dust

Well, having reread my OP after a couple of months, I have no major disagreements with myself (though my writing could use some polishing!). I'm still not quite sure how I feel about a couple of things, though. Assume the above interpretation is correct -- that the text is urging governance through quiet manipulation. 1. How is this applicable to personal cultivation? (assuming people have found ways to apply it) 2. In terms of governance, is this a "Taoist" way of doing things? i.e. Is manipulative rulership in line with our currently accepted Taoist ideas? (e.g. ziran/tzujan, wu wei) 3. Assuming we believe that there should be some form of control, is this the best way of ruling? What about democracy?

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Because raw milk is DANGEROUS!! Full of POISON!! It'll KILL YOU DEAD!! It's not like humans have been drinking it for thousands of years... or... wait... ______________________________ On a separate note, I disagree with modern dairy practices and therefore choose to buy my milk from a local, independent supplier. It is pasteurized, but the cows are not pumped full of hormones and, most importantly, the calves are not killed at birth just so the mother can be impregnated again as soon as possible to keep the milk flowing.

They are complex living things, and depending on the city they can be quite wonderful.... But, personally... I don't think any city is any more "high energy", or any more wonderful, than the wilderness. Beneath the surface it all operates on the same principles. We fool ourselves into thinking that modern civilization operates on the higher principles of compassion, sharing, reason... and that because city-dwellers appreciate art and practice yoga they are kinder and better than those living in the woods drawing circles in the dirt. But in actual fact, the major flourishing cities of the world could not exist in any way without the labour (exploitation?) of millions of rural people the world over. Food, clothes, technology...a majority of the stuff that the compassionate elite of NYC or LA or London depend upon to continue their lifestyle is grown or manufactured somewhere else. Fans of Apple point to their innovation and how they are supposedly trying to make people's lives better. I would point to the fact that they're about to be selling gold-plated watches produced in Asian factories using minerals mined from African land where people are routinely raped and forced into slavery. Ach...we all know this happens, and yet we all still buy computers and mobile phones...

Some people are able to actually think for themselves ...

Better education leads to longer life span, for sure. We know to wash our hands and not shit where we eat! But a lot of people live longer because they take a cocktail of prescription medication each day. I don't think that many people I've ever met who live in the city are actually all that physically fit and healthy. Do these things make people happier? I live my life joyfully free of social art events such as the ballet... Seems to me like your facts and experience here are based on USA country living. This is absolutely not applicable to every place on Earth. Having lived and sojourned in various places in China, I can say that some of my favourite, most genuinely warm and welcoming people, have been the "hillbillies" living out in the mountains of Sichuan, or near the beaches of Hainan, and a couple of other places. They're not educated to your standards, they don't live in fashionable apartments full of shiny appliances, they don't have a great amount of worldly experience, but in my opinion they're often better for it. In these places, where people have enough food to eat (and, though many live in poverty, by no means are all rural Chinese starving to death), they're doing alright. Large cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenyang, Taiyuan, Shenzhen... they very much suck the life out of many people. And cities like these are what we're going to be seeing more of, around the world. In part because of the expansion of modern "farming" methods, relatively few people are needed for farming anymore. Migrant labourers and immigrants flock to the cities to find work. Vast areas of land throughout China are covered in unused apartment buildings. Students from all over are sent to cities to study. These cities grow with no regard for human happiness or "worldliness". The upper class is comfy, the middle classes are OK (though all are subject to the same pollution as everyone else, and a lot of stress), and the poor live in squalor. There are situations all over the place where migrants and other poor live in tiny basement rooms underneath mid-priced apartment buildings. A friend of mine used to live in a tiny (~30m2) apartment with at least 3 other people. As far as oil dumping... well... nasty practices like that are pretty common all over China at the moment, and limited neither to cities nor the country...! That's weird to me. I have been afraid for my life a number of times in cities, but never in the country. I think this is an American thing. You guys get everything backwards

Not the answer you're looking for, but a lot of the time it depends on the dog(/animal), and the person. Some dogs have been abused and are afraid of everyone; some are protective; some can really tell "good" people from "bad" people; some just yap at anything that moves; etc. And some people are afraid of dogs, and most dogs can tell. I don't know how this would translate into yang and yin though.

No way... ...I really enjoyed that movie..

After the buzzard the other day I decided that I wanted to learn a bit more. I see lovely birds all the time, but often don't know what us humans refer to them as...so I paid special attention yesterday and today. In the past few days I have been able to identify each of the following (most of these are, of course, not new to me!): Gull Pigeon Magpie Robin Blackbird Buzzard Chiffchaff I think, but am not sure, that I can identify: Great Tit Need to take my camera out tomorrow, and then based on photos perhaps some folk here will be able to help me identify a couple that I'm missing...?

If I might offer a response also I think that, after the initial shock (that anyone would pay money to read me) and anger, I'd be flattered -- and try to figure out a way to make some money for myself....

Sorry to take this on a tangent, but.. what is a "First World Problem"? Is this any problem that only someone in the "First World" can face, or does it refer specifically to problems anywhere that aren't truly serious problems (in which case someone in the "Third World" could have a "First World Problem") ? I hope people don't truly believe that the "First World" doesn't have any serious problems...

Is it worth it? IIWI!

