I’ve only vaguely seen headlines. What started the panic and to what are these people even referring? I live in NJ and I’ve only heard about this on the national stage. Who started this and does anyone have any thoughts on how this spread?

My friend and I often debate topics like neuroplasticity, quantum physics, and manifestation. I lean more toward science, while she’s more spiritual, but I enjoy these conversations because they broaden my perspective. For example, I see value in things like CBT for building habits and John Sarno’s work on mind-body connection, but I’m still pretty skeptical about claims that quantum physics or neuroscience back manifestation.

When I asked her for some science-based research, she mentioned: James R. Doty, a Stanford neuroscientist and bestselling author. Dr. Jessica Connor, who has a PhD in metaphysics from the non-accredited University of Sedona (?).

While I haven’t done any research yet on either of them, I did tell her right off the bat that I don’t think they’re equally credible.. Stanford neuroscience and metaphysics from a non-accredited school aren’t the same to me, which upset her.

Am I being too skeptical or is it fair to weigh these credentials differently?

Almost broke acknowledges the reality of being a tradwife isn’t like the image being sold.

I’ll acknowledge that many things that are advertised or pushed may not be like the reality of the experience. Unlike a vacation or a festival, which a person may not enjoy, there’s not much loss other than the one-time monetary cost. With tradwife, it’s a lifestyle being sold.

While many trends come and go, this one cannot be divorced from the image aligning to right-wing and far-right propaganda that existed. Yes Chad and the woman (I don’t remember the specific names, but the meme cartoons are common) tied to tradlife before breaking into the mainstream and being used in non-sketchy memes.

Guys im genuinely scared about nuclear war and the drone situation. I don't know what to do. Im really scared it will happen. Can you guys give me some clarity.

While there may be unique manifestations of life, evolution itself is a necessity for a life form to exist.

Evolved creatures don't appear out of nowhere. Where there's evolution, theirs competition.

So you can't have large life like humans without also having microbes that evolve. The small life is required to get to the big life. Virus's, bacteria, etc. So a highly complex & evolved organism like ourselves would require an immune system. We can be certain that complex alien life also has one. You don't win at evolution by being vulnerable to microbes and disease.

Everything on our planet shares a significant amount of DNA with each other. Our DNA would be entirely different and dramatically more foreign compared to Alien DNA.

There's no reasonable reason that they would visit here. Even if they could circumvent quick death via allergies, There are 20 sextillion planets. If only .0001% of them are can support life, that's still a crap ton of planets to visit. Nothing about earth seems like it'd be a prime destination to visit. Maybe it'd be smart to avoid adding on top of potential dangers by staying away from massive species that are obsessed with violence and killing each other.

There's no reason to think that humanity and earth are special compared to the countless planets that have life. If anything, humanity just makes it far more dangerous.

Aliens definitely exist, some which are likely far more advanced than us. But I'm pretty sure that if there was an intergalactic travel advisory, earth would be a planet to avoid. Dealing with alien wildlife would be near certain death, dealing with alien wildlife that has guns and nukes is even worse.

Hi Folks. The current Events about drones and UAPs Had me feel uneasy. Does anybody know of a subreddit Like this one Here but specific for UAP phenomena? I have Seen some footage that I could Not easily explain myself and would Like to interact with more knowledgable people what might be Seen there.

Edit: Well this was a fucking disaster. Many know-it-alls came into the thread and basically disregarded the base graph (without my scribblings) as "fake" just because I drew on it. AND they got upvoted, because people don't want to accept the premise of what I, and the base graph, was saying. For a "skeptic" sub that's supposed to be somewhat rational and understand the scientific process, many here are irrational as all hell. Deal.

Hi, I'm a fairly informed individual who's read hundreds and hundreds of reports and articles about climate change for the past 10 years. I consider myself fairly unbiased, and I sincerely believe my opinion is in line with the scientists who have been most accurate so far (I follow them all). Here's my take on the latest from climate change science today, in December 2024.

https://i.imgur.com/RkCW9fe.jpeg

First of all, have a good look at the graph and ignore the 2 black lines I've drawn on it. Try to understand what it's about. Spend a good minute looking at the various lines and explanations.

Ok, good?

Basically, the circled data is "monthly average global temperatures", so you know, how hot the earth was that month. If you draw a line through it (a "mean"), you get the IPCC "likely estimate". That's the orange line drawn through all of the circled data.

