Taomeow

He's not the type you see every day in today's CA either, but definitely people of nontraditional orientations are more visible here these days than even ten or so years ago.

Here in CA it's different. Here you are in danger of potentially being hurt if you think differently rather than look differently. But trans people (and LGBTQ+ too) get every opportunity to express themselves safely, far as I can tell. For an example: there's a store I visit quite regularly, and one of the sales people is -- well, I never asked him about his self-identification (for lack of any knowledge of the personal pronoun he might prefer, I'll use "him/his" until/unless I'm otherwise informed) but let me describe his appearance. A young male with mustache, which he dyes bright pink, alongside his eyebrows, to match his fuchsia colored hair. He wears skirts or dresses, his legs are very hairy but he doesn't shave them. Dress style -- not of a man but I wouldn't say it's the outfits of a woman either, more like kindergarten-aged little girl: extremely bright and cheerful, with pleats and ruffles, embroidered ladybugs and butterflies, stuff like that. Bright nail polish on very long fingernails (but no maintenance skills so it's usually peeling.) He's always an eyeful of colors. Very friendly, with no exaggerated mannerisms (which is my personal preferred style in men, women and trans people alike.) We usually have a little chat -- just small talk, he's curious and likes to comment on my purchases and share about his own favorites, I find him more pleasant to deal with than a couple of "regular" ladies at the same counter on different days. I've never seen anyone being rude or hostile to this guy -- and he interacts with dozens of people every day.

Yes, it's a different world. A hearsay world where we are thoroughly indoctrinated to take someone else's word for absolutely everything -- including our history and how bad our ancestors had it for a million years, how stupid and fragile they were. How on earth did they manage to survive and thrive everywhere on earth until the Flexner Report introduced a superior world a hundred years ago?.. Mystery of mysteries... I love the fact that hearsay doesn't stand in court. But then, our ancestors didn't know how to lie... I read extensive accounts of the conquest of Siberia, e.g., and the way it was easy for people from "our" world to fool the natives -- they believed everything, they had no cultural skill of lying and so didn't expect it from others. Many of them went practically extinct -- as did many peoples everywhere else when bestowed the blessings of our different world -- to a great extent due to this fatal cultural flaw. But we are doing all right I'm sure.

I read about it a while ago, and I think I even mentioned it here on TDB at the time. The article I recall was about Native American tribes where trans folks were thought of as special, sometimes became shamans because they were thought of as naturally talented toward "straddling both worlds," and so on, and not discriminated against in the least. The difference from the modern approach being, they didn't resort to surgical and hormonal sex change, they just accepted the fact of this dichotomy (body and mind of different "worlds" in the same person), much the way people accept other things about their own and other people's bodies that may not correspond to the ideal body they would prefer -- shorter or taller than average, thinner or fatter, asthenic type or hypersthenic type, boobs of all sizes and shapes with no particular size or shape fetishized, and so on. There was no inner conflict and no outer bias, pressure to conform, activism to promote, or any social disadvantages to just feeling a particular way inside one's body and making those feelings known to others. And above all, no money changing hands as a "side effect" (or as some cats would suspect, as the root cause of an exponential growth in the number of such occurrences.)

