns of the people to the outside world. The AU should establish special bodies of experts who will serve as advisory bodies to the AU. The complete silence exhibited by the AU during the current global financial crisis necessitates for the establishment of such bodies of experts. These bodies may include health, economics, environment, resource, science and technology.
Each country should strengthen her intelligence capabilities so as to ward off the undesirables of the cold war tactics where Africa was destabilised by the west using their intelligence branches and the various African countries should share vital information about what the west is up to. Every effort should be made to prevent arm struggles either within the countries or between the countries.
The days where suspensions are used as a form of punishment for coup plotters should be things of the past. Instead there should be a strong, well funded standing army (Africa High Command) ready to be deployed to any country where the army will try to cease power. Such an army should also be used to crash any arm insurgence that will show it ugly head onto the Africa political scene.
The Pan African Parliament should be strengthened and its decisions binding on all member countries. An African Court of Justice should be established to settle disputes between nations and within nations and its decisions must be binding on all members as well. This court must be the highest court on the continent. It must be modelled in line with European Court of Justice. Individuals could take their case to this court for dispensation of justice. These democratic and constitutional measures will definitely help to reduce conflicts and human rights’ abuse which is rife on the continent.
Africans must unite and form a common front so as to make their voices heard on the international stage. We must unite against all forms of propaganda from the rest the world. The positive effect that Aljazeera is having on the world is an indication of what positive thinking could bring to the world. Aljazeera has done well in shaping the world opinion about Islam, Arabs and issues affecting Muslims, Arabs and people of the developing world. To counter the growing influence of Aljazeera, BBC for example has had to close down some programmes in order to launch an Arabic version of the BBC. Africans must know that our coming together will be interpreted differently by many who do not share our interests. As a result every effort would be made to thwart these laudable efforts in order to maintain the status quo of having a north –south divide. We must also know that our effort to change our predicament would meet several challenges among them the huge financial requirement, the human and material resources needed and many others. But we must put ourselves together and start doing something now because a journey of a thousand miles begins with a step.
Finally it is time for the old guard of African politics to leave the scene and give way to the younger generation. There are a lot of Barak Obamas on the continent but they have been prevented by the old guard from making any economic, social and political contribution towards Africa’s development. It is very sad that even in this 21st Century these old guards still think they only hold the key to wisdom. Some of these old guards have been in power for more than 3 decades yet they still want to continue to rule. For example Gaddafi of Libya has been in power for 39 years now. Omar Bongo of Gabon 31 years, Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea 28 years, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe 28 years, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt 27 years, Paul Biya of Cameroon 26 years, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda 22 years, Omar Al Bashir of Sudan 19 years, Iddriss Derby of Chad 17 years, Yahya Jammeh of Gambia 14 years, and the list goes on unending. Recently the president of Tunisia has decided to make himself a life president of the country. The presence of such dictators is not only harmful to the image and the development of the continent but a major factor why impoverishment and underdevelopment is prevalent on the continent. Every effort should be made by the AU and the regional bodies to discourage such blatant abuse of power. It is against this background that Ghana should be commended again and again for conducting one of the freest elections on the continent.
Ghana’s elections are a straight message to the African Union and its members that democratic reform needed on the continent is long overdue and that the African Union should take notice of it. Let this 21st Century be a century of hope, a century of development, a century of prosperity and a century of peace for Africans and the world.
Lord Aikins Adusei
http://www.articlesbase.com/politics-articles/did-the-african-union-get-ghanas-message-726487.html
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