redcairo

Once I was in a movie, watching SALT and eating popcorn, and I said to some of my inner world who I was in a close phase with at the time: Me: Is this a problem? Violence, negativity? Terrible popcorn? I should eat healthy and be more peaceful? The response was (I blogged it or I wouldn't remember the detail): What matters more is that you “live”. Keep your attention fully in the present, as completely as possible. Let experience come about and come to you, and meet it with real interest and clear integrity. Of course you don't need to believe the voices in my head, ha -- but the answer worked for me then and now. RC

The german video was kinda hilarious. Everything mean sounds better in the germanic languages. Everything nice sounds better in the latin languages. Some of the pictures on the thread were funny too, thanks you guys. I discovered that a current debate of a sort that I am in on another forum has all but about six of the 'logical fallacies' being used by the other side. Probably I'm using the rest LOL.

Well he has certainly made a huge effort to write about energy stuff for the West. Doesn't make him an expert but he's more expert than anybody I know personally I'd guess. Some of his exercises I've done were useful. Can't help on the post-meno energy source but I am near that and find it an interesting question. RC

I admit I kind of skimmed the thread. This is thoughts when done. 1. Planets have perception. They are gods-little-g to us (mostly little compared to medium-G sun and big-G god-the-ever-whatever). Human senses are just some flaps and filters, they're completely arbitrary, one certainly can't judge the awareness of the universe by human senses. We are just acids and enzymes on a substrate of minerals, experiencing space-time. I suspect it takes a certain faculty developed in a person before a degree of rapport can be made with this awareness though. 2. I had the wrong idea coming in by the title. I just finished a good book related to use of statistics in nutrition science where the 'absolute' answers would be like "out of hundreds, 1.3 more persons" and the relative would end up "reduces risk by 45%!" or something totally crazy that made me decide never to believe any relative risk statement again in my life. 3. The Largers speak answers in two ways simultaneously. Some of proverbs is written like that. I was told it was a form of old Hebrew poetry or 'styled' writing. I think they were just talking to identities like the L's that I think you get it in your head and it just translates it in almost reverse sentence ways. RC

Please read on magnesium and irregular heartbeat; and CoQ10 and heart energy. Oh I see you had CoQ10. I sometimes take a ton of it through the day. Yes it can keep you up at night because it actually gives the heart energy (imagine that).

P.S. On Ravens: I once knew a guy who knew a guy (...) who worked with them. He said they would be just monstrously intelligent except they had like a 6 second attention span LOL. I once met a real living raven. My dad and I were at this park in Santa Paula California and there were some cages, I have no idea why someone had cages there as it wasn't a zoo but they were rather 'official' looking. We hadn't seen them before. We reached the end of this row, and at the end was this really big cage, probably about ten feet tall and six feet wide and four feet deep. And there is this huge black bird sitting on a branch right in the middle. Dad and I stop in surprise, and after a moment I say, "Wow. Is that a raven like in that movie??" And he says "Yeah, that's a raven." And the raven, in a voice so low it vibrated the marrow of my bones I think, said: Hello there. I swear me and dad both nearly fainted. If we'd been cartoon characters, our eyes would have rolled up in our heads, our toes would have lifted and we'd have gone straight over backward. We laughed so much later! We were both AGOG. Neither of us had any idea that Ravens can talk!! Ultra-bass. Wow. Edited to add: I forgot until I hit send that actually a friend in high school who had an aviary, had a raven that lived in a big cage outside her kitchen window. Her mom and the bird were half in love. She always kept the window open when in the kitchen (which she was a lot) and the bird hung around inside. To me it looked like "a very big crow" though they said it was a raven. They told me that it was intelligent and that a couple times when her mom was afraid of an intruder, she opened the window, because they had seen from the bird's behavior that if anyone ever even seemed like they would attack her mom, it would totally attack them.

