The effects of Psychedelics, Growth

For the personal psych I do see the benefits of Psychedelic therapy

to get over the problems that people might have!

In all therapy there is the point to realize there is a problem and

to give the reins to the therapist.

The point is to understand there is a problem and to say please help!
Help? In life lovers, love and heal but in the setting of hell Psychedelic therapy
is the resolve!

~~~~~Psycholytic therapy involves the use of low to medium doses of psychedelic drugs, repeatedly at intervals of 1–2 weeks. The therapist is present during the peak of the experience and at other times as required, to assist the patient in processing material that arises and to offer support when necessary. This general form of therapy was utilized mainly to treat patients with neurotic and psychosomatic disorders. The name, coined by Ronald A. Sandison, literally meaning "soul-dissolving", refers to the belief that the therapy can dissolve conflicts in the mind. Psycholytic therapy was historically an important approach to psychedelic psychotherapy in Europe, but it was also practiced in the United States by some psychotherapists including Betty Eisner.

An advantage of psychedelic drugs in exploring the unconscious is that a conscious sliver of the adult ego usually remains alert during the experience. Throughout the session, patients remain intellectually alert and remember their experiences vividly. In this highly introspective state, they also are actively cognizant of ego defenses such as projection, denial, and displacement as they react to themselves and their choices in the act of creating them.

The ultimate goal of the therapy is to provide a safe, mutually compassionate context through which the profound and intense reliving of memories can be filtered through the principles of genuine psychotherapy. Aided by the deeply introspective state attained by the patient, the therapist assists him/her in developing a new life framework or personal philosophy that recognizes individual responsibility for change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_therapy

It's about healing... To have growth and yes Psychedelics do make us grow.
It helps to repair the brain or jump starts the brain in a early age in a therapist
supervised session. Give a homeless person slipped me LSD when I was a kid
I acknowledge that it helped me in my multiple intelligences that set
my thinking in a multiple format. Or brought me questions and set me on a path
as I wondered what the hell that was. Either way Growth!

~~~~~Psychedelic mushrooms already have a reputation for helping people open their minds and broaden their perspective on the world. They have shown an ability to combat mental disorders like depression and anxiety. Now, research is showing that the magic mushrooms can actually help physically rebuild a damaged brain.

In a study conducted by the University of South Florida and published in 2013 in the Experimental Brain Research journal, researchers measured the effects of mushrooms on mice that had been conditioned to fear certain stimuli.

The results were striking: Not only could psilocybin, the main active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, help them get over their fear, it promoted cell growth and regeneration in their brains.

During the experiment, mice were exposed to an auditory tone while receiving an electric shock, training them to fear the noise even when the shock was not administered.

Mice that received low doses of psilocybin, however, were quickly able to shed their aversion to the tone, while mice that did not take the substance took longer to return to normal. “They stopped freezing; they lost their fear,” study co-author Dr. Juan Sanchez-Ramos said to Live Science.

What’s more, the psychedelic mice showed growth in new brain cells, perhaps erasing memories of the fear response. Researchers think that the psilocybin is binding to brain receptors that stimulate growth and healing, acting on the hippocampus, a small part of the brain that is essential to learning and forming memories. Since PTSD is thought to result from a similar response in which patients cannot separate a stimulus from a traumatic event, psilocybin could perhaps help them heal their brains just like it did for the mice.

“Memory, learning, and the ability to relearn that a once threatening stimuli is no longer a danger absolutely depends on the ability of the brain to alter its connections,” study leader Dr. Briony Catlow of the Lieber Institute for Brain Development said to Real Clear Science. “We believe that neuroplasticity plays a critical role in psilocybin accelerating fear extinction.”

“It is highly possible that in the future we will continue these studies since many interesting questions have come up from these experiments,” Catlow said. “The hope is that we can extend the findings to humans in clinical trials.”

Psychedelics work, in part, by overriding the “default mode network” in the brain, which is thought to be responsible for wandering minds, self-criticism and an inability to focus on the outside world. Instead, the substances help people focus on living in the moment, similar to many Eastern meditation practices. That can also help with PTSD as well as other mental disorders like depression.

“People with depression have overactive default mode networks and so ruminate on themselves, on their inadequacies, on their badness, that they are worthless, that they have failed — to an extent that is sometimes delusional,” David Nutt, of the Imperial College London’s Neuropsychopharmacology Unit, said to Natural News. “[P]silocybin appears to block that activity and stops this obsessive rumination.”

