Karl

Rupert Harrison of black rock (hedge fund) now warns how bad it will be for the bankers who will have to reduce profit margins if we leave the EU ! Oh how I weep for the poor bankers and their profit margins. Rupert is George Osbornes friend. He is an example of the revolving door between the city and the Government. Rich, privileged kids that attend Eton, go into Government and then take a fantastically well paid job in a financial institution. Rupert, it is suggested, is the real chancellor and one of the most powerful men in Britain. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Harrison The maggots are coming out of the rotten meat trying to protect their lifestyles. Vote leave.

Stuart Rose who heads up the BSE campaign admitted in front of the treasury select committee " leaving Europe will mean higher wages for British workers" he also stumbled over his words when he said "immigration was the cost of doing business with Europe" Now Mervyn King (the former chair of the Bank of England) has dropped a bombshell that the current European crisis was deliberately created by the elite. This confirms that a slide from a presentation accidentally captured on camera by a reporter is a reality. Lord Lamont has also come out and rubbished the remain campaign and its fear mongering. On yesterday's Daily Politics show the conservative minister Mathew Hancock was asked why, if the Government thought that leaving would be so catastrophic and that we were so fragile on our own in the world, did they advocate a referendum in the first place ? He couldn't answer. Then he was asked where he got the figures that Switzerland and Norway had to accept virtually all the EU laws. He couldn't answer. The presenter revealed that Norway took less than 9% of EU laws and not the 75% that the Government suggests. Next he was asked about tariffs. Neither Turkey in the South nor Iceland in the far North of the Eurasian continent pay tariffs despite the lies of the Government. The only tarrif paying state is Belarus, which is a tiny Stalinist tyranny. Yet Mathew thought we would be likely to receive that kind of treatment. This crap is unwinding faster than a wishing reel with a Marlin on the hook. There is no good reason to remain. No one needs to present what 'out' looks like anymore than they do to provide a reason to leave a burning building, or sinking ship. No one can say exactly what will happen if we leave, but we sure as hell know what will happen if we remain.

Is it as reliable as my internet connection. Does it guarantee the result of an action with repeatable, incontestable consistency ? Can you demonstrate it to my complete satisfaction ? I ask rhetorically because I know you cannot show it, or prove it. Sometimes I wonder at the wisdom of taking part in these kind of discussions. It's easier to leave the believers to believe, is this really my business ? and what harm can it do to continue believing these things ? Yet it seems that we are all here, and have signed up volitionally to a quest to discover knowledge and the truth of things-not as we wish them to be, but as they are. To fill our heads filled with faulty concepts and foggy definitions is like throwing a wrench into the works of the most magical thing of all-our minds. If we knew that we were poisoning our minds and actually preventing the expansion of consciousness that we seek then we would not do it ? Man is a volitional animal, he can choose to abuse himself, to self destruct if he wishes, he can prefer the worse to the better as a matter of reasoning. That is the curse and the blessing.

LOL That you ask that question is proof of it. Some things we can change, others are absolutes.

Depends what you mean by 'magician'. I'm writing to people all over the world and that seems very magical in the sense I can influence things that are very remote to me. I can order a product from a foreign country, we never meet, the product is part of an enormous web of interconnections which is too much for even the cleverest scientists to document, yet, it arrives on my doorstep a couple of days after I've pressed the order button.

'Against the odds' and miracles are very different. From an objectivist view there is no such thing as miracles. It would mean something that couldn't happen that did. A pragmatist will of course say that what can't be done today can be done tomorrow. The religious mysticist will offer no proof, or fact. Visualising and planning are entirely rational things. They help to focus on goals. We used to do this in NLP. The important part was always to visualise something that was possible. For instance, if you are an 80 year old with severe health problems, then, the likelihood of achieving a Gold medal in the 100m Olympic sprint isn't going to happen. Something more moderate is possible though. Perhaps running a mile after struggling to walk to the shops.

