Taomeow

An excerpt from an article by Yves Smith The Act of God stipulation originated (...) in the Laws of Hammurabi c. 1750 BC. The problem that the Babylonians had to deal with was what to do when there is a flood, a drought, warfare or a pandemic. What should be the rules when, suddenly out of nowhere, cultivators and the citizenry on the land are rendered unable to grow and harvest crops, out of which to pay the debts that they have run up during the year and are falling due. They owe the taxes, sharecropping or other rent that could not be paid. Hammurabi was quite specific about how to handle this situation. Paragraph 48 of his Laws said that there would be a debt and a tax amnesty when the weather god, Adad, created a flood or otherwise prevented debts and other obligations from being paid. If the storm god floods the lands, the debts and rents don’t have to be paid. A fresh start was made under conditions of balance for the next crop season. The basic problem was similar to that today: How does a society restore continuity and save itself from disruption creating a permanent loss and distortion of existing wealth and income relationships? What Hammurabi and every other Babylonian, Sumerian ruler and other Near Eastern rulers did between about 2,500 BC and the 1st century BC was to proclaim amnesties in such circumstances. If they hadn’t done that, cultivators would not have been able to pay their creditors and they would have fallen into bondage. They would have owed their labour and crops to their creditors. This would have caused a serious fiscal problem for rulers. If victims of a crop failure or other economic interruption had to pay their creditors with their labour and crop surplus, this labor and crop tax wouldn’t be available to pay the palace its normal claims for taxes and corvée labour duties to build infrastructure or even serve in the army. Social balance and continuity would have been destroyed – from within. So when Hammurabi and every ruler of his dynasty proclaimed a clean slate cancelling the debts and rent arrears that had mounted up unpaid, proclaiming a return to the normal situation prevented a creditor oligarchy from emerging and seeking its own interest as distinct from that of the palace. All this changed in Roman times. Classical antiquity protected the financial and rentier elites. Cicero and the other Roman leaders said that all the debts had to be paid, even (or indeed, precisely because!) this led to the enslavement of poorer Romans and Greeks. Rome’s creditor oligarchy used every crisis as an opportunity to grab the land of the smallholders, to force the population into bondage and to get control of their land. We’re seeing the same basic dynamic occur throughout the post-Roman Western world. Creditors are now already planning to buy up distressed real estate from landlords that default as their rents are not paid. There is going to be a huge bankruptcy sale. Large private capital funds have already announced their intention to begin buying out the retail stores that have gone bankrupt, along with their real estate. Individuals who are unable to pay their debts, workers who’ve been laid off, are told to borrow from their pension funds or social security accounts. That means that they won’t be receiving the retirement income they need to live. Likewise, the states and the cities that Jeffrey Sachs mentioned also are facing a debt crisis with their bondholders. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate head, said that Democratic states like New York, New Jersey and California should cover their shortfall by taking the pension funds that they’ve set up for public employees. The financial sector’s intention is to use this crisis to wipe out the pension funds and transfer the savings of the wage-earners to pay bondholders and other creditors. The promises that state and local governments made for pension in exchange for not asking for higher wages are to be wiped out. The debts that have been built up are being used as a financial warfare tactic. It is more efficient than military warfare. Debt has been used to strip away the assets of middle-class people, of home owners, of employee pension funds, to suck their savings and property up to the top of the economic pyramid. The pandemic crisis has created a battlefield. Its rules have been written by the financial sector and their lobbyists as an opportunity for the largest property and financial grab since the Great Depression. The result will be that much of the American and European economies are going to end up looking like the Greek economy five years ago, when it was unable to pay its euro-debts. You can look at Greece as the future of the United States, catalysed by the coronavirus pandemic.

I was very tempted to do the same while on the subject -- had to delete a paragraph about printers. No, I can't help myself. Never had a good relationship with a printer. Might be just me -- people use them all the time and don't think twice about them. In my case, it's the printer that always has to think twice whether it's going to print what I want it to or throw a tantrum. And I will always remember my very first job in an office in NYC which involved a boss who trusted my nonexistent technical expertise enough to ask me to change a cartridge in that monster machine. I have no idea what I did wrong but after my intervention the monster started spitting thick layers of black goo all over every page it printed, and also had massive internal ink bleeding, which took a repairman called to the rescue several hours to staunch.

