Taomeow

"The Code of Hammurabi," a 1950 painting by Robert Thom from his History of Medicine series. A doctor defends himself against complaints of a patient who claims some iatrogenic condition. If a patient's injury was determined to be the doctor's fault, the doctor had to pay damages.

I had some raven buddies too. Sometimes they allowed me to take a picture (I always ask permission)

Yeah, but the thing is, I don't trust you to ask a straightforward question at this stage of my experience with the way you interact with me and some others. If that changes, I might find it worthwhile to have a straightforward discussion with you on some issue or other in the future. Not saying it can never happen, but right now it's not an option.

Darling, for fuck's sake. I avoided many (some of them potentially life-destroying, for myself and others) KGB entrapment snares quite successfully when I was much younger and much more naive than I am today. What makes you think I'll jump into any of yours? Really, Ralis. Have some respect for my lil' brain.

@silent thunder Thanks for the fascinating stories! Verily you're my spirit brother from the Great Mother! The same thing happened to me -- a red-tailed hawk dropped a feather at my feet, at a very significant point in my life. It was in 1996. I still have it. I keep it in my bedroom by the window, just standing in a little cloisonne vase. For some reason, which I no longer remember, I decided it's a deflector of bad dreams, like a dream catcher. I never had a bad dream in all these years. Wish it was also as efficient for my waking life, where shit does happen, no doubt about it.

One of my favorites too. "It all happened before, and it will all happen again..." -- I just found out that it's actually a quote from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations (another favorite) -- here's the complete version: "To bear in mind constantly that all of this has happened before. And will happen again—the same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging." Also it had the best opening lines of all time! "Are you alive?" "Yes..." "Prove it."

My regards to your thumb from my middle finger -- no, not in that sense. And I can't even send any designers to hell, the design is impeccable -- no plastic anything, solid 1075 high carbon steel all of it, but I'll gladly send to that Circle 2 any and all corner-cutting manufacturers who have this screw the finishing touch mentality. Don't they know that god is in the details, whereas inattention to details is the domain of the devil? I'm talking about a Condor Matagi knife which arrived dull -- so I sharpened it myself, to perfection -- trouble is, after a while I forgot that I did, and when I decided to handle it at some point, I operated on the unconscious assumption that it was still dull. Big mistake. Hope your thumb recovers nicely -- my middle finger did, took 10 days though.

Hi Rene Hope they burn in the special hell for the stupid people whose stupidity hurts others (I don't know which circle it is -- did Dante ever mention it?) but other than that, welcome back!

You've read all of Helena Blavatsky? I'm impressed! I had "The Secret Doctrine" in four volumes on my shelf for years and I don't remember finishing even one of the volumes, due to the density of the material more than anything else. I wound up donating the whole thing so it doesn't sit there shaming me for my lack of perseverance every time I glance at the shelf!

What a beautiful and smart bird. We don't have red-tailed cockatoos here but we have red-tailed hawks. I have a bit of a relationship with them too. They often like to circle overhead to supervise my taiji. They occasionally scream when there's things I ought to be aware of. Four days in a row before the local wildfire started, e.g., one of them woke me up every morning, screaming right outside my window. I'm, like, what? What is it this time? Oh... a bird's eye view over the landscape, gathering information, alertness, awareness ahead of time. Thank you.

To just walk around, the red-tailed hawk has folded her magnificence.

I just read that one.

Thanks, and to you too!

There's multiple wildfires all across California, over 2,2 million acres have burned so far (making 2020 the largest wildfire season in California history already, but it only just began) and nothing is contained yet. I'm not in the evac zone for the moment -- the closest one, Valley fire, is still far enough, so all I had to deal with so far is some smoky air (and today a smoky fog -- it dawned on me that that's what they call "smog," after I initially mislabeled it "foke"). But we're going to get Santa Ana winds, by tomorrow I think, and these are expected to be strong (50-60 mph) and are always incredibly erratic, changing direction without a warning and likely to complicate matters. So I'm just watching it and trying to not be caught unprepared just in case, the way I was the last time it happened -- we were told to be ready to bug out within an hour (didn't have to in the end, but there was no knowing in advance) and it's too stressful to be figuring it out on such short notice. I bet you're getting a bit of a deja vu by proxy.

