Taomeow

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Nah... the West was messing with China for 250 years prior to Mao. Mao was one outcome, not the cause. Read up: In the 1800s China simultaneously experiences major internal strains and Western imperialist pressure, backed by military might which China cannot match. China’s position in the world and self-image is reversed in a mere 100 year period (c.a. 1840-1940) from leading civilization to subjected and torn country. The Japanese witness China’s experience with the military power of Western nations, and after the arrival of an American delegation in Japan in 1853, Japan is also forced to open its ports. Japan is able to adapt rapidly to match the power of the West and soon establishes itself as a competitor with the Western powers for colonial rights in Asia. In 1894-5, Japan challenges and defeats China in a war over influence in Korea, thereby upsetting the traditional international order in East Asia, where China was the supreme power and Japan a tribute-bearing subordinate power. Through the 1700s, China’s imperial system flourishes under the Qing (Ch’ing) or Manchu dynasty. China is at the center of the world economy as Europeans and Americans seek Chinese goods. By the late 1700s, however, the strong Chinese state is experiencing internal strains — particularly, an expanding population that taxes food supply and government control — and these strains lead to rebellions and a weakening of the central government. (The Taiping Rebellion, which lasts from 1850-1864, affects a large portion of China before being suppressed.) Western nations are experiencing an outflow of silver bullion to China as a result of the imbalance of trade in China’s favor, and they bring opium into China as a commodity to trade to reverse the flow of silver. China’s attempt to ban the sale of opium in the port city of Canton leads to the Opium War of 1839 in which the Chinese are defeated by superior British arms and which results in the imposition of the first of many “Unequal Treaties.” These treaties open other cities, “Treaty Ports” — first along the coast and then throughout China — to trade, foreign legal jurisdiction on Chinese territory in these ports, foreign control of tariffs, and Christian missionary presence. By the late 1800s, China is said to be “carved up like a melon” by foreign powers competing for “spheres of influence” on Chinese soil. From the 1860s onward, the Chinese attempt reform efforts to meet the military and political challenge of the West. China searches for ways to adapt Western learning and technology while preserving Chinese values and Chinese learning. Reformers and conservatives struggle to find the right formula to make China strong enough to protect itself against foreign pressure, but they are unsuccessful in the late 1800s. The Qing dynasty of the Manchus is seen as a “foreign” dynasty by the Chinese. (The well-known “Boxer Rebellion” of 1898-1900 begins as an anti-Qing uprising but is redirected by the Qing Empress Dowager against the Westerners in China.) As a symbol of revolution, Chinese males cut off the long braids, or queues, they had been forced to wear as a sign of submission to the authority of the Manchus. The dynastic authority is not able to serve as a focal point for national mobilization against the West, as the emperor is able to do in Japan in the same period. China finds its traditional power relationship with Japan reversed in the late 19th century, especially after its defeat by Japan in the Sino-Japanese war in 1894-95 over influence in Korea. (The Japanese, after witnessing the treatment of China by the West and its own experience of near-colonialism in 1853, successfully establish Japan as a competitor with Western powers for colonial rights in Asia and special privileges in China.) China is impressed by Japan’s defeat of Russia, a Western power, in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05; additional reform efforts follow in China and the examination system, which linked the Chinese Confucian educational system to the civil service, is abolished in 1906. Internal strains and foreign activity in China lead to rebellions and ultimately revolt of the provinces against the Qing imperial authority in 1911 in the name of a Republican Revolution. (New scholarship, by writers such as Edward Rhoads, challenges the notion that the 1911 Revolution was “inevitable” and suggests that reforms leading to a constitutional monarchy, recommended by the Chinese reforms of 1898 and similar to reforms of Meiji Japan, might have been possible were it not for court politics and military delays that facilitated the 1911 Revolution route.) Chinese military leaders, “warlords,” step into the political vacuum created by the fall of the Qing. The warlords control different regions of the country and compete for domination of the nominal central government in Beijing. Sun Yat-sen and his nascent Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or Guomindang) struggle to bring republican government to China. The terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, ending WW I, enrage the Chinese urban populace by recognizing Japanese claims to former German rights in the Shandong peninsula of China. This leads to an outpouring of nationalistic sentiment on May 4, 1919 and to the subsequent “May 4th Movement” to reform Chinese culture through the adoption of Western Science and Democracy. The Confucian system is discredited and rejected by those who feel it did not provide China with the strength it needed to meet the challenge of the West. For some Chinese, Marxism a) represents a Western theory, based on a scientific analysis of historical development, that b] offers the promise of escape from the imperialism that is thwarting their national ambitions, and c) promises economic development that would improve the lot of all. It also offers a comparative philosophic system that can for some fill the vacuum left after the rejection of the Confucian system. The founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 follows the success of the communist revolution in Russia of 1917-18. The Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party (founded in 1921) work and compete to reunify China politically. The very rapid change in China’s international status and self-image as a leading civilization leads the Chinese on a quest to reestablish China’s place in the world — a quest that continues today.