Weird true story that fits into the offbeat of this forum. I have a tendency to natural, mystical experiences. But I have only had one "omen" in my life. I used to think that an omen was just a thing people claimed, like some psychic prediction. That someone saw XYZ, and they thought to themselves, "Oh this probably means such-and-such" or whatever. Or that they were superstitious, so they'd see a certain thing they culturally had been 'trained' to believe meant something, and decide it was an omen of something. I didn't know that a genuine Omen is a mystical experience. When you have it, you KNOW it. You understand a lot about it right then. It is not just a casual feeling. It is not an intellectual assumption. It is a mystical experience that seems very disturbing yet real. OK so here is the experience: It's somewhere in the early 2000's. I am sleeping peacefully. I'm a single mom so I'm living with just my small girl. I have at that moment something like eight cats, a couple of whom don't get along with the others at all so they don't hang out together, and it is wintertime, so it's snowing. The cats have a door in the window of the back room, and leading up to it is a plastic children's slide from a big 'cube' toy I'd had for my kid when she was just a bit younger. The slide and winter = utter hilarity at times. The cats would run up the slide toward the window -- it was covered with frozen snow -- get this fabulous look on their face, extend their claws fully, and then sliiiiiiiide back down it. I know it was cruel, but I swear I used to laugh until I almost peed my pants about it, it was just so funny. Suffice to say that getting back in the house was harder than getting out for them, so most the time they were inside. And the cat door was actually barely big enough for a couple of the big male cats. (When they were outside, one day I was out in the backyard and they all ran across the frozen-snow ground. It was like half a dozen cats "galloping across the frozen tundra." What an awesome sound! I didn't know cats galloped until then.) Anyway all that is just background. I am woken up at some ungodly hour by all this noise I can't understand. Something just outside the back room I thought at first, as I came awake, but then it sounds like it's in the house. It sounds like the cats doing something crazy as that many of them in one house has a tendency to bring on, a few cats in motion at once when playing can knock over anything. I get up, and I'm probably still like 50% asleep, and I stumble to my bedroom door which is half-closed, and I open the door and step into the hall. And I stop and stare. Because right there in the hallway, in front of my door but back a foot, is the largest freshly dead black bird I have ever seen. I am so half-awake that I freeze and spend some time letting the shock wake up my brain in case I'm imagining some of this. We get a lot of crows in Winter passing through, but this is like the mother of all crows, so it's either literally some kind of mutant giant crow, or it's an actual raven. I'm no expert so I don't know, but I consider this as I stare down at it. Then I realize that all my cats are sitting there in the hallway -- all of them, even the ones that don't get along with the others -- surrounding it weirdly, like a circle almost but not quite as there isn't room in the hallway -- looking at me. Then I realize that in order to get this gigantic dead bird into the house, ALL the cats had to collectively work together to drag it UP the frozen slide and in through the cat window it probably barely even fit through at all, and then drag it across the room and down the hall to in front of my bedroom door. However, all these thoughts in series, were only the intellectual part. Because from the instant I stepped into my bedroom doorway and looked down, I had this overwhelming FEELING: This was "a message" to me. It was what my people would call "an omen." This was the first of three messages that I would be given. Each one would be a sign of the continuing 'development' of something in my world. The large probability for it now existed. If the third message arrived, it was sure. And whatever that was, was not a good thing. It was a bad thing. I mean like "the doom of my...." -- country? perhaps -- level bad thing. I didn't feel like the planet or my species would end. I didn't feel like it meant my life or house or even city. But it seemed like a really BIG doom that might fit with how I might interpret "my country" -- given a strong degree of patriotism (early childhood indoctrination in school worked really well for me). And I felt the bird, its size, its death, the cats, everything, were part of some equation, some song, some complex symbol, that could have told me something about this potential except I was oblivious to it, so I didn't know what it meant. Only that it did have MEANING. It wasn't merely a chance, coincidental event. I stood there staring at the bird dead at my feet, at the cats, silently for awhile. Then finally I went out and found a box big enough to fit the bird in, put it in and for lack of any idea what else to do, said a sort of prayer over it, closed up the box, and the next day called the animal control guy who came and got the box. OK so this was really weird, right. But I kinda forgot about it after awhile. I had lived here for about two years at that time and I had worked like 120 hours a week doing programming mostly so I was really living in a cave and didn't know anybody besides my dad, a slightly crazy (rather ditzy) aunt, grandmother and my kid. So it's a long time later. I'm thinking now maybe a year later but I honestly don't remember. Long enough that I had forgotten the incident as far as thinking about it goes, though I'd written it down for online friends at the time it happened. My aunt, whose landscaping team mowed my lawn weekly, stops by to see me. I'm sitting in the living room folding laundry and she sits down and volunteers, "I had such a weird dream last night!" And she tells me her dream. There are these two cats, like house cats, she says. One is very large. The other is very small, and tabby striped, like that grey one you have. Except it's actually sort of blood red shades, not grey, an impossible color for a cat. And something happens, and then the small red tabby literally consumes the large cat. And it's sitting there, and the tail of the larger cat is hanging out of its mouth, like it swallowed it whole. And some part of me I had not experienced since that night in the hall suddenly activated the moment she had begun talking and was telling me: This is the second message you are being given. I understood it implicitly, that this was the 2nd of 3. The probably was still developing. And I felt this kind of horrible lurching in my gut because I really felt that the possibility of something quite horrid was coming closer. And I was surprised because I didn't know that "someone else's dream" could be part of one's own Omen. I guess I never gave the subject much thought, but that seemed surprising. And while she was telling it to me, I had this overlay of the biblical story of Joseph interpreting the Pharoah's dream, and how the seven emaciated cows eating the seven healthy cows indicated seven years of famine. I wondered in some horror what the small red tabby cat represented in my world, compared to the much larger cat. And then the day went on. It's been probably a dozen years since then. I have never had the third sign. Does that mean it's not going to happen? That probability shifted? Or it just hasn't happened yet? I have no idea. I also didn't know that Omens could come in 'pieces' or stretch out so much or be... potentials, you might say. This is not a topic I ever had an interest in. Well that's my story. Maybe a let down since nothing exciting ever came of it! Yet. Maybe that's a good thing. RC

