Taomeow

I watched it four times over the years. The first time, I didn't have enough English to understand much of what was going on, so it was extremely mysterious and disturbing. The second time, I found it extremely funny. The third time, profoundly tragic. And the fourth time, I don't even know what. And this might be what the printer was trying to tell Basher with those four repetitions of page four antics? Watch this movie four times?

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You are having yet another conversation with yourself, pretending something was said that was never said, and then triumphantly, indignantly, or whateverly, striking it down. Another impressive victory over a straw man of your own making. Maestro, trumpets please!

Well, there's some serious scientific basis for this assertion. You would need to study the work of some renowned geneticists, notably L.L. Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman, who pioneered the field of cultural antropology, also known as gene-culture coevolution. A bit of a minefield for the entrenched orthodoxy, this vibrant young science. A bit of a heavy gun against agriculture, which is why a silencer was installed for purposes of mass indoctrination, which is why the masses under indoctrination haven't heard about it. The inquiring minds may have, some of them. "Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach" (1981) is the source of these ideas far as I recall -- been a while. White skin evolved three times in different populations, via unrelated genetic routes and not sharing the same genetic architecture. Once in Neanderthals, to whom we are not related, and twice in our own species -- in East Asians (similar lightness, different genes underlying the effect) and Europeans. The last and surprising one, in Europeans, for which the two genes SLC24A5 and OCA2 are responsible, is the outcome of very recent selection events, around (or less than) 10,000 years. Which neatly dovetails with the time frame of the advent of agriculture. Which rapidly leads to drastically impoverished diets compared to those enjoyed by hunter-gatherers. Whose unbelievably variegated and nutrient-dense natural diets were, among other things, particularly rich in vitamin D, a crucial player in melanin production in the skin. This explains, among many other interesting things, why peoples that lived around the North Pole at the same time agriculture descended upon Europe, and proceeded to live an unchanged lifestyle for another 10,000 years, up until Europeans came to shove their agricultural blessings down their throats, are pretty dark in complexion. This simple observable fact flies in the face of all those theories (which we are taught as "fact" as usual) about white skin being an adaptive trait to make up for the lack of sun-derived vitamin D production in northern populations. Nope -- it's adaptive to a poor diet chronically deficient in vitamin D. The pretty dark-skinned Inniuts, Chukchi and so on live much farther north than Scandinavians and get much less sun, but they did consume marine and land animal foods extraordinarily rich in vitamin D while Europeans were munching on bread for ten thousand years -- and so the former were getting enough of it from their diet to not need to sacrifice the protection of a darker skin shade (which curbs the excessive mutagenic effects of the sun's radiation) in order to compensate for a culturally induced chronic, transmittable generation to generation, nutritional deficiency.

Reminded me of this scene from one of my favorite movies:

Incidentally, CERN is scheduled to be cranked up to full power on September 23rd, and since in the documentary I watched about its creation quite a few of its scientific fathers and mothers asserted that every now and then they don't really know what they're doing and just keep their fingers crossed, methinks the asteroid story may have been put into circulation so that if CERN does do some significant, critical, or terminal damage in this mode, which is according to some a >0 possibility, they have somewhere else to point a blaming finger. That is if any pointable fingers are retained. Since there's speculations that this device is capable of creating a black hole, it's very comforting to know the work of Nassim Haramein, now mind-bogglingly echoed by Steven Hawking (with no references to Haramein's work, obviously -- so I guess it's his own original idea, just a coincidence). According to Haramein, the black hole is half of the toroid structure which does not crush you all to hell once it pulls you in but merely spits you out into a parallel universe. I hope this parallel universe is the exact opposite of ours, everything vice versa, topsy turvy, helter skelter, and they keep anticipating the beginning of their world rather than the end. They have many legends about the upcoming beginning. Just as we have ours about the impending end. I do hope their skeptics laugh at the absurd notion of the world they couldn't get going in all of its history, a static, unmovable world where nothing ever changes, suddenly going wrooom wrrroom... and beginning. I so look forward to going na na na na in their face.