I've often formed lovely relationships with a few favorite things, ever since I was a kid. Some of those I lost along the way I still remember with a wistful feeling that is not as strong but not unrelated to the feeling left in one's heart by a departing friend. Others just left quietly, like friends with whom one parts ways with no regrets because they've grown apart. The ones that remain the recipients of my gratitude have mostly withstood the test of time. A new thing (with rare exceptions) has to prove itself, I don't dish out gratitude in advance. So the ones I'm currently most grateful for are my trusty Armenian cezve which I have been using every day for 30 years; an English porcelain tea pot of the past 10 which I admire for its ergonomic beauty and its perfect balance -- not a drop spilled, ever, and the lid never falls off even if I tip it over to get the last one; a pair of small gold earrings I wear almost always -- they behave as though they belong even though I don't feel them at all -- which, for me, is what perfect earrings are all about, just as any and all other items worn on the body. Whatever it is, if it makes any demands on my physical attention -- too tight, too loose, too stiff, too flimsy, too many frills to fumble with, etc. -- I can at best tolerate it, but it won't make it to the list of "spark joy" things, and if it insists, it will get donated; and a few weapons, each with a personality and a name. (Dragon Well, Immortal Peach, Odoroblo, Fan-Fan the Tulip, Lethal Detraction, Businesslike, Shelter-in-Place and Social Distancing.)

This is a bit off topic but it reminded me of one of the greatest (IMO) Soviet era animated short films, "Contact" (1978)

This feature is a life saver on FB, which would be completely done for and unusable if one couldn't block the participants one finds incompatible with one's online presence and forget all about them. There's TDB members I don't want in my online life in any shape or form. I don't want to argue with them because it's a pointless waste of time. I don't want to read what they write because I've known for years that their position is incompatible with mine. I'm fine with letting them retain it and share it with whoever is interested -- I'm not fine with them intruding on mine. I'm not OK with "ignoring" them as long as they aren't simultaneously set to ignoring me. I'm not here to practice some self-flagellation rites, and "ignoring" without being ignored (unseen, invisible to the people you don't care to see and to be seen by) amounts to just that. Currently, if you just "ignore" them, they are free to snoop around your posts and make public statements regarding their view of your presence in your space -- like some peeping Tom who would look into your window without you knowing he does and then broadcast his take on what he thinks he sees there to the neighbors. I don't like peeping Toms. I don't like passive-aggressive attacks anymore than I like open attacks. I don't think I should be under any obligation to like everybody who would pick a fight, whether aggressive or passive-aggressive, and I don't think it's prudent to offer caving in (by "just ignoring") as the only solution, technically speaking. Am I dreaming or is it possible to install a "block" feature? Say with the understanding that no one can block a moderator? And if it is, would this venue be supported or at least explored with an open mind by other participants, and maybe found to have some merit? Thank you for listening.

Yes.

If it turns out it does, I will make sure to put some folks on that list, which is something I have never done except on the list in my mind. But if it counts, I'll transfer the list to the shared medium.

I've no idea -- thanks for bringing their existence to my attention, I'll explore. I was talking technical capabilities of TDB though and the feasibility of using this particular one, blocking a select individual, in case it exists. Per current mods' response it does not, technically, so its merits or drawbacks are perhaps a moot point. Because it does not seem to resolve the problem (which I have reasons to believe is more than just "Taomeow's needs" for at least some of us or I would't bother suggesting it), I might try to eventually formulate an alternative suggestion for a solution, an administrative one rather than a technical one, and see if that might gain some traction. The solution I have in mind was pioneered by no other than the site owner, Sean, when handling one particular case of wrongful spamming/derailing of a thread by a particular member despite repeated OP's and participants' expressed requests not to. Sean was asked by a few participants in the thread to intervene (he was more around at the time than he currently is) and told the derailer not to post in that thread anymore. The derailer refused to cease and desist, whereupon Sean banned him permanently. (The thread proceeded on its merry ways for many more pages as a result, and still survives although has been on hiatus due to OP's and regular contributors' focusing their attention elsewhere for the moment.)

Thanks for your interesting inquiry. I hate to do this but I can't participate any further in any thread infested by a troll who currently decided to stalk me in two simultaneously and shows no intention of slowing down. I'll have to leave it to him to answer all further questions. "Don't feed the troll" is my sacred online commandment -- I haven't always followed it 100% but that's the goal I'm shooting for. My apologies to all innocent bystanders.