The therapeutic value seems clear. “[Psilocybin] facilitates extinction of the classically conditioned fear response, and this, and similar agents, should be explored as potential treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder and related conditions,” the study concludes. However, despite its demonstrated success and unlimited potential, psilocybin is currently banned by the U.S. government, considered a drug of abuse with no medical value.
http://reset.me/study/study-psilocybin-mushrooms-stimulate-growth-of-new-brain-cells

~~~~~Researchers in Brazil have used miniature human brains to reveal the effects of psychedelics on neural plasticity, inflammation and neurodegeneration. They shared the results of their experiments this week in the journal Scientific Reports.

"For the first time we could describe psychedelic related changes in the molecular functioning of human neural tissue," lead study author Stevens Rehen, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said in a news release.

To study the impact of psychedelics on the brain, scientists exposed cerebral organoids -- cultures of neural cells that approximate a developing brain -- to dimethyltryptamine, or 5-MeO-DMT, a psychedelic compound. Mass spectrometry-based proteomics, a novel imaging technique, allowed researchers to analyze the compound's effects on thousands of neural proteins.

The analysis revealed an increase in the production of proteins related to synaptic formation and maintenance, as well as proteins linked with the regulation of learning and memory. The compound also decreased the production of proteins linked with inflammation, degeneration and brain lesions.

"Results suggest that classic psychedelics are powerful inducers of neuroplasticity, a tool of psychobiological transformation that we know very little about," said co-author Sidarta Ribeiro, director of the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte.

Previous studies have suggested psychedelic drugs, including LSD and MDMA, have anti-inflammatory and antidepressant qualities, but until now, scientists have struggled to identify the molecular pathways through which the substances deliver their therapeutic effects.

"Our study reinforces the hidden clinical potential of substances that are under legal restrictions, but which deserve attention of medical and scientific communities," Rehen said.
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2017/10/09/Mini-human-brains-reveal-the-effects-of-psychedelics/3191507580281

Synesthesia

The mind is very plastic, adaptive.
~~~~~Perceptual adaptation is the means by which the brain accounts for the 
differences that the subject may witness, particularly alterations in the visual field. 
For example, if an individual's visual field is altered forty five degrees left, the 
brain accounts for the difference allowing the individual to function normally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_adaptation
http://walmartramen.blogspot.com/2013/11/perceptual-adaptation.html