The ignorance of youth is understandable. In older age, it’s unforgivable. --Oliver Stone

Yeah, what "grains" and "seeds" have in common is that both are words. And oxen and centipedes are both animals. So?.. I have acacia gum in my pantry. I use it in cooking on occasion, when I get adventurous and cook Indian. But acacia gum is the dried up sap of the tree, not a "seed" or "grain' or "legume." Acacia seeds are eaten just as peppercorns are eaten, which are also seeds... or like caraway seeds, cumin seeds, sesame seeds... one gram of that per one hundred or so grams of whatever is seasoned with them. "Staple" and "seasoning" are also words, and they mean very different things. Also, most people who used grains before the forceful installation of grain agriculture (and make no mistake, it was installed by brute force, no one ever chose to be bondage peasants willingly) made alcohol out of them, not food. Our ancestors realized they were dealing with drugs, see. Poppy seeds for opium drink, barley and cassava for beer, ergot in wheat and rye for a shamanic LSD trip, everybody discovered a grain that would get them wasted, they liked playing with different states of consciousness, it was not illegal. But they were never permanently stuck in just one altered state brought about by grains for ten thousand years. We are...

Ack, they are Japanese! Now they ought to shake in their boots -- guilty or not.

I hope people are noticing that grains or legumes weren't part of their diet. They weren't part of anyone's natural diet. Wild wheat is inedible, but modified, edible modern wheat is not exactly food either. NIH researchers showed that gluten-derived polypeptides cross into the brain and bind to the brain’s opiate receptors. This is a super drug -- given the euphoria from eating it is mild and the alterations to the thinking process subtle and gradual enough to go unnoticed, a lifelong addiction is guaranteed. Sugar doesn't come close -- it only stimulates serotonin receptors. Nicotine doesn't come close -- it only binds to proprietary nicotine receptors (yes we have those in the brain) and stimulates (and also preserves) dopamine receptors. The only things that come close to the milder but metabolically identical effects of wheat are opium, heroin, cocaine, LSD (because the gut also releases LSD-like substances in response to being exposed to gluten) and crystal meth. Bon appetit...

In the Food Street in Beijing, I've seen it all, but couldn't eat it all. Not the skewered live scorpions anyway. I've never eaten a reptile, a rodent, or an insect, but guess what -- neither did our paleolithic ancestors if they could help it. Everybody always went for the fattest animal in the environment, not the easiest-to-catch. Mammoth, mastodon, whale, walrus -- and that was universal, no exceptions. They ignored lean meat until they would be running short on fat varieties. I'm pretty sure the Tarahumara only eat mice because the bison are gone. During the WWII Leningrad Blockade, which resulted in 1.5 million starving to death, the residents of the city ate to local extinction all cats, dogs, mice, rats, everything people there had never eaten before.

Also you may have fun digging deeper into what the Fabians really were, behind the left facade. Incidentally, there's no source difference between "collectivism" and "individualism," "communism" and "capitalism," same folks played both hands. There was a rather brilliant Russian female writer whose works only became available to the public after the fall of the Soviet Union (or else via Samisdat, at the risk of getting a prison term for reading them), Evgenia Ginzburg, who spent 18 years of her life imprisoned in the Gulag. She wrote a memoir about those years, Journey Into the Whirlwind. One episode from that mind-blowing narrative: at some point two new women were added to the overpolulated cell where Evgenia was imprisoned at the time -- German Communists who escaped from Germany after having spent a couple of years in Hitler's prison. Upon their arrival in the Soviet Union, they were promptly accused of being German spies and arrested. So, one of them undressed and showed Evgenia the right side of her body, disfigured with horrendous scars. "This is the Gestapo," she said. Then she turned and showed her the left side, covered with almost identical scars. "And this is the KGB." Then she described the interrogations, the methods, the moves... and said, "they must have the same boss, they were following exactly the same procedure, as though they had the same training based on the same manual. Absolutely identical."

Probably nothing or he wouldn't be hiding it from his friend? -- if they're in it together?.. And he isn't even looking at the women. Definitely not exposing himself. And if he was indeed doing something under the robe, to follow this up with an actual assault on the women would be unlikely or he wouldn't be discreetly discharging his gun?.. Anyway, I don't know what a sex crime investigator might see -- potentially any encounter between unprotected women and a certain kind of "men" (calling them that with much reluctance) might be a dangerous situation, but to me, those men in the picture are innocent until proven guilty.

