The Difference between a Leader and a Master

J.G. Vibes
Activist Post

What is the difference between a leader and master? These are two different terms which imply two different types of relationships that exist between human beings. The key element that separates these two types of people is the element of force; masters will use force and intimidation on others so their commands will be obeyed, while leaders will naturally gain admiration from their peers for contributions that they have made to the community. Leaders have no interest in obedience and have no time to bark out orders; they are too busy hacking through the vines in the jungle, clearing a path for the rest of us to follow.

Leaders are chosen voluntarily by people who are inspired by their acts, while masters are imposed on many different people who have no choice in the matter and would most likely prefer to be left alone if they were given the opportunity. Leaders may be exceptional in many ways but they are still on equal ground with their peers, while masters always require the upper hand and will typically have privileges that they deny to those around them.

There are some who are deceived into admiring their masters, and they end up mistaking these masters for leaders, but that doesn’t change the nature of the relationship between these two people. The fact that a slave may trust and admire his master does not magically turn that “master” into a “leader”. If the interactions between these two parties are involuntary and involve force, then you can be assured that you are dealing with a master/slave relationship, not a leader/learner relationship.

Likewise having a choice between various masters does not change any of them into a leader, because the nature of the interactions that they will have with others once they are in power will still be those of a master, not a leader. Being the best or most popular master does not make you a leader, leading peacefully and by example is what makes you a leader.

True leaders set a positive example for others to follow by partaking in voluntary interactions with their peers and showing the community how to live more meaningful and peaceful lives. These people may be artists, philosophers, inventors, builders, entrepreneurs or skilled workers that are involved in win-win scenarios with their fellow human beings. In other words, people who create some sort of value for the community, even if that value is just a good imagination or personality. With that being the case, if someone spends their time barking out orders, committing acts of violence and meddling in the lives of their peers, does it make any sense at all for us to call that person a “leader”?

The majority of the people living on this earth are unknowingly involved in a forced association with someone who acts as their master, yet ironically so many of these people habitually refer to their masters as “leaders”. While this may be an innocent and unintentional misunderstanding, it is important for us to consider that people who demand obedience from others may not deserve to have the title of “leader”.

Any head of state or political ruler that has ever walked this earth falls into the “master” category based on the value of the interactions that they had with other people. However, these masters have been incorrectly labeled as “leaders” in the history books and the media that surrounds us all. This is no coincidence considering that our masters keep a stranglehold on public perception by controlling the education system and media broadcasters, thus allowing them to paint themselves as virtuous and admirable people.

Talking about politics in terms of slaves and masters may make some people feel uncomfortable due to the dark history of racial slavery in the Western world. However, there are varying degrees of slavery, the conditions that we saw in colonial America just happen to be some of the worst in recent memory but that doesn’t mean that those conditions must be repeated exactly for a situation to be considered slavery. In reality any relationship where someone is beholden to another person who is allowed to use force against them can be described as a master/slave relationship. Since this relationship has been responsible for such unbelievable horrors in our history it is important that we do not shy away from understanding it, as unpleasant as it may be.

J.G. Vibes is an author, and artist — with an established record label. In addition to featuring a wide variety of activist information, his company Good Vibes Promotions hosts electronic dance music events. You can keep up with him and his forthcoming book Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance, at his website. AOTMR will be released in March 2012, thanks to Leilah Publications.

Your brain on ‘shrooms: fMRI elucidates neural correlates of psilocybin psychedelic state

February 29, 2012 by Stuart Mason Dambrot in Neuroscience

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Decreased cerebral blood flow (CBF) after psilocybin imaged by fMRI. Regions where there was significantly decreased CBF after psilocybin versus after placebo are shown in blue. No CBF increases in any region were observed. Image Copyright © PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.1119598109

(Medical Xpress) — Psychedelic substances have long been used for healing, ceremonial, or mind-altering subjective experiences due to compounds that, when ingested or inhaled, generate hallucinations, perceptual distortions, or altered states of awareness. Of these, the psychedelic substance psilocybin, the prodrug (a precursor of a drug that must in vivo chemical conversion by metabolic processes before becoming an active pharmacological agent) of psilocin (4-hydroxy-dimethyltryptamine) and the key hallucinogen found in so-called magic mushrooms, is widely used not only in healing ceremonies, but, more recently, in psychotherapy as well – but little has been known about its specific activity in the brain.

