Taomeow

Kudos for investigate further! People who jump to conclusions seldom eat well! So, as I mentioned in my original recipe, there's many ways to modify it, streamline, take shortcuts. Later I specified which one shortcut not to take, but this does not invalidate the earlier premise -- shortcuts can be taken. One major shortcut is the length of time of preparing bone broth. Yes, there's the ideal loooong preparation time, but how much better is 48 hours than 8 hours? Maybe 15% better. We're dealing with the Law of Diminishing Returns here. Eight hours is plenty. You'll get good stuff. Well, maybe you won't extract each and every mineral you could if you cooked for 24 or 48 hours, but we're gourmets here, not gluttons, we don't need to get greedy. 24+ hours -- that's when the tribe is at the risk of not getting enough nourishment during a harsh winter, or when the broth is made commercially and greed is a factor. For regular home cooking -- well, I've made excellent bone broths in 4 hours too. So, no need to overcomplicate a simple task toward perfection when perfection is only very slightly better than "imperfect but really, really good." However you arrange your timing, between 4 and 8 hours (shooting for 8 if you can, not sweating it if you can't) will do the job. And if it's a longer, involved affair, then I'd make a large batch and freeze it to have on hand for future needs.

Bones, meat and vegetables cooked together in a slow cooker will yield meat-vegetable porridge with bones in it. If that's what you're after, you won't be disappointed. But for a stew, you still want to make the broth first, separately. (Or skip it altogether and just use water.) A bone broth takes at least eight times longer than a stew, regardless of whether you use a slow cooker or stovetop. So if you combine both steps into one, you are shooting either for a bone broth eight times undercooked, or a stew eight times overcooked, depending on your preference. Just sayin'.

I am not a fan of slow cookers, but my overall leanings are taoist so it's no surprise -- my culinary creations are all about timing, and different ingredients ask for different preparation times in order to reveal their best flavor and best texture. (So, CT, the "thank you" was for the addition of the tallow. Yes to that. ) I used to have one, it did save time and effort, but somehow everything cooked in it wound up tasting the same. And pressure cookers I'm actually afraid of, after one attacked me many moons ago with rapid fire of pressurized oatmeal. The valves got clogged, the pressure rose way above what it's meant to be, then the valves got unclogged and started spinning, shooting streams of above-boiling-point-hot oatmeal in a perfect circle that, unfortunately, covered not only all the kitchen but, through the open door, was hitting the living-room as well. I had to approach the cooker crawling on my belly from the living-room to the kitchen, under tight streams of fiery oatmeal hissing with extreme hostility, in order to turn the damn thing off, but this did nothing for another twenty minutes or so, whereupon the pressure finally subsided. I spent the whole night washing oatmeal off the walls and furniture. I never owned a pressure cooker ever again, and I don't care how advanced they have become since. Better safe than sorry. Oh, and I don't eat oatmeal anymore.

