Taomeow

I agree. You don't just give a scalpel to anyone who would be surgeon, or else there's no telling a surgeon from a thug. Where do we find surgeons who don't cut out vital organs from the forum just because they can? I thought mod rotation was somewhat of a solution. The worst started happening when that was abolished. If a poster runs into a personally or otherwise selectively hostile mod impossible to get along with, at least it's not forever. And maybe make it short? Like, three months tops? The problem is, will there be takers? And if it all goes unmoderated, no holds barred -- well, unfortunately, the ideal of an anarchy usually runs into a peculiar obstacle online. To wit, people who don't actually live in an anarchy anywhere in their real lives don't know how to use it. They may have a whole lot of pent-up urges toward freedom -- but the only freedom available is a virtual anarchy place, guess where all that pent-up dynamite will go. Have you seen what's going on elsewhere and everywhere where there's no moderation? Still, at this point I would also prefer a chaotic battlefield of a forum to an Orwellian order or a rule of thugs with zero accountability. Neither one is very appealing, but if one has to choose...

Yes, exactly. E.g. a post where you tagged me yesterday (thanks, by the way! ) that concerns an interesting question regarding possible parallels between Dzogchen's rigpas and taoism's yuanshen -- I didn't have an answer off the top of my head, went to explore a bit, uprooted some really interesting material, was thinking, ought I think about it some and then try to answer, or just post a quote from and/or a reference to that article I liked, or wait till Steve gives a better Dzogchen perspective than I currently can -- then this-here thread came up and I forgot all about it. That's my main complaint about chronic derailers. They effectively replace not just posts on a virtual page but us with themselves. Like some practicing body snatchers that start seemingly small and then who knows when and where it stops -- if at all. Replacing our thoughts and feelings with their own urgent itches to scratch in public. Well, I don't want to be replaced. Online, I don't want to be everything that is. I want to be a poster, reader, interactor with people who interact with me and with each other, I want to be a forum participant when visiting a forum. Not a dumpster for garbage sermons about how I don't know how to live in here and now and here and there and everywhere. I frackin' do.

No need to remove what is in reference to my humble person, but I'd appreciate a more precise wording. I myself didn't understand what you meant by "break" on first read and was very surprised, almost to the point of dropping and in all likelihood breaking a cup of tea I was holding. Ah... he means I "took a break." I did take a voluntary break, which would have been permanent departure if the staff that caused me to make this decision was still in power. As I told you in our private conversation. What that hardworking, tireless, industrious mob you were either unwilling or unable to stand up to (if you can't beat them, join them kind of a deal -- or maybe more like if you don't want to beat them because you're OK with their ways -- I won't speculate which) -- what they managed to pull off was the single meanest, ugliest, most dishonest, most disgusting and distorted example of power abuse -- beginning with the power of interpretation/spin that, in a dizzying display of black magic, twisted the right into the wrong and the wrong into the right with stunning sleight-of-hand -- that I've ever encountered in all of my virtual, online life. However, it was still virtual, and anyone who might even have the foggiest about what I had to deal with in real life without breaking would split their sides laughing at the prospect of me "breaking" from a virtual event. I merely decided, with profound regrets, that unless those responsible are gone from the position of power, I'm not going to be part of this forum. And no, I don't want to discuss it any further either, it was protracted enough in its own sweet time and serves no current purpose. You know what I said about the possibility of coming back from our private exchanges. The condition has been met, not by you and not on my behalf, but it came to pass, so I'm back. So all I ask for now is that you rephrase "break" to "voluntary exile" or "deciding to stay away from the forum" or even "taking an indefinite break" -- for stylistic and factual clarity. If you don't mind of course. If you mind, just remove the whole paragraph, please.