Recently, however, scientists in the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit at Imperial College London used complementary blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) functional MRI, or fMRI, in conjunction with a technique for imaging the transition from normal waking consciousness to the psychedelic state. The study found decreased blood flow and BOLD in the thalamus, anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, and medial prefrontal cortex. The researchers concluded that the surprising results strongly suggest that the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain’s key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition.

Lead researcher Dr. Robin L. Carhart-Harris, working in the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit created by Prof. David J. Nutt, recounts the team’s main challenges in establishing an fMRI methodology that would be specific enough to highly correlate neurophysiological activity with the neuronal presence or absence of psilocybin. “There were a number of considerations,” Carhart-Harris tells Medical Xpress. “In terms of experimental design, we had to determine the precise dose and delivery protocol that would be appropriate for obtaining clear fMRI results. “For example,” he explains, “we had to consider temporal dynamics: If the drug was administered orally, the protracted period of time between ingestion, metabolism, and crossing of the blood-brain barrier would fall outside of the short scanning window needed to capture induced brain activity.” They therefore had to rely on intravenous administration.

“Another issue,” Carhart-Harris adds, “was methodological – specifically, isolating any placebo effect derived from changes not due to the injection itself, such as anticipatory anxiety.” The team also had to measure physiological parameters, including breathing and heart rate, in order to use these signals as weighting factors, correlate with baseline levels and remove them as a possible explanation of any observed brain changes.

To address these challenges, Carhart-Harris points to the pilot work the team performed in order to determine the optimal dose. “The original dose was too low in our mock scanner environment, in which subjects were asked to rate regular subjective or perceptual experiences< he recalls. “However, that simply wouldn’t work in a scanning environment, since their very response would interfere with fMRI measurement.”

Regarding next steps in their research, Carhart-Harris sees obtaining a grant to study psilocybin as a treatment for depression – scheduled to begin at the end of 2012 – as key. “Psilocybin decreases brain activity in regions such as the medial prefrontal cortex,” he explains, “that are overactive in depression.” The team may also perform the same investigations with alternative psychedelic compounds, such as MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) – a synthetic, psychoactive drug, commonly known as Ecstasy, that is chemically similar to the stimulant methamphetamine.

Carhart-Harris is also interested in the effects of psilocybin on memory. “When subjects are in the scanner,” he illustrates, “and are shown personal memory cues, then asked to close their eyes and remember the emotions at the time of the original event, the recalled emotions are more vivid – indicating elevated brain activation – when under the effects of psilocybin.” Moreover, Carhart-Harris notes that when administered psilocybin when undergoing psychotherapy, there is an increased incidence of sudden personal insights. He speculates that this suggests that psilocybin-induced visual changes indicate that the visual pathways are more sensitive to signals from the hippocampus, which is involved in memory, when under psilocybin.

In addition to depression, Carhart-Harris observes, there are other research and applications that might benefit from the team’s findings. “Those suffering from cluster headaches,” he notes, “report excruciating pain that is difficult to treat, sometimes describing it as worse than the pain childbirth. During such headaches, they show an increase in hypothalamic activity to date has only been ameliorated by deep brain stimulation. However,” he concludes, “when administered psilocybin, they display a decrease in hypothalamic activity and a corresponding suspension of cluster headaches.”

More information: Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin, Published online before print January 23, 2012, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1119598109, PNAS February 7, 2012 vol. 109 no. 6 2138-2143.

Related information:

Implications for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study with psilocybin, Published online ahead of print January 26, 2012, doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.111.103309.

Copyright 2012 PhysOrg.com.
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or part without the express written permission of PhysOrg.com.

CIA Admits Using News To Manipulate the USA (1975 video)

By VC | March 6th, 2012 | Category: Latest News | 38 comments

This old clip shows CIA officials admitting the agency’s infiltration of mainstream media in order to influence public opinion and to manipulate the thoughts and values of Americans.

Did things change since 1975? Nope. Actually, things are much worse as the merger of media companies into a very small number of mega-conglomerates made the “filtering” of information even easier. The input of governmental sources such as the CIA and the Pentagon into news stories is now a fully integrated process and has even spread into entertainment, using TV shows and movies.

