Taomeow

Supremely unpopular opinion number next: Subconsciously, humans will never forget that we used to belong to tribes originating from families, where everyone was "one of us" while everyone in another tribe was not, anymore than a modern family can forget they're a family and count all accidental neighbors as members of their family. A family doesn't casually decide to go live in a neighbor's house or apartment, swap spouses and children and grandparents and cats and dogs on the premise that the neighbors are also "us," use their bank accounts and their cars as their own, go to the hospital to do the neighbor's orthopedic surgeon job while the neighbor goes to their HVAC job, and so on. But subconsciously, humans will never forget that "us" used to mean extended families of 120--150 members, and whoever was not part of that tribal family was not "one of us." Humans will forever project this mentality onto every stand-off for "us," for "belonging" that civilization has offered instead. When (hypothetically and utopically) "everybody is equal" they will find ways around this, finer and finer divisions, in order to obey this subconscious imperative to differentiate between "one of us" and "not one of us." Latest example. This has been spotted over one of our highways: It says, "Go home LA asshats." If you happen to live in San Diego, everybody who lives two hours away in LA is "other." "Not one of us." Not a member of the imaginary "tribe." Same thing with "zonies," tourists from the neighboring Arizona. There's no end to put-downs the locals use to describe this special alien species, the zonies. Who are "not us," "intruders," "invaders." Funny how these things work.

CA "govern me harder daddy" governor has mandated $20/hour minimum wages for restaurant workers. In the absence of any incentives or assistance for small mom and pop food businesses this ensures further increase of prices and drop of quality (which has been rather drastic since 2020); jacks up obligatory "service charges"; and puts more small food businesses out of business (in addition to 156,000 closing here in 2020, with yearly numbers in a similar range since then). But that's not what belongs in a Stranger Things thread of course, what I thought did belong here was something else. This minimum wage decree includes an exemption: if a restaurant has a bakery on its premises, it doesn't have to comply. I thought it was strange and irrational... but then a perfectly rational explanation presented itself. Panera Bread is a chain of restaurants that all have bakeries on premises. Panera has 24 locations in California all owned by billionaire Gregg Flynn, Newsom's personal friend and campaign donor.

My taekwondo teacher also taught us to carefully fall down. I have forgotten most of it, alas, except for one exercise where he would put a stack of mats on the floor and say, this is a rocky terrain, try not to hit the rocks with your face -- and then push you from the back so you fall face down on the "rocks." Once you mastered it, he added some more mats to the stack -- "this is a glass coffee table, try not to cut your face to pieces falling on it face down." It was very scary! So scary I still remember the technique.

Spotted by a friend in front of a little cafe in Germany. Translation: "The more you weigh, the harder it is to kidnap you. Protect yourself -- eat a cake!"

A seismograph invented in China in 206 B.C.. There's a pendulum inside. If the tremors reached the device, a metal ball fell out of one of the eight dragons' mouth and fell into the open mouth of the frog underneath with a loud clang that alerted people to the danger. The dragons were positioned to precisely face the eight compass directions, so which particular dragon dropped the metal ball indicated the direction of the area where the earthquake was taking place so help would be sent in that direction. The device was sensitive enough to also alert to the approach of an enemy army and the direction from which it was advancing. I suspect one of the reasons ancient scientific devices are pooh-poohed is that they were often so beautiful as to be, to a modern person, indistinguishable from mere art objects.

The Chinese version of the sign reads, "Mind your head."

IQ has very little to do with being smart. True life-sustaining intelligence has been shackled and chained, and the little fragment thereof residing in the upper part of the neocortex is chiefly a trauma processing/reinterpreting machine and a prison guard tasked with keeping the rest of our intelligence suppressed and inactive. Genuine fact of physiology per cognitive neuroscience. As for the number of children, I'm convinced that having too many is a side effect of this state of affairs to the same extent as having too few. Original human tribes typically didn't exceed 120 members and maintained this number -- I'm pretty sure via intelligent fertility regulation, primarily with plants in their environment. I own "A Barefoot Doctor's Manual," a fundamental work undertaken in China circa 1977 toward overcoming the health care crisis inherited from the "cultural revolution." Alongside modern western and TCM material it includes a lot of rare and formerly secret herbal remedies which families of healers that inherited them for many generations were forced to surrender. Among other things there's a couple of herbal formulas that grant temporary reversible infertility, one of them for a whole year after a single dose, with no ill effects on the woman's or her future children's health. I don't know if those herbs still exist but I am pretty sure our earlier, pre-civilized ancestresses knew them all and used them expertly. The story of our overwhelmingly genius contemporaries having had stupid helpless irresponsible blood-thirsty etc. "prehistoric" ancestors is very modern and far as I can tell, entirely unscientific. Much more unscientific in the sense of being a groundless confabulation than the memory, vague but consistent in all parts of the globe, of the golden age we once knew.