Not on this specific topic as much as on this among all others I'm not very trusting of the motives of those who promote anything that happens to be fantastically profitable for the medical cartel. The minds of the recipients of any and all of their offerings are manipulated very skillfully, in every possible area, and I'm not saying all of their offerings are corrupted by ulterior motives (money, power, 'fame and fortune' as a taoist would put it) -- but failing or avoiding to consider them as a factor is IMO a mistake in many cases. I don't know how sex/gender dysphoria would be different in this respect from a multitude of over-diagnosed, over-treated, mis-treated conditions going hand in hand with a multitude of under-diagnosed, under-treated, and again mis-treated conditions. I could give a million examples... For instance, antibiotics resistance is directly responsible for millions of deaths every year, yet research into new antimicrobials has been stagnating for decades, because, to quote a PubMed publication titled "There Is No Market for New Antibiotics," "By the early 1980s, private investment in antimicrobial research ebbed as a result of (...) a broader reorientation of private research and development (R&D) towards more focused investment in expensive yet lucrative noncommunicable (e.g., cancer and lifestyle) medications. The decline in private investment was exacerbated by the parallel closure of formerly successful public R&D efforts, as a result of the contemporary political emphasis on privatization and marketplace-oriented research." In other words, they figured they get more bang for their buck if they invest in chronic conditions requiring continuous indefinite (often lifelong) use of their medications. No one is interested in financing whatever can be cured by efficient new antimicrobials, hence their nonresearch, nondevelopment, and nonexistence. (And no media>public outcry despite an incomparably wider population affected.) Nothing personal -- they just don't care if millions die from this nonresearch and nondevelopment, as long as they can develop something that guarantees repeat customers. On the other hand, any agile kid bored with school will be diagnosed with ADHD in the blink of an eye -- and the fact that it was proved in court (sic) that there was indeed a conspiracy (sic) entered in by pharmaceutical companies and doctors aimed at overdiagnosing this condition was only mentioned in small print somewhere no one is looking... except the likes of me of course, because if I trust, I trust, and if I don't, I look closer. Cats and curiosity, you know... except I believe the proverb is misguided. Curiosity actually saved many a cat. They investigate instead of rushing into things headlong... but don't let me digress. So, I do believe that one has to look very very VERY closely in each case, and I agree with Snowmountains that Which of course would only be working if the psychiatrists weren't all indoctrinated and kickbacked in exactly the same standard of care, otherwise one or three or thirty is all the same. They will uphold whatever standard they are instructed to uphold and won't rock the boat. How do you protect a teenager, let alone a child (it's puberty blockers for children as young as 6, 7, 8 that are part of the current approach that make me go, Jesus quilt-knitting Christ...) in this situation? Like in any other -- keep your fingers crossed and spit thrice across the left shoulder?.. I've heard stories (youtube had many interviews, don't know about now, may have been censored) from young people who were brainwashed by parents who wanted a boy/wanted a girl and wouldn't give up despite the fact that the child they got was not the one they desired; by peers; by their own mistaking, due to young age and inexperience, of a plethora of gender-nonspecific behaviors and feeling (like an interest in a particular style of clothes of lack thereof) for specific for the opposite sex, and so on. I don't know. I asked a friend who is a psychiatrist with a lifetime of experience (in two very different countries) and a lot of compassion and caring. She told me she could help in 19 cases out of 20, and the remaining 1 in 20 was a case of genuine sex dysphoria, far as she was able to tell. I have no idea what these figures signify in the wider world though, but I suspect that out of some other 19 out of 20, some may not get a really good psychiatrist on their case -- let alone three of them -- and may regret the route they have taken. It is not an easy thing to resolve by cavalry attacks on "bias" and hasty irreversible interventions. But it's not different in this respect from many other things that are not easy to resolve. I think modern society in general is a helluva lot better at creating problems than at solving them.

So what I'm gleaning from some of the responses is that talking therapies that used to attempt to change the mind were horrible and unnatural (couldn't agree more), but sex change treatments currently used are natural and problem-free. And also, that those surgical and hormonal treatments treat something that is not a disorder to begin with. Good to know.

My point was, you fought with no help from anyone when you tried to change your mind, but you had everything available when you decided to change your body instead. Nevermind though, it's just me looking at the bigger picture.