I don't know who "escalated" what. Personally, all I did was ask "Everything" to not post unrelated stuff in just one thread -- a thread I started that was focused enough, alive and well and ongoing, and specific enough to require some reading effort toward participation and some thinking effort toward meaningful participation. The Sumer thread was conceived of as long term, a gradual exploration of a complex subject. "Everything" brought that to a halt repeatedly. I asked very politely to please stick to the topic. That was very easy for "Everything" to ignore, just some chirping OP interfering with his flow, who cares when he overfloweth. I asked him to please start his own thread for things he'd rather talk about. I asked again. And again. And again. Other posters in the thread did the same. And again. And again. He responded by more massive spam and a rather unpleasant attempt at identity theft -- in my thread he wrote an imaginary dialog between a wise sage "Everything" and a mean-spirited idiot "Taomeow." Didn't even bother to mess with quotes the way he did with other people, but just wrote purported "Taomeow's" speeches ascribed to me from scratch. ( I shudder at the thought of someone doing a search online and that falsified identity coming up in response. It got later split off into a separate thread by Sean, along with some of "Everything's other "contributions," "Everything's" very own to do as he pleases. I resisted the urge to ask Sean to at least remove that "fake Taomeow" part because I didn't feel like "escalating." I was just hoping maybe no one will go read that, not many people are capable of reading everything "Everything" writes. But I still feel a bit uneasy for it still being there.) Sean asked "Everything" not to post in the Sumer thread anymore. That, too, was promptly ignored. How on earth did I manage to "provoke" it? I've been a magnet for a certain kind of energies on many occasions, I'm not complaining, it's part of my path and I wouldn't be on "any" path if not pushed by rather merciless designs and devices, I know that. But still... What kind of disability of sense and sensibility ought to have struck to help anyone "just ignore" attention of this nature? Which brain pathways ought one to disable to successfully see this behavior as harmless, and one's reaction, as "escalating?" If this is love, I'll take abuse, please. And if this is abuse, as I think it is, it ought to be stopped, please.

More a propos those gears. Here's a machine a guy named Arthur Ganson, a kinetic sculptor, saw in a dream and then created. (My god, what a profound dream! And what great reward for a creative mind to be attached to a pair of skillful hands equipped to actually make a visionary dream transition into material reality -- and tangibly illustrate a deep truth! In this case, the shocking magnitude and unforeseen implications of exponential powers.) Each worm/worm gear pair reduces the speed of the motor by 1/50th. Since there are 12 pairs of gears, the final speed reduction is calculated by (1/50)12. The implications are monumental. With the motor turning around 200 revolutions per minute, it will take well over two trillion years before the final gear makes but one turn. So it is possible to do anything at all with the final gear, even embed it in concrete. It is, for all practical purposes, never going to move even though it is connected to a 200 rpm motor. Once the prerequisite of exponential powers is set in motion, you can never affect the outcome. Not in two trillion years.

Yup, we lost the knowledge. Not just ancient knowledge at that. Here and now, I've witnessed the disappearance of scientific (but not politicized/monetized yet, hence not molested into unrecognizability) knowledge that was available to me in the 7th grade, for crying out loud. Googling it today is simply shocking. Nada. You can read this or that "everybody knows" corroborated by the sacred mantra "a gazillion studies confirm and a quadrillion scientists all agree" -- but you can't ever be dealt all the cards you would need to assemble your own solitaire, and neither is any single one of those gazillion scientists or a group of them or a group of groups of them of any size and any credentials. Because one of them or all of them, it's still a cog inside a larger cog, and they can't move in any direction not dictated by the larger cog. And the larger cog is not even the largest. And the largest is always out of sight. Verily, he who controls information controls the world.

My Savior! At last!

We'll get there in due time I hope. I've been listening to a paleontologist/biologist (just yesterday, after a couple of exceedingly bright people I know kept bringing up his name) who took a bit over an hour to explain climate on Earth in a way that made my heart sing -- as fractals, large cogwheels (turning with the periodicity of tens of millions of years) and then smaller ones (millions) and smaller (hundreds of thousands) and then smaller still ( tens of thousands) and smaller (thousands) and smaller (within a thousand) and smaller... all the way down to that one spike on the tiny cog we're presently riding... but don't let me go there yet (or ever), the reason I brought it up is, I now understand how climate on planet Earth really works -- perhaps for the fist time -- so "far North and "far South" don't really mean what we expect them to mean when the bigger cogs turn... I don't know if there's an English version for this dude, will try to find it. (A blitz search yielded only a short bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirill_Eskov )

