Karl

A Maine Coon, that was going to be our next cat. My wife wasn't so sure, but their nature is so endearing. It's like having a dog, but with all the prettier, cooler cat bits. I found a local breeder who was selling-wow they were just stunningly beautiful kiddy Kats. I'm told they can be walked and some like swimming ? It was the cost and the rarity, plus the breeders insistence that they must be protected in a run and not allowed to roam the streets that caused us to rethink-now we are sans cat :sniffle: but we like talking to the many cats we find in our regular 3 mile walk. Most of the local cats know us and come running and we don't feed them. It's like adoptacat, or kitty club.

Then you understand by saying 'matters to you' that it is not a matter of living for someone else's life ? This knot can easily become tied if you form that relationship as selflessness, altruism etc. You have stated explicitly 'meaning to you' which implies selfishness in the sense of a rational animal. Objectivism is defined : "man as the heroic being, with happiness as the moral purpose of his life, productive achievement being his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute". This isn't an ad hoc, intrinsically divined philosophy, neither is it whim worship. So, not like a passage in the bible, nor something from the pages of the Marxist manifesto, but a completely logical total philosophy the asks the questions 'where am I, who am I, what am I, why am I and how can I know it.

It's got electrolytes ?

iPad even though in recent years it has become bloody cantankerous-time/money saving, entertainment, information..... V2 Visor cleaner - makes shifting bugs off a dirty visor simple-ease of use Air compressor with tools - marvellous, particularly for tyres and all sorts of jobs that can't be done without one-convenience Weather device with all the instruments-information LED spotlight bulbs - 3 watts equivalent to 50 watts and last ages-economy Optimate battery conditioner - bike has never had a flat battery since buying one-Peace of mind. Sat nav - sometimes, it's referred to as satan nav, but still, my days of fidgeting with an AZ and running out of fuel/getting lost are at an end- lifesaver. Mobile phone-yeah, I hardly bother switching it on, but such a handy thing, we really dismiss them these days-safety/convenience Waterbed-if you haven't tried one you should. Utter bliss and warm in winter, cool in summer-comfort, health.

2B or not 2B ? that is the draftsmans question.