Yes, it was my first intro to Chinese medicine some 20 years ago, and I still consider it a must read for a beginner who wants to get the right idea from the start. Of course its second part that deals with things like pulse diagnostics is for general idea purposes only -- back then I felt ambitious enough to start asking everyone I came into contact with to let me take their pulses (much to everyone's amusement and probably to the detriment of my reputation as someone sane ), and then tried to compare what I perceived with what the book explained in words and graphs. While this exercise I practiced for perhaps a year taught me much, the main lesson was, nah, without in-person instruction and ongoing clinical exposure you can't make heads or tails of it. Too freakin' complex. So I've been learning many other methods to make heads or tails of what I observe (in self and others) but left this one to the practitioners (many of whom, sadly, suck at it too. This is a skill which in the classical setting they used to work on for at least 15 and often up to 30 years on average, starting as young apprentices, before using it diagnostically as practitioners...)

OK, get the benefit of the doubt. (But please don't betray my trust.) "How can you tell someone not to drink water while they are eating without knowing them or doing a detailed work up on them?" I did not tell anyone not to drink water while they are eating. I responded to the question regarding the rationale for this recommendation that was not originally made by me. I corroborated that recommendation by explaining the reasoning behind it that I am familiar with, in particular from the work of Henry C. Lu, a highly respected TCM author, translator of The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine into English and a trusted friend on a bookshelf for many years. Hope this clarifies the matter. No one is under any obligation to follow "generic" advice when individualized one is available. But nothing but generic advice can be shared online unless you are a practitioner of telemedicine. Which I'm not, so I never tell anyone what they, personally, should do. I just tell the generic audience about the generic information I come across, or occasionally personal experience -- what I, personally, gained or lost from believing or not believing this or that source of information. My acupuncturist told me not to drink coffee before a visit, e.g.. If I never pursued the issue further, I would be acting on blind faith. That's not my modus operandi, so I asked him why exactly. His answer: because you drink strong black coffee and it paints the coating on the tongue a different color, so I have trouble making tongue diagnostics, color of the tongue coating is diagnostically important but I can't tell whether yours is yellowish because it's a diagnostically significant sign or because you just had a cup of your strong coffee right before the visit and tinted it yellow. I laughed and promised him to do as he says. "What evidence do you have for that statement?" You can start here: https://redwingbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/WeChat-post-formulas-Jan.-29-1.pdf

Change your overall tone of communication with me to a friendlier one and get your answers, rethink your "haha" under my post that is clearly not meant to be amusing, or get ignored, your choice.

That's exactly right. Classical Chinese medicine is always aimed at treating the individual, and not only that but the same individual differently at different times and under different circumstances in the course of even one illness. TCM at its best comes close to this classical model, though it is already "tainted" with all the features of mass-produced anything, i.e. is constantly being moved toward addressing large groups while ignoring individual peculiarities, as all mass-produced products targeting the "average consumer" do. It's true regardless of whether this "average" abstraction is Chinese, Caucasian or African. The latest example -- the herbal formulas developed and officially adopted in China for the treatment of covid, which were, truth be told, the very first thing that turned things around in Wuhan and then was extended to the whole country. The strengths the TCM approach still retains come from classical Chinese medicine -- it's not one formula approved for use with covid, it's four different ones for the same patient: the first one for the initial presentation of the illness, which is changed to the second one if the patient is already in the full-blown disease stage, which is changed to the third one once things start turning around, which is changed to the fourth, for the convalescent to regain health rather than just get out of the woods. The weakness of it -- it's still partially designed according to the extraneous (Western) paint-by-numbers guidelines, except instead of "one treatment fits all" it's "four different treatments fit all either in sequence or starting from wherever an individual's at." This is at least four times better but still not the classical version which would ask for the classical healthcare model, currently nonexistent. (The classical model has been globally forced out of existence with extreme prejudice via hostile-takeover style aggressive investments yielding astronomical profits unprecedented in human history -- and very little health.) Classical medicine (not only Chinese, just human medicine) was designed to be used by a doctor who knows each and every patient in the community under his/her care, often from childhood, with all their individual peculiarities, and adjusts the formulas accordingly -- sometimes on a daily basis if necessary, or on a weekly or monthly basis with a chronic complaint. TCM is an attempt to bridge the real thing and things that have nothing to do with it, like commercial viability, profitability, and the ambitious goal of gaining even tiny, marginal, condescending acceptance of at least a humble little part of it into the Western paradigm that rewards its unquestioning followers with such tempting riches and such ego-boosting prestige and recognition in the "Scientific Community ™ ® ." It is greatly weakened by this approach, but it's still many times better to have access to this incredible system even in this mangled, politicized and mass-commercialized shape and form than to not have it at all.