Or with spatial intelligence.
~~~~~Spatial Intelligence is an area in the theory of multiple intelligences that deals with spatial judgment and the ability to visualize with the mind's eye. It is defined by Howard Gardner as a human computational capacity that provides the ability or mental skill to solve spatial problems of navigation, visualization of objects from different angles and space, faces or scenes recognition or to notice fine details. Gardner further explains that Spatial Intelligence could be more effective to solve problems in areas related to realistic, thing-oriented, and investigative occupations. This capability is a brain skill that is also found in people with visual impairment. As researched by Gardner, a blind person can recognize shapes in a non-visual way. The spatial reasoning of the blind person allows them to translate tactile sensations into mental calculation of length and visualisation of form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_intelligence_(psychology)

Synesthesia varies from person to person and cause to cause.
~~~~~Little is known about how synesthesia develops. It has been suggested that synesthesia develops during childhood when children are intensively engaged with abstract concepts for the first time. This hypothesis – referred to as semantic vacuum hypothesis explains why the most common forms of synesthesia are grapheme-color, spatial sequence and number form. These are usually the first abstract concepts that educational systems require children to learn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

~~~~~My sudden synesthesia: how I went blind and started hearing colors
It took just 72 hours for me to lose my sight entirely. Just before my blindness hit, I had been laid up with an unknown virus that had left me suffering severe headaches and sweats. My body's immune system had gone haywire, responding to the virus by attacking my own nerves, causing loss of sight and mobility -- I had been struck down by biological friendly fire.

Going blind was devastating. I hadn't just lost my primary sense -- I had lost my livelihood too. As a television producer, my vision was my job.

My sight started to return weeks later. I opened my eyes to a strange, supernatural view. Everything was just a swirling gray fog. I was momentarily elated that the world was no longer a suffocating black cloak -- but I realized quickly that I didn't recognize anything around me. Over time, black lines started to appear, crudely constructing windows and door frames, but little else.

Slowly the gray mist dissolved into a brown muddy haze that obscured anything more than a few feet away. Color eluded me, and people were hollow ghosts with no solidity or humanness. I often had no idea where I was, and I wondered if I would ever feel normal again.

As I recovered at home, color started slowly creeping back into my life. This was a very perplexing time, for often I felt I was seeing a color but was unable to identify it. I would stare endlessly at trees and lamp-posts, desperate to match the color I believed was there with my strange sensory experience. Bright primary colors were the first I could identify with any conviction; I struggled enormously with greens, grays and any pale or muted colors. This was not the vibrant rainbow world I was used to.

Even though my visual world was still predominantly black and white, it felt like colors were talking to me, as if my senses were communicating in ways I didn't understand. Explaining my new relationship with color only provoked confused silences, and when I described it to neurologists, I was told that nobody knew what was causing it, but that perhaps my sensory system had become cross-wired.
Color information was still being transmitted to my brain, but I was receiving only part of the message. My lifelong emotional associations with colors were still intact, even if my sight was not. I tried to use language to help myself recover. "You are green," I would tell the grass, using reminders to try and bring my normal vision back online. The more I did this, the more it worked.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/10/health/sudden-synesthesia-blind-hearing-color-partner/index.html

Changing reasons why women cheat on their husbands

Why do people cheat? It's in our nature... Well we all are made with hormones
and where did hormones come from? 
"Researchers have identified several new traits in modern humans that 
are influenced by Neandertal genes."
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2017/10/05/Scientists-find-more-modern-human-traits-influenced-by-Neandertal-DNA/4371507230900

These are real questions that needs to be
asked to accept each others nature instead of fighting it constantly!
It takes that talk, it takes that first step, those words many long to hear,
"Walk with me!"



