Taomeow

I don't see the options to Edit or Hide anyone's posts but my own in that section anymore. Please look into that, venerable sages.

Oh... Thanks, Karen, I guess I suppressed that memory.

Three years ago, I watched in total disbelief what a "peaceful protest" in the main square in Kiev (which I remember very well as the vibrant and beautiful site of my first kiss, many moons ago) was turning into. Was being relentlessly and unstoppably turned into, to be precise. A civil war later, tens of thousands of deaths later, three million refugees later, tens of millions of critically impoverished citizens later, and no one of the parties involved getting what they wanted regardless of whatever it was they wanted or got, with the exception of a handful of profiteering scoundrels (as usual), I don't have to question the usefulness of such activities. I know what they're pregnant with. So, if the law is aimed at preventing the birth of yet another out-of-control monster of the same species as the one that was born in that square, I don't think it's all bad. You never know though... politicians are not to be trusted. But to disrupt a mechanism that's been relentlessly and unstoppably disrupting country after country into total one-way-street chaos might not be such a bad idea. Perhaps the methods are not ideal. Whoever has the ideal method, I'd love to hear from them.

"Almost as threatening," hmmm.... a quick question: to whom? Your assertion implies that someone who notices the fruits of brainwashing in someone else can't possibly notice, shouldn't possibly be able to notice. And if they do, they are either conceited bastards who appoint themselves "the chosen few," or deluded bastards who are as brainwashed as the next guy but oblivious to the fact. This leaves out in the cold anyone who is simply normal. Anyone who is both not brainwashed and notices the brainwashing in the brainwashed. You mean such folks are already extinct? I beg to differ. Being or not being brainwashed is not about who is faster slapping the label on whom. There's ways to tell. They are a bit laborious though. You would have to investigate where someone who believes a particular position is the outcome of brainwashing is coming from. What is their background? How did they arrive at their conclusions? The process is everything. If you discover that there was no process of truth-seeking, that there was a process of lifelong TV-watching and serious-books-non-reading and world-non-travel and experience-non-gaining (a vicarious, virtual life where nothing that could be credo-forming actually happens to you first hand, everything that happens that you think you are aware of is hearsay, someone else's word for it -- and coupled with obedience-to-authority indoctrination it's sufficient to make it real for you), and all opinions resulting form such process of information acquisition reflect a particular standardized model used by a particular group enforcing a particular party line, you can be reasonably sure you are up against a brainwashee. Some people can still see the fnords (look them up if you don't know what they are). Don't deny them this ability, they fought hard to acquire it and protect it from anyone or anything that would strip them of their human right to remain normal even under the heaviest, most devastating and most comprehensive manipulative assaults on their perceptions. One thing people who see the fnords have going for them is, they do see the fnords. That's how they can tell. Can you see the fnords?

...supporters who are now showing their convictions, acquired independently, and their fully fledged ability to think for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions, with such gusto?.. The thing that robs me of hope more than most is that the elites who engineer public opinions, convictions and beliefs with utmost precision to serve their purposes and cater to their needs have got most people's number: if you want them to fetch, just get the suckers to believe that they are thinking for themselves, and they'll either fetch or die trying. And there's nothing easier, with all the mighty propaganda machine of ages at their service, than to convince the brainwashee of something he yearns to believe with all his heart: that he is not a brainwashee.

This is the age of hybrid wars. Informational warfare is one aspect of it, arguably the biggest... and "fake news" is the pot calling the kettle black. Truth is an endangered species in the toxic environment of hybrid warfare, and it may not survive it at all. It may go extinct. For the majority, it already did. A virtual reality has been carefully manufactured where most people can no longer tell the difference between what is true and what is false. Or rather, nothing is true, pretty much, if you get to the bottom of it... it's just that certain lies are being promoted and enforced more vigorously than certain other lies, and those former ones is what gains the status of "truth" in people's minds. A whole lot of regime changes, "color revolutions," manufactured fake agendas and subsequent quite real destruction and devastation of numerous countries that got targeted while the Art of the Hybrid War was being developed and perfected have brought us here. Here, where the quaint "it can never happen here" no longer applies. Anything can happen anywhere. There's not one company (named in the article) involved in this kind of manipulation, there's hundreds of them -- and the one named in the article is not even on the list of the top 100. Since Silicon Valley moguls and whales of AI backed up Hillary rather than Donald, I suspect he is not the one who got first rate service from this particular source even if he did manage to get some.

Some AI savvy folks believe it's the other way around. It doesn't get hired. It does the hiring.

Ah. So it means Russia didn't hack the elections after all. The Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine did. I think the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine owes Mr. Putin an apology.

Very.

Coming soon, near you apps on your smartphone, malware that's your heart bypass.

