Taomeow

The funkiest and funniest folk band

China imported 12 million tons of coal from the US in 2024. The coal was delivered on huge oil-burning ships. China burned that coal to make energy to build solar panels. The solar panels were then exported to the US and delivered on huge oil-burning ships. In 1992, a cargo ship container tumbled into the Pacific, dumping 28,000 bath toys, mostly rubber ducks, that were headed from China to the U.S.. Currents took them, and news reports said some have eventually reached Maine and other shores on the Atlantic. In the following years, they showed up all over the world, Seattle to Alaska to Hawaii and back to China and to the Arctic. Pop quiz: how do you think the two stories are connected? Here they are in Chicago River

He was provoked. The cat wrote "Domovoy is stupid."

Mine is probably a domovoy.

How do you test for timelines? I know so many stories like this, on top of it occasionally happening to me. My sister-in-law, e.g., when living in an apartment, discovered one day that one of her earrings was missing. A diamond earring, expensive, a present for some anniversary. She turned the apartment upside down, then went over every step of the staircase outside the apartment, enlisted her husband and her daughter and her mother to look, they did it the next day too, just in case they missed a nook or a cranny, they used flashlights and what not, maybe not a microscope but other than that, literally everything in their power. And then she gave up. A week passed. She stepped out the door and there it was, that earring, in the middle of the top stair, shining brightly.

Brutalist style! I remember an even more streamlined set from my 7th grade... Around that time several of my classmates got into chess. Most played in their spare time, but the not-too-diligent me and my deskmate (we had shared desks for 2) started playing during classes. We were trying to be discreet of course, using mini sets and then smaller pocket sets as teachers kept confiscating them one after the other, two of his, two of mine. So finally we made a pencil drawing of the board on the plastic top of the desk and cut a bunch of little squares of paper on which we drew the pieces. Once caught again, the teacher would then make us wash the board off the desk and get rid of that "set" -- we did, only to replicate it by next class. I haven't played in a long time, but I do own a nice set for when civilization collapses... and even if I didn't, I could always revert to my 7th grade solution.

I found my lost Swiss Army knife. It was in a small inner pocket of a small German backpack I use when I go hiking. I checked that pocket at least a dozen times before, the knife wasn't there I swear, and now, out of the blue, it's there. People who experience weird comings and goings of small objects in this manner call it a glitch in the Matrix or the Mandela effect. I call it mindfuckery.

We have an idiom, "the hat is burning on the thief." Meaning, there's no evidence against him but for some reason he self-incriminates. Thanks for the heads-up.

You go backward in your memory, from the last thing you did that day back to the previous one back to the previous one, reconnecting everything in reverse, then go to sleep. Got it from a seminar. Very simple -- yet helps one combat fragmentation and realize how much of the day they were aware and conscious, and which parts their body or their mind disconnected from and sleepwalked through. Can be a fractal -- you can get a broad sketch of your day (I did this, and right before this, I did that, and that was preceded by such and such actions, etc.), or you can go into an infinite number of details. Ee.g. instead of "got undressed before going to bed" you remember "took off the left sock before the right sock" (can you remember?) or instead of "made boiled eggs" -- "cracked the boiled eggs on the left side of the counter, boiled the eggs for 6 minutes, turned the burner down, put the pot on the burner and turned it up," whatever.

I was thinking about that too. I'm no fan of excessive rules and regulations, prohibitions and restrictions, etc. -- nor of giving the mods extra work -- yet I've often wished we had stricter rules against stalking threads and/or users, against hijacking discussions via brigading, and against inquisition style interrogations thinly veiled as "just questions." (Gives me bad KGB flashbacks.) There's enough Savonarolas foaming at the mouth elsewhere and I don't think a forum that accepts that mode of communication in any section remains attractive -- except for those thriving on it. Maybe @stirling was right asserting that section is harmful (if I remember correctly -- if not, my apologies) -- even when ignoring it, one can't unknow that it exists and its qi affects all the rest. In any event, I'll figure it out for myself, and if others figure out a better solution, great.

