When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking. That’s dangerous for human development.

— Ai Weiwei - NSA surveillance: The US is behaving like China (via mattlehrer)

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”

― Nikola Tesla

Amazing Resonance Experiment! (by brusspup)

transpondster:

In just ten months, the United States managed to transform an 82 year-old Catholic nun and two pacifists from non-violent anti-nuclear peace protestors accused of misdemeanor trespassing into federal felons convicted of violent crimes of terrorism. Now in jail awaiting sentencing for their acts at an Oak Ridge, TN nuclear weapons production facility, their story should chill every person concerned about dissent in the US. (via How the US Turned Three Pacifists into Violent Terrorists | Common Dreams) _____________
This is an amazing story. When you read about kangaroo trials in Russia or Iran, remember this case in Tennessee.

Awe (by ShotsOfAwe)

brilliant. and yes. 

Stowe Boyd: David Burney On New York and the 21st-Century City-State →

stoweboyd:

Burney channels Kenichi Ohmae’s The end of the nation state, and brings it up to the awful, sludge-filled poltical scene of the present day.

INTERVIEW: DAVID BURNEY & NANCY LEVINSON

An Interview with David Burney: On New York and the 21st-Century City-State

Nancy Levinson: As an urban…

A U.K. psychologist ran experiments in which he divided self-described lucky and unlucky people into different groups and had each group execute the same task.   In one experiment, subjects were told to go to a café, order coffee, return and report on their experience. 

The self-described lucky person found money on the ground on the way into the café, had a pleasant conversation with the person they sat next to at the counter, and left with a connection and potential business deal.  The self-described unlucky person missed the money - it was left in the same place for all experimental subjects to find, ordered coffee, didn’t speak to a soul, and left the café.  One of these subjects was focused in a more stressed way on the task at hand.  The other was in a state of relaxed presence, executing the assignment. 

We all have a capacity for relaxed presence, empathy, and luck.   We stress about being distracted, needing to focus, and needing to disconnect.  What if, instead, we cultivated our capacity for relaxed presence and actually, really connected, to each moment and to each other?

Linda Stone on Maintaining Focus in a Maddeningly Distractive World - James Fallows - The Atlantic

There is an increasingly heated conversation around “disconnecting.” I’m not sure this is a helpful conversation . When we discuss disconnecting, it puts the machines at the center of everything. What if, instead, we put humans at the center of the conversation, and talk about with what or whom we want to connect?

— 

The power of digital devices is that they open up opportunities for us: we have new choices about whom to connect with, and we can either incorporate that into our life successfully or not. 

Linda Stone on Maintaining Focus in a Maddeningly Distractive World - James Fallows - The Atlantic

Healdsburg wedding of Simkoff and Saslaw

Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want to keep doing it. Traditionally the thinking has been that employers should appeal to workers’ more obvious forms of self-interest: financial incentives, yes, but also work that is inherently interesting or offers the possibility for career advancement. Grant’s research, which has generated broad interest in the study of relationships at work and will be published for the first time for a popular audience in his new book, “Give and Take,” starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other people’s lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.

— 

Susan Dominus, Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?

A deep piece on the research and personality traits of Adam Grant, Warton Business School professor and the author of the soon-to-be-released Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, in which he argues that a sense of service to others — an almost obsessive focus on the contribution of our work to other people’s lives — may be the single greatest key to productivity, much greater than trying only to help ourselves.

Read the case study that started his career:  as a sales lead at an academic fundraising call center, bringing in a student who benefitted from that fundraising, and letting him tell the callers, directly, of how it had changed his life, led to enormous gains in their productivity, gains that could not be explained by other factors, even when the callers themselves were unaware of that motivation, or actively pooh-poohed it.

To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.

— The City That Ended Hunger, by Frances Moore Lapp