Well, those things don't sit well with anyone and "if he doesn't laugh it is not the tao" -- anyone that is who hasn't spent a bunch of years playing with many, many thousands of pieces of this humongous and horrendous ancient puzzle. I have... I like this little game called "integration of information" which liberates one of reliance on any one piece of any puzzle by actually giving an idea of what the whole emerging picture might look like. But back to the point -- well, rumor has it that Ayn Rand was Philip Rothschild's mistress and he provided the blueprint for "Atlas Shrugged" and commissioned the writing of this novel, a manifesto of sorts. I've no way of verifying this, except to look at circumstantial evidence, and circumstantial evidence tells me that this novel written in 1957 reads as today's newspapers -- this guy, e.g., http://rense.com/general78/ilumm.htm asserts that that's who and what is behind Ayn's creation. He was in the position to know, but of course... well... take a look but mind you, I'm not going "there" to argue one way or the other. Too heavy.

Back to the OP though. This is the actual sugar amount in each of these:

Yes, RL, cultivators, artists, thinkers, storytellers, singers, inventors, spiritual leaders, spiritual followers (one has to be a being of culture to choose who or what to follow wisely) -- we are good at that, even great, we don't need complex technology to accomplish what we need. Even animals have these things when left to their own devices. Some great apes meditate -- for hours. Some jaguars chew ayahuasca and go to other dimensions to see what's up there and learn. Some monkeys wash their yams before eating, but others -- even members of the same family -- don't, it's not part of their culture, they brush the dirt off with a bunch of grass instead. I always get a kick out of those "cute" interspecies interactions videos and see way more than cuteness. A cat adopts an orphan baby squirrel, baby squirrel learns to purr! -- that's not instinct, that's upbringing, cultivation, empathy... culture. A snake snatches a mouse, starts slithering up a tree, another mouse attacks it from behind, bravely, bites its tail, forces it to release the mate. That's cultivation -- courage, decision-making, even self-sacrifice (although in this case it ended well.) An elephant befriends a dog, the dog gets sick, stays in an animal hospital, the elephant stands under the window the whole time, a couple of weeks -- I'm guessing praying?.. sending healing vibes?.. or just experiencing the deepest emotions over the friend's misfortune that we usually think of as "civilized" and that are anything but?.. My own cats have always developed a way to express to me that they "get" humans and what humans do. When I was learning to write as a kid, my cat would put his paw on my pen to "help" and wouldn't let go. We were learning to write the ABC together. My other cat saw people cover food leftovers with lids, and decided it's a smart way to protect them, so she started covering her bowl with the plastic mat it was standing on whenever she had any leftovers. My current cat invented water basketball, he plays with a rubber band and then throws it into his water bowl from a distance. Culture is what we do when no one forces us to do it. Pure free will. Civilization and culture have nothing in common. An archeology professor once gave an assignment to his students to make a stone ax, using any tools they like, but replicating exactly the 250,000-year-old original. How hard can it be with all the modern technology at their disposal?.. Well, everybody failed. They had six months and they couldn't do it. They couldn't figure out how. That design was in continuous use for close to a million years, no changes. No changes were necessary -- it was perfect. A modern, sophisticated, educated human was unable to even come close. This ax, too, was culture... and since there was no money to be made off a patent, once it was perfect, no further improvements were needed. For a million years. For some reason I feel deeply moved by stories of things culture that last... Trends for a season... not so much. Sorry for rambling...