No, not from an amoral standpoint. On the contrary, I feel quite passionately non-indifferent about the amoral things happening in the world. But our lists of perpetrators of those things, their causes, and helpful vs. harmful solutions are not likely to intersect. I feel that many good people who tend to be naturally moral have been taken advantage of and manipulated into countless fake causes and away from countless real ones -- by entirely amoral sociopaths in charge of their indoctrination -- precisely because normal people do have emotions strongly connected to moral values. This is what makes us vulnerable to being manipulated by those who have neither. As for famines, I think they are very likely. There's many different ways to unleash them though if either the sociopathic individuals in charge or their economic decisions make them unavoidable. As an example -- here's just one story about farmers being forced to destroy millions of pounds of potatoes as we speak: https://www.businessinsider.com/potato-farmers-destroy-potatoes-covid19-even-in-a-food-shortage-2020-6 I've been following the supply chain closely since the beginning of the year (not the MSM but the conversations between people who actually work in the supply chain) and saw dozens of similar stories regarding other crops, livestock, and food processing/storage facilities. It's a worldwide phenomenon, and countries that don't want to do it somehow wind up "revolutionized"-- somehow they start seeking liberation from this and that all of a sudden as soon as they don't want to play along. Can "something" cause devastating famines if things keep going where they're going? Alas, I can't presently see how it can be avoided, though I may be wrong and hope I am. Does the sociopathic system and its built-in cannibalistic machinery depend on climate adversities in order to unleash famines on humanity?.. Historically, it never did.

Happy to oblige. I've got way more where this comes from.

I also feel it in my gut that we're being propelled headlong into interesting times, alas, but for a different reason. I don't think a warmer Earth is what's going to do us in, in particular because all civilizations in our history, without a single exception, were spawned and reached their peak in the warmest periods of Earth's overall cold-as-hell history, and none of them in the coldest periods -- which constitute 99% of all history of Earth's existence. Earth the Cosmic Snowball, that's what we're nicknamed in the galactic presently unmentionable pockets of the scientific community. Even today, at the end of a brief 12-thousand-year-long period of thawing out in our Sun's warm hand (which the scientific consensus of a few decades ago saw as being just about over -- the ice age was overdue they warned, like clockwork, it never failed before and was just running a tiny bit late this time) -- even today, do you know how much of Earth is currently uninhabited due to being too cold? Subtract 57% which is deserts and mountains out of 15.77 billion acres of the total uninhabited surface, that's your answer. Not enough? 95% of the earth's population is currently concentrated on 10% of its surface. (World Bank's World Development report, 2009). Why exactly are "we" supposed to be desperate for solutions to a problem that, in the warming scenario and only in the warming scenario, will go away by itself: the problem of scarcity of life-sustaining resources on planet Earth?.. An eight billion acre question.

Yup -- I also believe the solution (if it is possible at all, this late in the day) could only be found along the lines of decentralized, non-hierarchical, and ideally matriarchal tribe-like communities. As for the "matriarchal" part, that would certainly take time -- right now a matriarchal society is impossible, we had several thousand years to thoroughly forget what those are really like. As things stand now, any women who have power and authority can only act as honorary males, rather than true matriarchs in any meaningful sense. Women would have to unlearn that, and men would have to unlearn that -- before anyone who happens to be a female of power stops acting as a patriarchal hierarchical overlord and manages to turn off any of the patterns in the overall structure of patriarchy-derived power. An anatomically female patriarch who was able to overcome this anatomical handicap by strictly adhering to the patriarchal, centralized, hierarchical paradigms is not it. Matter of fact, an anatomically male matriarch would be my choice against her -- if he ever materializes in the real world, which is not, theoretically, impossible. Like Laozi, you know, who identified with The Great Mother. But when was the last time someone like Laozi had anything to do with politics?.. But no one is going to "give it" to us. The centralized, hierarchical machinery is not there for the purpose of dismantling itself. Wish I had more hope for "us." It really makes no sense that so many of "us" are so thoroughly bent on keeping the machine well-oiled --or else, as the only alternative we see, on breaking it down here and there only in order to assemble a bigger, more crushing one in its place. But those are the facts...