But is that not an assumption? They learned sharing was miserable? So misery is a good thing -- are you sure? 1 - maybe they learned sharing in fact made them feel better as they ended with someone who played 'with' them or later shared something of their own. 2 - or maybe it occurred to them at some point to think about how the other kid felt when he had no toy, until one was shared, and how he had himself felt in the past when in the same situation, and how he could easily alleviate that negative experience by sharing. My best friend and I were talking recently about Oprah. He happens to live in the HI Islands where she owns a staggering amount of land. Various celebrities (esp. sports) live there, and all support the area in some way (there is a lot of need for social support for locals -- like most 'extreme tourist' locations it's a study in econ polarity). She does jack-all. Not even lending her name to anything that wouldn't cost her a dime, other people'd do all the work, for any kind of charity. My friend's been there a decade but he's an AZ boy so he's not a local and 'observes' the social and political things perhaps a bit more objectively than those native. The people on the island generally have a very big opinion about the foreigner who came in, bought so much of the land, and shows zero appreciation for the land or people or or local biz or anything else. Of course, everyone will admit: in our corporate culture, nobody owes anybody anything. Nobody is expected to be a decent human being officially. At least not here in the USA. Being a Ferengi is actually considered perfectly reasonable and comes with a nice sportscar, trophy wife, and wiki tells me Michael Milliken, man who annihilated the life savings of god knows how many people in junk bonds, is a philanthropist, thanks to the millions or more he made off the mass destruction he created... you get the idea. Anyway, so I said, well, maybe she clawed her way up from the bottom of the food chain economically and feels others should have to. He said, well maybe that ought to make her even more aware of the situation and willing to do something, anything, even that literally cost and troubled her nothing, as a result. And at that moment I realized that it never worked that way for me. I was lower-lower-lower middle-class growing up. Had one of those situations where what little we had went to rent, so we lived in an area beyond our means, which meant I was actually living in near poverty in the midst of upper-middle-class (I owned a single pair of Levi jeans and 2 ratty t-shirts for like 3 years of high school, in a school where girls' daily outfits could cost $1200 or so -- and that was 1980-3!). (I actually never got lunch until 10th grade when I moved away from home and a Dean found out when I got in trouble for something, and gave me 'free' lunch. I ate what pieces friends didn't want off their trays for years prior to that.) And when I was an adult, I worked my ass off, but I had the very strong work-ethic and personal-feeling that nobody owed me anything. Since even my parents had sucked for what parents are actually responsible for. I had two people who profoundly influenced me. One was a woman-friend ML, she had been a Vietnamese boat person as we called them, though you'd never know she wasn't a local, no accent at all, girly-girl new-age sort to the max. (Ha. My California girl lingo creeps through.) She remothered me you might say. The other was a boss for four years, an inventor and CEO of a small R&D corp. Both of them told me at various times, and years later, how self-contained I was. They would do something nice for me and I would literally take a step back and say, wary, "You don't owe me that." And they'd say, I don't need to owe you something to do something nice for you! And eventually after years of them demonstrating more human decency to me than anybody ever had, and totally sharing their stuff and their lives -- I separately lived with both of them for a time, both loaned me their vehicles at other times, and more -- I actually relaxed a lot and began to accept that good things were allowed to happen for me without my actually suffering, starving, and working myself to the bone for it. Nearly everything good I have ever come by in my life has, directly or indirectly, been via other people. And that's what taught me to be decent. I wasn't quite Machiavellian before but not far from it. It was all I'd known. But they both could have easily made no effort on my behalf. They didn't owe it to me. They were political poles -- she was a metaphysical minister who mostly worked for donations, he was so right-wing he once paid me to read and listen to Rush Limbaugh LOL -- neither had any good objective reason to reach out to me of all the people around them the way they did. And thank the gods they did because who I am today is radically different as a result. Anyway the thing is, I did not learn the 'emotions' that drive what I consider to be altruism until someone had given it to me. Growing up on a hard street did not teach me to be good let alone an altruist. It took actual altruism on other peoples' part to demonstrate it for me, and to make me realize the larger picture, not just of friendship or compassion, but the larger picture of why doing what seems the right thing matters. Even when the right thing is sometimes a pain in the ass, even when the people don't frankly deserve it at least by behavior. There is a greater good in humanity as a whole, I believe that. And that one line I think is what you detest most about the word and concept -- is that the greater good is a myth to you, a fairy tale imposed by the powers that be, from parents to clergy to war generals, solely to manipulate people into being decent to each other or even worse, decent to "ideals" (which can mean decent to the perceived community, not just individuals or single situations). But I don't think TPTB can truly teach a human to be decent. I think only other humans and interaction with them can teach that. And I think that decency is what breeds behaviors like altruism. Not because the state says so or mandates your taxes to pay for immigrants or whatever. But because one learns the experience of being a human in a big world, and begins to operate not just on their own behalf, but also sometimes on the behalf of other humans or elements of that larger world. Which to me is what begins to explore the larger-consciousness or perspective that is a potential in our species. That we are actually able to cognitively perceive, consider, and then behave in a way contrary to what seems beneficial to ourselves or sometimes even our tribe, based on our perspective about something, someone, somewhere, somewhen else. Something we prioritize. Is that not altruism? Why would this be a bad thing? I mean isn't every emotion or situation the "potential" to be a good or bad thing just depending on how one implements it? I could use the example of love and protectiveness to example a bad marital situation or a good one, for example -- one can misapply or overdo anything. One can use any emotion to attempt to 'influence' whole groups -- families, cults, countries. Is there no instance in which altruism is a good thing, and not a symptom of a bad thing? RC I type like 120wpm+ so a conversation in my head becomes a book.