Good piece courtesy of ZH and it says it all really (exactly what people in the UK felt during the Brexit referendum). Even now we are receiving platitudes from our new PM about ' reporting the number of immigrants working in companies' and creating a shame list WTF ! Brexit wasn't about immigration, it was about the growing disparity between one group and another after promises that things would get better, they got and are getting significantly worse. Listened To A Trump Supporter... Now I Understand" Tyler Durden's picture by Tyler Durden Oct 6, 2016 9:14 AM 75 SHARES TwitterFacebookReddit Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Bltizkrieg blog, The following article by David A Hill Jr is simply outstanding. Here are some powerful excerpts from the piece: I Listened to a Trump Supporter I talked at length with a Trump supporter I grew up around. I wanted to understand. I respected her growing up. I wanted to know why a person as kind and compassionate as I remember her is voting for someone like Donald Trump. She was a family friend, a good person. In rural Ohio, everything was tight. Money, jobs. If you really needed quick cash, she’d put you to work doing landscaping. She’d pay fairly and reliably for the area. She’s voting for Donald Trump. I disagree with her choice, but I understand why she rejects Clinton so fiercely, and why she’s been swept up in Donald Trump’s particular brand of right-wing populism. I feel that on the left, it’s increasingly easy to ignore these people, to disregard them, to write them off as racists, bigots, or uneducated. I think that’s a loss for everyone involved, and that sometimes listening can help you to at least understand why a person is making the choices they make, so you can work on the root causes. For her, the root cause isn’t racism. In fact, I remember her as one of the only people in the area who proudly hired black workers, in a place where that was a huge issue. She fought over that choice. But that’s enough background. Let me relay a bit of what she told me. She’s a person who built her business from the ground up. She wasn’t rich, but was very comfortable for the area. She had a nice house, a nice car, and was stable. She achieved the American dream of not having to struggle. Things changed during the housing crisis. A landscaping business requires customers who need landscaping, and people who don’t own homes just don’t need landscaping. In some of these neighborhoods, one in five people lost their homes. That almost immediately turns a successful landscaping business into a struggling one. Then there was a domino effect. She couldn’t pay for her lawn-care equipment leases and loans. That hurt her work efficiency. Then, she lost her car. But that didn’t stop the payments. Then, she lost her house. She slowly had to let go all of her employees, until it was just her, hand-mowing lawns for cash the way you might expect a high school student in the summertime. She told me that every week, it seemed there was another default letter, another foreclosure, another bank demanding more blood from her dry veins. To her, that pile of default notices and demands for payment looked suspiciously similar to Hillary Clinton’s top donor list. She lost everything she worked so hard for. Obama swore he was going to help. The Wall Street bailout did seem to help Wall Street. But it did absolutely nothing for her. She turns on the news and sees how the Dow Jones is doing better than ever. But that didn’t bring her house and livelihood back. Liberals insist that Obama’s made her life better. But, now she’s driving a car that falls apart randomly while having to pay those same banks for a car she doesn’t own and never will. It’s difficult to convince someone whose life is objectively worse that their life is better. And it’s disingenuous to try. You can break down the specifics, sure. But when someone’s hungry, and you’re busy silencing their complaints by telling them how well world hunger is improving, you’re just going to upset them. This is not a person who is stupid or racist. She knows Bush caused the economy collapse with his irresponsible tax policies and wars. But she saw liberals as fighting for the banks’ recovery, to hell with her needs. She sees in Hillary someone who celebrates that approach. Who measures US success by the success of multinational mega corporations?—?corporations who undercut and destroy local businesses. This is a person who grew up in a town with a friendly neighborhood general store, a locally-owned hardware store, farmers’ markets, florists, and auto shops. All of these businesses closed when Walmart moved into town. All their owners now work at that Walmart for a fraction of their previous wages, no benefits, and no hope for something better, something of their own. And now, she sees a free trade supporting former Walmart executive about to come in to office, and it feels like salt in her community’s wounds. This is a wounded person. Insulting her or continuing to hurt her isn’t going to help. She’s swept up in Trump’s message because she feels someone’s finally listening. Right-wing populism is an awful thing. But desperate people with their backs against the wall will grasp on to whatever they feel will bring a change. Neoliberal capitalism is not sustainable for these people. Over the past few years, she tried getting back in her business. But a corporation moved in and is operating far cheaper, using undocumented immigrant labor. I should note: She specifically said she doesn’t hold it against the migrant workers. As she said, “They’ve got to take whatever jobs they can get. Just like we do. It’s not their fault. They didn’t choose to make prices so low that legal businesses couldn’t compete.” She was literally a “job creator”. And she wasbeing priced out by the very people Donald Trump insists are pricing her out. That hurts everyone, and it adds an air of authenticity to what he says. I asked her if she supports Trump’s Mexico wall. She told me, “It doesn’t matter if I do. Hillary wants a wall, too. That wall’s gonna happen.” She wasn’t simply making this up. She’s heard this from many sources, Clinton being one of them. So to her, the idea of a border wall is a non-issue. I pressed her on the issue, and she said she thinks, “It’s a waste of money. If someone wants to cross the border, they’re gonna cross the border.”… A few times, she seemed ashamed of things Trump’s said or done. I’d ask her to unpack her feelings. She said he sometimes upsets her, but “If you wait and wait for a flawless candidate, you’ll never find one.” She said she’d be much prouder to vote for Trump if he’d tone down his rhetoric. This fits into my strongly held belief that people are looking for an excuse to vote for Trump. All he has to do to win is tone down some of his more heinous and idiotic tendencies. I talked to her a bit about Bernie Sanders, to see what she thought of him. She told me, “He seemed like a nice enough guy. But I didn’t pay him much mind because there was no way he was gonna beat Clinton.” I talked with her about his platform, his policy proposals. She lit up. She told me, “It’s a real shame he didn’t make it.” She told me that if she knew him, his record, and his proposals, she’d have voted for him. I said that since the primary concluded, Hillary’s shifted some to adopt policies similar to his, and I asked if that changed her mind. She told me, “It doesn’t matter what she says. It matters what she’s done.” No amount of insulting her from an ivory tower is going to change her mind. No amount of guffawing about her lack of education, her self-deception, her racism, or her internalized misogyny is going to change her mind. The only thing she’ll listen to is a promise of real change to the system that’s hurt her. If the Democratic Party can’t offer her a viable alternative, we’re going to see another neck-and-neck election in 2020, and in 2024, and in 2028. These people need a populist answer. They need someone willing to listen to their very real concerns, and offer solutions that don’t look like Band-Aids on bullet wounds. If they had that on the left, we wouldn’t even be discussing Ohio as a “swing state”. Right now, this is the discourse we’re seeing about Trump supporters. This only emboldens those attitudes. To people like her, this feels like the left is laughing at her for her unwillingness to get in line and support the things that have left her broke and broken. The above excerpts are not the entire piece. You should read the whole thing: I Listened to a Trump Supporter. The more deeply I think about this election, the more I agree that the above sentiments motivate Trump voters far more than feelings of racism or hate. As I noted in a piece published a few weeks ago, The Status Quo vs. Donald Trump: This isn’t about me. This is about the American voter, and the more time passes, the more I understand the motivations of the vast majority of Trump supporters. It isn’t xenophobia or racism, it’s a vote against the status quo and the way they’ve strip mined and destroyed this country. It’s a FU vote and a major gamble, but it’s not as irrational or hateful as you might think. This doesn’t mean that Trump won’t betray his supporters and prove to be the Republican version of Barack Obama, but it does mean that the dominant media narrative characterizing Trump supporters as a bunch of racist, uneducated brutes is pretty much just dishonest, elitist propaganda.