(NaturalNews) Most people who smoke at least a pack of cigarettes per day have tried to quit at some point in their smoking “career,” but unfortunately returned to smoking, mainly because quitting involves combining several strategies and behavioral modifications, it’s not just about the nicotine. In fact, smokers create several habits, rituals, and behaviors that they take for granted and fail to replace when trying to quit. That is why quitting cold turkey without help sends 95% of ex-smokers back to cigarettes within 6 months.

Most quitting methods, like the pills, the patch, and nicotine gum address only nicotine, but behavior modification is the only way to ensure permanent cessation.

(1) Breathing pattern: Smokers take between 9 and 14 drags off one cigarette. If you smoke a pack a day (about 20 cigarettes), that means you are inhaling, holding, and exhaling over 200 times a day in a particular way (two packs a day = 400). Although the smoke contains over 700 toxins, the breathing pattern is relaxing and meditative. When smokers quit, they fail to replace this ritual, which leads to stress and builds anxiety, especially when they feel the urge to smoke. Try pretending you have a cigarette and breathe the same way as often as you smoke. This also aids in digestion.

(2) Change of environment: At least 90% of smokers change their environment every time they have a cigarette. That means leaving an office, restaurant, factory, home or party to step outside. This change of scenery is an escape from the hustle and bustle, or the stress of work. Add to the fresh air a glance at the sun or stars, and you’ve built in some stress relief. Take “fake smoke breaks” after quitting.

(3) Replace nicotine with natural stress relievers and motivators: Hundreds of chemicals in cigarettes disrupt the central nervous system, creating and heightening anxiety, nervousness, doubt and frustration. Nicotine provides just enough kick to make smokers feel normal for 20 to 30 minutes. Ex-smokers must replace and replenish the body’s capacity to produce normal hormones that defeat anxiety and motivate them into action (http://addictions.about.com/od/overcomingaddiction/f/vitamin_B.htm).
Specific natural foods, vitamins and supplements boost dopamine and serotonin production, and balance the central nervous system. Vitamin B complex, mucuna, and cabbage are great examples(http://www.serotune.com).

(4) Hand to mouth habit: Multiply a dozen drags of a cigarette by a pack a day, and that’s about 250 hand- to-mouth motions a day, a ritualized behavior that must be replaced by something productive and mood enhancing. Eating raw mixed nuts, sipping a healthy drink, nibbling on dark organic chocolate or chewing licorice replaces cravings and converts a bad habit into a productive one.

(5) Shift your acid heavy system to alkaline: Most smokers have given up on nutrition and exercise. Common food for smokers includes meat, dairy, processed foods, alcohol, sugar, salt, and possibly artificial sweeteners. In order to defeat stress, the body must be more alkaline than acid, which means consuming mostly fresh vegetables, fruit, and spring water. This balances the system and detoxifies it, driving away the urge to smoke(http://www.findaspring.com/).

After breaking the nicotine addiction in 3 to 4 days, a new non-smoker must face the facts that there are at least 5 major ritualistic behaviors they’ve created and fostered that must be replaced somehow with productive ones. Without addressing behavior modification, attempting any smoking cessation program is like running a marathon with a broken foot.

14AndOut is a comprehensive, 60 minute video andnutritional guide that fully addresses behavior modification so smokers can adapt and adopt, without substituting one bad habit with another. Rather than taking prescription chemicals or more nicotine, 14AndOut uses natural methodology that gives smokers the best chance of quitting cigarettes for life (http://premium.naturalnews.tv/14AndOut__WS.htm).

Sources for this article include:

(1) http://addictions.about.com/od/overcomingaddiction/f/vitamin_B.htm

(2) http://www.puritan.com

(3) http://www.findaspring.com/

(4) http://www.serotune.com

(5) http://quitsmoking.about.com/od/preparetoquit/a/mythsvsfacts.htm

(NaturalNews) The following is an article by Steve Watson, an in-house reporter for InfoWars (www.InfoWars.com). Steve covered the astonishing breaking news of an engineer who revealed a shockingly simple loophole that completely defeats the TSA’s “naked body scanners” and would allow anyone to smuggle guns, explosives, box cutters or practically any metallic objects directly onto airplanes.

Even more astonishingly, as this story reports, YouTube immediately censored the video of this engineer in order to prevent the world from seeing it. So now YouTube is covering up for the TSA which is running a total security hoax that can be easily defeated by someone with only a $5 sewing kit!