I don't see any reference to utter-lack-of-self in the definition. In usage, human experience is a spectrum, so it could cover the range of the human spectrum, including as much lack-of-self as possible. It certainly does include in the definition putting something else ahead of or above the perceived good of oneself. (In the case of altruism that kills you I suppose we could as slang give it leeway to say it was about no-self... eventually!) But I see altruism in many people past and present, and in many accounts of peoples' behavior in times of threat and war for example. I have known people (when I was a child and they were grandparent age) for example who during WWII risked their lives constantly to help jews escape through the underground in Holland where they were, amazing real accounts they had to tell, and often of many other people whose compassion moved them to daily acts of altruism many of which led to them being hung or shot. There is a photo I saw as a teen that has stuck with me for decades. It's of a young man and his sister -- she had just been hung, he was next -- I think in Germany (as opposed to the outlying areas), who had worked together on the underground. He was standing tall and looking as pointedly un-fucking-sorry as a human ever looked for anything, as if even knowing of this day, or a worse day, would not have deterred him in the slightest from doing what he felt was the right and good thing to do. I was so moved by the impression I got from it. To me, that is an extreme example -- it's over on the far side of the human-experience spectrum -- but it IS an example of altruism. Not that he died although that is too. But that what he did every day, when he was a handsome white just-past-teen who could have ignored all that, instead was all about helping others. Did the state force him? No the state killed him for it. Did someone "preach" it at him? Who knows but he was a young adult and made his own decisions and paid for them. Most the people I have personally known who were the most altruistic, were not so because they were manipulated or preached or guilted into it and in many cases they were in fact bucking every authority whose influences were exactly opposite. And often whatever they were doing was exhausting and unrewarding and sometimes embarrassing or detrimental to themselves in some fashion. Usually quiet sometimes even secret. Say the woman who sends half her meager income to her nephew to help him in school and he doesn't know she can't afford it or works a second job for it and does without everything for it. She doesn't owe it to him and barely if at all knows him. Sure there's a long dictionary list of nice emotions we can assign to this, but the --behavior-- she's evidencing is "altruism" -- behaving in such a way that puts the perceived-good or worth or need of someone or something else ahead of one's own. It would be injust to assume she was manipulated or preached or guilted into it. Maybe she just loves him. Or maybe she doesn't love him at all and in fact dislikes him, but simply feels it is the right thing to do -- because he's younger and will have a better outcome for having college and she did love his mother who died. Altruism doesn't have to mean you even like the person or thing you're favoring with your behavior, it may not be kind or compassionate -- only that you are favoring it for whatever reason at all. Not at all -- those are different words entirely, although nearly every human emotion word could be dragged across the lines to say that altruism sometimes could involve ____. The second could be stretched to say "Jane 'cares about' thing/person-X or wouldn't behave like-so" but that's about it. Altruism does not imply any sense of well-being or happiness in carrying out actions, aside from the fact that one is choosing to make a decision and so it is assumed that even if the decision makes you miserable that there must be some brain reward from making that decision or it wouldn't be done. It may not be able to be consciously perceived by the individual though. Many times altruistic behavior in fact makes one totally miserable and even resentful, but is done anyway for what is perceived to be a good or need or ideal of more import than the alternative/s behaviors. Often there is what is easy, and there is what is right. When people choose what they think is right, not out of guilt or fear or conformity-to-right or fear-of-wrong or expected benefit, but because they simply consider the right thing more important than their own ease, that is a form of altruism even though this can be mild and even for an 'abstract.' Preachers? Altruism is not a religion or a political party. It's just a word in the dictionary that represents a human behavior, and that human behavior itself. Actually I just realized you live in socialized Europe so you've probably had people stuffing their bogus thou-shalt-give-your-stuff-to-others-the-state-defines your whole life. Perhaps using "If you loved everyone else the way you should you would agree, you mercenary cretin!" as leverage, I don't know. Probably this could develop a knee-jerk response in anybody... I agree with that although I do not see that this particular word is a captured example. Um. I don't agree they are slaves if they volunteer and work for pay; I agree that if they think like they are that they become so; I agree that this could be one of many examples of the power of words; but I don't see how that relates to this particular, specific word in example. Best, RC