My room was once filled on a regular basis with all manner of beast and hobgoblin. It's an hallucination, but a strong one. I've pinched myself, shaken my head, ducked under the cover and the things remained there. I once thrashed out at a horrible monstrous thing that stood a few inches from my bed looking down at me with malevolent eyes-I smashed the bedside cabinet over and broke the lamp, my hand was covered in blood from the impact, but it was so damned real. I've had things sitting on my bed and on me (I think they call this 'the hag' look it up as its common). None of these were momentary images, they lasted for many seconds, maybe a minute for the most persistent.

Loads of ees where I live. The lavender is loaded with them like a little factory. Got um ble ees and normal honey ees.

I'm getting used to the time when they might ecome extinct. The English language will miss them terri ly.

The stillness/gentleness I would describe as deeper introspection. AYP would refer to it as the witness. Is an introspective exploration and it's not easy when we are young to develop this introspection with any rapidity. It can't be forced. We need a certain level of pre-knowledge of the place we intend to explore which requires many trips extrospectively to build what might be described as 'the right tool'. I don't have an insight on the development of that particular tool except the desire to create such a thing and the effort needed to fashion it. Too many people simply wish it, or they try and explore without the knowledge tool (which is probably non-relational self inquiry). It is at this point that I hesitate to mention the role of meditation-which must be active meditation. I wonder if a less mature mind just cannot sit with it, it's off trying to gain something beyond knowledge of itself. A constant effort to reach a point (I think this is where you are going with stillness/kindness) without force (unkindness) or strain (stillness) at which the first strands can be teased out, then going progressively higher and lower in the conceptual hierachy until the very highest concepts, the axioms, are revealed. We are trying to answer who we are ? then how we know it ? then what to do with that knowledge ? As Rand put it geographically 'where we are' ? How we know it ? What should we do ? If we look at those questions in a purely self relational cognitive sense it achieves the set of questions I outlined first. The problem is that asking the question 'who we are ?' Immediately removes the relational aspect and leaves our minds spinning in a vortex.

ack in the day we had a local museum which had a ee hive where we could watch the ees come and go. Our garden contains species to encourage ees and other wildlife. Can't eat the taste of fresh honeycom spread thickly on uttered toast.

