Posts tagged azspot

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RJ Matson

How’s that song go?… “You can’t always get what you want…”

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RJ Matson

How’s that song go?… “You can’t always get what you want…”

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August J. Pollak
…Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.
LMAO
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Matt Bors

Sleep for Success: Creativity and the Neuroscience of Slumber

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For years, scientists thought that the function of sleep was merely to rest the body and mind, but recent research suggests that sleep is essential for both learning and creativity. It’s no surprise that people who are well rested learn better and are more creative. What is new is the value of sleeping after learning something or during a break in trying to solve a problem. Studies have looked at the benefits of taking naps as well as sleeping through the night.

During sleep, rat’s brains (and yours) practice what they’re recently learned.

Researchers have discovered that your brain becomes very active when you sleep, and that during certain phases of sleep, your brain becomes even more active if you’ve just learned something new. In an early study that identified this process, rats were hooked up to measure the electrical activity of their brains while they learned a maze. Later, while the rats were sleeping, the researchers observed that their brains were emitting the same pattern of activity they had emitted during maze learning. Apparently, the rats’ brains were “re-running” the maze in their sleep and using this time to consolidate their memories of what they had learned. These rats performed better on the maze the next day than rats that were prevented from re-running the maze during sleep. 

This same phenomenon has been observed in human learning. In other words, if you learn something and then sleep on it, what you’ve learned becomes clearer just as a function of sleeping. But what’s even more interesting is that sleeping on a problem helps people find better solutions. In a study titled “Sleep Inspires Insight,” participants were given puzzles that involved finding the final number to complete a series of digits. The way they were trained to solve the puzzle was to compare every two-digit pair in the series. What they were not told was that there was a shortcut that allowed people to identify the solution after only two steps. Participants performed three trials of the puzzle and then were given an eight-hour break before returning for ten more trials. Some of them slept during the break and some did not. The people who slept between the two sessions were twice as likely as the others to discover the easier way to solve the problem. According to the researchers, sleeping on a problem apparently allows for a restructuring of the brain connections, “setting the stage for the emergence of insight.”

So does this mean my 4 hours of sleep a night is making me dumber?

The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes… As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong it’s reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
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Steve Benson
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Matt Bors

Will 2050 be another movie based on a year in the not-so-distant-but-still-future future?

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Matt Bors

Will 2050 be another movie based on a year in the not-so-distant-but-still-future future?

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Mike Luckovich
Everyone knows health insurance cannot continue to operate as it does. When you ask an American if they want to keep their health insurance, they’ll say yes…but that smile on their face is actually a rictus. Only people on defined benefit programs are really happy, and those things haven’t been offered since 401Ks became the thing to do. Worse for the insurers, none of the other industries that pay for politicians is defending it. For well over a decade there’s been an annual ritual of reviewing and renewing your employer-provided health insurance. You find your deductable went up this year, your share of the premium went up last year and this new paper is talking about the co-pay. And all the while your employer’s payments are going up too. You as a human may feel you must absorb any rate increases that befall you but when a corporation finds health insurance benefits too expensive to provide they can simply stop doing so. The first public corporation that does this will see a spike in its stock price, which would start the general abandonment of employer-provided health insurance. Yes, it would almost certainly happen given an effective public insurance option. When the health insurance industry’s politicians say if we create a a public insurance plan, everyone will be forced to join it, this is what they are talking about. But it would also almost certainly happen if, as the Republicans would prefer, no regulatory change is made. In either case the only way that can happen in our system is if employers decide en masse to stop providing health care coverage, and in neither case is the decision yours. The decision belongs to the medical insurance industry’s customers…Corporate America, with its non-human priorities. The decision you face is, will your government do what it can to protect you, or to protect the health insurance industry?

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Chilling Arrest at G-20

We are witnessing Freedom of Speech’s slow death.  Everyone paying attention knows that these aren’t isolated incidents.  Check out Naomi Wolf’s documentary, The End of America. Chilling.

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Troubletown
I mean, I always get up after I finish watching.

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Troubletown

I mean, I always get up after I finish watching.

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Rob Rogers