~~~~~Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality is a book dealing with the evolution of monogamy in humans and human mating systems. First published in 2010, it was co-authored by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. In opposition to what the authors see as the 'standard narrative' of human sexual evolution, they contend having multiple sexual partners was common and accepted in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Mobile self-contained groups of hunter gatherers are posited as the human norm before agriculture led to high population density. According to the authors, before agriculture, sex was relatively promiscuous, and paternity was not a concern, in a similar way to the mating system of Bonobos. According to the book, sexual interactions strengthened the bond of trust in the groups; far from causing jealousy, social equilibrium and reciprocal obligation was strengthened by playful sexual interactions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_at_Dawn
https://chrisryanphd.com/about-sex-at-dawn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2W0xNXjNzE

~~~~~The changing reasons why women cheat on their husbands
One of the more interesting facts in Esther Perel's new book, State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, comes near the beginning.

Since 1990, notes the psychoanalyst and writer, the rate of married women who report they've been unfaithful has increased by 40 percent, while the rate among men has remained the same.

More women than ever are cheating, she tells us, or are willing to admit that they are cheating -- and while Perel spends much of her book examining the psychological meaning, motivation, and impact of these affairs, she offers little insight into the significance of the rise itself.

So what exactly is happening inside marriages to shift the numbers? What has changed about monogamy or family life in the past 27 years to account for the closing gap? And why have so many women begun to feel entitled to the kind of behavior long accepted (albeit disapprovingly) as a male prerogative?

These questions first occurred to me a few years ago when I began to wonder how many of my friends were actually faithful to their husbands.

From a distance, they seemed happy enough, or at least content. Like me, they were doing the family thing. They had cute kids, mortgages, busy social lives, matching sets of dishes. On the surface, their husbands were reasonable, the marriages modern and equitable. If these women friends were angry unfulfilled or resentful, they didn't show it.

Then one day, one of them confided in me she'd been having two overlapping affairs over the course of five years.

Almost before I'd finished processing this, another friend told me she was 100 percent faithful to her husband, except when she was out of town for work each month. Not long after, another told me that while she'd never had sex with another man, she'd had so many emotional affairs and inappropriate email correspondences over the years that she'd had to buy a separate hard drive to store them all.

What surprised me most about these conversations was not that my friends were cheating, but that many of them were so nonchalant in the way they described their extramarital adventures. There was deception but little secrecy or shame.

Often, they loved their husbands, but felt in some fundamental way that their needs (sexual, emotional, psychological) were not being met inside the marriage. Some even wondered if their husbands knew about their infidelity, choosing to look away.

"The fact is," one of these friends told me, "I'm nicer to my husband when I have something special going on that's just for me." She found that she was kinder, more patient, less resentful, "less of a bitch." It occurred to me as I listened that these women were describing infidelity not as a transgression but a creative or even subversive act, a protest against an institution they'd come to experience as suffocating or oppressive.

In an earlier generation, this might have taken the form of separation or divorce, but now, it seemed, more and more women were unwilling to abandon the marriages and families they'd built over years or decades. They were also unwilling to bear the stigma of a publicly open marriage or to go through the effort of negotiating such a complex arrangement.

These women were turning to infidelity not as a way to explode a marriage, but as a way to stay in it. Whereas conventional narratives of female infidelity so often posit the unfaithful woman as a passive party, the women I talked to seemed in control of their own transgressions. There seemed to be something new about this approach.

In The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism, and Pleasure in Women's Infidelity, another book on infidelity to be published this November, the sociologist Alicia Walker elaborates on the concept of female infidelity as a subversion of traditional gender roles.

To do so, she interviews 40 women who sought or participated in extramarital relationships through the Ashley Madison dating site.

Like The State of Affairs, Walker's text offers valuable insight simply by way of approaching its subject from a position of curiosity as opposed to prevention or recovery, and she investigates which factors led the women in her study to go outside their marriages.

Surely, one might think, a woman who would do such a thing must be acting out of a desire to escape a miserable marriage. And yet it turns out, this isn't always the case: Many of the women Walker interviewed were in marriages that were functional. Like the women I knew who cheated, many of the interviewees said they liked their husbands well enough. They had property together. They had friendships together. They had children that they were working together to raise.

But at the same time, they found married life incredibly dull and constraining and resented the fact that as women, they felt they consistently did a disproportionate amount of the invisible labor that went into maintaining their lifestyle.

One woman in Walker's book told her, "The inequality of it all is such an annoying factor that I am usually in a bad mood when my spouse is in my presence," and another said that while her husband was a competent adult in the world, at home he felt like "another child to clean up after."

Many of the friends I spoke to expressed similar feelings. "I shop and cook, my husband does dishes and empties the trash," one told me. "We each do our own laundry. But I've always been in charge of the 'calendar,' and what I didn't realize until recently is that in some way I'm in charge of managing many of our relationships.

My husband is a homebody and I initiate/plan almost all of our social endeavors. My mom got this phrase from her therapist: 'keeping the pulse of the household' -- this idea that someone has to be managing the emotional heart of your tiny community. I think women do that a lot."

And as Perel repeats frequently in this book, and in her previous one, little does as much to muffle erotic desire as this kind of caretaking and enmeshment.

"I think there's an incredible amount of deep resentment for women in America about divisions of labor," said sociologist Lisa Wade when I asked her to comment on this contradiction. "And what social scientists are finding now is that there is a correlation between equal division of labor and better sex."

No matter how much attention is paid to these issues, she told me, "these kind of cultural beliefs hang on a long time after they're relevant. They hang on in ways that are often invisible. A lot of women have tried to address these problems and have faced a lot of stubbornness from husbands. They feel there's no way to win this battle. So maybe now what women are deciding is that infidelity is a third way."

Of course, it's a "third way" that is not feasible for everyone, even if more women are taking it up, usually women who feel financially secure and independent enough to risk potential fallout. These women seem to be finding that no amount of sensitivity or goodwill on the part of their husbands can save them from the fact that in every arena, from work to marriage to parenthood, they're always doing more for less.

As Wade put it, "It's such a precarious balance keeping everyone happy, that for many women, to start a long conversation about her own sexual satisfaction seems like a bad idea. We now tell women that they can have it all, that they can work and have a family and deserve to be sexually satisfied. And then when having it all is miserable and overwhelming or they realize marriage isn't all it's cracked it up to be, maybe having affairs is the new plan B."

I tested this idea out on a few of the friends who had confided in me about their affairs, and most of them agreed. Twenty or thirty years ago they might have opted for divorce, because surely there was another man out there who could do better in this role, who could satisfy them completely. But a lot of these women are children of divorce. They lived through the difficulties divorce can create.

"Even now," all these years later, one told me, "Do you know what my most vivid memory of Christmas is? Driving through a blizzard up I-95 in the back of one of their cars, and then they'd pull over on the side of the highway and hand off me and my brother without speaking. That was our Christmas. Why did these people marry in the first place?"

Maybe that's the essential question, the question preceding those Perel explores in her book. Why do women still marry when, if statistics are to be believed, marriage doesn't make them very happy?

I confided in a friend once that, after 15 years of marriage, the institution and the relationship itself continued to mystify me. At the time I married, marriage had felt like a panacea; it was a bond that would provide security, love, friendship, stability, and romance -- the chance to have children and nice dishes, to be introduced as someone's wife. It promised to expand my circle of family and improve my credit score, to tether me to something wholesome and give my life meaning.

Could any single relationship not fall short of such expectations? Maybe these women were on to something -- valuing their marriages for the things it could offer and outsourcing the rest, accepting the distance between the idealization and the actual thing, seeing marriage clearly for what it is and not what we're all told and promised it will be.

My friend told me she felt this way of thinking was the only answer, and the way she'd come to reconcile her feelings about the relationship. She said that she used to compare her marriage to her parents', who always seemed totally in love. "Until the end of my mom's life they were spooning together every night in a double bed ... not even a queen. But," she added, "they were awful and narcissistic, with very little to give to their children."

My friend felt she and her husband were much better parents, more involved and attuned to their kids.

"But often," she went on, "it can feel like my husband and I are running a family corporation together and that our emotional intimacy consists of gossiping about our friends and watching Game of Thrones. Sometimes I wonder if when the kids leave I should either (a) have a passionate affair or (b) find another husband. I may do neither, but it seems like (a) is more likely than (b). I don't have any illusions that marrying someone else will make me happy, not anymore."
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/05/health/why-women-cheat-partner/index.html

Legend Tom Petty dies

 

I give full respects to the Tom Petty family! 

Agreed he was a good artist and a human! 