Stupidity is an acquired skill. Mother nature meant us to be smart. We couldn't possibly survive for hundreds of thousands of years if we were stupid from the get-go, because we are born in a very helpless state, into an environment that doesn't meet our needs on autopilot. Our young remain helpless and unable to take care of their own needs longer than the entire lifespan of many other mammals. Our young had to always rely on smart adults, otherwise they would never reach adulthood and our species would go extinct a long, long time ago. Cultivating all-around, all-encompassing stupidity is the surest way to depopulate. Smart people can survive an untold number of adversities -- they are inventive, resourceful and resilient, they learn on the fly, adapt, find non-obvious solutions which stupid people couldn't see in a million years. Smart people's ability to withstand an untold variety of assaults gives them a chance because it may surpass the assault repertoire of their adversary -- unless their adversary is smarter, but I doubt destruction is smarter than creation in the long run, I doubt the universe could exist on this kind of premise. Yet wherever agents of destruction figure out that, since they can't increase their own smarts, increasing mass stupidity in the population is the way to go, the surest way to tip the scales in their favor, their victory is guaranteed. We as a species are simply not cut out to survive mass stupidity for a long stretch of time.

I haven't been to the south of the US except on a drive, once upon a time, along the east coast all the way from New York to Florida. The impression I got on the way was that of extra politeness but I only interacted with gas stations attendants and motels personnel. There's a difference between east and west though, the western style is somewhat less immediate I would say. In the east they rush into an insult headlong, without missing a beat, while in the west they take their time to think about it first. And then verbalize something of equal weight but with less gusto, so some of the effect is lost to the delay. Timing is everything, as taoist sages say.

The purpose of damned if you do and damned if you don't is to make damn sure that you're damned. -- Jordan Peterson

Watch with sound https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6yTJPtvQ3g/?igsh=MXZwb3hyMHVidzd3cw%3D%3D

The art of verbal insult has been cultivated by the human race for millennia, but while some countries have mastered it to perfection, others remain at the stone age level of finesse. As an example of the former I would offer the English way and the French way to insult individuals, groups and whole species. Among many tools they developed there's, e.g., elegant and eloquent mockery thinly veiled as praise -- of exactly the traits and features they are putting down. By contrast, American, Russian, Italian put-down styles lack sophistication and tend to be unveiled, direct and plainly rude, most often related to physiological acts reinterpreted as demeaning -- sex, defecation and its product, etc.. Chinese and Japanese insults are routinely limited to the withholding of the carrot rather than the application of the stick. Some curse words are so complex in their originating context that they require an explanation and even a story or a historical anecdote in order to be understood as insults.

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I'm experimenting with meme generator

It's true that he didn't resort to personal attacks, at least on my memory. Instead he attacked whole races (not those politically incorrect to pick on though, just the one that is fair game) and national/religious identities and so on. And, yes, spammed copiously. And gave conspiracy theorists a bad name by being indiscriminately omnivorous toward all things conspiracy. (I am a huge proponent of the theory that most of civilized history is primarily a history of conspiracies, but it doesn't mean "anything goes as long as it's not mainstream." ) I've no opinion one way or the other about letting him back on TDB, just wanted to set the record slightly straighter, to the best of my ability.

Sorry to say I don't. 19th century Russian literature, to me personally, is primarily about poetry, vast, superb, effortlessly masterful, and barely translatable without losing 95% of its poetic impact. The mastodons of prose of that century are, to me, like mastodons in a museum of natural history -- impressive but somewhat dusty... besides, I'm a bit rusty, read "it all" too long ago.