The word "civilization" derives from the Latin civitas,"city." All it really means is "life in a place, and in a way, severed and separated from nature." It does not mean "more advanced culture," "better social order," or "more efficient ways to survive and thrive." All it means is that a separation must take place and parts of the population quit doing what humans have always been doing on this planet -- living intertwined inseparably with their natural habitats -- and adjust to living in unnatural habitats that keep growing in size, influence, and impact on the remaining natural ones. The impact is not just drastic but mind-boggling and its progression is geometric. In the past 50 years alone, humans destroyed 50% of all forests on Earth. But "civilization" has always meant, first and foremost, "deforestation." Someone (or something) drives this process who seems to have placed an order for a desert planet and they've been "redecorating" a planet whose surface used to be covered with forests everywhere, ever since "civilization." I have no idea why this client who ordered the remodeling wants it remodeled this way, but it's definitely a client very hostile to things alive, very very opposed to the process of aliveness on Earth. Everything else that has ever been done in the times of our (?) civilization has always been presented to us as the most important things, while the main thing that was happening all along, unstoppable deforestation, hardly ever mentioned at all. It's a famous trick of all stage magicians and all con artists -- they distract your attention with something bright and shiny, visible and attention-catching, while the sleight-of-hand act quietly goes unnoticed, and they deceive you with utmost ease because you're looking elsewhere. So, to answer your question: I believe civilization in the shape and form we know it to be an absolute evil. For it not to be that, cities (and the non-cities that are basically sucked out, chewed up and spat out discards of cities, which is what the accompanying "countryside" turns into, courtesy of this division) and deforestation must not happen. But in this case it will no longer be "civilization," it will be what it has always been -- culture. Human culture can be as rich and as advanced as we would make it -- as we always made it before what I believe constituted a hostile takeover by some parasitic opposing consciousness. As for hope... If vast numbers of people were to suddenly see the light and learn the difference between "culture" and "civilization," there would be hope. We are truly magnificent when left well alone. I remember... But will we ever conquer the parasite and recover from the incalculable damage sustained, will we suddenly spontaneously become wise and strong and whole, or whether someone or something will have pity on us and fix it all for us, including us (don't we always wait for a "savior?..")?.. Does not seem likely, but one always hopes, dum spiro spero...

Genetic engineering is as much natural selection as a lab mouse in a cage is the beneficiary of natural selection. Alas, compared to their wild counterparts, those lab-born, lab-raised (for countless generations now) mice are sickly, weak, miserable, aspontaneous, inept, and stupid, albeit docile and obedient. There's nowhere to evolve inside the cage. Not that a mouse outside the cage needs to evolve -- in its own environment it's perfect as it is or it wouldn't be here after all those millions of years. Civilization is not natural selection. It is a parasitic infection. Just because someone has worms does not mean he is evolving. It may simply mean he is going extinct. History of evolution is full to the brim of stories of unsuccessful species that were able to start but weren't able to hold on to life on earth for more than a few dozen million years. And the ones extinguished even sooner are far more numerous. And we aren't anywhere near that mark which allows to assess the evolutionary success or failure of a species -- in evolutionary terms we've been born a minute ago. The younger a live creature, the more vulnerable to sudden changes in its environment -- try imagining a newborn baby whose parents decide he needs to be able to adjust to conditions that drastically change every five minutes -- or else, bad luck, he failed to evolve. This will give you an accurate picture of humanity's place in evolution. To assume that civilization is "evolving" us is similar to assuming that an ingrown toenail is a new evolutionary venue and all the pain is toward some future superclaws we're supposed to develop. Nope. It's just that the shoe was too tight and thwarted the normal development of that toenail. That's what civilization is. That's what genetic engineering is. Nothing more promising than that.

I researched Tarahumara too. They hunt deer, in addition to eating maize, but because of the overall decline of the land and drastically diminished availability of what they used to hunt, they also eat mice. Given their lifestyle, they are likely to have been full time hunters before the white man displaced, enslaved, decimated them, displaced again, and devastated the land, forcing them to flee repeatedly to less and less hospitable environs. Careful with those blind colonialism-derived views of who's healthy and who's not "due to what they eat" -- also with extrapolating what they eat post-catastrophically to what they ate traditionally. To expose people to genocidal interventions and then announce that whatever health problems they have are due to their dietary habits... come on. Really.