If that's real, then you know what it means, right? It means the massive shift in education country-wide to being controlled by socialist gender-feminism and unions has apparently resulted in the most profoundly incompetent educational base in the history of forced schooling. Although to be fair it isn't a very long history. For the bigger picture or the paranoid or the interested in history, John Taylor Gatto's first 8 chapters of "The Secret History of Education in America" is fascinating and free online at several places. His own website is having an odd but recent error or I would link there. I realized when I was 18 and in jr. college that I'd missed something. I actually made myself read half the english lit list I never had (realization: I don't much like english lit, and am dearly grateful that I spent the previous six years obsessively reading science fiction / fantasy instead) and go through grammar in the language lab (the teachers there laughed at me as I'd scored better than they had. But I had no clue. I got language through feel, not intellect. I wasn't even sure what a verb was). (Result: grammar knowledge did absolutely nothing for me, except that I have learned not to end a sentence with of, for, with, etc.) I had already taken up reading history (a topic I despised in most of high school -- it is taught SO badly), and had gradually become a science buff (another topic I thought I hated thanks to school). In retrospect now as an old woman (I'm 50), I would start children in school vastly later (development is affected by certain kinds of knowledge at too young an age), it would be far more focused and play similar to Montessori, and it would obsess on incredible reading skills as the base of everything. That's the one resource -- ala fishing rod/net -- that changes lives and makes everything else possible. Oh right: and it would be competent so when they were 14 they were old enough to start apprenticing somewhere or a year of 'competence training' before college or whatever, because I think extending childhood as late as we do robs the primary drive years from youth and causes all kinds of issues. Every person I know who voluntarily reads for fun (even if, these days, it's mostly internet) is substantially more intelligent and better educated than those who don't. I've got no study telling me why, but I observe this. I'm willing to bet that a huge amount of the information I have about history (and politics) of all kinds I got as an adult. And thanks to reading. I didn't have it when I was the age of these people in the video. I knew about the civil war but that was due to reading following my meeting a man in Canada whose near ancestor had been a paid German mercenary imported by the North to fight in it and I found his account interesting. I hadn't known the North did that. When I was 18, I thought -- I am not making this up -- that "Palestinian Refugees" were a few hundred people in tents outside a chain link fence around Israel. I thought Africa was mostly people'd with two 'races' both dark: Pygmies and Bushmen. As some humor on the latter, my best friend in college for a couple years was a young man from Nigeria, who could not understood why all the guys/athletes in our college called him "Bushman." He had never even heard of either of these groups. He took a black studies class, mostly filled with jocks. Lectured them one day when he lost his temper, and everyone including the teacher just broke down and cried. Totally different cultural perspective for sure... although my favorite part of having a foreign best friend like that was the white women accosting me in the ladies room wanting to know if it was twue about black men. Like I would know, just a friend. Ah Madeline I miss you... if anybody gets that. I also thought that I was a liberal. Because conservatives were bad, right-wingers were bad, neocons were bad, and government was bad. I was at the fair and there were two political booths on opposite sides, the dems who were really cool and had fun music and cool clothes and lots of people, and the reps who looked like a bunch of mormon young republicans. (They probably WERE mormon young republicans.) Being a contrary sort, I went over to them while my friends reacted in horror, just because I wanted to hear, with great humor, what they would actually have to say. Then I discovered to my horror that everything I intuitively believed, and everything I had been taught at age 5-6 about "my country," and everything I assumed was obvious and good, was in fact... not only conservative but even what today would be called "constructionist." (Because it is -not- corporatist like both parties actually are now.) I didn't know I had been "politically brainwashed" by school, but due to a strange home life I had no TV, almost no radio, was nearly on room restriction for six years, and had nearly no interaction with my parents (except the run for your life kind). And due to that and related stuff, only a couple friends at lunch. I only had two influences: the books I read -- scifi and everything in the library, and a lot of Robert Heinlein; and school. Heinlein ironically ended up a socialist but he was an "individualist" first and always (which I perceive as fundamentally capitalist) and I see the former affiliation only as something he did in later years, both in recognition of what wasn't working here, and in support of a close friend. (So there I was, a southern coastal California girl, a total hippy, long tie-dye skirt (way out of fashion time) and a sailboard and a guitar, mystic leanings and a desire to save the world starting with animals and trees -- and it turned out I was a staunch political conservative. The universe has a sense of humor. But conservative women have no fashion sense at all!) Anyway I'm rambling. Yes, they're idiots, but adult professionals making money had TWELVE YEARS to teach these kids basics so the REAL incompetents are those adults.

Got that, but altruism is about "oneself." It is how an individual chooses to behave based on their own assumption of the good of something/someone else, The desire of the Left to "manipulate authority figures into mandating that other people give those-other-peoples' stuff to the causes I think are good" requires a whole new word. And a big stick. For them. And the Second Amendment. For everyone else.