One of my family recipes for the stew (just the basic one, there's many versions): 1. Make bone broth in advance (if you make a large batch, you can freeze what you're not using for later), using marrow bones and adding, an hour before done, a large onion, criss-cross cut to the center but not all the way, with skin on (cleaned at the ends); a large carrot, also cut lengthwise but not all the way; a generous amount of celery, parsley, and a parsnip if you have it on hand, or a piece of celery root; a couple of bay leaves and some crushed (better than ground) peppercorns. Once ready, strain, discard everything that's been cooking in it (except for the bone marrow, which it is a good idea to retrieve and add to the stew, or eat on the spot with some salt, as I usually do) and have the broth handy. 2. Wash meat very thoroughly (any meat you have on hand will work), cut it into chunks, not too small, not too large. Sautee some onions in a skillet, add the meat, stir-fry them together for a few minutes, transfer everything to a pot. Splash the skillet with your broth and bring to a boil to pick up all the caramelized juices, add to the pot. 3. Pour enough broth and then some over your meat to cover it, bring to a boil, cook on low for some 30 minutes. 4. On top of it all, add cut vegetables -- the ones that work well are potatoes, sweet peppers, and my favorite addition to this stew -- eggplant. Anything else vegetable that you like, you can use too. Cover, stew it all together till the toughest of your vegetables are soft. 5. The only way to screw this up (provided you don't burn what you're preparing in the skillet) is by oversalting it, so for a beginner I would suggest a safe strategy, since I never know any proportions (an experienced cook just "knows" and uses no recipes, but that comes with, well, experience). Ten minutes before you're going to finish cooking, add some salt, a very conservative amount on the not-enough side, to the pot, stir it all to intermix, and then, ten minutes later, taste a sample of the stew. If you find it undersalted, repeat, with a small amount. If you still managed to oversalt it, that's when your hot water comes in, you can save the pot by adding that and cooking for a couple minutes, but if you don't need to use it, don't, the savory stew has none. This whole thing can also be simplified and streamlined of course, any ingredients can be omitted safely and many can be added safely. Good luck! By the way, don't use "vegetable oil." Either use coconut oil in this recipe (to sautee your onions and meat) or ghee or a mix of both (my favorite). Good luck!

The "sleeping Buddha"position is not buddhist in its origin, but taoist, comes from taiji (the supreme ultimate, not taijiquan the martial art), and a better version of it is reputed to be the pose in which taoist immortals occasionally sleep for indefinite stretches of time when they have nothing better to do or when they practice sleeping arts -- up to four hundred to one thousand years. Let me respectfully correct the buddha who got a few details of this pose wrong: 1.The bottom arm should not be compressed by your neck or head, this impairs circulation. Instead it has to be rounded naturally and rest near your cheek but not under it. It may need a small pillow of its own. The top arm is correct. 2. The top leg shouldn't overhang the bottom one, its foot should not be hanging unsupported because this, again, creates circulation difficulties. Instead, it has to be bent a bit more (not a bit less as is the case with the statue) than the bottom one, and the foot of the top leg must rest just above the ankle of the bottom one. 3. The part the buddha got right is that he is positioned on a flat unyielding surface. You won't be able to pull it off on a spring mattress, e.g.., the whole structure will sag and you won't be comfortable. So, this is for a surface as firm as what the statue rests on. Very little padding, only enough for you to have some buffer between the hard surface and your own bones so there's no uncomfortable pressure. 4. Instead of the arm under the neck/head, a sausage-shaped hard(ish) pillow goes under the neck, or the kind that supports both the neck and the head (indented in the middle, a bit toroid). A Chinese immortal would in all likelihood just use a wooden log under the neck. No need to be this extreme, but the pillow must have structural integrity and leave your face well alone. Either a buckwheat husks or silk fiber stuffed pillow works well (and, in my experience, nothing else).

Edit: original response (to zeros) too gloomy for Thanksgiving. Will save for later.