The original article appears at:
http://www.infowars.com/man-demonstrates-why-tsa-body-scanners-are-wo…

YouTube Restricts Video Of Engineer Proving How Useless TSA Scanners Are

by Steve Watson, InfoWars.com

Google/YouTube has placed restrictions on yet another video that exposes the fraudulent claims of the TSA and highlights how the federal agency’s security theatre is part of a wider social manipulation agenda.

Engineer Jon Corbett of the popular blog TSA Out of Our Pants! (http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/) posted a video yesterday that demonstrates how the TSA’s radiation firing body scanners can easily be bypassed.

The video shows Corbett carrying a metal case through the scanner, away from his body in his side pocket. Corbett explains that because metallic objects appear as black on the image the scanners produce, the machines do not pick up such objects if they are obscured by the background, which is also black.

Watch the video at:
http://tv.naturalnews.com/v.asp?v=91718591ABF48A76EB2423DA212DC115

Corbett has been rallying against the TSA for some time and has had several run ins with agents at airports. Corbett was also the first person in the country to sue the TSA for invasion of privacy. His case is still ongoing and is headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The scanners are now effectively worthless, as anyone can beat them with virtually no effort.” Corbett writes on his blog. “The TSA has been provided this video in advance of it being made public to give them an opportunity to turn off the scanners and revert to the metal detectors. I personally believe they now have no choice but to turn them off.” he adds.

Within hours of the video being uploaded, blogs and news sites, including Yahoo News and the Mail Online had begun to pick up an the video, saying it was sure to go viral.

Now, despite the fact that the video contains no nudity, violence, abuse or other explicit content, YouTube has placed it behind an age restriction wall, meaning anyone who wants to view it on YouTube has to login or sign up for an account and verify their age.

“This video is not intended to teach anyone how to commit criminal acts, nor is intended to help “the terrorists” — if I could figure this out, I’m sure they’ve long figured it out, and by exposing it to the public, we now have an opportunity to correct it.” Corbett writes on his blog.

This means that the video has been restricted for no reason other than the fact that it is critical of the TSA and the government.

Corbett also explains in the video that multiple experts have already pointed out that the scanners can be easily bypassed and are next to useless at detecting explosive material and even metallic objects, meaning that standard metal detectors are more effective than the costly and potentially health threatening radiation firing scanners that are being rolled out in greater numbers across the country.

The same type of censorship has previously been applied by YouTube to other videos that have been critical of the TSA.

Last month, Mike Adams of Natural News produced an animated video (http://www.naturalnews.com/034955_Judge_Napolitano_censorship_TSA_vid…) that highlighted how the TSA is using invasive enhanced pat downs, even on children, purely as a show of power and even a form of punishment for those opting out of the body scanners. Within hours the video had been restricted by YouTube.

New York Prostitution Ring Provided Minors For Wealthy Elitists

Clients included bankers, politicians, lawyers

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Yet another elitist pedophile ring has been exposed with the bust of 44-year-old mother of four Anna Gristina, charged with running a prostitution ring out of a New York apartment that relied on police protection to provide wealthy clients with minors for sexual encounters.

Gristina’s list of customers “included powerful politicians, top-law enforcement, influential lawyers, bankers, entertainment execs and Fortune 500 businessmen, as well as several ultra-wealthy European clients,” reports the New York Post.

Some of the sexual encounters included the involvement of children, according to Manhattan Assistant DA Charles Linehan.

For years we have documented the fact that global pedophile rings are operated primarily due to demand from rich elitists in positions of power. Cases in Portugal, Austria, France, Chile, Belgium, and Bosnia have all pointed to the involvement of prominent individuals in sex rings, sadomasochistic orgies and even murder.

In almost every case of human trafficking for child sex slavery, court proceedings get shut down or diverted when a clear connection to the elite arises.

In the mid 1990′s, convicted child rapist Marc Dutroux built a secret prison cell in his Charleroi basement where he kept abducted young girls hostage at the behest of what he called “a big crime ring,” which in the 2004 court case was thought by many to encompass some of Belgium’s top politicians, judges and policemen. The reason why it took so long to apprehend Dutroux was that he was being legally protected by these same individuals.