Now, in early 2023, we had a global catastrophe happen (bet you heard about this one...). We had an absolutely MASSIVE increase in temperatures, literally rocketing the entire human race into what temperatures that were believed to get here around 2036-2040 (!!).

The likely reason for this increase? A lack of low flying clouds which happened to coincide with cleaner shipping fuel regulations, in all the world's ocean born ships. It (likely) turns out that sulfur is just extremely good at producing low flying clouds, which cool the planet. Oh, and the effect is called "the Albedo effect". If you've ever worn a black T-shirt in the sun and noticed it's a lot warmer than a white T-shirt, there you go. Darker stuff just absorbs more sun energy.

Here's the fun part! I speculate that the new temperature increase, seen as a separate cluster of circle data points in 2023-2024 (where the bent black line starts), is SO high that it breaks the traditional algorithm used for "mean curves". This means that beyond 2023, the orange mean curve is simply broken. It tries to compensate, but you can tell it's just not working.

So I simply broke the mean line in two and drew my own. I matched the inclination and curve, sliiightly increasing the curve to match a speculative 2035-2040 curve, but even if I didn't do this, 2C of warming would be just years away, instead of decades.

Long story short, we'll very likely have catastrophic planetary warming in the early 2030's. Exactly what 2C of warming looks like is unknown, but it's nothing good. Likely we'll have weather extremes the likes no human has ever seen, and destroyed crops and infrastructure bogging down the global economy. Wars will likely break out too.

Just to give you an idea of what 2C, 3C and 4C of warming means, 3C is in my opinion the end of civilization. Billions dead. World wars raging. 4C is so hot that the last time we had these temperatures, there were tropical swamps on the north pole, where crocodiles and palm trees existed. So... yeah. Game over.

Science is clearly behind on the timescales on what's happening, and there are already MANY extremely worrying articles in (credible) mainstream media, citing top scientists about how this new temperature boost is all kinds of FUBAR, breaking models in half. But, many scientists already agree on 3C of warming being "locked in".

They say it'll happen by (hahaha) the year 2100, but doing juuust a bit of digging like I did here, and you can see that people under 40 won't live to see a hospitable planet before they retire at around 65.

Anyway, there you have it. Humanity is very likely doomed, maybe not to extinction, but definitely to some sort of near future collapse. If you want to read more, maybe on the off chance hope that I'm wrong, visit r/environment, r/climatechange and read up for a couple of weeks. It's dark, and mainstream media has basically dropped the climate topic like Microsoft dropped Xbox 1 support when the 360 released.

I dont mind knowing more about this "drone" phenomena.. but am I the only one being swarmed by post from a bunch of different subreddits about UFOs? Half of my home page is about damn drones/UFOs, is it , propaganda?, psyops? China? or what?, can someone explain why all of a sudden its all I see and I really dont want to subscribe to them but neither block them...

• Effectiveness of Meditation Techniques in Treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating condition worldwide. The limited effectiveness of current psychological and pharmacological treatments has motivated studies on meditation techniques. This study is a comprehensive, multiple-treatments meta-analysis comparing the effectiveness of different categories of meditation in treating PTSD.

Methods and Materials: We followed Prisma guidelines in our published protocol to search major databases and to conduct a meta-analysis of the studies.

Results: We located 61 studies with 3440 subjects and divided them logically into four treatment groups: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR, 13 studies); Mindfulness-Based Other techniques (MBO, 16 studies), Transcendental Meditation (TM, 18 studies), and Other Meditations that were neither mindfulness nor TM (OM, 14 studies). Trauma populations included war veterans, war refugees, earthquake and tsunami victims, female survivors of interpersonal violence, clinical nurses, male and female prison inmates, and traumatized students. Of those offered, 86% were willing to try meditation. The baseline characteristics of subjects were similar across meditation categories: mean age = 52.2 years, range 29–75; sample size = 55.4, range 5–249; % males = 65.1%, range 0–100; and maximum study duration = 13.2 weeks, range 1–48. There were no significant differences between treatment categories on strength of research design nor evidence of publication bias. The pooled mean effect sizes in Hedges’s g for the four categories were MBSR = −0.52, MBO = −0.66, OM = −0.63, and TM = −1.13. There were no appreciable differences in the study characteristics of research conducted on different meditations in terms of the types of study populations included, outcome measures, control conditions, gender, or length of time between the intervention and assessment of PTSD. TM’s effect was significantly larger than for each of the other categories, which did not differ from each other. No study reported serious side effects.