"Don't like" is too vague. I wish there were buttons I could use to express my attitude to some posts I don't like without going to the trouble of writing a response, or to the self-restraint of withholding it altogether. The buttons I would like to be able to use toward this goal might read: I think this was bigotry. I think this was racist. I think this was profoundly idiotic. I think you are trolling. I think this was a personal attack. I think this was insensitive and harsh. I think you are patronizing. Thank you for mansplaining. This is gaslighting. You are boring me. This was ridiculously holier-than-thou. You have embarrassed yourself. This was self-aggrandizing and I noticed. You don't strike me as sincere. A samurai posting this would follow up with a seppuku. And so on... sky's the limit. Maybe someone in a less jaded mood wants to offer laudatory buttons to complement the set? I do recall we considered many different buttons when the change was taking place, and at the time I wasn't into that. I may have been wrong.

Came across this poem by a Russian poet, Vitaly Pukhanov, which I will try to translate: It's possible to get an old friend back, or an ex girlfriend. It's impossible to get a cat back. A cat won't respond to a phone call, won't create a social media page. "Come kitty kitty kitty" into the dark of the night is all you can do. To get a cat back, one must turn into a cat without turning back, go the way of the cat after the cat. But who has enough love.

Yes, but my taoist teacher and my taiji teacher are Chinese from mainland China. My taiji style flourishes in Chen village, and my taoist teacher's methods are practiced in those monasteries that are not frequented by tourists. I have great respect for Westerners keeping taoist arts close to their hearts, I am one of them, but I don't credit us with more than our due. We produce some bright disciples and occasionally masters, this is not unheard of in taoism, one of the most prominent taoist deities was foreign born after all, I'm talking about Quan Yin... but I wouldn't put the cart before the horse, or forget who invented the bicycle we ride along the Way.

Dear Gerard, I'm not "mystifying" China. I've been there. I found all the things you think are gone forever in places where tourists don't look. Not in the mountains. Not in the circus monasteries. Elsewhere. Yes, modern times are unprecedented but not only for China. Yes, China didn't have the immunity -- and who did? The assault on our humanity is global. To single out one of the poorest -- despite being the most hardworking -- peoples on earth (and despite millions of millionaires, the vast majority of the Chinese still live in poverty... poverty plus trinkets, cell phones ringing in jeans pockets of people who share one ten square foot room between two families, I've seen those rooms, and work sunrise to sunset) -- to single them out as "only interested in making a lot of money" -- who are we comparing them to?.. What exactly are those "enlightened Westerners" who think they are better because they had it easier and didn't have to get obsessed with money because mom and dad were in the position to provide enough? Who are they to begrudge China her growing prosperity even if it is indeed growing? What fucking moral right do they have to judge? I've read many, many books about contemporary China, both documents of the times and works of fiction, have you? Do you have any idea how superficial and uninformed a "disillusioned" Westerner can get when he expects fabled immortals peopling every corner of the most populated country on Earth with the longest uninterrupted history, the contemporary of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and finds instead a billion poor peasants forced into the cities and adjusting within less than one generation, with flexibility and attunement to the times unmatched by anyone anywhere at any time?.. Those immortal values are dissolved in the bloodstream of the people of the country, they are not "tao of the mouth" and therefore not obvious to an "enlightened Westerner" because he doesn't know where to look, and sees nothing because he's looking in the wrong place for the wrong manifestation? The truly enlightened Westerners understood, and left the rest with just two admonitions: don't poke the bear, and above all, don't wake up the dragon. Both may be busy for a while adjusting to their respective cages, doing their best and looking ridiculously inadequate to a visitor in the zoo. But one day the cage goes bust. It happened before, and it will happen again. Wanna bet?..

