Taomeow

I think loyalty through thick and though thin makes life harder -- while its absence makes it about as meaningful as a cardboard cut-out of a person. An imitation of humanhood. I don't mean loyalty to those who abuse us or exploit us or take unfair advantage of us. For them, screw you is the only adequate response. Loyalty is precious and not to be wasted. But neither is it a good idea to withhold it from those close to us just because they've hit difficulties, or because it makes our life more difficult. I seriously believe the world will come to an end due to an unnaturally and insidiously cultivated lack of loyalty between people, a species nature herself designed to count on each other and depend on each other. (An aside. I used to like a lot a very famous and talented icon of the 20th century Russian poetry, Marina Tsvetaeva -- until I learned that during the civil war when food became scarce she decided that supporting both her daughters was too much and abandoned the younger one, a toddler, at an orphanage where the latter soon died of hunger. In her diary Marina referred to that toddler as a greedy bitch who was unworthy of sharing food with, and gloated that when she was giving food to the older one, bypassing the younger, the younger one followed her with "those stupid greedy eyes" in vain. That was the end of Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry for me --I didn't donate her books, I threw them in the dumpster. I hate it when fans of her writings (who are many) try to downplay this "episode," citing her difficult life and how bad everything was for her yada yada. All true -- years later she committed suicide, in part because of betrayal by her beloved son. What goes around comes around...)

Yeah, I'd like to look at her bazi chart... probably Fire in all pillars, maybe Wood in one stem or branch... so handling Fire, to her, is like handling Water for a fish

Wearing gloves normally solves this problem, but I occasionally forget. The most treacherous peppers are serranos, you get both very mild and extremely hot specimens within one batch, and you never know which is which! At least with chiles, jalapenos etc. you know what you're dealing with (they do differ in hotness batch to batch, but not within the same batch!) I do keep a little jar of Carolina Reaper among my spices ( 2.2 million Scoville Heat Units), the hottest pepper in existence until 2023 (selectionists have now created Pepper X which is 2.7) and, since it's ground, I don't have to touch it with my hands -- but it's not a bad idea to wear a respirator when you shake it out of the jar, and not just in the kitchen. When it was very freshly bought, one could feel the impact of even one molecule in the air in the living-room too, and if god forbid you give the jar a careless shake, in the bedrooms behind closed doors! But it's fun to handle provided you approach it with every precaution as hazardous material, and it can do amazing thing to chicken.

Haven't perused the wiki link (wiki articles come and go but the earth abides forever, per Ecclesiastes), but in my experience, it's not true at all. Perhaps social limitations on women's roles, of various severity in different times and societies, may have created this illusion, and "they're all the same" is one of the misogynistic put-downs men affected with the malaise of misogyny like to throw at women -- but give women a chance to lift their heads from chores and responsibilities and secondary/submissive roles, and you will find a great variety of female traits. And even within patriarchy-imposed limitations you may find matriarchs of large families and hired assassins (a traditionally female occupation in China for many centuries), and any other kinds of variability. What if role models are fathers, uncles, grandfathers, older brothers who process their thoughts, emotions, etc. in a particular way? "A role model" offered within a bogus society is bound to be something fake, but real people in a boy's life are bound to be default role models, both consciously and (to a greater extent) unconsciously emulated. (Or rebelled against, which is also a form of following in the footsteps -- but in the opposite direction, not a freely chosen one but a contrarian one, preselected out of spite.) Humans develop by emulating -- which is normal. Tao patterns itself on itself. Of course when what's available for emulation is corrupted from the get-go... sigh.

Stranger thing, they have competitions rubbing the hottest peppers into their eyes. The world champion, at the last one the internet made me aware of, was a woman from India who rubbed the hottest peppers in existence into her eyeballs for the longest time. I can handle hot peppers and hot sauces -- in fact I rather like them -- but carefully, without overdoing it. But if god forbid I've been handling hot peppers and then wash my hands with soap and water very thoroughly and then accidentally touch my eyes... ouch. Some of the bite gets transferred to the fingertips, and washing doesn't entirely remove it. I make some Georgian (from Georgia the country, not the US state) sauces on occasion, those are my favorite, and some of them are very mild, some, medium, and some, killer. The killer ones go very well with things like shish kabob (or rather shashlik)...