Promiscuous = dissatisfied, but promiscuity does not engender satisfaction, only more dissatisfaction = more promiscuity. How odd. Not odd at all though if you consider the fact that sex is the only outlet for human closeness left a modern "civilized" person. We have sexualized human contact, a vital need -- which is nowhere near "always sexual" in normal human reality. Most indigenous people, e.g., sleep together in a non-sexual way -- all their lives, regardless of whether they engage in sex with the people they sleep with. Most importantly, mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers (and, at an age above infancy, also fathers, uncles, grandfathers and brothers) sleep together with infants, so the developing and learning human being ( learning through feelings, through the whole body surface and whole brain, mind, proprioception, soul surface -- toward meanings these experiences continuously translate into internally -- through the whole growing, unfolding consciousness) never sleeps alone (in addition to never being left alone during waking hours), never feels disconnected. Thus the life-defining need for physical closeness to a loving, protecting body does not get frustrated at the developmental level, something that always translates into this need later reemerging all thwarted and unrecognizable, in a totally inappropriate and misunderstood context. Misunderstood and mishandled because of the gaps in the sensorium -- and in consciousness -- unnatural upbringings leave forever. This sleeping-together between non-spouses is always asexual in normal natural circumstances, and people raised like that from infancy don't commit sexual crimes, don't molest children and don't understand the point of promiscuity. In fact, they don't even see the human body the same way our "civilized" folks do. Anthropologists tried showing some Playboy pics to members of one such tribe, registering reactions. There was zero reaction. These people just didn't understand that they are supposed to get sexually aroused or generate lewd jokes and propositions from looking at a young naked body in a "provocative" pose. What's a provocative pose?.. Depends on the level of frustration of the "provocatee." There's islamic countries where a woman can't show her face lest she provoke a man, and also her leg is cut off below the ankle by her clothes because the ankle, let alone anything above, is also too provocative. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers couldn't be in public without stockings, by the way. The fancy among them couldn't be in public without gloves. And so on... Why don't our men get all excited from seeing the back of a woman's neck, the way countless generations of Japanese men used to? Why don't we find "golden lilies," foot-binding-mutilated Chinese feet, particularly sexual? -- they used to be a must for a woman who wanted to sexually function as a woman in any social position, wife or courtesan. It's all about fucking conditioning, but it's not all about fucking.

Absolutely not. As I said earlier, compassion is intensely personal -- and it is not, unlike empathy, a fleeting sentiment, not "milk of human kindness light, low fat, homogenized," nor an abstract concept that you learn from books or gurus. It is a feeling and a doing that cause you to put your own life on the line, as the result of feeling and in the process of doing. Skin in the game, man. If you have none, you are not going to have compassion. Skin in the game is not selfish -- it is the organ with which you can feel compassion, and without this organ, you can't. You can only intellectualize the concept, not live it, if you are not personally in the thick of it. What gets you into the thick of it is who you are. I've encountered a lot more examples of compassion missing from the actual real-life world of abstract peddlers thereof than the other way around. Alas. Many, many of them go by some Platonic ideal of morality and trample whoever doesn't fit in underfoot without even noticing. Compassion can't be learned. It's like money in the bank. If there is, there is. If there isn't, there isn't. Empathy can't be learned either, by the way. Has to do with brain defects, a deficiency of mirror neurons that help us get an idea of what the other person feels. I believe they must be developmental, those defects. The brain of a person raised by non-empathetic folks may or may not form properly to have access to this ability. Some still manage to develop it, many don't. Compassion, however, is way more complex and at the same time way more simple. It hits you like a ton of bricks but then causes you to act rather than just sit back and feel or analyze or meditate or what have you. What's there to analyze when a ton of bricks hits you?.. Or if it never does -- what do you know about it?.. I mean the generic you, of course.

I humbly disagree. Any admin deed that would effectively kick in the where-the-sun-don't-shine anyone resorting to ad hominem by way of an argument should not only go unpunished but, instead, be generously rewarded. I would even pay a small monthly sum (if more bums agreed, it could add up!) to the mods for not letting anyone get away with things like "Absolutely deluded views you have!" instead of "Your views don't coincide with mine" or suchlike. Seriously. Not because I take offense (I am not that easy to offend personally -- though I do feel profoundly offended when vulnerable groups are attacked on the basis of racial, national, religious, gender, age, etc., discrimination, and are put on the receiving end of hate speech -- this I indeed find profoundly offensive.) But because I quite spontaneously and inevitably lose interest toward anything else anyone who resorts to ad hominem attacks has to say. I can't help it. This just kills my curiosity (curiosity didn't kill the cat, ad hominem killed the cat's curiosity is the real story, at least in the case of this cat). It's like a signature "I'm going to attack you personally if I happen to disagree with your views" that gets invisibly attached to their name, and I wind up not reading any further -- and not just in a particular thread where it occurred. One might say I impose my private sanctions for this. No big deal. But if a mod gets them to reconsider, then I resume reading. So, I'd reward that. As for splitting -- I don't have a strong opinion, believe it or not. I don't have to have a strong opinion about "everything," so about this, I dunno. Up to the admin I guess...