I can't argue with that, but maybe Trump is really the Gladiator ? It's a miserable position to realise ones impotence to change a thing through a vote. You want to see what consolation prize we ended up with in the UK after voting Brexit. We kicked out a Spiv and got a Anglican vicar. It wouldn't surprise me if there is a Government 'help the neighbour' scheme and prayers to be said before eating in a restaurant. At least you still have the freedom to own guns, we aren't even allowed pen knives, I'm surprised all our scissors aren't state mandated rounded plastic.

Not the consciousness, definitely we can be more conscious of our own internal philosophy. I'm not sure how that would make one any more aware than they already are, unless you mean by being more aware internally. Funnily enough I was reading a transcript of Rand talking to a couple of professors. I won't add the context, but the reply adds up to something like what you are saying: "To reach axiomatic concepts consciously, you have to have a certain amount of knowledge about epistemology. You do not need a full philosophical theory of epistemology, but you need the self consciousness to identify explicitly certain elements in your knowledge which have been implicit until then. It requires a sufficient amount of knowledge and a very significant degree of introspection. The ability to introspect is necessary to begin to identify the implicit explicitly. And for that there needs to be the material of introspection. So you have to have sufficient knowledge both of the outside world and of the process of your own consciousness before you can begin identifying the widest abstractions." I think this is what you are saying but are foggy about exactly what you mean. It looks like you are feeling your way in the dark with some notions, ideas, facts and concepts that loosely tie up into something, but this is the problem, you are not yet conscious explicitly of the ideas in your head. If we said super consciousness was roughly the process Rand describes, then as yet you have not fulfilled the criteria under which your thesis springs. It's like a rough sketch where you aren't sure exactly the subject, it's dimensions, or its possibility of it becoming a concrete existent.

Yet they are trying awfully hard aren't they ? If it were really so cordial would they be so concerned about Trump making it ? Without a doubt Trump has been part of the cronyism, but that's the way if you live in a corrupt country then the officials have got to be paid off or an entrepreneur cannot get anywhere. They have to know who to butter up in order to get things done, but Trump hasn't completely relied on cronyism to get where he is, he has built stuff, run businesses, taken risks. Clinton has done nothing else but Government from the day she graduated-building a business, or doing a job is not something where she has experience. If Trump had been in the circle he wouldn't have likely bothered working as hard as he has.

The establishment want Clinton, they say they don't want Trump. That's all that can be inferred. Clinton is definitely 4 more years of the same, Trump is a different face, but whether that means anything who knows. If it's a vote between Clinton or Trump and your life has been going down the shitter under the grinning idiot and his phone crony crook woman, then Trump is the obvious choice. Trump promises to 'make America great' to 'bring the change'. Whatever criminal acts Clinton has or hasn't done is fairly minor at this point as her slogan is really 'keep America exactly as it is and don't change a thing'.

Look a dat lazy keedy :-) I just stayed at a hotel called Pasha. Met Oliver Reeds son whilst I was there.