More coffee, maybe. :-) Not sure of the 'sliding' term added there, but it certainly does involve intention, profoundly, since the word is defined by one's "behavior" and/or "devotion" {emotion or the use of resources}. There is no such thing in such a literal sense: the emergent property of identity, let alone autonomy, fundamentally implies a Self from which to intend and decide and behave/act. You have given it the word selfless and then redefined selfless to such an extreme polarized literal it no longer even applies to human beings. You want to define the construct of language but it exists to serve humans. When you lose this context it's like losing the awareness of the spirit rather than the letter of the law. Ha! Such drama! I do not see within it anything of the sort. ("It means you intend to do something good for someone or something else, even at your own expense." "No, no! It means you defy your very existence and sacrifice the integrity of your Being to the nothingness of ignorance that demands you repress your very soul!" OMG! Ok actually maybe LESS caffeine... for one of us LOL...) "Altruism" does not deny anything nor imply the expectation of anything: it merely recognizes intent and behavior. Ohhhh pollution of consciousness... Really you must be such a kick at social gatherings. ;-) I have no idea what that is. I was referring only to a word. Not to someone's doctrinal religious practices or whatever it is. Cannot speak to the thing above I know zip about. However in a Zen sense I think there is a lot to be said for telling the logical brain to shut the F--- up, allowing oneself to "be in the moment" and engage, without "thinking about" something during that -- because the latter is a forcible "separation" required for analysis. This is something I have had to work on much of the last two decades as I am left-brain (sic) given to 'think about' things rather than live them, which is very destructive if not totally preventative to many mystical experiences, I have found. It's a behavior of insecurity, the inability to let go of that. All you need is a soapbox and a preacher's collar, so you can lead us to your re-definition -- as if it's better. Trivia: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/altruism Full Definition of altruism : unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others : behavior by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its species That definition requires decision, and does not anywhere imply that the altruist must be an amoral robot who knows nothing and denies their own identity and very existence. Pretty sure. RC

What the... why is he doing that? Is that real? Why are the fish behaving like that?

ALTRUISM. To go back a few posts... Communication can be a subtle thing. This word is one of those words that is fundamentally misunderstood by its very nature. Altruism is a decision (even when actively-lived-in-the-moment). It is not about what a given thing "is." Until humans are binary machines there will not be anything that "is" one thing vs. another like black and white. Rather it is about what something "means" to a human and hence why they are making that decision -- which is a spectrum of experience because meaning inherently is subjective and individual. Sometimes, the spectrum is between the meaning and experience of two people (for example, defining what is 'fair' or what is 'rape' is a spectrum, not a polarity, despite our bizarre cultural redefinitions). And sometimes the spectrum is limited to the meaning of only one human being part of the equation such as "altruism" (regardless of whether other people are involved in the outcome of the decision. They might not be). You can operate for the good of an abstracted ideal for example. But it is always your decision, which means that on whatever level you wanted that thing more than you wanted anything else. This doesn't speak to the joy or suffering of the decision. Merely that "it was always what you wanted." There is no such thing as a decision for someone else -- it is impossible unless you are possessing someone like a spirit to make a decision "for" them, all decisions can only fundamentally be for yourself -- but your list of motives is your own and how you perceive and rank the seeming good for someone or something else may be part of your decision. Or not. Fundamentally, free will is absolute. Even with a gun to your head it is still your decision. Everything we do is because we choose to do it. This has nothing to do with how much we enjoy, or expect to enjoy, the decision and its results. Altruism isn't about what we do it's about "the motive of what we mean when we do something." Some people make decisions that make them suffer. I've spent much of my life making decisions that have often put the good of someone else before my own. I graciously did not murder my second stepmother when a teen solely because I loved my father so much, and knew how much he would grieve both over her death and over my behavior, even though a secondary, less powerful motivator of not wanting to spend my adulthood in prison was also present. I graciously refrained from insuring my ex and pushing him into traffic despite that I had more than enough base for justified murder in many cultures and that it would likely have been the best thing for our child as it turns out and I suspected all along. Gee nobody appreciates my altruism. I spent most my life a single mom and graciously, and sometimes not graciously at all, have made decisions putting what I perceived to be her good above my own. Sometimes it really was her good. Sometimes it was not and now she is an "entitled" 20 year old (with a tendency to emotional bullying via alleged victimization -- and she's not even in a four year college, where she would fit right in with that mindset!) whom I pray recovers some character and maturity from my less than stellar though well-intentioned parenting. I have been involved with any number of seemingly solely altruistic causes over my life, because -- well I don't know why, four planets in Virgo or something, or perhaps it's that I had to consciously design a personality worth having when a very young adult and the one I made for myself seems a little better to me than the ones most people appear to have come by as an accident of genetics, inattention and experience. One of the (by my arbitrary definition) 'better' elements is that I am a kinder person because I chose to be and choose to be. All that benevolent not-murdering and such, don't you know. You can make an altruistic decision with the most glorious of intentions. You can suffer utterly for it, day after day, and still re-make it because you genuinely believe it is a GOOD thing to do, a kind thing that serves a person, a group, an ideal, humanity, your own future, or whatever-else. It might be a bad thing. It might only be good in your head that your children, now in their 30s, are still locked in the basement for their own protection. And it might be bad in your head that you put your own health and happiness first when in fact that might be the best thing you could do for literally everyone around you -- coincidentally including yourself. Any word that implies a human behavior, emotion, decision or experience "is" vs. "is-not" a given thing, is inherently an oxymoron and must be interpreted, in its role of communication in the language of our culture, within the subjective or as part of a spectrum. IMO. And I think this matters because we define a great many things including relationships, justice, and more, by how we understand and apply our words.