What is masculine (as well as feminine) changes from culture to culture of course, some for the better, some for the worse. I remember seeing a Japanese movie in my teens, a rare occasion at the time, where a mighty general, as macho/samurai as they get, lost a decisive battle. In his headquarters he receives the report, tells everyone to leave, and allows himself to react emotionally. The way he does it is, he picks up a fan and starts slowly dancing, striking poses, fanning himself, and solemnly reciting a sad poem of defeat, with eyes full of sorrow. It is a highly ritualized performance -- with no spectators, he only expresses his feelings to himself in this manner. Back then I found it entirely incomprehensible and, to be honest, rather comical. Now I understand a bit better what it was all about.

Protector, defender of those who are weaker (whether physically or socially -- primarily children and other endangered species, whether permanently endangered or in danger in the moment). Someone reliable and trustworthy, not a backstabber, not a fair weather friend. Quietly strong (primarily in spirit -- physical strength welcome but optional), genuinely kind out of a strong place, not out of weakness. He has courage off the scale but he's not reckless, he's emotional in a healthy way, level-headed, a calming rather than agitating presence. He is after love, not after scratching the itch. He is after living in peace with himself and people around him, not in perpetual search of drama or conflict. He is never cruel but don't mistake him for a push-over -- he will stand his ground, not out of stubbornness but because he has a spine. He doesn't snore.

It's very true that academic standards and intelligence are absolutely not the same thing, but schools don't teach intelligence. In the best case scenario they educate, and in the worst case scenario they brainwash. In the current scenario they fail to educate and excel at brainwashing. AI is not intelligent. It's a machine for processing and plagiarizing data. A GIGO* machine, as a programmer might put it. Its pattern recognition is mercifully still paltry (that's why you are given those "I am not a robot" patterns to recognize when you want to sign up for this or that online -- you recognize them, the machine doesn't. And those are simple visual patterns a 2-year-old has no problem with. About complex ones, neither machines nor people with this skill deficient even know they exist, and fail to notice them on a lifelong basis.) Our current environment is all about dumbing people down. And I don't see anyone being "harder to fool now" -- what I see is the opposite. *GIGO -- one of the basic principles of programming: "garbage in, garbage out." Meaning, the machine is unable to obtain its own judgment, and whatever data you feed it will form the basis of its quasi-thinking process. The data that is corrupted, untrue, biased, one-sided, distorted, fake, etc., will be processed toward conclusions that are corrupted, untrue, biased, one-sided, distorted, fake. A machine is not capable of critical thinking, and its quasi-thinking will consist of garbage if people who program it supply garbage input. But then we have to deal with garbage output this process produces that is, at the next step, fed to other machines as input. So the process becomes exponential, and the pile of garbage masquerading as information grows at every step of it. The same is true of people too, except those capable of critical thinking (the "intelligent" in the real sense of the word) might escape this process and avoid turning their brain into a dumpster for "trends" overfilling faster and faster.

Methinks you're in the wrong thread for this.

It is OUR law to irradiate and chemicalize all fruits and vegetables from Mexico and China, so whatever may have been organic on location becomes non-organic once it crosses the border. My special pet peeve is medicinal herbs -- sulphur added as preservative, otherwise can't be imported. And to read labels on imported Japanese foods, you need a Ph.D. in chemistry.

I wasn't done yet. Please stay tuned. Serbia was called Servia until 1916. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22913

Sure -- before the exam, and after. Been trying half my life to figure it out. I also grew up with the metric system. I miss it every day. There is. "Diagram" means draw as a diagram the syntactic relationships between words in a sentence. Aka a simple derivational tree. "The Lord loveth a cheerful giver": "The Lord" is the subject, "loveth" is the predicate, "a giver" is a direct object, "cheerful" is its modifier. The diagram would look something like this:

Will you marry me? (just kidding, don't get scared) I have great respect for practical skills of all sorts. I like people who can build and repair and create and grow stuff, not just shop and order services -- or, alternatively, let things break and fall apart and do nothing. But everything you mentioned is quite beyond me.

I wonder how many eighth graders would pass this 1912 exam in 2024. What do you think?