I'm thinking about removing my access too. If I wanted a nonstop stream of regurgitated MSNBS etc. spam in my feed, human beings reduced to assorted dehumanizing labels, and events presented through the crooked lenses of the mighty lie machine, I could go straight to the source. In the current events section, I was hoping for something very different-- there are people with whom really meaningful and productive exchanges could happen if only... Ah well.

That's so cool. And so sad, because don't know about Australia, but in the Amazon rain forest the majority of plants found there haven't even been identified yet -- while they keep going extinct. Some of our pharmaceutical substances that were derived from those identified, in the meantime, have revolutionized modern medicine whenever they found an inroad there. Curare, without which modern general anesthesia doesn't happen and most major surgeries would be impossible. Quinine, which globally turned around malaria (synthetic versions, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, are derived from it.) Pilocarpine, which is prescribed for all cases of glaucoma. To name a few. And god only knows now many were never touched out of hubris (old wives' tales, snake oil, woo woo medicine is the common way to refer to those miracles of healing nature and native expertise spanning millennia.) I used to gobble up books on ethnobotany. Sometimes they made me cry.

I'll tell you about the second biggest. It was Mo Pai, occasionally referred to as more pie, and it was not a pie I ever took a slice of but I remember it being baked and burned and banned and resurrected from the ashes again and again, like, forever. Still won't say anything about the biggest. Sorry, I just can't. 😿

Western medicine used to explore this venue -- have you heard of Coley's toxins? This mixture of bacterial toxins to use as treatment for cancer was developed in the late 19th century by Dr. William B. Coley, a surgeon at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in NYC. It is still used in some "alternative" clinics, particularly in Tijuana, and google tells me there's some renewed interest and new research into this method. I happen to have seen it in Tijuana. It's a pretty scary method, relying on hyperactivating the immune system by a massive assault with bacterial toxins that raises the body's temperature to very high figures and kick-starts a drastic response from cell-mediated immunity, i.e. immunity that relies on mechanisms different from antibodies -- phagocytes, antigen-specific cytotoxic T-lymphocytes, and various cytokines. The reaction itself lasts for about an hour and then it goes away once the toxins are processed, since the critters themselves aren't present. I don't know how efficient it is, but I've seen this reaction (that went away after an hour) in a patient who wasn't treated with conventional methods before, i.e. the immune system was intact and capable to mount a response. And I've seen zero reaction in another patient -- no temperature spike, nothing. That second one was trying it as a last resort after conventional chemo and radiation failed to help him, and his immune system was completely shut down by prior interventions and didn't react to the toxins at all. So I guess if someone wanted to disprove its efficiency, all they have to do is use it in this manner, as a last resort in an immunocompromised person, and it's guaranteed not to work. How well it might work, statistically speaking, if used as the first resort, no one knows today.

/\ When was it written -- 19th century, 20th? It's different now... let me take it from there. In god's good time came climate change, man-made it was, no less. "You'll all be rooned," said Klaus Schwab, "unless we chip your ass." "Unless you pay your carbon tax and kill your cows and shit and wield that mighty battle ax and eat your bugs -- that's it."

Two perfect circles by Akiyoshi Kitaoka

18 hours ago, doc benway said: blessed sanity has drown’d herself in the Gulf of Amerika I'll let the chain proceed as usual -- from the last line of the last haiku, which is Jenn's -- but I did have mine linking to Steve's yesterday, just couldn't post it due to the continued glitchiness of the forum. So I'll post it just because, not to disrupt the chain now but as an aside. (Maybe put it on a T-shirt?) Of Amerika: all it gave me were my woes, my guns, and my cats. .