China has more people in the top 1% IQ range worldwide than America has people. I just love the condescending attitude to a civilization that was already done creating a complete and fully functional "general theory of everything" readily and efficiently put to practice, with noncontroversial cross-reference and mutual empirical verification of all scientific disciplines (that never had to be discarded as false every few decades the way our modern sciences do) when future Europeans lived in caves. At the time of the Yellow Emperor they already lamented the sorry state of medicine forced to rely on substances and manipulations because the powerful doctors who healed with qi and sound no longer came down from the mountains, having written off the world of "red dust" as lost. By "red dust" they meant human blood cells and, wider, the human genome. See, they just didn't use any Latin. Lingua Latina non penis canina, but our modern (actually, not so modern, we inherited this from our obscurantist church fathers) quasi-scientific way of expressing our ideas has left us with the delusion of knowing what the ancients didn't. Nope. They knew a helluva lot -- they just didn't resort to obscurantist foreign terminology of the privileged "scientific" caste as we do. "It's as true as that a horse is not an ox" -- the Chinese mathematicians' way to say "axiom." What's an axiom? Something that requires another definition. They avoided it. They cut to the chase with their terminology. "A hosre is not an ox" does not require a further definition. Ditto "an invisible worm" or "dampness" or "liver fire." They say "fire," we say "inflammation." Same thing, only "inflammation" is Latin and therefore we think it's more scientific than "fire." For China, fluctuations of fortune spanning a few decades here, a hundred years there are nothing new. "It all happened before, and it will all happen again," as my favorite movie line goes. So they didn't use Latin names for what they discovered -- so a bacterium was an "invisible worm" -- so what? They still invented vaccines in the 13th century. Thousands of years ago they discovered organs in the human body that modern medicine is only catching up with now, e.g. the "gut brain" -- you know you have the ENS, right? -- enteric nervous system? -- a complex system of about 100 million nerves found in the lining of the gut, right?.. They did. Only they called it the lower dantien, and knew way more about its functions than modern Western science had a chance to learn to date, having discovered it only a few years ago. OK, I better bail out... It all happened before, and it will all happen again.

No. I read Mao's biography written by his personal live-in physician who ministered to him for over 20 years. He was a Chinese, Western trained doctor of Western medicine, which was what Mao preferred. But by the time, Chinese traditional medicine was already grossly mutilated by John D. Rockefeller, and wasn't the same since the early 20th century. Rockefeller's plans for takeover of medicine were global, so about 50 million (billions in modern exchange) was invested into destroying the tradition in China specifically. New schools were established there in the 1920s and schedules were developed on Rockefeller-Mellon-Carnegie specs, and these got ample funding and promotion while traditional ones were cut off from the dollar tit and subjected to an orchestrated campaign of ridicule, defamation and aggressive business warfare. By the time Mao seized power, he was already a product of this having happened earlier, i.e. a believer in Western medicine. That he didn't ban traditional medicine altogether is a miracle, considering how our "democratic" societies went a whole lot more totalitarian in this respect, swallowing the Rockefeller medicine (i.e. profiteering from illness by all means available, and replacing treatment and cure with "management" of disease) and smacking their lips. The taoist God of Health must have intervened, or Mao would have followed suit -- he most definitely considered it.

Get super well super fast. Sorry about the pain you have to endure -- and I do think you have the right idea of it also being a useful control mechanism, telling you what to do when and what to save for later. However, have to mention this low tech all natural painkiller -- it won't knock you out, but it may take the edge off the pain and also help with healing. You make strong ginger tea, as strong as you can tolerate, but then on top of that add cayenne pepper, making it as strong as what they would call 20 at a Thai restaurant where they ask you how spicy you want your food on a scale from one to ten, and then add lemon and honey. Drink it piping hot, slowly and carefully, in little sips. The concoction has been shown to deplete substance P, whose role it is to transmit pain information to the CNS. And all of the ingredients are useful in healing injuries and reducing inflammation. The more painful the tea, the more efficient. Use your best judgment. Another thing that I would be taking is moomiyo (or mumiyo), aka shilajit in India. The best comes from Altai, Indian stuff is not as potent, but either one is the number one traditional remedy for all bone injuries. It was discussed here somewhere sometime, see if you can find that thread. If not, just go to google for a source. The Altai stuff comes in little black tablets -- you don't want to swallow them whole, crush them into powder and dissolve in a tablespoon of warm liquid, fatty is best (broth or milk). I have extensive experience with it. The healing can be quite miraculous -- on three occasions I personally knew people in whom subsequent X-rays after healing broken bones (in one case it was the spine) showed no trace of those bones ever having been broken. Externally, I would use a good dit da jow. Good luck!

