Taomeow

The hurricane/tropical storm is a couple hours away from us per latest predictions, but some fire hydrants in downtown decided to help it along ahead of schedule. Video: https://packaged-media.redd.it/k703vjwl1bjb1/pb/m2-res_1280p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1692572400&s=6d053c7ae8deeab4e038fffffacb9f5afa090978#t=0

Not sure about Roman concrete -- I seem to remember they used egg whites in it, but modern industrial processes have long been way too stingy for that. As for herbal birth control, I have this Chinese medical book, A Barefoot Doctor's Manual (too lazy to re-tell the story of its origins and contents but you can look it up), and it has a few plant based methods of birth control. It was developed as an entirely practical book, no tall tales, but a couple of birth control recipes there blew my socks off... There's a monthly method -- fertility is on hold while you take that herbal brew, and when you stop it gets restored within a short time. And a yearly method -- a remedy you take just once a year that switches your fertility off for that year. Also reversible. So those plant methods weren't lost everywhere... although I don't know the current fate of the plants that went into making them. Pre-civilized people always controlled their birth rates, and not via infanticide as our so-called "scholars" (indented slaves of the system, with perks) would have us believe. Women of our species, let alone matriarchs, were neither ignorant about things nature nor numb as doorknobs back then.

@old3bob So maybe you can recall the secret, lost for many centuries, of making that most desired trade item that was known as the Tyrian purple? It cost more than three times its weight in gold, and only the royalty, nobility and the Roman high clergy could afford it. I know it was obtained, via an incredibly laborious process of procurement and production, from certain species of Mediterranean snails. The snails might still be around... but the technology is lost. If you knew it in that past life and could retrieve it, you could make a fortune. The mega-wealthy still hunt for things no one else can afford, and pay incredible money for the items that come with a guarantee of no mass access to them. Of course countless modern purple pigments exist, but none can replicate that royal color. (In fact, I know the color purple has the potential of being striking, but in modern clothes, in most cases, I find it ugly. I do own one exception but that's it.)

Anemoia. From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig, comes a word the language badly needed but never had until 2021. It's the feeling of nostalgia for a time you've never known. A wistful longing for an idealized past that exists only in imagination or secondhand accounts. When I first came to the US, to New York specifically, it was a different city from what it is today, and far as I'm concerned, a better one. But back then my older female co-workers, native New Yorkers, would often tell me about New York they used to know in their childhood and youth, and it was nothing like the city I was witnessing... it sounded like a dream, an urban fairy land. On more than one occasion they actually shed a tear telling me about that lost city. And they gave me anemoia. That's just one example. I'm massively afflicted by that feeling for many purposes. Some of it overlaps with nostalgia for the worlds (sic) I knew in this life, some must be genetic memory, and some -- possibly -- memories of past lives. I wonder how widespread this anemoia thing is.

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which only proves the point of the headline: I remember the early explorers of the land that was to become the USA reporting on what was to become the Hudson river -- they asserted you could cross that river stepping on salmon's backs.

We were born to brachiate. I don't know how well-known this term is (when I first heard it in my teens someone explained it to me) so I'll define it in case it isn't -- to engage for extended periods of time in locomotion in the trees. Like all primates, we are built like brachiators, but we hardly ever climb trees anymore, let alone sleep in the trees or jump from branch to branch and from tree to tree as a means of getting from point A to point B. (I've seen forests where it would have been quite feasible and probably more efficient than any other way of moving through them, but those are almost nonexistent in most parts now -- whereas once upon a time the whole planet was forested.) Some folks in the Ancestral Movement community do this as part of their training and occasionally get very convincing and very impressive. Parkour fans do this in urban settings, but the ability harks back to the primeval forest...

I've read that book and liked it a lot -- the parts where McDougall sticks to observed facts that is, not so sure about his evolutionary theories. (We spent a good deal of our evolutionary history -- the vast majority of the past 400 000 years -- in the ice age conditions, so overheating from running may not have been as much of a consideration from the standpoint of evolution... freezing to death was a bigger concern...) There's another theory I like more -- the aquatic ape (Desmond Morris in his book by the same title goes into some of the details). But based on the evidence from genetics, fetal development, history (especially the history of the "discovery" of sedentary agriculture all over the planet at once, in places that could have no contact with each other) and so on, I tend to consider, strongly, the possibility that we are a designer species, genetically modified toward goals unknown to us and quite seriously damaged by the intervention (like all GM organisms are). However, that post of mine was not a serious foray into the subject. I just pity those cats who look like alien chickens... reminds me of Plato's definition of a human as a "featherless biped." (Featherless rather than furless because bipeds -- e.g. chickens -- tend to have feathers rather than fur.) And I miss my tail.