That's part of what I mean. The current situation is, you have specialists to help you realign your body with your mind in case you feel they are not in correct alignment, by changing the body. And there's no one but you, yourself and your mind for the opposite way -- to help the mind align with the body, rather than change the body in order to align with what the mind thinks. Someone working on their own mind might be, in the words of (I think) Einstein, trying to solve the problem by the same means by which it was created. He wasn't a meditator so his opinion may not matter, but in his opinion, it was not the best route. Personally, I had life-saving help working on my mind at one point (on different issues altogether, but numerous and disastrous enough to lead to debilitating suicidal depression, the adult-onset outcome of childhood adversities.) But if you (or anyone else in the same situation) were to decide that, instead of changing the body to match the mind's self-perceptions, you were to seek out specialists working on the mind to help it match the body instead -- that wouldn't be available. So hence my question -- why do you think this is the case? Why does the current standard offer help only to those who choose to change their bodies, but no one is there -- not in any official capacity, with training, funding, studies, social encouragement, etc. -- for those who want to achieve such alignment via the opposite route, without changing their bodies? I'm not pressuring for an answer, just wanted your perspective in case you'd given it any thought.

Sex reassignment is accomplished via physiological interventions -- surgeries, puberty blockers, lifelong hormonal therapies. To change the physical body into a different one which will "more correctly align with the gender" is the standard practice today, with the number of such medical procedures in the US tripling every couple of years. This is aimed at correcting a person's sex, which is physical, to align more correctly with the person's gender, which is mental. At the same time, any attempts at working instead with the mind, i.e. the gender, which is "cultural and psychological identification of the mind" toward such "more correct alignment" are currently considered abusive, politically incorrect, and unacceptable. Q: why do you think this is the case?

No radio here, no TV, no more watching electricity.* ___________ *电视 diànshì -- TV -- is comprised of 电 "electricity" and 视 -- "to look at"

Soft shadows and Tears for Fears on the radio. Halagrian world.

My cat used to bring home assorted cat toys I didn't buy. Mystery was solved when a neighbor told me that those were his departed cat's toys which he was giving to my cat to play with. He didn't want them back. He was an elderly French guy and one day my cat came home with a pouch filled with vintage French postal stamps depicting cats of various breeds. Possibly valuable but I know nothing about postal stamps. I knocked on the neighbor's door to give them back, but he told me to keep them, as a gift for me for letting him play with my cat. A while ago the guy's adult son decided it was time for dad to live with his family as he was advancing in years, so new neighbors moved in. I thought the supply of cat toys from the outside would stop, and was mighty surprised when new ones started appearing with some regularity. Turned out the new lady next door was a cat lover with an allergic husband, and she happily befriended my cat and started buying toys for her. I have a large Chinese bowl, one of those in which they sometimes keep goldfish, filled to the brim with felt fish, mice, little balls of assorted sizes, cat teaser wands and so on. I don't think I bought any of them.

There's nothing stranger than current events. Although this thread was named after "Stranger Things" the TV series and I originally thought of it as a depository of facts, well, stranger than ordinary, or stranger than fiction, or stranger in a strange land, that kind of stuff. The strangeness of current events, however, is ordinary; mostly belongs to the realm of fiction (far as the way they're being reported is concerned); and stranger in a strange land -- that's currently all of us, even those born and raised.

San Sha is one of the Flying Stars in feng shui, an inauspicious one. Every year it moves to a different position, affecting a different sector of the bagua. In 2024 it is in the South, so it indicates the location of the adverse energy it emits. This affects the southern part of one's home (as well as office, city, state, country, planet), and produces inauspicious energy there. If it's a much-used area of the house, consider moving activities that take place there to a different location if possible. In many cases it's not possible (e.g. if your entrance door faces South), so the rules are similar to those for avoiding "aggravating the Tai Sui" -- minimize noise, try not to do any hammering or digging or any kind of noisy renovations, don't play loud music, don't shine bright lights there, etc.. Keep that part quiet and inactive if possible. Some feng shui folks advise keeping a "cure" in that location for the duration of the year, some go with protective talismans, some, with rituals performed on certain days. But most ordinary people just keep their fingers crossed.

Hate Crime is straight from Orwell. In "1984" it was called "thoughtcrime," and our beloved spying devices were "telescreens" there, and so on. All those Newspeak terms are being continuously slightly renamed (while remaining fully recognizable --- to me anyway) by the Ministry of Truth, but the goal is identical -- "a boot stamping on a human face forever."