Yes, it is universal, but I believe it is intensely personal. Here's a few illustrations:

But hardly anyone except the splitee notices anyway.

Dawei split off this thread from another, where I merely responded to something Hillary-Trump, something that purportedly made a non-supporter of Hillary a misogynistic women hater -- I objected to that, tried to explain why exactly. Wasn't planning on launching this as a separate topic, I damn well know better by now. Of course got pulled in, having inadvertently become the instigator, but now I pull myself out. Thanks everyone, but my time is not made of rubber and I can't stretch it any further toward having a "bless you" to every sneeze. Carry on to wherever the spirit moves you without me. Profound thanks to those who get it. You know who you are and I love you.

Ah yes. I don't have to imagine, I remember. I can't prove it of course and won't try, but there's no harm in mentioning it I hope. I'm not supposed to have accessible genetic memories according to the paradigm that passes for "scientific" these days, but I do. For me, it's not a belief or a fantasy that I miss, it's real human life, miracle of miracles, which I remember living, countless times. That's why what's going on today with us humans hurts me more than it does the scientifically sanctioned genetic amnesiac.

Amen, sister. A lifetime of impossible choices... that's what women live. Not to brag, to illustrate the point further -- my IQ can't even be calculated (it is literally "off the chart" into the area where it is impossible to quantify) but ask of me to use that toward a "career" that I must combine with raising two kids and taking care of absolutely everything life-related and, not being a machine that peak performs 80 hours a week on no sleep, having to sacrifice quality somewhere -- guess where I would have to sacrifice it for my "career" to be "successful." Hell no. I'm not dumb enough to buy into trying to please patriarchy. I'll have it remain displeased with me, thank you. Zhuangzi's "useless tree," I will remain until it rewards me for my being a tree, not for the tables and chairs it could have made out of me if I "tried harder."

No, quite the opposite. Yes, she could have been a bigger boss if she wasn't a woman, but all those spots were occupied by actual males, and there was a glass ceiling, but that's not what I'm driving at. What I'm driving at is, in a real society (matriarchal until the unnatural intervention that changed it), she should have been in the position where her choice between her career and her child would have been rewarded by society if she chose her child. She kicked me out at the age of 11 months for getting sick too much, at a crucial juncture in her then-budding career where staying at home and nurturing her child to health and thriving would have been punished by society -- forever, for the rest of her life. So she chose the reward, and got it. However, in a parallel universe, where she is rewarded rather than punished for her role as a mother, she would have been a wonderful mother. She could have used her talents to create happiness and love and peace -- every second of every day there's demand on a woman's natural creativity and intellect and heart to create that. But in this one, it would have only generated misery, frustration and poverty if she chose that. That's what I'm talking about all along.