~~~~~Rocker Tom Petty died Monday after being rushed to a Los Angeles hospital, according to Tony Dimitriades, longtime manager of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. Dimitriades confirmed Petty's death on behalf of the performer's family.

He was 66.

The singer was found unconscious in his Malibu home on Sunday night, authorities said.

Petty was transported to UCLA Santa Monica Hospital where he was reportedly placed on life support.

"He suffered cardiac arrest at his home in Malibu in the early hours of this morning and was taken to UCLA Medical Center but could not be revived. He died peacefully at 8:40pm PT surrounded by family, his bandmates and friends," Dimitriades said in a statement.

With his nasally voice and chiming guitar, Petty and his longtime band, the Heartbreakers, churned out an instantly recognizable brand of sturdy, heartland rock that made them a classic-radio staple for decades. Petty, along with the band, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

The group finished a summer tour with three performances at the Hollywood Bowl last week.

Petty and the Heartbreakers first came to fame in the 1970s. It was both with that group and as a solo artist that Petty had a string of hits across the decades, including "Free Fallin'," "American Girl" and "I Won't Back Down."

Their 1976 debut contained a minor hit, "Breakdown," but it wasn't until Petty's third album, "Damn the Torpedoes," that he and the band broke through to the mainstream.

That 1980 album won critical raves, went platinum and spawned the hits "Don't Do Me Like That" and "Refugee."

Petty sang with Stevie Nicks that same year on her smash hit, "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around." The duet kicked off a long and fruitful period of collaboration between Petty and other artists.

He recorded "Don't Come Around Here No More" -- memorable for its trippy, Mad Hatter-themed music video -- with the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart in 1985. Petty joined Bob Dylan on tour the next year, which also included dates with the Grateful Dead.

He joined fellow music legends Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison in 1988 to form The Traveling Wilburys. They released two studio albums.

It was a rich career for Petty, who was born in Gainesville, Florida and became hooked on rock and roll when -- at the age of 11 -- he met superstar Elvis Presley on a movie set.

Petty joined his first band, The Sundowners, in high school at the age of 14.

After getting into an argument with the band's drummer, Petty quit and moved on to join a group called The Epics, which included Tom Leadon, a brother of Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon.

"We realized Tom was the real musician of the band," their fellow band member Rick Rucker told the Orlando Sentinel in 2006.

