Taomeow

The hurricane/tropical storm is a couple hours away from us per latest predictions, but some fire hydrants in downtown decided to help it along ahead of schedule. Video: https://packaged-media.redd.it/k703vjwl1bjb1/pb/m2-res_1280p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1692572400&s=6d053c7ae8deeab4e038fffffacb9f5afa090978#t=0

P.S. And quite a lot is either stolen or absorbed by the black budged programs, looks like. E.g., the Pentagon has failed its 7th audit in a row and in this one, as well as the previous ones, couldn't account for sometimes hundreds of billions and sometimes for trillions. $236 billion dissolved in improper payments in federal programs in 2023. $200 billion of the pandemic relief money disappeared in fraud/abuse. And so on, a billion here, a billion there, no one knows where. Trickle up economics.

Other countries, the Federal Reserve, mutual funds, and other entities and individuals, Social Security, Military Retirement Fund, Medicare, and other retirement funds. Of the foreign countries, the most $$ is owed to Japan, next to China, then the United Kingdom and, amazingly enough, No. 4 is the Cayman Islands and No.5, Luxembourg. Apparently there's intragovernmental debt and public debt (also created by the government), and a lot of it is hard to understand because there's treasuries created when revenue exceeds spendings which lend money to other treasuries which spend more than they get, and as a result the government somehow winds up owing money to itself rather than the taxpayers. I don't think I am smart enough or lucky enough to become influential enough to figure out how to get rich off any of it in any practical terms, like creating agencies that spend money studying the impact of tequila shots on quals' and squids' promiscuity (I'm not kidding and I'm not making it up), so I don't bother getting into it in depth.

When people watch "the news" or read articles secretly and criminally infused with gain-of-function enhanced rabies virus, droplets of saliva in its virtual state fly in their face and get inhaled. This is how virtual rabies is contracted. Virtual rabies is less deadly for a period of time than the purely biological variety, but far more contagious (due to virtual human to human transmission) -- especially when one's cognitive immunity is drastically compromised by early exposure. It becomes more virulent and deadly when an epidemic breaks out, although the exact global mortality rate is hard to evaluate due to multifactorial manifestations which often include rabies-induced delusional social agendas and result, on a mass scale, in dangerous behaviors of seeking what unaffected healthy individuals normally avoid and avoiding what they seek. The single most beneficial mass vaccination -- against rabies -- could potentially solve the problem. The shots are notoriously painful and about 40 of them are required for stopping the disease, but if they were mandated, they could save countless lives and mental health of billions. Albeit the measure seems drastic, doing nothing is often conductive to even more detrimental outcomes. Psychological side effects can be severe, so qualified psychiatric help, whether voluntary or involuntary, would have to be administered on a mass scale alongside such a campaign. Yearly boosters would be a must.

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Yeah, I also thought I knew everything when I was 14. But I was not supposed to argue with adults at the holiday table, so I didn't -- except about alcohol, we had the ages old tradition of giving children small amounts of alcohol during celebrations, from whatever age they wanted it, and I usually appealed to my mom who was in favor of it against my dad who was against it, and then the guests would divide in two groups, one supporting and one opposing children's drinking habits. (I believe it's a sensible tradition in a family with no alcohol problems history, don't know about the other kind). By now the technology to repurpose nuclear waste does indeed exist (unlike that for waste from newer stuff) and it's a matter of public acceptance which in its turn is a matter of which industries gain the upper hand selling their version of what's clean and what's dirty, which is a matter of which politicians get a bigger slice of their respective pies.

We were introduced to the tradition of thanksgiving dinners by our American relatives whom we found upon arriving -- my mom's cousin, then 70, her husband and three grown children. They didn't have any other relatives by the time we arrived, so we were it, and they proceeded to invite us to their thanksgiving dinner every year. Yes, the whole family gathered at the parental home, even though two of the children lived in other states. Our relatives turned out to be those wealthy liberals (rubbing shoulders with the Clintons at Martha's Vineyard, among other things) who are presently... wait, that's exactly the topic to be avoided. But it wasn't avoided at those dinners -- my radically antiliberal parents and the hosts kept mutually shocking each other with their political stances, but no blood was spilled and the tradition lasted for many years.