Scientific references are provided in the book. Conclusions do not rely on one particular method but are, rather, interdisciplinary (as is the author's schooling), some of them from areas not under dispute, others providing circumstantial or corroborating evidence, but none of it is a matter of agenda -- she had none starting out her research, beyond trying to figure out why her originally very healthy and very scientific family eating according to all the accepted scientific recommendations were dying young of degenerative disease. My interest was also piqued by her putting her research to the test by living for a few years with Innuit communities in the North Pole and even with a pack of wolves. (And looking a picture of health, strength, and natural beauty at around 60. A far cry from the emaciated look of the older vegetarians, the flabby carb addicts, and the knotted and convoluted "sports nutrition" victims alike.) I do my research like that too, not necessarily going this far but going the extra mile always. So, I read the papers referenced in the book, as I usually do with any book of interest to me, and the dissenting evidence too, trying to decide who is more trustworthy, and also did 9 months of eating the way she suggests myself, switching my metabolism to ketosis after about two weeks from the beginning of the experiment. Since I was not completely satisfied with "all" she presents -- not because of "prior beliefs" or poor research on the part of the author but because it is my nature to always dig deeper, for what the author may have missed -- I proceeded to undertake some research into epigenetics, a science that can theoretically disprove some of the conclusions of paleoanthropology and the like. And a parallel inquiry into why earlier, pre-TCM taoists (and the older schools of zen in Japan too) advocate "abstaining from grains." And so on. Nutrition is the single most complex subject in existence, make no mistake. It's a lifelong study for me, and I take it seriously. "Paleo" is just a word, and it means different things to different people -- just a label, nothing more. ("Atkins" is very wrong from my POV, though not as wrong as "macrobiotics" or "fruitarianism" or the like -- there's shades of wrong and shades of right, of course -- but it's also just a label. What to actually put in one's mouth and what not to put in one's mouth for optimal health is the real question. I was ultimately satisfied with the answer I got, for now. It is always a work in progress for me, has always been, and I adjust and modify beliefs to practice and comprehension continuously -- not vice versa. I wouldn't wish the opposite approach on the worst enemy. )

Well, not exactly Atkins of course -- he's the baby of nutritional nontradition, a dissenting one but still affected by lack of historically accurate perspective. But what these peoples really eat -- super high animal fat, moderate protein, very low carbs -- someone else ate in the recent enough past, and no, it's not poor dietary habits that caused their demise: 100 million Native Americans, before you-know-who came to bless them with you-know-what. And the huge cooking pits designed to fit a whole buffalo or whole bison for slow-roasting still exist, carbon dated 40,000 years, of which at least 25,000 years they were in continuous use, same pit, twenty-five thousand years of cooking meat for the whole tribe, year in and year out, millennium in and millennium out.

No, but I read her letters to her mother and sister which she wrote in the beginning of her Hollywood life, in Russian. That is, until contacts were severed. Many moons ago I happen to have attended the premiere of the documentary about Ayn Rand and a (small scale) Hollywood party that followed. The screenwriter latched himself onto me for much of its duration, a notebook and pen in hand, writing down silly things I was saying. I think he was drunk enough to believe me when I said I was Ayn's reincarnation (and obviously I was drunk enough to say it.) But in all actuality, I could never get past boredom when I tried reading her novels. That's what happens when a talent takes a back seat to an agenda. And her agenda wasn't even her own... she got enlisted... but you and I needn't go there because we're not going in the same directions. Anyway, thanks for the thought.

In the book the protagonist, in his youth, was on the quest for a "hidden treasure," a woman who, without the benefit of a refined and privileged upbringing, naturally and spontaneously developed the finest features of femininity -- somewhere rural, somewhere hidden. The picture reminded me of those sentiments to which Genji dedicated a lengthy explanation (to his friend) as to the kind of wife he hoped to find. He searched for this "hidden treasure." Had to hide himself and observe, I'm guessing, before making contact. Does this lighten the pic for you, Manitou?

I really have no interest in making this personal. If you find the time and interest to read the book I referenced, we can have a meaningful conversation afterwards, and I will be happy to hear out your scientific refutation of the scientific arguments that made a dent in my own former biochemical picture of the human body. If not, here's the post I redirect everybody to in this situation -- nothing personal: http://thedaobums.com/topic/38950-doing-no-homework-to-prove-anything-to-anybody/?p=641514

I don't think there's any other area of human knowledge today where ignorance bordering on clinical idiocy is more rampant than in nutrition. I suspect it's the doing of the food corporations which routinely present as "science" whatever boosts their profits. I mean, I've seen ignorance pertaining to various areas of life on four continents and nine seas. But nutritional beliefs people manage to contract in the West in general, and in the US more than anywhere else, defy credulity. I wrote in this thread to help someone with a soda addiction, the way I've helped many people over the years, with much more serious problems than this and with zero failure rate. To argue with vegetarians and "corporate science" brainwashees was not the goal of my participation. Let them eat cake.