I read it in college, it was part of my American Literature course. (Read it in translation though, didn't have enough English back then for the original -- nor access to the original. Read the original years later.) Wrote a term paper on it too. My professor (whom I had a crush on by the way -- he was a fearless free thinker, a rare bird at the time/place, an eloquent, deeply and broadly educated man, and he looked like Kirk Douglas in Spartacus and had a most dignified demeanor but easygoing, not self-important... sorry for the tangent, got carried away by the memory) -- suggested "Man and Nature" as the focus of the paper, but I asked him to change it to "a study of the nature of evil" because I thought that was the main theme, so we compromised on changing the assignment title to something like "ethical problems tackled in Moby Dick." In hind sight, "man and nature" could have been a great aspect to touch upon too, but I was always a ponerologist,* and remain one to this day. I loved it, though when I re-read it later, I found that it's too long and there's a million pages there it could do without -- but then that's my opinion of most novels ever written, with some 5% exception consisting of those I hated to see the end of. To this day I count the opening line of Moby Dick one of the best opening lines in all of literature. (But don't let me write a paper on why. ) I delivered the oral presentation (which was required) of that term paper to the audience with such passion that everybody woke up (of course the audiences were typically sleeping through those presentations) and at the end cheered like it was a football match and their team scored. *Ponerology: a study of the nature of evil

I'm pretty sure the whole "positive thinking" thing was/is a psyop. Don't know how modern, but at some point -- I seem to recall in the 60s -- it was unleashed in earnest on the population, as an antidote to antiwar protests, to fighting injustice, inequality, poverty, tyranny, in general to making too many unsanctioned waves. People were indoctrinated to "don't worry be happy" or else risk social stigma. After a while it sank into the subconscious and became a self-perpetuating thing. Nothing makes me feel more forlorn than toxic positivity.

Yes, yin and yang opposites/partners together (are required to) create harmony, but I wasn't following this particular discussion so I don't know what they have to do with it, or with satan. 666 by the way is a taoist symbol that means "extreme yin." It's no more satanic than 999, "extreme yang." Together they are balanced. Flip them around and one turns into the other. Meow.

When a beloved family member was terribly ill for a very long time and I was the sole caretaker with a thousand hands, using all of them nonstop, another family member used to come visit, sit comfortably on the sofa and make pronouncements in this cloying voice, "It's going to be all right," "I know it's going to get better,' "I prayed and asked very important and pious people to pray too, so it's done deal, now it will all pass" and so on. At one point I told her, "yeah, I could use a bit of help right now, how about let the dishes pass, for starters? Can you maybe wash the dishes for me?" (I was making vegetable juices for the sick person 16 times a day, among other things, that was part of one of the protocols, so among other things I was washing dishes 20 times a day.) She got mighty indignant. Took offense and proceeded to behave as though I'm a horrible ungrateful person and it's all my fault. And no, she didn't wash the dishes.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. -- attributed (possibly erroneously) to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

How about this one? Looks pretty roomy.

From personal experience I know they exist, but I'm not sure about 10% -- seems a tad exaggerated. An even rarer phenomenon (again, personal experience) is a healing presence. It so happened that my grandparents, my parents and me all had a bunch of MDs for friends, some of them lifelong friends, but there was this one woman among them, my mom's friend, who came to check on me whenever I was sick as a kid or teenager, and later to check on my own kids. I can swear that whatever the illness was, it always got immediately better when she just entered the room. Pain, fever, cough, stomachache, anything. She only used Western methods, very minimalistically, usually dialing down on whatever our regular physicians prescribed, removing rather than adding treatments and medications. She carried an aura of calm detachment about her and it was "contagious" and healing. (Worked better than compassion -- there was no "passion," no fuss, nothing to excite a sick person's emotions. She never offered words of encouragement or consolation... and for some reason that also helped. You could tell -- she's the boss over the illness, not over your emotions. Hard to explain... a gift.)

I understand the source of the misunderstanding: I mentioned many times that as a general tendency I'm an "out with the new, in with the old" girl and like stuff that's very, very old, centuries or millennia old. But if I have to put up with modern technology, it better be very, very modern. Fast and sleek over pompous and cumbersome. Tiger over dinosaur.