The dog isn't eating food though. The dog is eating something created for commercial profit and consumer convenience that has nothing in common with what canines actually eat in nature. It is dehydrated, see. Dry dog food. The dog is trying to compensate for the water extracted from his food. If I was to eat all my food in this desiccated state, I would also drink water with it. So would you and I would only applaud the effort. I propose leaving it at that. I was answering OP's question with information and certain free-style musings around it, to the best of my humble ability based, however, on being pretty well equipped to answer it meaningfully. I 'm not trying to win an argument here and I believe you would do great if you stopped shooting toward that ephemeral and worthless goal at this point. That would leave us hope to have a more compelling (for me personally) conversation on some other subject sometime in the future.

"With food" was the subject matter of the original inquiry and of my response, not "before" eating or "after" eating (which I said was OK). Your dog does everything right. Drinking after eating was not being disputed. Most whales, with few exceptions, not only don't drink with meals but they don't drink before or after meals either -- they don't drink at all. Pinnipeds and cetaceans get their water supplied by metabolism of prey proteins (metabolic water) and the oxidation of fat (drinking water).

Tea is "drying" (and, unless wrongfully commercialized as iced tea, hot), so it is better suited for the purpose than water if one wants to drink it before meals. I never feel compelled to drink it before meals though. I think the single exception for tea that can go well with a meal is when the meal is a sweet dessert -- which is a very rare thing for me to eat, sometimes I go for months without any cake . But if I am to have some cake, it's going to be eaten with tea, no doubt about it. I think this is somewhat traditional too in some tea-drinking countries (though not in China). Otherwise, I drink tea away from meals. But I'm not a great expert on teas. I drink coffee long before I eat anything first thing in the morning -- with an obligatory glass of water (coffee is drying, so is tea but to a lesser extent).

Apologies for not responding the first time, I meant to and forgot. The term, in this context, refers to water-based nourishing fluids that are thicker and denser than water, jelly-like, viscous, able to congeal to varying extents at various (especially lower) temperatures -- these are "slow yin" and the body can hold on to them better, having enough time to extract both the moisture and the nutrients for various organs rather than let them "run like water" through the system, in and out. That's why they counteract many syndromes of deficient fluids the body can be prone to under various conditions much better than just water. The cue is the texture, many substances have properties of slow yin and all traditional cultures are very partial to those. The most common would be bone broths, congee, "grass tea" (made with herbs that make it somewhat, or considerably, gelatinous), in Japan it might be konnyaku jelly, the South American version would be various drinks made with chia seeds, in my childhood in Russia it was "kissel," a slow-flowing semi-clear drink of some kind of berries (the most popular was cranberry) thickened with potato starch, in herbal medicine there's many decoctions that are used to make thick-ish decoctions that help with many conditions associated with inflammation, especially "Toxic Fire" or "Dryness" conditions -- Job's tears, linden flowers, parsley (if you make a strong decoctions you will see that it congeals somewhat in the fridge) and a whole bunch of others. There's also foods that are thought of as capable of producing this kind of fluids in the body -- collagen in its various manifestations (primarily bone broths, thick fish soups, assorted jellies), seaweed, rice (especially glutinous rice), some mushrooms, okra, some kinds of yam (notably nagaimo, a Japanese vegetable available at Asian stores), and so on. Salmon roe and, for those who can afford it, caviar (I wish... its medicinal slow yin properties are endless.) For practical purposes, you can choose whichever of these you like, do your best to make them staple foods/drinks in your diet and try to consume them as often as you can. (If you go for chia seed drinks, you need to make sure you don't skimp on water or else they would absorb it from the body and do the opposite of what you're after). They don't "work" immediately, they are "slow" -- slow but sure. I would avoid sugary jellies (except when a bit of sugar is indicated medicinally, e.g. with a cough, but the amount ought to be small), the rest is up to your preferences. My first choice is bone broth or oxtail soup, my second choice is congee (when I'm not avoiding carbs, which I sometimes do), homemade jellies with either gelatin or agar-agar, and occasional herbal drinks of this nature.

Plenty of things have to be lived with, it's true. At some point, with some of them, it becomes a question of whether it's worth it though. Thank you for considering the suggestion and being open to bringing it up to tech support. I will keep my fingers crossed.