The Amherst video: I had watched that some time ago. I recall thinking that I felt a bit bad for the student, only because he is a well spoken young man with a brain and I believe that he genuinely wants to BE good and DO good. It is a difficult situation to be in, in today's world: nearly everything cultural says live for the day and yourself, except the things that say you're so privileged you don't know jack but first-world problems. Yes of course, but still here we are, we have to operate based on the experience we have. The author is saying if you really want to help someone, "give up your college here," so some poorer person can have it, then you're giving away something of yours not just something that'd be someone else's. The point is totally valid, objectively, gods the socialists wanting to "give away other peoples' stuff" is obnoxious, heh. But it's unfeasible and really, the kid honestly just wants to 'do the right thing' and making that like "the only option" does not seem just. If I said I wanted to help the overall cause of homeless veterans someone telling me "move out and become homeless so someone else can have your house" doesn't seem like a reasonable answer which I feel is the analogy to what that young man was told. It is difficult to know what is the right thing sometimes. I spent the entire day Sunday reading about rape and alleged rape and I swear I feel I know and believe less about it, and have more ambivalence about it and its definition and what is 'right' on the topic, than I did before. One thing is clear though: the ridiculous notion of "a rape culture" being the US has absolutely no reality or sanity when compared to the ACTUAL rape cultures such as those this thread topic overlaps with and which mysteriously are treated completely differently than the topic and behavior is when the alleged perpetrators are locals instead.

I would humbly suggest that the difference, for the young woman -- using the alleged original phrase "will trade racists for refugees" -- is that currently, she is not feeding, housing and clothing the racists. And their children and friends. So it is not really that she "has" the racists in order to make that trade in the first place, right.

Is it certain that the girl with the sign was not intending to say the opposite of what it seems? Because when I saw it, I actually grinned and thought, "Well I suppose that is why politics is getting the support it is lately." Because, you know, it is like saying that people may be wrong (racist) but at least their behavior is protecting their people as a side effect (if the people being excluded due to racism are often accused of rape). And then I realized she'd said it backward and implied she wanted to bring rapists IN while handing over racists which is the opposite of what I thought she meant at first. But is it clear to her, are you sure?

I read tons on this over the years. Most has fallen from my brain alas. Hydroponic is cool but a lot of work. A lot of electricity. A lot of chems. I gave in eventually and just bought a bloody Aerogarden instead of dealing with the hassle of it all. Then I bought five more. Because anything worth doing is worth overdoing. I put them all away and then about once every 18 months, I dig them out for 6 months. I do organic gardening, or did until recently when obnoxious health issues started interfering, so it was really only used for soft clean lettuce-ish stuff we made lots of salads with. Tomatoes and peppers, which can be grown in that in limited form, I'd rather grow for real out back since I have two each large 24" and 32" high standing cinderblock gardens. Anything that grows underground is out for hydro of course. The fish idea if you have property and energy for it, is a good one if you're looking for long term. Tilapia are freshwater, tasty white, small, breed insanely (to the point I think it might be against laws to have over a certain number females or something like that), and might be an option. This could help get you part of what's needed for the plants. By far the most interesting thing in this topic for me is the LED approach and an air-spray rather than water. As it turns out, vastly less electricity and light is needed than suspected. You might read up on the vertical LED farms already being used for garden veggies -- you might even be able to visit one, they are around the US too, to see what it's like. This is very different than super bright lights and chemfoods in water like the original hydro stuff.

A playlist I made for my dad of some acapella (except this song!) music I dig, on youtube. He's a Country & Western guy, so after the first couple there's a few country (some humor), and then a few Christmas songs. Hmmn. Actually the auto-video plugin in the forum or youtube does something odd. So, the playlist is But the song I wanted to share is Lindsey Stirling on the violin and Pentatonix on the acapella (except also on cello) and Imagine Dragons wrote the song, "Radioactive"