To the castle! To the point! Napta, the Sumerians called petroleum. Versions of this word still mean "petroleum" in many European and Asian languages. It is the second most abundant liquid on Earth. Petroleum has been used since at least 6000 years ago -- though until the 19th century, seldom as fuel. That's one thing we can't blame the early civilizations for. It was explored and employed when needed -- but it was too stinky and messy to burn for energy (with a noteworthy exception of 2000 years ago when the Chinese used oil and natural gas for heat and light. They used bamboo pipes for carrying gas into homes.) In Mesopotamia, bitumen and asphalt were used as caulking for ships, a setting for jewelry and mosaics, and an adhesive for weapon handles. Egyptians used it for embalming. There's references to bitumen being used for Moses' basket and Noah's Ark. Native Americans used asphaltum much the same way -- to waterpoof stuff and make it airtight. They also used it medicinally, and the Seneca who traded it also employed it in body paint and for ceremonial fires. European settlers, until the late 19th century, used to be bitterly disappointed if they dug a well to find water and struck oil instead. But then someone who probably had an olfactory disability invented the kerosene lamp. The year was 1854. And that's when the modernmost history commences in earnest.

Only if she has just one tail. This one has two. Melusine could stand just fine, but once a week she had to take a bath and stretch out her tails. At some point she was spied on, and that's how they found out.

I thought they were using lapis lasuli. It's supposed to improve one's eyesight. As for fertility symbol... also possible, I have seldom come across a symbol that stands for just one thing without hiding another which may be hiding another -- many are Russian dolls. That's why I asked you about the Starbucks' logo. You could have said "It stands for Starbucks coffee," and wouldn't be wrong.

Possibly -- they may be related -- but primarily Melusine, the progenitor water dragon/woman/monster/serpent/fairy/mermaid/queen o'two tails many European royal families still trace their official genealogy to as the progenitor of the royal blood lineages -- the Plantagenet families, Angevin, the House of Anjou and Vere and the Merovingians, in particular.

"Okay then." Not what I said or meant. What I said and meant was, it doesn't matter if they did or didn't. It is interpreted (see Apech's contribution, e.g., though this is something that entered mainstream and new age and what not, unlike the sandal explanation) as "life" etc.. What my scaled and feathered informant asserted though is that it's not just any "life" it means but "civilized life" exclusively. And whether Egyptians knew it en masse or not, I don't know. But, like I said, it doesn't matter, because this interpretation ascribes the significance of the symbol to something bigger than the knowledge (or superstition, whatever the case may be) possessed by Egyptians. The second thing, the fishing spear/grabber, is also something I don't know whether they remembered hundreds of thousands of years of using like that or, again, adopted and reinterpreted much later as a symbol of certain "power" or redesigned to do something else and reinterpreted the meaning of or the function of or both. But that, again, doesn't matter. In this case, it is a symbol whose interpretation of "power" comes from the actual power once wielded by those who used it as described. Humans who used tools without yet taking the perilous step of becoming tools.

What did Egyptians (via Egyptologists, of course) have to say about those neck twisters on the left? Sumerians had them too, and referred to them as lions (there's a story there as well). Actually, I've made a pair of traditional huaraches for myself from scratch at one point and they were constructed not approximately but exactly like that. The round part for the heel, the flip-flop strap between the big and second toe, and the things on the sides are tied over the top of the foot.