Yes, I know that people in traditional cultures occasionally snacked on crickets, but they were never more than that -- a snack, not a food source. I grew up snacking on our super delicious freshly roasted sunflower seeds which this or that entrepreneurial babushka (that's not a hair scarf contrary to the way the word entered the English language, that's an old lady or a granny) always sold somewhere in the street, often placing herself and her bucket, strategically, not far from a school so kids could buy that snack on the way to or from school. The sunflower seeds were sold in shell and often still hot from having just been roasted at home. Yum. Beats all packaged junk foods combined, but junk food (or rather junk snack) is what they were considered even then and there, albeit I later discovered research showing that they are supposedly good for the brain development and that regular consumption in childhood might raise one's IQ. (I don't have a control group of me who didn't indulge to compare my IQ to, so I can't vouch for that. ) I think attitudes toward crickets would have been the same... my dad, e.g., hated it when he caught me snacking on sunflower seeds, telling me it was low class and uncultured and a dumb thing to eat all around. As for your brother, you need to think back to his med school and especially residency years to understand the trauma conditioning they all undergo, specifically designed for the purpose. Sleep deprivation is one of the surest ways to trauma condition -- and they are forced into schedules of 36-56 hour shifts then 8 hours on call, then rinse, repeat -- all under high stress, high demands, high competition, a lot of responsibility with zero authority (a prescription for slave-like receptivity to brainwashing), and curricula developed with "a patient cured is a customer lost" credo hammered into each petroleum/industrial waste derived "remedy" for "symptoms" which constitute upwards of 90% of what they learn (how do I know? -- I used to own a PDF and study it for educational purposes, then check what this or that wonder pill is made of...) ...and you'll understand that when you're dealing with an MD product of that system, all bets are off. Whatever they learn, they can only learn by rote -- not analyze, question, get curious about, much less doubt -- there's simply no resources being left for that, by design. Total enslavement of a brain to the 4.5 trillion industry, the largest in the world not counting the military.

I've never seen a bug on a lettuce in my life. However, the EU just approved adding 4% bugs to human foods. There's even a German phone app I've seen (only in a demo, I don't have it) which scans products in supermarkets for this particular ingredient. A really nasty-looking cockroach appears on the screen if the app detects this addition. I guess it's all about making sure that "plant based diets" don't bereave their consumers of B12... it's all for our own good. In China, I've personally cooked (not for myself) huge bugs and enormous centipedes which were part of very complex herbal formulas prescribed to the patient by a rather famous classical Chinese medicine doctor. The condition of the patient was serious, and the treatment called for class 3 ingredients -- i.e. highly toxic ones which are never used for anything less serious. It was the part of the treatment that is known as "attack poison with poison," perhaps a bit similar to the chemo approach in the West (though the toxicity of those traditional ingredients is much lower). Alongside with those, there were tons of other things in the formulas though, nourishing, replenishing, moving stuff along, etc. -- usually a couple dozen ingredients many of which were changed every time after a weekly exam. The nasty bugs remained though. The outcome of the treatment was a bit of a medical miracle -- my MD friend told me later it's considered impossible and explained the physiology of why exactly. I had to then ask permission to talk about qi, with apologies of course. As for B12, it is stored in the liver in amounts that can prevent deficiencies sometimes for even a couple of years after the start of a vegetarian diet... but after that, I wouldn't count on bugs. If I were to take a wild guess, I'd surmise Western food industries don't know everything about bugs.

John Steinbeck (Nobel prize, 1962) was born in Salinas, CA, in 1902, spent his youth there, and based his novel East of Eden in part on his family history. Today I accidentally came across this passage and... well, many thoughts, literary to political to climatic, and now also personal experience. What a gem of straightforward reality. If you watch reality long enough -- for generations as they used to -- instead of your screens, you notice patterns in nature personally, without the middleman's interpretations... and, paradoxically, you also don't notice it. You don't notice due to a very peculiar phenomenon: what new agers drawing on poorly digested sources call "the power of Now" is something that does always have the front seat -- "Now" does -- but that seat is not located in reality. Because reality is the pattern, and "now" is always out of touch with it. I forget the name of that Chinese philosopher who maintained that the past and the future are real and the present is an illusion, but I've long been fascinated by this unexpected twist of taoist thought. Now the Steinbeck quote: “I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.” ― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Double post edited out

Same for me except the theme is the opening chords of Beethoven's Symphony No.5.

In walking the plank, the anti-pirates bias becomes apparent.