I refer you to my InsaMorph endorsement in case you are talking about a part that is not subjected to high temperatures or high heat of rotational friction (I don't have that machine and don't know where the seal you're referring to is located.) If it stays cool and does not have to rotate at a high speed, you can probably fix it yourself with this or make a new one. It's easy to use though your creations do tend to look like kindergarten level crafts. Not industrial looking. But functional.

Nice. Taoists also discourage recklessness and exposing oneself to unnecessary danger -- in fact a bold, devil-may-care attitude is frowned upon. And Laozi has this to say describing the ideal ancient sages and masters: Watchful, like someone crossing a winter stream. Alert, like someone aware of danger. Courteous, like visiting guests. Yielding, like ice about to melt. Which of course does not make them cowardly. Just wise.

Fearlessness is real only for the invincible. Everyone else who feels or acts fearless is either engaged in counterphobic acting-out (aka repression and denial), or is too numb and/or dumb and/or unimaginative to comprehend the danger, or -- best case scenario -- has courage. Of all traits in a vulnerable, non-invincible human being, I value courage the highest. Courage is doing what you know is right when doing it puts you in danger, knowing and feeling and owning your fear and yet overcoming it for the sake of something bigger than your safety. Courage has nothing to do with recklessness, and the fearless can't be courageous, because... see the beginning of this paragraph. My favorite Castaneda quote: "A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge and going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and those who make this mistake may not live to regret it." (Quoting form memory, and of course what it says about "man" applies to "woman" as well.)

I only know the speed of dark matter. It's equal to mine -- or, to be precise, to the speed with which I decide, in silence and darkness, what matters and what doesn't.

Thanks for the ideas, ST. I'll have to do something like that too with a closet or don't yet know what. I'm starved for total darkness. I remember moonless, overcast nights in nature, and how you would start seeing the bioluminescence once your eyes got used to it, around plants and insects and, eventually, people. How alive the total darkness was. Maybe someone knows of an eye mask that blocks out the light completely while letting you keep your eyes open? Please endorse if you do!

Hi Oak, you will find the time and motivation and the money for lessons eventually, the prerequisite -- the love of the art -- is already there, the rest will come, taiji reciprocates when you love it. Like you, I started it in the most difficult year, in fact the first three years of taiji overlapped with the most difficult years of my entire life to date, and possibly of several lifetimes. I had very little time, money, energy or motivation to dedicate to it, it all was invested elsewhere. But it was love at first sight, and I kept it up, in small doses back then, but I kept it up. I've come a long way since then and I hope the journey never ends. Taiji has no bottom and no top -- it's not for nothing they call it "the Supreme Ultimate Fist." It's not the punching fist that is meant, we never punch in sparring (a skilled taiji punch is too deadly to use on a practice partner, LOL), it's the fist in which you hold a treasure that never diminishes, the more you spend, the more it returns to you. So imagine you have a penny in your fist right now, a penny's worth of taiji. Invest it into taiji and you'll find you have two. Invest that and you'll have four. Few people hold heaven and earth in that fist, but if you invest enough, you become one of them. Good luck!

Is there some sort of ventilation when you use it like this? How do you breathe?