Winter, spring, summer, fall, five years of drought, but then -- then comes the deluge.

Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth, by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend I'm going to have so much fun with this one. Both brilliant and scholarly, this book is one of those rare and precious ones that provide a whole higher education (a compromised term, but I'm using it in its original sense) to those who (like I) have lost their religious belief in the modern folk myth of the "scientific method." The method it uses is the same I use in my investigations: 1. Go to the source, not to the later interpreters thereof; start from scratch, don't drag into your inquiry the burden of careers, ambitions, ulterior motives and ineptitudes that have cumulatively shaped the "currently accepted model." Go to the oldest scholars (historically, not biologically) and treat what they had to say with respect. 2. Apply interdisciplinary integration, don't get pigeonholed into what an "expert" clueless or wrongfully dismissive of the world outside his area of expertise invites (or forces) you to see through his pinhole. 3. Don't rush it. Knowledge is not a box of lego blocks shoved your way by the creators of the orthodox model. Knowledge is a mighty oak growing out of a humble acorn. Plant it, water it, fertilize it, let it grow, watch what happens. Meditate in the shade. Do the opposite of what the pigeonholed scholars had to do. Unless the first few pages and a fascinated leafing through what's yet to come have misguided me. Don't think so though, I smell yum.

Thank you for the link, but the info presented therein is skewed in its own right. "The doctor will spend a lot of time and money trying to revive a 400g infant?" The doctor will spend the money? To revive a 400g birth weight infant is not health care. It is a scam. Mortality rate of 50% in such infants is not mortality rate in infants, it is mortality rate in medical experiments. The surviving 50% will have to live in hell for the rest of their lives -- and pay for it too. The doctor "saving" a non-viable fetus (that's what a 400g birth weight human infant is in nature) is not the one who is going to pay. Actually, I have to stop. I'm upset and horrified by yet another medical fact I didn't know. Thank you for presenting it, now I'll try to calm down and go about my day.

I haven't looked at Venezuela or North Korea, I did see info on Cuba. In 2016 it was named as the country that has the best health care system in the world. Yes, between quality and availability, it was calculated to be number one, who'd have guessed.

Independently wise

Independently wealthy

Purrrrrr I meant in the house that Sean built, I'm just a house cat.

I'm just a house cat. I'm not in charge of livestock here.

All of taoism is a way to overcome what the non-taoist word "karma" stands for, even if its (taoism's) origin won't have much to do with definitions for things that are not definitions and didn't designate a term to the phenomenon. Taoists have never been big on definitions that require other definitions. "The tao that can be told," you know. The way the classics put it, they didn't use a one-word term, they used an explanatory line instead: "In the human world, tao has been destroyed" (Laozi, Yuandao, Wenzi). To a taoist, karma is a lot bigger than what you brought with you from the past. It's what brought you from the past. And that's what you're dealing with in cultivation, not a clean slate of some people's wishful thinking and/or fertile imagination. What destroyed tao in the human world -- that's what brought you into "now." That's what you're up against. I stand by my earlier assertion that any taoist art-science-practice addresses "karma." If it's taoist, it's about fixing things you didn't break, plus things you broke, plus things in you that have been broken, and that's what mends things around you that have been broken. Taoists don't fix anything less than the whole world when they improve their posture and consequently their and consequently everybody else's qi flow with good gong fu. It won't make a big dent. But it's a dent. And you will make more if you cultivate the taoist way. And there's no way you can cultivate yourself the taoist way and avoid benefiting the universe. That's taoist karma for you. I'm pissed to have to be part of it, and proud to be part of it.

We shall study every philosophy, search through all the scriptures, consult every teacher and practice all spiritual exercises until our minds are swollen with the whole wisdom of the world. But in the end we shall return to the surprising fact that we walk, eat, sleep, feel and breathe, that whether we are deep in thought or idly passing the time of day, we are alive. And when we can know just that to be the supreme experience of religion we shall know the final secret and join in the laughter of the gods. For the gods are laughing at themselves. ~~Alan Watts

33 changes to 8 via lines 3, 4, 6. You need to read these lines to understand the message. At a glance: the oracle advises ending the relationship with no hard feelings.

That's exactly right. I'm eating chicken soup with rice. Family recipe. One of the 3 soups I make most often, and the simplest. For Chinese New Year last week, a friend who always celebrates by cooking at least half of all the dishes you would expect to see at a traditional Chinese New Year banquet (and half rather than everything only because I stop him or he'd kill himself cooking -- trying to do it the way his mom used to do it) made, among other things, a soup with three kinds of meat in it, something I've never done in my life. Wow...

Sorry... the multiverse isn't easy to simplify. Working on it.