Whatever you think you grasp it is still only what you are grasping, it can't be more than you are grasping. This is the mistake made by philosophers who begin with consciousness as the primary. Imagine you are a baby, you at first sense there is something (existence but not yet understood) and later through introspection that there is some faculty inside you that is doing this sensing, but the important bit is that you were first conscious of some-thing prior to being aware of it being a 'self' being conscious of it. This is why there is no super consciousness or states of consciousness, there is just consciousness and it's only there when it is conscious of some-thing. If there were no existence, then there would be nothing to be conscious of. A consciousness cannot be conscious of itself. Equally if something is without consciousness they can't be conscious of existence. It sounds like a tautology, but one has to be conscious to be conscious. It's an axiomatic corollary of grasping existence. You might say you have increased awareness, or better senses than average, or are more intelligent, or can focus awareness for longer, or have very fast reactions. All those things are possible, but they aren't 'super' in any way. In other words they are not better than they are. The implication of super is super natural IE beyond the nature of what they are. Nature beyond nature is incomprehensible it's like saying a super pig is a pig beyond a pig, obviously a pig that isn't a pig is something other than a pig. A consciousness beyond a consciousness would be something other than consciousness, so there would be no sense in referring to it.

Consciousness isn't an existent per se, it is a corollary of grasping existence. There is no consciousness standing alone and seperate, we only realise we are conscious when we realise there is something 'out there' and then by introspection we discover the axiom of the self 'I'. Consciousness has to be conscious of something for us to know there is such a thing. What would super consciousness be ? It is an adjective added incorrectly to a concept. No consciousness can be greater than it is. It can't grasp more than it can grasp.

Don't forget her expert play on the stock maket with cattle futures. Even the cattle experts never managed the trick Hillary managed. If there is any justice in the world this woman would be rotting in prison with her husband. As it is, I expect she will collapse and die before that could ever happen.

I refuted 911 until a few days ago. Then I saw a video in which I was reminded of the conservation of energy laws. It's not necessary to even build a lot of conspiracy up, the simple fact is that a falling objects doesn't accelerate as it hits resistance. It has to slow down and eventually when all the energy is used up, it must come to rest. If 30 floors had fallen, then at maximum it would have crushed 30 floors and stopped-even then this is in an ideal world where somehow the top of the building falls as if totally unsupported-as if dropping a weight in free fall onto panes of glass.

You have plenty of your own parasites.

Cos it's an Apple and it likes to control my work. Arguing is what it's all about, I enjoy arguing if the argument remains civil. I can take or leave kiwi, I prefer cherries and grapes. We aren't terrorist loving, we get a lot of immigrants who are mostly not terrorists.

That's all my editor allows me. It gets upset when I try to use your full title, so I gave up. I don't think Britain is terrorist loving, but we are ethnically diversified and tolerant according to our Government. It was a shock to them that we voted to leave the EU and control our borders. Apparently we are dumb, uneducated racists. I can cope with that title.

Oh OK then mindcloud you have it any way you wish. I already accepted how bad my own country is. I hope you are right. Four years studying economics tells me that I don't expect you are, but then it's pointless saying I told you so after the event as I'm probably going to be too concerned securing my own position.

How well you are doing ? are you kidding me ? I wish it were true but it isn't. It's the cleanest dirty shirt in the West, but my my, it's still very dirty. Just remember that things look fine and then they don't. Those 9/11 towers are a good analogy for where America is right now- it's smouldering, but the fires are well contained. Then suddenly there are two piles of smouldering rubble. The time between these events may be long or short, but you can be sure that the problem isn't fixed when your current debt is 20 trillion, your productivity is in free fall, wages are barely rising, high paid jobs are being eroded away, savings are being squandered by the Fed, house prices, bonds, stock market are in a gigantic bubble (which includes the dollar itself), worker participation rates are at an all time low. When a country relies on financialisation to look good it's kidding itself. Production requires capital and that is being eroded away. You cannot have your cake and eat it, neither can you have no cake and have it. Inevitably reality catches up with the evader and then we get to see who wasn't wearing trunks when the water goes out. I admire you patronage to your country, but it's time you got aquainted with economic reality because what you are seeing is smoke and mirrors. You need to be ready when the fall begins to position yourself for job loss, hyper inflation or shortages. I was making the point that middle eastern countries generally have religious leadership. Not ALL and not ALL have elections.