A miracle, by definition is a supernatural event. If Wei Wu is action less action, or as described 'non doing' or 'effortless flow', then there is a logical contradiction (from my objectivist perspective of course). The only way to resolve the contradiction is to either accept that one exists, but that it is unfathomanable-which is why the Tao cannot be known, or to intellectualise the contradiction by an increasingly complex web of logical fallacies, in an attempt to complete an impossible equation. The idea of a Koan is to present something that appears, on the surface to have a solution, but doesn't. The person attempting the Koan eventually must accept that it is consciously beyond solution and therefore that one must stop trying to do this on an intellectual level. This is no different to any other kind of mysticism which says either; knowledge in intrinsic, or it is impossible to know objectively. Either some divine essence is leading us which is beyond our understanding, or we must take a pragmatic approach to life because nothing is certain. Both mean essentially the same thing, which is to abandon reason and simply go with the flow. A miracle is therefore a corollary. For the religious it is proof of the divine omniscient being, for the mystic pragmatist it is the proof that man can create whatever future he wishes, but that he cannot exactly wish it.

The problem is that Wu Wei will inevitably require interpretation and so those who cant understand will continually seek ways in which to make it conform to other philosophies and new age thinking with which they are comfortable. That's the nature of human reason and why there are Koans. It clearly means you cannot make sense of it and therefore you must simply accept it.

Action less action.

You shouldn't because it seems to me that you actually follow the Dao and your criticism of Nickolai's ever evolving interpretation would be very relevant.

You mean what you think it means ? Your posts don't exactly show that you follow the Daoist tradition. It seems you are interpreting it and adding other philosophies as you see fit. I would say you are no more of a Daoist than I am-so why are you here ? If it's acceptable for you to make these interpretations then it's perfectly acceptable for me to refute them.

It won't always fall way and sometimes it most certainly should not. Unearned negative values are useless baggage that drags a person down, but earned negatives that you consciously accept full responsibility for, are lessons that should be learned from. The problem is if you either; don't know why you are accumulated unearned negatives, or are consciously evading your ethical virtues and piling on earned negatives for which you take no responsibility and refuse to learn from.

True. A generalisation would be 'all vehicles are cars'.

I don't.

We don't create reality Nikolai. We can choose to act in certain ways but we cannot change absolutes. There are no 'miracles', there are cause and effects.

Stopping all practices is the advice that is generally given. You can't balance it out by doing increased grounding to continued practice-from my experience. Living in a subjective dream world loosens the grip on reality, the more that you break the link between reality and cognitive function, the greater becomes the disorientation. It's not too dissimilar to alcoholism, or other mental addictions. Eventually you either quit, or go on to ruin. Rarely does it get that self destructive, but it isn't impossible. Best to play at the edge of the pool than go so far out that you drown. Keep one limb on the bank by continually grounding. That way you don't overdose. Go too far out and the water gets deep- really, really deep.

These are just the facts and the obvious corollary of leaving the EU. We couldn't exactly be able to leave and sit around with our thumbs up our bums waiting for divine intervention. If you call it a plan then I'm not going to argue.

This ?