Of course I meant the queen of England when she was young and feisty (rumor has it she used to hit and punch the king -- but not with taiji -- back then), and Noam Chomsky when he was a linguist whose Transformational Grammar I studied at the university many moons ago, rather than a political sellout to ___________ (not filling in the blank to avoid the dreaded politicizing of the thread). The first one then did (rumor has it) something I wouldn't mind being able to do myself, and the second turned the English language upside down and inside out for me, which was quite beneficial for my then-budding ability. So don't dismiss them without consideration... although neither one did anything for my taiji... oh and all the taiji reading material, whether in English or not, didn't do that much either beyond giving me the ability to engage in taiji parlance... most folks in my lineage who practiced and developed it for the previous 400 years were illiterate to begin with.

As a reggae song goes, The harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all. Too bad you didn't have better luck with finding a group to your specs. Thank you. I credit my master, my grandmaster and the other three of the Four Tigers of Chenjiagou, as well as my practice partners and students with giving me a bit of a clue over the years.

There's as many ways to do tuishou as there are components to mastering it. Their way was quite expert -- they used ting jin to listen for any tension in the opponent's body which they could use, or the weakening of the root, or the opponent getting ready to attack, or a myriad other things. Everything matters in ting jin -- including subtleties of breathing pattern, heartbeat (sic), the irises of the eyes, but primarily of course the touch. I've pushed hands with each of these women (one was a taiji classmate, the other one a regular at our workshops and co-author of several taiji books) and I know that nothing like their encounter with each other ever happened in their encounters with me. Both are aggressive and ambitious -- something I am not, so I could use it against them -- and very, very dedicated to practice, which made pushing hands with them not as easy-peasy as it would be with someone aggressive, ambitious and slacking. But they did have the skill to discern the level of skill in the opponent -- instantly, like all experienced practitioners! -- inferior, superior, or about equal. When it's about equal, which was the case between those two, things can get... um... uninteresting to the clueless outside observer. You've never done tuishou, have you?

Life imitates art, eh?

The only "external" thing about fajin is that you release the force externally instead of circulating and returning it to the interior as you normally do with your qi when practicing taiji. It fully depends on internal processes, the difference being that when you don't use fajin they remain internal throughout the practice and your qi is not lost -- whereas when you fajin you do spend some, especially when you initiate it instead of waiting to use the opponent's. (That's fully legit provided you don't do it often.) I've seen it in situations where, e.g., two equal-skill level (high middle) and equal stubbornness level practitioners, in push-hands, were standing against each other for some thirty, forty minutes, hands touching, stance perfect, rooting equally solid, just listening for the opening... and neither one offered an opening. So to the less-than-clueful observer they were doing nothing the whole time. And to the one with a clue, it was a battle of wills in full force. (Of course both were women, the patient gender.) The workshop participants started making bets as to which one will lose patience first and initiate something. (I don't know how it ended because I was busy with my own tuishou partners, I think I went through a dozen in the same time they were trying to NOT fajin first... 'cause every time I was done with the next partner, I'd sneak a peak and those stubborn girls were still in the same position, unmovable like statues. )

We are the only hairless primates for the same reason we have bred the Sphinx cats. Someone, a long long time ago, was bothered by our fur when redesigning us. (Allergies? Or the same fashion craze as the modern obsession with exterminating all hair still remaining on the human body for cosmetic -- or rather profit-driven -- purposes? Or envy? -- those green/grey alien thingies that messed up their own genetics and lost their hair and a few other things couldn't bear looking at shiny-furred happy people? And what about not having to first kill other furry animals for their fur to stay warm and later not paying for the heaters in winter? They couldn't stand it... )

I googled images for hairless bears, bald bears, and almost cried. They exist, poor things.