Ah, the toys thead! I like toys. InstaMorph moldable plastic. I used it to fix a broken car key (made a new plastic "head" to replace the broken one), to make stands for large quartz crystals that keep them vertical and secure, to repair an indispensable Swiss grater (a replacement would be $39.00, I got it to work like new for pennies), to make a holder for calligraphy brushes of vastly different sizes that are now all aligned, and to make a fake stone to keep secrets in. This is not the limit of what it can do. Great product. Animal fats sold now in jars by some HFS and Amazon and assorted paleo food outlets. I'm still experimenting with brands for the optimal price/quality deals, but it's a vast improvement over my previous practice of begging the HFS butchers for fat trimmings and rendering my own, and melting down ducks and the like -- total steampunk, my grandmother used to do it, my mother was already in the generation that forgot how cooking with animal fats broadens the horizons of both the gourmet and the fad-proof health nut (I am both.) Fatworks pork lard and Epic duck fat, both free range, are the current favorites. I'm yet to find a beef fat counterpart that satisfies (Epic's I didn't care for, didn't try other brands yet). I keep looking for more stuff to fry in that duck delight -- apples, e.g., ...omg, crazy... but yum! Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. With this, I'm also always on the lookout for something to paint, because it is so much fun to use. Nontoxic, water-based, no smell, dries in one hour, idiot-proof (very easy to apply, very forgiving of mistakes), and you can use it on anything (almost... not on Formica or plastic) -- if you know the techniques (which vary depending on your goal), you can transform anything with it. If it gets too thick, you dilute it with water. If you get it too thin, you keep it in an open container overnight and it thickens. You just can't go wrong.

OK, here goes in no particular order. About 47% of the world population are blood type O about 42% are blood type A about 9% are blood type B about 2% are blood type AB All these are subdivided into a bunch of other categories, of which the best known to the public is the rhesus factor, which makes one's blood type "positive" or "negative" depending on whether one has that antigen. A less known but very important factor is one's "secretor" or "non-secretor" status. What it means is that secretors (who are the majority of the population) secrete their blood type antigen into their other bodily fluids, i.e. sweat, saliva, sperm, vaginal fluids, and so on. I.e. into the outside world. Whereas non-secretors don't, with quite a few implications for their health. Cats have three blood types -- A, B, and AB. About 90% of cats have blood type A, the rest is like in humans -- B about 9%, AB about 2%. If the Shroud of Turin story is correct, Jesus was an AB. Almost all Native Americans were blood type O before intermixing with other peoples (most still are), with the exception of the Cherokee tribe, which has a much higher than average percentage of Bs. Bs are also far more common in Asia, and in a few places in Siberia, they are even the majority. The recessive gene, while not manifesting in the blood type, comes with a bunch of traits that are inherited together with it (just like the dominant one is not inherited alone, but with hundreds of linked traits.) We each have a pair of blood type genes, which are either a dominant-recessive pair, or equally dominant. A and B are equally dominant -- you get type AB if they combine. O is recessive to the rest. But someone who has blood type B may have a dominant second gene, also B, or a recessive O. The AA and AO, BB and BO types seem to differ, but most people don't know what their recessive gene is. In many cases it can be figured out from the parents' blood types, even better if you know both parents' and children's blood types. E.g. you know you have a recessive O if one of your kids is an O but neither one of his parents is. So you also know that his other parent, say his type A dad, also has a recessive O. However, his dad's fraternal twin brother does not, which is also clear from his children's blood types, and even though his blood type may be the same (which does not have to be the case with fraternal twins), his personality is very different. Both consistent with what someone who has studied these things knows about AA and AO personalities. Enough for an appetizer I think.

Great cats, ST! The new kitty looks very intelligent. And those eyebrows of a taoist sage! My cat has long eyelashes. Well, long for a cat, cats aren't supposed to have any I'm told. But Haomao does. No one believes me when I mention them.

I have spilled some water on my ergonomic keyboard and am using a different one which I am not used to, will answer once the useful one has recovered.

Wow, RL, that's quite a catscape! About rubber bands -- I wrote somewhere about my cat inventing water basketball, he used to throw rubber bands into his water bowl, gradually increasing the distance from which he pitched. He abandoned this game by now, but it was going on for a while, maybe a year or more. The specific communication tricks are many and he also shares with me his telepathic insights -- e.g. he informs me that my son's car is five minutes away and he'd want tea (son, not cat) by a specific meow dedicated to this and no other information. A coming earthquake is announced a few hours in advance with a combo of a meow and a yawn reserved only for earthquakes. Rains, however, which are very rare in our parts, he thinks are my doing and makes a brief but ugly scene about them every time, meowing in my face in a stand-off, looking at me with indignation and pretty much demanding that I cut it out immediately. One has to learn about cats before hoping to be contacted by anything intelligent from outer space methinks. They provide training in reading comprehension of a nonhuman but human-compatible mind.

Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape. -- Michael McGriffy, M.D.

Wishing you good health. As for blood types -- well, yes, there's things to know. What exactly do you want to know?