The surface of the body is yang in relation to the interior of the body. Tattoos are on the surface of the body, not inside the head. Inside the head they are interpreted, but they exist on the outer surface independently of interpretations. Classically trained feng shui masters assert that the yang part, the outside displayed to the world, matters -- it matters as much as the inner yin part, and the interplay between them is perpetual. Therefore external presentation matters -- be it "curb appeal" of the house or the appearance of the person who seeks favors from destiny or hopes to avoid its unkindnesses. A dirty homeless bum in tattered grime-covered clothes may be smarter and a better person than an elegant businessman wearing an Armani suit, but destiny notices the outer presentation. The bum won't get the businessman's job unless he cleans up no matter how qualified he may be. The traditional taoist view is that tattoos interfere with destiny on several levels. I won't go into details, as I recall already writing about the subject before, but it's not just all in the head.

There's lots of surfers in San Diego, and many look so picture perfect, sun kissed, in shape, you might think the ocean somehow works on their souls, not just their bodies -- but that, alas, proved to be an illusion. When I was new here, at one point a group of surfing guys and gals plumped down on the beach to relax so close to me that I couldn't help listening to their conversation. It mostly consisted of nonstop expletives, the dumbest of jokes, and unimaginative mundanities. Not a spark of spirit or intelligence. I couldn't understand how it could be -- they are in such close contact with the forces of nature and it somehow doesn't affect more than their sheer physicality? Then it occurred to me... society acts as a force of nature too, society is the "environment," and that environment has the soul-shaping (or misshaping) power exceeding that of the ocean.

Wait until you see (hopefully not experience) how long people have to wait to see a medical specialist. In many places it's become a nightmare wrapped up in mockery. And for many conditions it's become a waste of time, money, and years or decades of life. Something has been happening done to civilization, in terms of the sheer accumulation of unsolvable problems, in an exponential sort of way.

Yeah, me too.

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Impressive. I have this bad habit of envisioning a spoof when I watch an over-the-top action scene, placing myself in the protagonist's shoes and fighting for something unexpected. E.g. storming into a den of thugs and criminals, casually maiming and killing countless opponents on the way to the main honcho, and then screaming at him, "Where's my croissant?!"

I wouldn't exclude the possibility. Psyops and agent provocateurs never go out of style. And they always pose as grassroots movements.

The link looks interesting, will take a look later. Is there a solution? I think for there to be a solution, there's got to be, for starters, a real problem, not an imaginary one. Clearly zonies are not a real problem, so there's no real solution to visitors from Arizona. There's tens of millions of tourists coming here every year from all over the place, a source of both problems and benefits for the locals, but there's nothing particularly problematic about zonies specifically. The real problem, in the meantime, is the roads that get clogged with traffic every day, so the real solution could be, e.g., well-developed (as opposed to near-nonexistent) public transportation. I think it's like that with every problem people face -- first, determine if it's real or imaginary, then ignore the imaginary problem but identify the real one, then see if it can be solved in a real meaningful way. Morale might improve if this approach were to be implemented consistently -- at least gradually, at least at some hypothetical future time. But that's not what I see happening. In fact, the opposite is more the rule. All emotions are misdirected toward imaginary or artificially created problems and diverted from the real ones. The bigger the real problem, the less it is likely to be addressed, because if decision-makers benefit from creating and maintaining it, why would they bother pointing it out and trying to do something about it? It's much more lucrative to create a make-believe problem that will siphon taxpayer money indefinitely toward a nonexistent or bogus solution -- considering most of it will find its way into the appropriate pockets.

Yes, and they're in conflict more often than not, but even in the absence of the real conflict, it is way too easy to create out of nothing, out of the slightest of (inevitable unavoidable) differences. Politicians looove to exploit this unfortunate trait to the max. I don't think it could disappear even if that wasn't the case, but it would have been a whole lot less harmful and malicious. After all, it's one thing to make a tasteless joke based on someone being different (whether the difference is fundamental or imaginary), and it's another thing to go to war over it, or to make the lives of those unable or unwilling to enlist under the latest dominant baboon of ideology living hell.

The guy named Simon Thakur. He had a youtube channel years ago when this thread came to be, I don't remember what it was called but you can punch in his name and something will come up. He's also on FB (Ancestral Movement group).