Why would you need a plan ? It isn't governments that set up and trade goods. There is no kind of plan inside a political union either it's just a customs area agreement designed to prevent free trade by protectionism. That's why the EU is dying economically, it's turned its back on free trade and is now completely out of sync with the BRIC countries and particularly the rise of China/economic changes in Russia. It's like an old record store trying to eke out a living in an Internet age, by restricting online trading within its boundaries. The arguments for leaving are so transparently clear that it is pointing out the obvious: 1. Once out we will renegotiate our terms of trade. As we are the fifth largest economy and a huge market for the EU-we currently have a hefty trade deficit which means we sell less to the EU than they buy from us. It's actually worse than the figures reveal, that's because we export much to the rest of the world through the Netherlands, so the numbers record those figures. 2. We will control our own borders and can let in and get ridden of whom so ever we like. It will improve our security, prevent swamping by immigrants from the EU that we are currently unable to prevent. 3. We can make our own laws, get rid of the red tape which has caused us to be uncompetitive outside the EU and has penalised is inside the EU. Currently we have no direct access for the financial services industry which is our major export. 4. We restore democracy which should be at the heart of the British political system and has been given away to Brussels. We have to do what the other countries want regardless of its effect on Britain. We have voted against 72 laws and been outvoted 72 times, we have no control at all. 5. We will save 15 billion a year which we can then spend how we like, be that getting the deficit down, improving the health service, upgrading our infrastructure. There are literally no negatives to leaving. That doesn't mean that suddenly we will become a super wealthy country when we hand back our membership card, but it does mean we are free- as the fifth largest economy in the world-to make our own deals. This will reduce prices of goods flowing into Britain, increase trade flowing out of Britain which will create more jobs and attract even more businesses. The only reason to vote to stay is if you believe that sharing a political framework as a tiny part of a German superstate is a positive. That is why I'm saying it is up to the remainers to produce a vision of the advantages of staying-the problem is they can't, because we already know what it is and that's why many want to leave and that's why the only response has been project fear. That if we leave then terrible things will happen, but, even then, the leavers admit that we could still do well outside of the EU. Remember we won't be leaving Europe, only the political project and its blanket of suffocating economic rules.

We don't need any 'influence' because we wouldn't be in the political union. Norway is a country of 5 million people, it's a tiny little econonomy that chose to be half way in, because it's people refused political Union, but it's government decided to ignore them. This isn't an economic argument. The union is a political project, the economics are very much a secondary consideration. So rather than 'leavers' having to have a plan, it's very much down to the remainers to explain why a better economic future outside the union is worse than a political position inside the union.

It's about aspiration. It seems to me that the wealthy British intellectual Liberals have decided that we must give up on aspiration and swap freedom to succeed, for stagnation. It's the opinion that British people are hopeless, useless lumpen proles who's best bet is to be part of a collective that can throw them some beans to enable their survival in his 'cruel' competitive world. This is of course a complete antithesis of reality. We aren't going to survive, never mind prosper and flourish if we don't get these liberals-and those they convince-to get out of the way in order that talented, aspirational entrepreneurs and visionaries can get the engine started. Our choice is not to bob along in a small boat tied to a rapidly sinking leviathan, but to cut that rope, break out the oars and head for a better future.

Unlike Chang I think it's done and dusted, the only about the UK is the depth of our own commitment to it. It's like we are in the team under the management, but have put ourselves on the bench. Once we fully comit (which is what Cameron's 'dock' is all about once he gets the city protected), then we are allowed on the field, but until then we have to abide by all the same rules-except because we aren't actually on the playing field we notionally don't have to actually conform to the on field playing rules, but as soon as we get off the bench we would have to.

A deeper level metaphysically or epistemologically ?

Stuart ??

It's very British to be part of Europe, because we are, in fact part of Europe. Its very unbritish, not to say irrational, to be part of a German federal unionist project which has already failed. The reason we fought two wars and spilt the blood of millions of troops and civilians was to stop Germany doing what they are doing at the moment, but that aside, this is a political project mired in economic and social disaster. If we vote with our heads we will vote to leave this disintegrating mess, if we vote with our intuition we will run for independence, if our emotions say anything other then we will go down with this mess. The latest from EU bods in Brussels is that there are currently 9 days until terminal EU anarchy/breakdown due to the refugee crisis. Greece has been left hanging on a limb after being ordered around by German autocrats. It looks like Czexit, Nexit and most ominously for Frau Merkel, Dexit referendums are being sought. The ECB and the DBank are coming apart faster than soggy kitchen paper and unemployment is soaring. It's self destructing in its present form, by June there be nothing left from which to Brexit. Things are changing very fast and I'm no longer of the opinion we should even consider the options. It it's looks as if there is only one and we might not even reach that referendum date. We may have to bring it forward, as a matter of necessity the Government might be forced to make the decision to leave ahead of time.