The Epics later changed their name to Mudcrutch, and Petty traveled to Los Angeles in search of a record deal for the rock quintet.

Despite landing a deal, the group soon disbanded.

A new group that included Petty and two former Mudcrutch members formed in 1975, eventually becoming known as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

After pioneering the heartland rock sound, Petty went solo in 1989 before regrouping with the Heartbreakers three years later.

He also found fame as an actor. His flair for drama was on display in his music videos for songs like "Mary Jane's Last Dance."

Petty starred with Kevin Costner in the 1997 film, "The Postman." He also had a recurring role as the voice of Elroy "Lucky" Kleinschmidt in the animated comedy series, "King of the Hill."

A 2015 biography on Petty documented a dark turn for the singer and his struggle with heroin addiction in 1997, following the collapse of his 20-year marriage and a failed album.

"Tried to go cold turkey, and that wouldn't work," Petty said in the book. "It's an ugly f***ing thing."

Petty told CNN in a 2007 interview that he loved music as much as it loved him.

"Music, as far as I have seen in the world so far, is the only real magic that I know," he said. "There is something really honest and clean and pure and it touches you in your heart." http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/entertainment/tom-petty-obit/index.html

( ( ( ( https://www.instagram.com/dadlivesmatteronelove ) ) ) )

http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/03/media/tom-petty-death-media/index.html

ASK WHY MILLENNIALS ARE AVOIDING SMALL-TOWN AMERICA

Small towns are small for a reason, the people don't want growth.

Having people coming in from bigger towns driving up the cost
for the low paid residents opening places that have bigger city cost
hitting a wall of the consumer based pricing of the low pay in town.
Or just have the locals just not go to those places because they cost
too much! So they are for the rich only, limiting any growth as it
stagnates with slow sales as there are only so many rich in town
they can't go everywhere. Places will close!

Like the Denny's in my town. Their prices where too high
for the poor to go there. Made less sales to do better so it
stagnated with low everything. Wages where too low you
get what you pay for so slow it was! Even if they consumer based
priced their stuff they still would of stagnated to death.
Wages are too low. The wages sets the market...
Like the saying "You can make it but they can't afford it!"

So why would anyone think about going to a small town with less resources
more people walking with no cars, or drive cars with no bumpers or
noting if they can't afford to fix their car do they have breaks in their car
being the cost with many living on 20 percent of their income.
Heat soaked because they had no AC on all summer they can't afford it.
Unsafe indeed!

And really hearing this a lot someone from a small town in Oklahoma
is "trapped in Tulsa!" The normality would be to just drive back!
Small towns live a third world lifestyle can't even buy a non food item.
All is a issue of low pay, higher pay would support growth as the people
could afford to fix their car or get one not broke people walking past the
businesses desperate for sales, as seen by the desperate TV ads!