It is known. It is known to all of California now. It's a boy. El Dorado fire was started by a pyrotechnic device released at a gender reveal party. Imagine starting your life by having a few thousand acres burned to the ground in your honor on the first day of your existence. That boy may be destined to grow up to be someone special. (Genghis Khan?..)

That makes no sense to me either but it's the facts. When all of the global activity came to a screeching halt with quarantines, billions of ordinary people no longer riding, driving, flying, sailing, operating machinery or having fun, one would expect a sizable difference in CO2 emissions following the accepted doctrine. There wasn't any. All I can say is that I'm not coming from the place most people are coming from -- to wit, from having been informed exclusively by the media without any first hand access to the data that hasn't been cherry-picked and reinterpreted. I had such access. My father was a physicist working on those problems, first in the Soviet Union and then in an environmental company in the US. My mother was a project leader on several Arctic natural gas pipelines. And I worked as a technical writer for the oil and gas industries for several years. I had to consult, in person, engineers and polar geologists and scientists on things I didn't understand in order to "get it" before writing technical stuff on the subject. My job depended on my not writing nonsense. But I didn't post out of "pity for your soliloquy," LOL, I posted because I respect your respect for the presenter's analysis and your willingness to use your own mind to draw your conclusions. I had only one objection. I believe this willingness, not just for you but for anyone, is nullified by one's mind having already been made up in advance. I'm not saying I'm immune to the confirmation bias myself. Just that my own confirmation bias is not derived from the same sources as yours.

Today's sighting nearby. A local's comment explaining it to the curious onlookers: "HOA president Karen reported that a resident's grass was 3.2" high, far above the HOA rule 4.2.4.66 clearly stating grass must be cut to less than 2.75" at all times."

If it was stored safely, it will last a few thousand years. Honey used to be the universal preservative for all things they wanted to preserve.

The view from La Mesa -- which is about in the middle between us and the fire

What a spectacular picture! Valley fire is 55 miles from us to the southeast. The wind is currently moving it in our direction, northwest, at 1 mph. My phone started meowing updates on warnings and evacuations. I'm also getting prepared. My car doesn't look like it's covered in snow, it's funkier -- a mix of ash, some yellow pollen, and a whole army of ants crawling on top trying to sort it all out.

I've made a few tinctures a few months ago. This time mostly antivirals -- I was consulting Buhner's "Herbal Antivirals" for this, he has very good detailed instructions for specific tinctures. I made them with cane rather than grain alcohol (from Mexico, and from my own research rather than Buhner's), and used it undiluted (96%) on fresh herbs and diluted to 55-60% on dry ones. That's because fresh herbs naturally have a high water content, while dry ones had all their water evaporated, or in the case of some -- like quinine bark -- didn't have much to begin with. For best extraction, some components in the herb need alcohol in the highest concentration possible, but some other components are water soluble, so to get a superior, maximum concentration tincture, you need both. I also made a quinine tonic syrup (with a few other herbs and citrus peel from three kinds of citrus fruit) used either for homemade tonic water (delicious) or in alcohol based cocktails, which I haven't tried -- I'm in the no interest in any alcohol phase, which happens periodically. I have made a great mint tincture planning to use it for a mint liqueur but, having lost interest in alcohol, haven't gotten around to that yet. Scutellaria (Baikal scullcap), eleuthero (Siberian ginseng) and rhodiola, herbs native to Siberia, must have channeled something inexplicable (tinctures made right are magical) and a couple of folks who run a health/ski/meditation retreat in central Siberia somehow found me and wanted to talk on whatsapp, whereupon they suggested I do a presentation in the course of a 6 week "marathon" they are going to run online on various related subjects. Thinking about it... but feeling a bit too lazy to get involved. Will see.