I'll start with these which I happen to have. But you have to keep in mind that I'm primarily an empiricist, not a scholar, so when something like this gets into my hands, I'll just monkey see monkey do before I read all the explanations, and then 9 times out of 10 I never go back to check the manual and just keep experimenting. Yup, guilty as charged... oops, I'm revealing the effect already. They can charge your meditation. But what matters is, it's like batteries -- more like an electric outlet actually -- what you get depends on what you plug in. If you plug in a functional TV, you'll get to watch TV. If you plug in an electric toothbrush, you can brush your teeth. If you plug in a table lamp with no bulb you'll get nothing. If you plug in a table lamp with no bulb and stick your finger to where the bulb ought to go to check what's up, you'll get zapped. And if you plug a 110 volt geared American appliance into a 220 volt European outlet, you'll fry the appliance. Am I making my metaphors clear so far? As for the rest, let me first assuage your doubts. I didn't mean Egyptians knew what the ankh was, or the fishing spear with grabber. I didn't mean they knew the actual object whose significance as a symbol they may have inherited in a cargo cult of sorts -- they retained the notion of it being significant without having retained the connection to the actual object that's given birth to the symbol. Much like today no one really knows (except for people in the know) that the Starbucks' mermaid stands for... well, my turn to ask trick questions for a change of pace. Tell me whence the Starbucks' mermaid really derives and I can try asking my scaled and feathered informant about your other illustrations. (I wouldn't call him my "friend" -- he's not friendly and we're not close... rather, you have to win his answers by showing a measure of astuteness, and you can't really know in advance which of your educated guesses might impress him into throwing a tidbit as reward).

A little bird who looks somewhat like this one but more like its scaly relatives told me a secret. An ankh is not a key. It is the universal intergalactic symbol of a sandal. (Later modified/simplified into a cross.) Footwear -- which signifies the first step on the path away from hunting and foraging in the woods toward walking the road of civilization. A species that has sandals is no longer wild -- this is what the symbol proclaims to the civilizations of the worlds. It will be viewed as potential partner, future ally, or -- more often -- as lucrative product, but regardless, it means it is ripe for control, it is no longer fully a wild thing. And as wild things, we were respected, mind you. The "crowbar" is not a crowbar, it is an implement for hunting in the water. Including luring a land animal, a predator, into the water -- where we would have an advantage because we can hold our breath under water and attack -- usually in packs -- both from above and from below. Try throwing a large land-dwelling animal in the water and grabbing its hind leg from below -- it will immediately become confused and start thrashing about rather than continuing the attack. That's when that "crowbar" can grab -- we used alligator jaws woven into the shaft to make those grabbers originally -- and drag it down and drown, or pierce the belly from below with that sharp hook on top. The lower part of which was also the trigger for the grabber that locked it in place. It was a versatile tool. Humans don't remember their history because our current life span is so short. But I talk to very long-lived non-humans on occasion, so they sometimes tell me a little bit of what they remember about us.

Those "purses" or maybe "buckets" of the gods (found all over Sumerian depictions and also at Gobekli Tepe) look an awful lot like something else too. Padlocks. The most distinctive signifier of civilization and domestication. Something the owner of cattle, property, or slaves would install on a barn door.

I found this about their god of the underworld (in the Ancient History Encyclopedia): NERGAL - Also known as Erra/Irra, the Sumerian god of war, pestilence, destruction, death, and the underworld, co-ruler with Ereshkigal, but originally associated with Shamash, the sun god, and a solar deity. His cult center was at Kutha where he was first known as Meslamtaea, an agricultural god associated with the heat of the sun in its negative aspects. The intensity of the summer sun (or the sun at midday) was thought to be caused by Meslamtaea's fury and shifted from a regional god to a universal god associated with the negative aspects of life. Nergal is best known for insulting Namtar, Ereshkigal's representative at the feast of the gods, and having to make amends to her, resulting in their love affair and his eventual move to the underworld to live with her. In some myths he is credited with creating human beings and in incantations is invoked for protection because of his great strength. As Erra he is famous from the work The Wrath of Erra in which he destroys Babylon for no reason. How similar or dissimilar their underworld is to Diyu, I'd have to investigate. What I do know off the top of my head is that some Sumerian afterlife beliefs were strikingly similar to those upheld to this day in many Asian cultures -- in China and (especially) non-mainland Chinese countries, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, etc.. They had a concept corresponding to the Chinese gui, hungry ghosts, and the same idea about how these come to be. They are what people became after death who died prematurely, died a violent death, were poor and hungry and suffering while alive, were not buried properly, and are not fed by their descendants in a special ritual offering food, drink, incense and remembrance. These ghosts were called gidim in Sumerian, etemmu in Akkadian. They were feared, because they invaded the world of the living and took revenge on them if hungry and cold in afterlife, starting with their own descendants. So feeding them was not so much in veneration as in self-preservation. Interestingly, early taoism, which found quite a few gods, ghosts and demons inside the human body and mind (not all of them were inner but some, indisputably, were) imagined "feeding the ancestors" not only as an external ritual but also as a personal choice of a diet that one's ancestors would choose. I.e. eating only whatever is popular/readily available today was understood as a diet that can anger the "inner ancestors" and cause them to mess up one's health and shorten one's life.