To add another?.. To your "why" -- because they are women of patriarchy and the only attractive spots to fill in a patriarchy are patriarchal spots. The only pigeonholes that come with money, recognition, rank, respect -- are patriarchal spots. Women, given the "freedom" to fill in those spots, take it, because the alternative is not nice and nurturing, the alternative is to be objects (not people!) handled by those who occupy them. "Insult those women that make this choice" -- how is stating the fact that women take patriarchal spots in patriarchy when patriarchy makes some of those spots available to women but still remains patriarchy as the only template for a desirable position in society insulting to women? It's a fact. They have only two "freedoms" granted by patriarchy: to be given a chance to serve as honorary males, or to be left in the position of marginalized females. How is it insulting to women to notice? I couldn't help noticing if I tried. My mother worked as an engineer, and was exceptionally good at it, so good (always and under all circumstances the top performer) and so fiercely competitive that she would have become a big boss if... well, nevermind the speculations, let me stick to the facts. She was a minor boss over some 30 people, most of them males. She lived a professional life indistinguishable from that of a professional who is male. Nothing she would have done in the invisibility of her other role, that of mother, would have earned her any points. Money, fulfillment, recognition, admiration for her talent, doing things the right way because she says so and she is the competent one -- all these things came only as the benefits of the patriarchal spot she took, so the other spot, that of mother -- guess what? She was very smart, and society has always been very clear on where her rewards lie, in which role she has a chance to get rewarded for her dedication. How is it insulting to her if her daughter happens to have noticed?.. It is what it is. For every woman in her position. A position in a patriarchy. How is it a tired cliché to put two and two together? Women in a patriarchy do not seek women's roles because patriarchy has made those roles, women acting as women, undesirable, unrewarded, and has made women occupying them into objects of handling (not people) of low value and quality. So the only way a woman in patriarchy can avoid that fate (which to many throughout history was worse than death) is by taking on a male, patriarchal drive, profession, performance, goals and reaching for male, patriarchal accomplishments, the only kind a patriarchy rewards. How is it that men (and too many women descended from thousands of years of patriarchy, not of their "instincts" which have been suppressed into nonexistence with extreme prejudice) manage not to get it I used to marvel. How can otherwise smart people be so incredibly dumb?.. But now I understand. They don't get it because to get it is punished and to not get it is rewarded. We now have 96 genders with associated pronouns to address people who think they have "chosen" to belong to those genders freely. Freely chosen. Uh-huh.

That's exactly what patriarchy has always been about and that's exactly what is wrong with it. Conquer nature, eliminate nature, replace nature. Know the gnostic myth? Gaia, mother goddess earth, gave birth to live creatures, and as an experiment, also made synthetic ones, animated but artificial (and therefore devoid of the soul -- a natural developmental history from the sacred source -- the mother goddess -- that soul really is... that's all it is, which is why there's no way to "make" one any other way.) These animated semi-machines, which the gnostics called archons, were meant to be assigned certain mechanical tasks. However, being devoid of souls, and therefore unencumbered by love, morality, compassion, the sheer joy and thrill of aliveness, genetic memory and all those other inconveniences that come with the soul, they managed their mechanical tasks very well -- better in fact than live creatures with souls and true feelings -- so eventually they decided they are better equipped to manage the human society than humans themselves. To install patriarchy was their central managerial idea, born out of hatred for the mother who deprived them of what she gave her natural children -- the soul. Hatred for the mother/mother nature, and hatred for the soul, and hatred for people who have that. That's what underlies patriarchy in the gnostic view. (Which I find very close to what really happened.) Will they prevail? Locally and temporarily, they already have. But in the grand scheme of things... I wouldn't hold my breath.

They actually can, if they ever decide (as you seem to fear) that males are superfluous. Parthenogenesis is quite within human reach and has already been accomplished successfully in a number of mammalian species (in addition to occasionally happening spontaneously). The catch being, the offspring of parthenogenesis can be only female! Nature made it possible for women to beget women, but impossible for men to beget men. Sexist to the core, mother nature is... "Clearly" is open to debate. Let me try reiterating. Patriarchy is bad and matriarchy is good not because men are bad and women are good. See, I'm a pragmatist, a taoist pragmatist at that, I look at the doings and their consequences, I hardly give a flying through a rolling about anything else. Patriarchy is bad because it has a shitty track record. A few thousand years and we've been not in a state of war for less than 5% of this time. 95% of the time since patriarchy replaced matriarchy we've had goodies we never had in the prior one million years: war, slavery, inequality, poverty, destruction of the environment, genocide on a scale unimaginable -- over and over and over again, and total evisceration of the human spirit in the service of what? -- war and profit, profit and war. And now? -- on the brink of extinction and getting closer by the minute. That doomsday clock that scientists keep pushing the handles on upon calculating, based on multiple factors -- facts of our way of life -- how long we've got left as a species currently stands at 2 1/2 minutes to midnight. That's not a "conspiracy theorist's" fantasy (with a nod to you-know-who-you-are), that's the general consensus of the leading minds studying our situation. What's our current situation as a species? Shitty. Never in matriarchy though. Not in a million years, and not a figurative million years but a literal one. No food for thought there? None? Just puffing up against a perceived threat to males from such -- let's be honest, marginal and inconsequential -- ideas as mine, derived from this fact and a bunch of others?.. Well, that sucks. Two and a half minutes. Not much hope you're leaving us, guys, not while you refuse to... well, refuse to backpedal and think about it without the adrenaline-testosterone screaming, "nothing to think about, anything negative about patriarchy is filthy feminism and we'll fight it to the death!" To the death of everybody, feminist, misogynist, sexist or saint, have you noticed that men, all men are in it too?..