They would probably still have access to quotes from your posts and comments that appear in someone else's -- a feature I find problematic but that's for a separate problem, and probably too technically complex to address anyway. That's not ideal but better than them having access to everything I say. And I'm talking common areas only, PPD is not a problem -- unless someone drags stuff out of there to the common area without the author's consent, which is a hypothetical situation and I believe could be specifically disallowed by mods (a rule written down somewhere in the guidelines to that effect would be nice I think.) Other than that, I don't have any problems with PPDs in the current state (aside from drastically diminished traffic of course -- some things therein are for sharing but not many go there). The author of the PPD is already the mod of their own threads with power of removing any trolling/derailing/hostile entry, and that's plenty good enough. What I mean is block a particular user in the common areas -- not from a particular area but from access to another user's material -- mutually. It's a bit like... well, imagine you invite neighbors to a barbecue. Everybody is neighborly but this one neighbor chooses to trample on your flowers, and when asked not to gets annoyed and starts kicking your cat, throws garbage through the window into your living-room, spray paints "suck it up" in huge letters on your garage door, and proceeds to overturn your punch bowl. And then does exactly the same thing at your next barbecue. You are under no obligation to invite him to the third one, are you? And if he invites the whole block to his barbecue you are under no obligation to attend either, are you? So that's what I mean. A block removes the forced communication with people you don't care to communicate with, and those who can get along will get along a lot better while those who don't will not have to be irritated by each other's presence and won't have to keep looking over their shoulder for the unwelcome intruder to jump out of the shadows and yell BOO!!!

Case in point. I'm talking BLOCK an individual. Silent Thunder chimes in with the idea to be able to BLOCK a thread. Along comes Ralis and immediately substitutes the straw dog LOCK. Which was never part of the conversation. He erects this straw dog and begins his usual derail -- expresses indignation, slips in his own fake subject, does his best to cancel and nullify the subject I was talking about. He's done it to me personally countless times. (No, I'm not accepting the homework assignment to give examples, Ralis. Don't even think about it. I said what I said because it is experientially true, not because I want a debate with you. Shudder.) I want him blocked from my view and mine alone and for it to be mutual. Him personally. From my online life exclusively. Is all. Not the threads he participates in. JUST MY THREADS AND COMMENTS. I don't want Ralis in my online life. That's the idea. He may be the greatest person on earth but he does not belong in my online life. A block would accomplish that and I would be much happier here. Anyone who repeatedly does things similar or identical to the above example would probably be blocked too unless it was an accidental misread for which they expressed accidental regret in the form of "I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention and misunderstood" or some such.

Not sure if you're addressing me or Silent Thunder, with whom I don't disagree at all -- however, for me it's not the priority to block threads (much as I'm saddened by the "watch our side triumphantly do exactly what we hate and despise if the opposing side does it" situation. I can't help wondering how many unaffiliated and centrists may have been pushed to the right by this behavior. Paradox, eh?..) A thread is much easier to ignore than an individual active in multiple threads and, especially, targeting the threads of another individual (aka stalking). So for me being able to block an individual is far more important. Wouldn't object to being able to block threads too but that's optional, although some threads make me feel ashamed of being a member of this forum to the point that I don't reveal my participation to anyone in real life who doesn't know I'm at TDB. This, too, saddens me, because many times I feel like directing, e.g., a student or a friend to some great resources and thoughts offered by some of the members I respect and admire, or to my own thought-through post which I could point out rather than repeat my own thoughts once again elsewhere. But when I think of all the people who used to be bums and are still friends who left precisely because of that -- ashamed to be part of this -- I ask myself what the hell am I still doing here. Perhaps still hoping... Contra spem spero -- hoping against hope.

You have disqualified yourself from further interactions for lack of interpersonal skills, indulging in meaningless rhetorical questions supposed to convey sarcasm but conveying, instead, a lack of ability to ask real questions and the resulting cognitive difficulties, as well as for making assumptions about what I do and don't understand without having the foggiest, and last but not least, for an overall rude trolling vibe in response to a patient and friendly tone giving you the benefit of the doubt instead of a boot for your ridiculous racist comments about genetic incompatibility of TCM with people of a different race. We're done here. Happy trails.

Classical Chinese medicine does not engage in genetic manipulations and modifications. It addresses the human body, mind, and spirit, and is appropriate to use on any member of the species.

If you doubt that a "Caucasian" can get TCM perfectly right, I would recommend Ted Kaptchuk's "The Web That Has No Weaver." I would say a person educated the Western way and exposed to the Western cognitive paradigm only (or even preferentially) will have endless trouble getting it right -- but this person, today, is as likely to be Chinese as Caucasian. Ethnicity and race confer no magic powers of comprehension -- education and exposure to a very elegant "way of knowing" not contingent on the prevalent methods of one's default culture do.

I give it thumbs down for approaching Asian traditions from the position of Western cultural colonialism: take a cultural whole and smash it into pieces, pick and choose among those pieces, appropriate what you like and throw away the rest -- dismiss, ignore, leave out or take a condescending daddy-knows-best stance. To say nothing of its relentless pushing of the manipulative globalist vegan agenda which Asian traditions never had.