Mainstream media -- which some started calling legacy media to differentiate from independent sources and social media -- and I just heard another term applied to them, deliberate media -- is a tool of destruction of the mind. The mythologies they create and maintain on a daily basis overpower normal human cognition -- as they are designed to -- and render it permanently abnormal. In the 1960s, the KGB conducted a psychological experiment. Every day in the course of the experiment, they relentlessly bombarded a group of subjects with fear-based messages none of which were true or represented the actual facts about any real threats -- they were all made up, distorted, exaggerated, and so on. Upon concluding this phase of the experiment, they then presented the debunking data, facts to the contrary of what the earlier brainwashing suggested. What they discovered was that the brainwashing was irreversible and no amount of truth could shake the subjects out of their acquired fear-based beliefs, and it only took an average of 2 1/2 months to accomplish it. Irreversible cognitive damage was done -- hardly distinguishable from any other kind of severe brain damage impairing one's ability to think outside the imposed narrative if the emotion behind it was fear. Compared to today's brainwashing capabilities and their practical outcomes which are nothing short of phenomenal in the sheer number of brain-damaged individuals they produce and the depth and breadth of the damage, those KGB ghouls were angels of mercy. After 2 1/2 months, they stopped.

Holy Fahrenheit 451!

Yalta, Soviet Union, August 1940, i.e. 10 months before the war. It wasn't yet the city where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin would be dividing the post-WWII world in 1945, just a resort on the Black Sea where fashion girls were ahead of their time. This is from someone's family album, the woman on the left is their grandmother. Like many women then and there, she could sew.

Wow. I've known Alexander Rosenbaum back in the day, he was a med school classmate of my best friend before he became famous as a "bard" (as we called a then-thriving cultural phenomenon of multitalented folks writing and performing their own songs). At the time he was best known for the songs he stylized to 1920s local counterpart of the "gangster rap" and classical Russian romance. You are amazingly open and multicultural in your musical explorations... a true polymath!

You want a downvote for this? Not from me you ain't getting it. Not just "the kingdom is within" is correct but taoist traditionalists have gods for internal organs up the yin-yang, for chrissake.

Himalayan Lynx ( (Lynx lynx isabellinus) Photo Credit: CGNP, Camera trap clicks. Chitral Gol National Park, Pakistan

Kudos to you. Anecdotal evidence regarding a family member dying from something the pharma likes to attribute to smoking is not very reliable though. My mom started smoking at the same age and quit at 83. Now, at 91, her health is unfortunately not that great -- but nothing is wrong of the things commonly attributed to smoking. A lot of things are wrong though that are attributable to the addictive meds she's been put on by her doctors. No quitting that. Most elderly folks who would have self-medicated with smoking back then are now routinely turned into heavy drug addicts by the new paradigm. Smoking, at least, preserved the dopamine receptors (a safeguard against Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, senile dementia) while the new paradigm is all about demolishing them.

There's a modern counterpart I would apply to men and women alike: if you can smell their aftershave, deodorant, perfume before you're at an intimate dancing distance, don't dance with them. They stink.

They have been attacked millions of times, that's why they need to know how to fight. E.g. Shaolin (a Buddhist place) was destroyed a dozen times throughout history -- by emperors, armed bandits and looters, the red guards during the cultural revolution, you name it. In most cases peaceful monks were killed, which prompted the ones who came after them and rebuilt the temple to start learning to fight. Chenjiagou, the birthplace of taijiquan as we know it, was attacked and looted and peasants were mistreated so many times and so brutally that there's even a proverb in China, don't remember it verbatim but the essence is, there's two things to fear in this world -- the pits of hell and the fields of Chenjiagou. It's not violence, it's self-defense that is behind the idea of a spiritual person having the right and, in the case of defending the helpless, responsibility to know how to fight and to fight when necessary. "Non-violence" is an empty set, as a mathematician might put it. What constitutes violence? If one is attacked by a murderer, is defending one's life "violence?" How about defending a child? Everyone and everything that is being threatened with annihilation? How about planet Earth if it gets in the way of some nefarious, demonic entities bent on unleashing extinction? "Non-violence" would be a crime against humanity under many special circumstances. Peaceful folks might train for such circumstances -- they are not the ones unleashing violence, but to be someone who can oppose it is fully compatible with both high spirituality, high moral standards, and common sense. Yes, it happens to everyone, welcome to the internet. They don't say that "95% of everything on the internet is bullshit" for nothing. Take this maxim seriously and don't get too frustrated -- the remaining 5% is gold, seek and you shall find. My understanding of ling comes from my taoist teacher. It was translated to me as "supernatural intelligence." The term means nothing of course without a more extended explanation of the concept. But the practice that is aimed at getting it back into the body is not explainable in words, only in -- well, practice.