Conclusions: All categories of meditation studied were helpful in mitigating symptoms of PTSD. TM produced clinically significant reductions in PTSD in all trauma groups. We recommend a multisite Phase 3 clinical trial to test TM’s efficacy compared with standard treatment.

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Note that the review finds that Transcendental Meditation has the largest effect size and that all reviewers are associated with TM. The lead author is the retired founding head of the Psychology Department at the Maharishi University of Management (and a personal friend).

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That said, studies on the effect of medtiation on PTSD do not require participation of believers in conducting the research, so any subsequent large-scale studies that might emerge from this paper can be conducted in various ways to get around the usual issues with believers performing research.

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Obviously, the best way is to simply not have any researcher-advocates of the practice or practices being studied, but an alternate method which should be equally acceptable is what was used in this study published 35 years ago:

• Transcendental Meditation, Mindfulness, and Longevity: An Experimental Study With the Elderly

In THAT study, each meditation practice had at least one researcher-advocate, and the study design was unanimously agreed upon by all researchers. Assignment to a practice or no-treatment control was random, and subjects were not told that other practices existed. All practices were presented in a way to normalize expectations (all meditation teachers were dressed professionally, and genuine research, presented in a professional way, was used to provide justification for learning the practice for health benefits). Data collection was done by Harvard University graduates who not only were blind to which meditation practice was done by which subject, but were actually not told what the study was about, so they weren't aware of what was being studied, period. In order to avoid any possible "no-cebo effect," only the researcher-advocate for a given meditation practice was allowed to interact with the meditation teachers that were teaching each practice.

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A similar design could be used for any head-to-head study of the various meditation practices examined in the review: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR); Mindfulness-Based Other techniques (MBO), Transcendental Meditation (TM), and Other Meditations that were neither mindfulness nor TM (OM).

Obviously, no researcher should be involved in teaching the practice that they are the advocate for (a flaw, IMHO, of many studies on MBSR, and possibly some studies on TM, though the larger the TM study, the more likely that the David Lynch Foundation has provided the teachers, rather than requiring the researcher to wear both researcher and TM teacher hats).

.

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A larger scale, multisite study on TM and PTSD has been ongoing for some time, funded by the David Lynch Foundation, but the only meditation arm is TM. The active control is Present Centered Therapy (PCT).

My friends in the community of researchers on TM have told me that they tried for quite a while to convince MBSR researchers to participate, but none were interested.

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Edit: Link to ongoing study details... ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT05645042; title: Transcendental Meditation in Veterans and First Responders With PTSD

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Study locations:

• La Jolla, California, United States, 92093

University of California San Diego

• Los Angeles, California, United States, 90033

University of Southern California

• Palo Alto, California, United States, 94305

Stanford University

• Great Neck, New York, United States, 11021

Northwell Health

• New York, New York, United States, 10032

New York State Psychiatric Institute

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The study is being paid for by the David Lynch Foundation. I'm told that the TM organization and the DLF have called in all their "markers" when organizing this study. The intent is to convince governments worldwide to do their own research, and upon confirmation of findings that "TM is best for PTSD," to have their own employees trained as TM teachers so that all relevant victims of PTSD, such as first responders, veterans, hospital staff, etc. can learn TM from theri governments rather than the TM organization or the David Lynch Foundation.

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Similar research projects are being conducted in other countries as well with the same long-term intent, such as Ukraine.

https://youtu.be/7s_R1dlprxg?si=JagPwYEopiG-PBff

Lots of things seem off:

• she starts recording an unrelated video seconds before the attack
• doesn’t hear engine until pirates are already boarding the ship
• his explanation sounds like it would’ve taken some time to play out and you would’ve heard a lot of noise (the hand-to-hand combat, her being beaten with a club, two men going overboard) but you hear none of that in the video and it seems impossibly short for all of that to happen
• lack of evidence, none of them dropped anything on the boat? No injuries to show? No other video recording?
• popular sailing YouTuber, the incentive to fake it is there

To be fair, there’s a couple points that makes me think it’s real:

• piracy of course happens and it’s absolutely possible that an attack like this could happen
• she sounds genuinely startled in the video

Perhaps it was a real encounter but the hand to hand combat was played up for entertainment? What do you think?