Once edu became a corporate construct, so it became vastly more difficult to get a job without having a degree, even puppetry (and its tens of thousands of loan debt) became preferable to nothing. That's a given here in the US that the hard sciences need first year (sometimes two) edu that will compensate for what they didn't get prior. Oh, I always called that metaphysics. LOL. Statistics is another example of this by the way. But there is kind of a big schism in stats in terms of how people think it should be taught. This rather opened my eyes to something I'd never considered before. For any given topic -- well the ones that aren't merely theoretical anyway -- there is the tools side of it (e.g. the math) and there is the application side of it (the logic). Now, the logic may determine the math approach. But they can still be separate. In the case of stats, if you teach it conceptually, it is like teaching people "How to think" or "how to measure in context." For example, you can ask a question for stats: what do people have for lunch? If you know math, you can hand out a questionnaire and do all kinds of fun math things with the results. But if you know the concept-in-context, you know that the detail of that questionnaire is an entire topic all its own, and where you hand it out, to whom, and when, and more, is also an entire topic all its own, and all the confounding factors and so on are huge issues, and in the end, the math you finally apply is frankly trivial as heck -- and there is software to do the harder parts of it. It's vastly more important for anybody "designing and applying" statistics to understand the concepts and context, than to be a math expert. Math is merely the tools. You don't have to know how to build an electric lathe to be a carpenter. But because our culture did not have tools for math like this until recently, math always had to be the primary edu for stats -- there was no choice -- because someone had to do it, and someone had to decide what was to be done, so that was the statistician. But mathematicians are not, actually, always the ideal personalities to do all the other critical roles of statistician, much of which, in order to absorb that context, are actually closer to "almost" social skills -- let's just say "awareness" of a lot of subtleties in culture, human interaction, sociology and psychology and so on. So when the rubber hits the road on stats, unless the question is merely in a lab or on rats, I'd rather have someone educated conceptually than someone educated primarily as a mathematician. To me the interesting part of this is that it's cultural progress -- the availability of more tools in an iPhone app than an advanced government scientist could have fit into a giant room in 1950 -- that has even made it possible to shift this focus (from math to context in stats) -- to put tools as "support resources in the background" instead of making the tools the primary study. I think it's an interesting study but should be avocational. Much like studies that are all about how to plan weddings, vacations, etc.: these are trade-school stuff, not university stuff, or should be. Lovely timing: yesterday I got an email from corp HR announcing a women's focus group and then announcing that now that it existed, we could all meet and form groups and projects and -- and I wrote my boss (a man) and said, please tell me this is not required professionally or personally. He said no it wasn't, but he'd heard good things about it and I should try it. I told him I'd been over-exposed to women's groups my whole life and would rather clean the cat box than sit through one more. This was probably an over-share. (Gods spare me the only thing worse than women running colleges: women running HR.) I adore women, but in group they have that "emergent property" rather like children do, where more than three of them become exponential, not additional. (Yes, I know I am a woman. I wouldn't change it (especially since it supports my carnal appreciation for manly-men. And I'm kind of a hippy.) It doesn't make me required to think any certain way about any certain thing though!) If there is a course of study DESPERATELY NEEDED and that should be absolutely first-year required for EVERY degree -- and expected to be modeled throughout the college experience -- it is the ability to respect and hold "civil debate." Seriously the people in colleges starting with professors often behave like 12 year olds. Emotionally disturbed obviously under-parented 12 year olds. When I was in school people would not even have held a conversation with anybody behaving like that and they would be considered too irrational to take seriously. Yet today they are professors, and editors.

John Taylor Gatto has a book online called the secret history of education in america that is really interesting -- it was free when I read it. The first eight chapters get you to the point of total paranoia -- it's a bigger picture than anything today. I found it interesting because in every chapter I felt like, what the heck does this have to do with the topic, and then by the end of the chapter I felt like WOW... I didn't know. It's not a pretty picture. I work in the edu publishing industry. Talk about everything politically correct. Nutrition has not only been killing the west since the late 70s and that Bright Idea of the government, but it will continue doing so for a century at this rate because the stuff that was actually BS in 1981 is still in textbooks teaching the people who will be doctors, nurses, and nutritionists (what the stupid people in high school do for careers: nutrition and HR) in another 5 or even 10 years. Some topics don't have a lot of room for either PC or idiocy though. Chemistry is still pretty difficult up close.

Not my area of expertise, but, heart rate isn't what I'd measure with a breathing exercise. It just doesn't really matter in this context I think. And if you want to bring it down as an overall average, cardio or weight-bearing that becomes cardio will be faster. But there's plenty of breathing and chi exercises you can have fun with. Search this forum for pranayama and you'll likely find at least some.

I don't know Europe's market. In the US, corporate vampirism is the only thing that seems to expand the last half century here -- I do think corps become Inorganics, in the Casteneda sense. We have a worldwide (legal) immigration system so I assume Europe does too, can't be just Muslims surely. Maybe they are the only ones that are such a visible PITA? The quantity of money any government (particularly mine) spends on other things esp. warfare is so out of this world, that the money spent on every kind of social aid we have is a pretty small slice comparatively. (Not to be confused with the very substantial money drain related to -illegal- immigration, in several areas.) I can't even imagine having Euro tax levels and then the size of the immigrant problem they have. People think the Tea Party is extreme in the USA but I think if we had Germany's level of problem the TP would be a bigger group than the Republicans.

In some areas where I post, acquaintances of mine keep going on about how person-X (Trump is the favorite) is pushing "hate speech." I keep asking what specifically is an example of this, so that we can look at it in context for consideration. Instantly some emotional waffling, broad generalizations, the invocation of how surely I know that some people somewhere in the world somewhere in time (probably while setting fire to a church with a black congregation) is guilty of hate speech -- suddenly the 'measure' has changed from 'this specific person and a specific thing said' to 'somewhere someone somewhen' -- when it comes to attempting to focus on any actual examples, so that they would get intelligent discussion and the benefit of context, they can't. Or they start to, but it turns out they're using something completely misquoted, and then they're using it completely out of context, and even when this is demonstrated, they just flare into that generalization again. I'm coming to the conclusion that every time someone says something ELSE is pushing 'hate speech' (or some variant thereof) that it is more a bully tactic, using generalization to beat down specific conversation.