Yeah..travelling even just from Hebei to a surrounding province, one can come to a sudden realisation that their well-pronounced Putonghua and excellent vocabulary is useless against certain regional dialects... A good friend of mine is from Liaoning province, where they replace the 1st tone with the 2nd. Really confusing sometimes. Yes.. can't remember the number of times a Chinese person has ignored me, fluent but white, in favour of trying to communicate with a friend of mine who looks Chinese but is in fact American and can't say more than "Hello" and "Beer please"

Thought this was worth bringing to the present. Goowday used (an irregular transcription of?) the MWD text? I think it might be useful to look at this and the next chapter of the MWD together. Especially when taking TT's interpretation into account.

Good answer

It's been a while and I can't be sure, but I think that was my point. IMO one has to make an incredible leap to get to this interpretation. If this is what was meant, it's not staring anyone in the face.

A buzzard just landed in a tree in front of me in the woods, and then was generous enough to let me watch it soar from tree to tree for a little while as I followed along. If only the woods were big enough to get lost in...

Study 2: So 2 of the 7 authors were employees of a vaccine manufacturer.. and I'm supposed to believe that this potential conflict is enough to have skewed very clear results how, exactly? Sudy 3 So the study was supported by the California DPH.. and this means that both of the authors are compromised? http://www.ehib.org/person.jsp?person_key=67 Judith Grether is interested in autism, not in linking autism to something other than vaccines. Seems to me that any possible idea of "conflict" is leapt upon and used as a reason that these studies could not possibly be valid in any respect... even though all of the data seems to me to clearly show that thimerosal did not cause autism. I'm not going to look at any more because it seems to be a waste of time. Most anti-vaccine people I meet seem to believe that the entire world is involved in a centuries-long conspiracy to inject their children with poison for no particular reason. I still don't get it. Yes. So? Seriously..? You can clearly see the numbers... Death rate was 25%-100% higher for the unvaccinated, and you're suggesting that this is some kind of coincidence because everyone who died went to a restaurant with an unsterilised kitchen? It's vaccination, not 100%-foolproof immunisation.

No more clueless than they must be about all the other dangerous poisons in vaccines that we're still recklessly injecting our children with... http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/pages/vaccine-ingredients.aspx So not only is it not considered to be dangerous, the government has banned it anyway because so many clueless people were making a fuss about it. http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/mercury-in-vaccines-and-autism-a-failed-hypothesis/

I wonder if these documents really exist. I'm going to be really surprised if it turns out that the end of the most recent cycle of each of these diseases just happened to correspond with the advent of vaccines. Perhaps I've been misled, though I still doubt it. You have not responded to any of the information in my last post, only the rhetorical questions I posed. If you have any actual evidence, that I can see with mine own eyes, for a 200-year international government conspiracy to inject us all with poison, and the reasons that statistics (all the ones I've seen) clearly show that the decrease of certain diseases appears to correlate very closely with public use of their vaccines...... I'd love to see it.. edit: Don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of government, or society in general, and I know that there have been many experiments done on people in the name of science which only served to make them sick. I wouldn't say it was too evil to believe of people. I just think it's incredibly unlikely.

Well, I don't assume the FDA is protecting me as I'm in the UK. But I do have a certain amount of faith in the NHS. Above anything else, I do not believe that a useless and potentially dangerous form of medicine would have been adopted all over the world and hailed as one of mankind's greatest inventions. If you really have that much mistrust for the medical field, I presume you don't bother with doctors or Western medicine generally? It is my opinion that, first and foremost, people should concern themselves with living a natural and active lifestyle (eating healthily, doing physical things, not sitting around all the time, not being afraid to go outside and get cold and wet and dirty, etc) and being sanitary (washing hands regularly, not shitting where one eats, etc). But beyond this, as an added defense, immunising oneself /children against certain diseases is clearly effective. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3320452/figure/F4/ There was an outbreak of smallpox in Liverpool in 1902. This diagram shows death rates for vaccinated and unvaccinated. Are you going to ignore this, I wonder, or claim that it's propaganda? Why, for well over 100 years, would people have been promoting and accepting vaccines if there was no evidence for their efficacy? Yes, but they're not just about sanitation. Rates of disease were decreasing before vaccines were introduced. People were learning how to be more sanitary. But sometimes, it just doesn't matter how clean your hands/water/streets are. A perfectly clean and healthy person can catch a cold, or HIV, or a number of other things, in a perfectly clean and fresh environment, if just one other person is infected (and they get sneezed on, or have sexual contact, or whatever).

It's "logically and technically impossible" to prove many of the things people here on The Dao Bums believe, but that doesn't stop people believing them. As far as vaccines... well, I'd say the evidence is fairly conclusive. Smallpox has been eradicated. Obliterated, removed from existence. Polio has been eliminated in many parts of the world. A number of other diseases have been brought under control. As far as this mercury thing... http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/UCM096228

Don't be silly

You make it sound like people were being injected directly with liquid mercury! Thiomersal is a compound, like salt - which we ingest in lots of things, but the 2 main elements of which are dangerous when encountered alone or amygdalin - which is found in apples, but will not kill us in such small doses... There may well be some harmful side effects to our vaccine addiction, but thus far vaccines have mostly served to obliterate a bunch of horrible diseases from the face of the Earth and prevent most of us from catching many of the ones that are left...

Science fiction shapes the future. It gives people ideas; fun ones, helpful ones, frightening ones... things that seemed bizarre just a few decades ago are commonplace now. There are some nutcases who are actually preparing to be blasted into space to orbit a lifeless planet until they die. It's not happening soon, but the way people are, I have little doubt that many will willingly take part in chipping at some point in the future.