Why would a Millennial move to a small town that stagnates
with low pay and the issue of small towns are small for a reason, 
they don't like growth! "Bright lights, big city" or " Dark ages small town" 
Knowledge or ignorance, it's about point A vs point B it is or it isn't.

~~~~~WHY MILLENNIALS ARE AVOIDING SMALL-TOWN AMERICA
“Most of the young people that go to college go away, and then they don’t come back,” observes Lee Bianchi, a retired engineer who lived in Clinton, Iowa (pop. 26,647), from 1961 to 2008.

That’s long been the storyline in small-town America, which has for decades bled citizens — especially young ones — to the more glamorous metropolis. One might have thought technology would stanch the flow, at least among millennials: With Wi-Fi and telecommuting, young people could theoretically pass on overpriced real estate and ugly commutes and opt, instead, for a spacious house with a big yard and a broadband connection.

But it turns out the millennial generation is only accelerating the demographic shift. In fact, this may be the most “bright lights, big city” generation in history. While the number of millennials is ticking slightly upward in small towns and rural areas, it’s nothing compared with the growth of their numbers in suburbs and cities. “At this point, the prognosis does not look good for much of small town America,” writes William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

The kids aren’t just flocking to the city proper, either, but to the metropolis writ large, including the fancier suburbs. The top destination for millennials is the D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia, where their ranks grew by a staggering 82 percent between 2007 and 2013. Arlington’s median home sale price is $557,250, and in just 10 of the 290 Arlington apartments listed on Zillow could you live alone for less than $1,200 a month; a couple of them might even give you more than 600 square feet to knock around in.

An enterprising millennial with a flexible employer might hop across the Chesapeake Bay to the historic district of Cambridge, Maryland (pop. 12,690), with a porch overlooking the Choptank River. With a thriving downtown and arts district, Cambridge was No. 10 on Livability’s list of Best Small Towns in 2013. Homes go for $164,154 , and a monthly $1,200 rental will get you a detached house or a 1,600-square-foot townhouse.

But affordable real estate and waterfront views don’t have millennials biting. They “continue a multigenerational pattern of young adults preferring more expensive urban areas over lower-cost rural ones because the lifestyles and opportunities in such places make the extra burden of cost worth it,” says Robert Lang, professor of urban growth and population dynamics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Which is to say: Getting to a big city — or at least near one — still has the smell of success. “We don’t all hail from small Midwestern towns, but most came from places where they felt limited — small town Maine, suburban west Texas, California’s Central Valley and the Inland Empire,” wrote 20-something Brittany Shoot of her friends and neighbors in the San Francisco Bay Area. “It’s easy to find people who will sneeringly complain about how trapped they felt as teenagers.”

Small towns will have to hustle to recruit and retain millennials, experts say. The American Planning Association urges local planners to mimic the appeal of city centers by creating “density.” That means keeping the walkable neighborhoods and traditional town centers that millennials say is key to making a community a desirable place to live. Smart-growth advocate James A. Bacon sees opportunities to fight off “brain drain” and attract urban “escapees” who start small businesses, but he worries that towns aren’t taking advantage. “Unfortunately, to date, local economic developers have stuck with the industrial-recruitment strategy that bears less and less fruit,” Bacon writes.

But without economic opportunity — that is, good jobs — the most charming downtown in the world can’t attract permanent residents. Small towns may have to reinvent themselves, according to experts like Frey of the Brookings Institution.

But all is not lost. The numbers that point toward the decline of small towns also show a positive narrative for millennials, and perhaps a sunnier economic outlook than you’d expect. Notwithstanding student-loan debt and the stereotype of living in their parents’ basements, a RealtyTrac analysis released in September showed that this generation is moving where the rents and mortgages are high. Arlington is just the tip of of it.

From 2007 to 2013, the 10 counties that gained the most millennial residents had a median home price of $406,800. And the average population of those counties was 587,522 — a far cry from small-town living. Baby boomers filled out the other side of the equation by flocking to counties with average populations of 261,232 and a median home price of $144,875.

So the best answer as to why millennials are moving away from smaller towns may be simple: because they can. And small towns will have to rev up their sales pitch to convince young adults that they can live not just cheaply but also well in the places that older generations called home.
http://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/why-millennials-are-avoiding-small-town-america/34058

Puerto Ricans fire back at Trump

Again I have to note about Trump and types being a isolationist like
out in the woods they don't care as long as they stay out of their own yard.
Like the sign on their driveway "Keep Out!" Xenophobia at it's best!

I see this as more proof Trump is catering to the small town people.
I am waiting for a huge sign at the White House "Keep Out!"
Why is that what do you have to hide?

It's not only Trump it is the norm for most Republicans.
Even small towns don't care about foreign matters.
Small towns are small for a reason, they don't like growth!
And along with foreign matters... Foreign... Hello! Xenophobia!

~~~~~Puerto Ricans fire back at Trump for critical tweets
Puerto Ricans reacted harshly on Saturday to President's Trump's tweets that leaders of the hurricane-ravaged Caribbean island "want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort."

Several Puerto Ricans contacted by CNN stood up for San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, who apparently provoked the Trump tweet with a call for more aid, and many said the Puerto Rican community at home and abroad is already working together.
"I'm amazed that he has the gall to say Puerto Ricans expect everything to be done for them," said Abner Breban of Atlanta, who started a Facebook group to raise money for relief. "They are working exhaustively to lift themselves up. We are citizens. We pay taxes. We serve in the military."
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/30/us/puerto-rico-responds-to-trump-tweets/index.html

Electricity Has Intelligence

Electricity, St Elmo's fire, does have Intelligence. As in the path of least resistance. 
Why? You would think electricity would just be random and take 

the path of most resistance and die. 

What makes it take the least resistance? Who chooses what is least and not?

Intelligence! This is something for the quantum physics stoners to talk about!