By "hot-botton," did you mean hot button or hot bottom? In either case my curiosity is peaked.

The literal translation of the components of the Chinese "herbalim" is "grass medicine study," herbalist -- "grass medicine master." The wuxing (5 "elements") theory which is an important part of the foundation of classical Chinese medicine views plants and animals as belonging to the same wuxing phase of qi -- Wood. From the evolutionary perspective (to name one), this is absolutely accurate. E.g., genetically we are only half different from bananas (50% of our genes are identical to those of the latter), and our hemoglobin only differs from chlorophyll in that the former uses iron where the latter uses magnesium. Far as wuxing phases of planet Earth are concerned, the whole totality of biological life is classified as belonging to the Wood phase. As Terence McKenna put it, "Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around."

Most alchemical and magical herbs can also be used medicinally, but differently. For herbs proper, i.e plants, there is an alchemical formula based on a certain vine combined with a couple other native Chinese herbs which is the taoist counterpart of ayahuasca. Master Wang Liping told me about it when we were discussing my ayahuasca adventures. His teachers used that concoction on him on a few occasions (don't remember how many, but not many, maybe two or three times.) It was part of the general alchemical education, not the main focus. He was of the opinion that risks outweigh benefits in those "shortcuts." We were talking via an interpreter, and Master either didn't name the plants or the names didn't get translated.

Minerals that are used medicinally are also in that category in TCM. Just the way everything of natural origins they use medicinally is classified. From the therapeutic point of view it makes no difference -- there's many formulas that contain herbs, animals, insects, and minerals, but the prescribing professional is known as a herbalist (or, as they say here, an herbalist, swallowing the h.)

Alchemical herbs are mostly animal parts. Most are either prohibited for sale, sold illegally (and are prohibitively expensive), falsified, or belonged to animals gone extinct. (Multiple reports in the imperial Yellow Register Archives of sightings of unicorns, e.g., make me at least consider the possibility that they may have been real before they became mythological. The rare sightings were considered auspicious omens and the emperor, e.g., would decide whether to start a military campaign or not based on those sightings. False reports were punishable by death.) Some (possibly all) double up as magical substances. E.g. powdered rhino horn mixed into a candle allows one to see ghosts if they are present.

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. -- Matsuo Basho

Or a lot harder.

Good friday to you. Who's the artist? This is the first painting I'm seeing of Christ before Pilate where Pilate's dog is present. That dog, named Banga, is a protagonist in "The Master and Margarita" novel, but I am not aware of any other sources mentioning its existence, except maybe Pearl Jam's lyrics -- "like Pilate, I have a dog" -- but they may have read the novel and got the dog from there (just like Mick Jagger got "Sympathy for the Devil" out of it.)

It must be the beer... An off-key voice in the night: "It must have been love!"

Cats are obligatory carnivores. Aside from this being a much-ignored axiom, there was this study with cat diets done by Francis Pottenger, MD, in 1932-1942. Of the thousands of cats divided into groups they fed different diets, the only diet they found adequate (resulting in perfectly healthy cats with perfectly healthy posterity) consisted of 2/3 raw meat, 1/3 raw milk, supplemented with cod liver oil. All cats that received versions of different diets (with cooked meat, pasteurized milk, or some combo of raw and cooked/pasteurized) fared much worse. And that was the era before commercial cat food, so those cats didn't eat what today's cats eat: corn, wheat, soy, artificial preservatives, artificial colors and flavors, carbohydrate fillers (aka cellulose, which deer and goats can digest but cats can't), sweeteners, vegetable oils, and something the labels call "animal digest" which is cattle manure. A long time ago, I did an internship working with patents, and saw many that were for chemicals designed to make what cats wouldn't normally eat attractive to them. Complex neuroscience behind each of those! Best scientific minds working on fooling cats, compromising their health and shortening their lives.