Chinese source does not equal competent source. My "English source" is also a Chinese source -- my Chen lineage master. In addition to his native Chinese he speaks pretty good English. He also holds a Ph.D. degree from Shanghai University as a taiji researcher, but more importantly he showed me short jin in real life. So my reasons for looking for a different source are exactly zero, both academically and empirically. I thought you knew by now not to try to teach me. Native Chinese proficiency does not make a self-taught taiji fan an expert or a master, anymore than English proficiency makes one the queen of England or Noam Chomsky, .

Uh-huh.

No, you may mean something else, but what I said refers to the level of skill, the development and refinement of qi with all its taiji-specific derivatives including fajin -- and its availability on a whole new level to those who had developed and refined it. Short jin refers to its concentration into ever-smaller units (in actual distance of application, among other things, but not only) of ever-greater power. Basically you generate it at what looks like a simple touch, not a punch, not a kick, not a push... just touch. You need to place yourself on the receiving end of short jin in order to get an idea of what it's about. A high level teaching master can show you... once. Once is enough, and you won't ask for more, I guarantee it. But you will understand what you're working toward. (And there's no other way. )

So I stay away for a month and come back to the tail end of the thread about the demise of TDB morph into bears and Egyptian magic.

Yup. And then there's "long jin" (chang jin 长劲) and "short jin" (duan jin 短劲) for all of the above. When a high level master shows what looks, to a less-than-clueful observer, either fake, staged, or magical -- that's the short jin. The difference in explosive power between the "regular" long jin and the top level short jin I would liken to the difference between regular powder explosion and nuclear explosion. The first one relies on a rapid chemical reaction (combustion) of an explosive material like gunpowder or TNT. The second one involves nuclear fission, where atomic nuclei are split into smaller fragments, releasing immense energy. (Bear with me, these are only metaphors, I don't mean short jin can split atomic nuclei... ...or can it if it's very short? )

Well, ergot fungus is not part of rye, it's an infection that can contaminate rye more readily but it can also spread to wheat, barley, oats etc.. So simply preventing this infection takes care of LSD. A better question is, what about gluten and cereal grain lectins stimulating the opioidergic system in the gut and the brain to produce endogenous opioids -- similar to morphine, codeine, opium etc.? Which explains why it has seduced our civilization into an ages-long drug addiction (which consuming those grains really is...) And why does our body release endogenous painkillers (for both the body and the psyche) in response to being presented with gluten and cereal lectins? Because that's what it does in response to being hurt, damaged. So the cycle goes on -- you eat that stuff, you hurt and damage your body, the body releases feel-good chemicals... and a grain "civilization" is born.

No, I didn't mean footwork. I meant "no issuing," "no expressing" technique. No fa.

I think this, like most things taiji, is misunderstood both in terminology and in application by quite a few. My teacher had me fajin him vs. fajin a pillar supporting a beam in his practice room, by way of explaining the difference hands on. Yes, of course you can fajin without an opponent, who's to stop you if you have the know-how. And no, that pillar didn't give me anything to use against it, I could only rely on my very own resources. Whereas a live opponent is going to give you something you can appropriate and turn against him (if you have the know-how of course.) Don't use your own resources is the golden rule of good push-hands. The highly skilled practitioner won't give you anything though. Moreover, they will create a perfect sensory illusion of "nothing there" -- try using fajin against a cloud, a swath of fog, a tactile emptiness... Very educational. So that pillar does give you something after all -- its own hardness which it is unable to soften, let alone to the point of disappearing from all your senses except your eyesight. Are you familiar with the "bu fa" technique?

Thanks. That's very impressive. Sounds like a lot of work but you must be having fun with it or you wouldn't do it, right? The fish pond with plastic sheeting to home edible fish... I'm no fish expert by any stretch of imagination but what immediately occurred to me was that microplastics might have a ball leeching into that water. Microplastics are the scourge of modern life (we have an average of a spoonful accumulated in the brain! doing our brain functions no favors... and a lot in all other organs, harmful all of them -- hormone disruptors, carcinogens, mutagens, teratogens... They are hard to avoid in everyday modern life -- but I think the ones that have the best chance to degrade under sunlight and heat and leech into water are perhaps the most dangerous ones. So I would look into some more traditional options if I were a fish in that pond building something like this. I know they exist, but of course I've no idea about the $$ and labor involved. Just a thought though.)