Conceptually it's akin to Archimedes's idea: "Give me a place to stand and rest my lever on, and I can move the Earth." The taiji classics version is, "Four ounces move a thousand pounds." (I think I wrote once that I suspect Archimedes, when he traveled to Egypt to study at the library of Alexandria, may have encountered some taoist teachers. And taoist teachers -- as well as Greek philosophers for that matter -- were big on cultivating both the mind and the body.) In taiji, "the place to stand" is rooting skills, and "levers" rest on that -- positioned and applied to "a force of a thousand pounds" provided by your opponent. (I've never moved a thousand pounds, let alone the Earth... but guys twice my size, half my age -- quite procedurally. If it was an inanimate object this heavy -- not a chance. That's because an inanimate object is not giving me any force, I've nothing to borrow. But a human opponent just begs you to apply a taiji lever to the force he's graciously supplying.) I don't know what "the energetic aspects of cultivation" mean, since I don't see qi as energy. Energy may or may not have qi; qi may or may not have energy. Qi used in taiji is more like a configuration of change... and believe me, that is way more mysterious and complex than "energy." By "that" in your last sentence, I'm not sure I know what you're referring to, would appreciate it if you specify.

Ling is a shen. Something qi dissipates into in many everyday situations. Cultivational practices of some taoist schools aim to get it back into the body. It is part of everything when it is strong and hasn't dissipated, but it is not in any way specific to the eight energies. For the authentic traditional take, you may want to read some taiji classics, in particular The Songs of Taiji: http://www.scheele.org/lee/classics.html

P.S. When you read like Speedy Gonzalez, you can misread stuff in English too.

Thank you. OK. Tuna is a fish. Also taoist breathing techniques. Pinyin is limited, and my Chinese literacy is even more limited. You score! Still, taoist breathing techniques are a tool for mastering some types of taoist meditation, one of many, but not taoist meditation. Taoist meditation is known as zuowang ("sitting forgetting"), jìngzuò ("quiet sitting"), shǒuyī ("guarding the one), xīnzhāi ("fasting the heart-mind"), bàopǔ ("embracing simplicity") and so on -- depending on the school, the method, the stage of the practice (!!!!) and its goal. Also sprach Taomeow.

Tuina is a massage. And taoist meditation has nothing to do with it. Breathing and meditation is like watermelons and navigation. Yes, both have something to do with water. It's true that watermelons can float. But this doesn't mean a watermelon is a cruiser.

That's a good approach. I hold in rather low regard teachers who start talking taiji esoterica with beginners before they get the basics down pat. (And "the basics" are huge -- a long learning curve!) When the student in the video tells the master that "it's like coming up against a wall" that reminds me of some "high end" push-hands encounters -- a wall, a tank, you name it, an unstoppable force advancing on you. Though I must confess the opposite impressed me more when I had the good fortune to deal with it -- a cloud, a swath of fog, a nothing... nothing to hang your hat on, I mean your skill. I would like to see how a wall or a tank would fare advancing on a cloud.

I have only watched it diagonally and recognized some of the ideas as legit, but I was surprised that throughout the presentation talking about taiji, no taiji distance with peng-lu-ji-an dynamics has been demonstrated, everything is happening at the kung fu/hard MA distance. At 9:40 he says, "original Yang taiji understanding of peng-lu-ji-an involves manipulation of qi that is outside your body." (Could have thrown in cai-lie-zhou-kao too while at it -- why mention peng-lu-ji-an in passing and never show what they are?..) A more meaningful way to put it -- and not in the "original Yang taiji" but in any of the five major styles -- is that it involves manipulation of the qi of your opponent -- or his li if he ain't big on cultivated qi. It's not some mysterious qi outside your body you are manipulating in a tuishou practice/fight situation. The borrowing from the opponent is the cornerstone of this art, but he keeps talking about manipulating his own qi. Do you agree with his take?