Ah, that. That, my friend, was pulled by a dominant patriarchal baboon outta his ass. For a better idea, I highly recommend this book:

Xi Wangmu is one of my heroines, but the picture is of Quan Yin. Also known as Quan Shi Yin which means ‘The One Who Hears the Cries of the World.” When I get around to that manifesto, I'll be sure to include the ability to hear the cries of the world as the extension of the mother's ability to hear the cries of her infant, which immediately propels her to action (if she's normal that is -- the prevalent indoctrination of ages has been, at best, "let them cry or they will learn that they can get what they want by crying" -- meaning they will learn that they can have their normal natural needs fulfilled as they arise... totally unacceptable! You can't raise an acceptable member of our society without trauma-induced mind control, that's the prerequisite for "it all" "working..." but let me get back to what I was saying.) The action she takes is the epitome of matriarchy. She does not start a political party to "deal with" a crying baby. She does not put it to a vote and she, not the "majority," decides what to do -- and does it, immediately, asking no one's permission. She does not raise taxes toward investing into better earplugs for the most deserving ears. She does not slam the door shut so as to have some peace and quiet necessary for writing a philosophical tractate or a set of religious precepts along the lines of "spare the rod, spoil the child." In other words, she does not do anything patriarchal when she hears the cries of the infant and, in them, as a direct fractal continuation of them, the cries of the world. She does something matriarchal instead. Until patriarchy doesn't let her. Then she is forced to choose her options out of a total of one. She does something patriarchal instead. And we wind up with billions of patriarchal mothers who are neither fully patriarchs nor fully mothers. And billions of their neither-here-nor-there children. And therein lies our trouble...

Anastasia, don't use me as a springboard to launch into your hobbyhorse subjects. And don't try to control me by ascribing feelings to me I didn't proclaim. "I sense a lot of anger from you" is a manipulative and dishonest move behooving only a gaslighting sociopath. Don't fall for the seeming ease of dominating someone by telling them what they feel. Some people indeed are manipulable by this method, you can shame and belittle them easily by telling them what reprehensible emotions you "sense" about them. I am not one of them, so don't waste your energy playing this game with me. I've known too many players, professionals some of them, demons some others. I eat them for breakfast. Peacefully, with no anger. I don't ever get angry at my food. Edit: typo

No, those "other words" are in your head. Instead of putting them into my mouth that has never uttered them, ask me what I mean. Works better than getting angry at a fantom of an opera never written or performed. "Misandry card?" Don't have one. Patriarchy is no androphilia, it is humanophobia. The card is anti-patriarchal, not anti-male. Patriarchy is misogyny plus misandry. You can't raise a male whole, normal and happy by first damaging beyond repair the woman who will give birth to him. Matriarchy does not damage women -- and that's why it does not damage their sons. Patriarchy does. It's as simple as that. Edit: typo

Compassion is something most people have never experienced. Empathy, maybe. Empathy is fleeting and doesn't disrupt your own life. Compassion derails it completely. A power tremendously greater than self-preservation, self-interest, self-care, self-help, self-anything grabs hold of you, plucks you out of your life and crucifies you on the altar of devotion to the one you feel compassion for. I know what I'm talking about. Language is funny...

Welcome home again Welcome to the machine, son It's all right we know

Kimberly