Material witnesses at the trial described “child sex parties involving judges, politicians, bankers and members of the royal family.” Victims that managed to survive (most were butchered snuff style after being raped) verified the claims.

Police actually visited Dutroux’s home and heard the cries of help from children concealed in his basement yet believed Dutroux’s explanation that the sounds were coming from kids playing in the street.

Dutroux was eventually convicted for his role in the pedophile ring but the involvement of the country’s elite was never properly investigated.

The more recent scandal involving Jerry Sandusky also led to rumors that Sandusky had “pimped out” boys to rich donors.

As we have documented, almost every major pedophile network that has come to public knowledge has included tentacles that stretch high into the upper echelons of the global power structure.

On June 29 1989, the Washington Times’ Paul M. Rodriguez and George Archibald reported on a Washington D.C. prostitution ring that had intimate connections with the White House all the way up to President George H.W. Bush. Male prostitutes had been given access to the White House and the article also cited evidence of “abduction and use of minors for sexual perversion.”

In July 1990, a Nebraska Grand Jury was convened to hear allegations that Lawrence “Larry” King, then manager of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union and a rising Republican Party star, along with Washington lobbyists, had set up a child prostitution ring in which minors were transported around the country and forced to have sex with King, other top officials, and according to victims who some allege were later harassed into recanting, then-Vice-President Bush.

The Grand Jury dismissed the case as a hoax but former Nebraska State Senator John DeCamp later investigated the claims and was horrified to learn that they were indeed legitimate.

The operators of such pedophile and prostitution rings are routinely silenced in one way or another to prevent their client list from ever becoming public.

Let’s hope that Anna Gristina doesn’t meet the same fate as DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who after threatening to expose her client list was found dead in an alleged “suicide,” despite the fact that Palfrey had complained of a contract being out on her life and had appeared on the Alex Jones Show just two months before to assert that she would never kill herself.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

What Makes a Robot Fish Attractive? Robot Fish Moves to the Head of the School

ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2012) — Probing the largely unexplored question of what characteristics make a leader among schooling fish, researchers have discovered that by mimicking nature, a robotic fish can transform into a leader of live ones.

Through a series of experiments, researchers from Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) aimed to increase understanding of collective animal behavior, including learning how robots might someday steer fish away from environmental disasters. Nature is a growing source of inspiration for engineers, and the researchers were intrigued to find that their biomimetic robotic fish could not only infiltrate and be accepted by the swimmers, but actually assume a leadership role.

In a paper published online in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Stefano Marras, at the time a postdoctoral fellow in mechanical engineering at NYU-Poly and currently a researcher at Italy’s Institute for the Marine and Coastal Environment-National Research Council, and Maurizio Porfiri, NYU-Poly associate professor of mechanical engineering, found conditions that induced golden shiners to follow in the wake of the biomimetic robot fish, taking advantage of the energy savings generated by the robot.

The researchers designed their bio-inspired robotic fish to mimic the tail propulsion of a swimming fish, and conducted experiments at varying tail beat frequencies and flow speeds. In nature, fish positioned at the front of a school beat their tails with greater frequency, creating a wake in which their followers gather. The followers display a notably slower frequency of tail movement, leading researchers to believe that the followers are enjoying a hydrodynamic advantage from the leaders’ efforts.

In an attempt to create a robotic leader, Marras and Porfiri placed their robot in a water tunnel with a golden shiner school. First, they allowed the robot to remain still, and unsurprisingly, the “dummy” fish attracted little attention. When the robot simulated the familiar tail movement of a leader fish, however, members of the school assumed the behavior patterns they exhibit in the wild, slowing their tails and following the robotic leader.

“These experiments may open up new channels for us to explore the possibilities for robotic interactions with live animals — an area that is largely untapped,” explained Porfiri. “By looking to nature to guide our design, and creating robots that tap into animals’ natural cues, we may be able to influence collective animal behavior to aid environmental conservation and disaster recovery efforts.”

The researchers posit that robotic leaders could help lead fish and other wildlife that behave collectively — including birds — away from toxic situations such as oil or chemical spills or human-made dangers such as dams. Other experimenters have found success in prompting wildlife to move using non-living attractants, but the researchers believe this is the first time that anyone has used biomimetics to such effect.

Marras and Porfiri conducted their experiments with support from the National Science Foundation.