• ‘IMPOSTER SYNDROME’ IS A COMMONLY-HELD SYNDROME OF HIGH-ACHIEVING PEOPLE, a sense of being secretly unworthy of their position, with feelings of inadequacy and chronic self-doubt. It affects mostly high-achievers who fixate on their flaws (versus strengths), fail to achieve their own setting of high goals, and/or refrain from asking or accepting help, fearful of appearing weak or incompetent. Latest research studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that, to the contrary, others have a positive perception – that “people who have workplace Imposter thoughts become more ‘other-oriented’ and are evaluated as being more interpersonally effective, a result of their persistence and mechanisms to compensate for perceived shortcomings by being good team players with strong social skills and cooperation, then recognized as productive and evaluated as higher performers.” [MIT NEWS – 4/15/22]
  • NEWEST PERSPECTIVE ON ‘NEAR-DEATH’ EXPERIENCES comes from scientists at NYU School of Medicine, in research representing several disciplines including psychiatry/ neurosciences/ social sciences/ critical care/ humanities, who conclude that ‘Life Flashing Before Their Eyes’ is NOT hallucination, illusion, or response to psychedelic drugs and, typically, multiple different ‘events’ are interacting: (1) Heightened consciousness & recognition of dying; (2) Separation of mind from body; (3) ‘Travel’ away toward a place that feels like ‘home’; (4) A critical, meaningful, purposeful analysis of past actions; (5) Returning back to live. “The experience usually triggers a positive and long-term psychological transformation, except for people who had negative and distressing experience while near death.” [LBN EXAMINER – 4/17/22]
  • CALIFORNIA’S ‘REPARATIONS TASK FORCE’ voted in March (first in the nation) to recommend compensating “all direct descendants of slaves and free Black residents who migrated to the U.S. in the 1800’s… intentionally leaving out those who came during the 20th and 21st centuries, in order to best survive a legal challenge in a conservative Supreme Court… The taskforce has not yet decided how residents would prove eligibility and what kind of reparations they would receive (of estimates around $672 billion), but examples stated by UCLA’s Director for Race and Equity include cancellation of all Black home mortgages, college debt, current auto payments, future tax payments, along with release of all non-violent-offense prisoners.” [THE GUARDIAN – 3/30/22]
  • “DOES CRYPTO REPRESENT A LIBERTARIAN DREAM OR A SOCIALIST UTOPIA? Bitcoin’s potential role as a currency free from verification by centralized 3rd parties and oversight by governments, with Artificial Intelligence machines making centralized ‘top down’ decisions, appeals to conservatives. Reality is that crypto actually requires many individuals & computers making decisions from the bottom up, architecture commonly called web3… Where modern tech firms are incentivized to build mammoth platforms that show users as many ads as they will bear, developers and users of a web3 application can earn rewards just for creating and interacting with the platform while the community owns the means of production, distribution & exchange… The winners that flourish may be those where privacy is retained, or become the social democratic metaverses with automatic wealth taxes and virtual, paternalistic officials.”  [ECONOMIST – 4/16/22]
  • THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:

If you believe in the saying ‘What goes around comes around,” click 2-minute 12 LAWS OF KARMA: https://biggeekdad.com/2016/03/12-laws-karma/

A current Kickstarter campaign claims to have invented and manufactured a “fully functional Invisibility Shield,” in sizes up to 3’ high and 2’ wide, which reflect objects to the left & right instead of what a viewer is looking at. “The effect works best when used in an area with uniform foliage like sand, sky or asphalt,” and is said intended to be priced below $400 per Shield.