Please. Mr. Trying to Convince TM to Never Start a Thread Again is what I call him. If he can't be stopped, he'll be renamed Mr. Has Convinced.

Thank you for the references. I'm yet to check out the Phantom Time version you posted, but I'm familiar with the theory from (mostly) Russian sources, and they talk not just about the invented events that supposedly took place but really were made up, but quite a lot about "missing time" -- a whole millennium, no less, and not that long ago -- that was simply skillfully removed from our purported history. Damn, they make up stuff today that didn't happen and omit most of crucial information about what did happen, so, no wonder. Cherry-picking everything that did happen too, so you learn an aspect of the story spinned toward conditioning your beliefs this way or that way, and out of context partial truths are perhaps more dangerous than outright lies because they have something to show as proof -- used to cover the ass of a bigger lie. Carbon dating, however, is notoriously imprecise for real, and more and more information about serious flaws in the method is coming from most "non-outrageous" sources, so methinks "suspending disbelief" in its accuracy would run counter to the scientific evidence of its inaccuracy. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180605112057.htm Separate thanks for the newly-discovered tablet. How can we make sense of it all? Perhaps partial sense has already been made by some -- that's a start... Of course we are trying to assemble a picture while missing out on countless details. But the human mind, intuition, vestigial embodied memory, the ability to integrate disjointed and seemingly unrelated information from multiple sources... sheer feeling of "rightness" and "wrongness" some of us still discern through all the bombardment with all the confusion... all of it together and more -- is pretty good at filling in the blanks sometimes and getting at least the general picture right if not all the impossible details. When I was a kid, my dad involved me in his hobby, black and white photography, and I participated in printing pictures (the kitchen would be temporarily converted into a photo lab.) So I would hold a blank sheet of photographic paper under that thing that projected the picture from the film -- you couldn't tell what you were looking at on the film because the black and white were reversed, as were all the shades of gray -- so, you held it under that whatchamacallit magnifier, counting so you don't overexpose it, then dip it into a solution that would start revealing the picture -- very vaguely at first, you watch closely not to overdo it and count again, and then it becomes clearer and clearer, you see a perfect image and promptly dip the sheet into another solution, the fixer. Making sense of stuff you can only discern very vaguely at first seems somewhat similar to this process to me. There's many ways it can go wrong, but there's also a way to get it right -- after all, it's a picture of something real in the past, and no one will ever convince me that my mind is not equipped to do what a bunch of apparatuses and chemicals can. Put a picture together by being patient and careful, and make sense of it.

Well, they (scientists with a clue among them) are beginning to understand and even occasionally verbalize (when it doesn't interfere with research grants) that "junk DNA" is a shy ignoramus's way to say "DNA we don't understand the function of" -- "yet" in the best case scenario, or "at all" to be completely honest. Our "life sciences" always take this approach to whatever they don't understand and can't figure out how to exploit -- all "primitive" cultures have been essentially "junk" to them too for as long as they interacted. The alterations of the human genome is another story though. There's no accounting in any natural way anyone can think of for what happened to our Chromosome 2 (and perhaps quite a few other things, but let's start there). Exhibit 1: Chromosome 2. Here's what has been discovered about that baffling fusion once cytogenetic techniques advanced enough to notice (I wonder how much stuff we still can't notice in our genome because the techniques for noticing don't exist -- "yet" in the best case scenario or "at all" to be completely honest.) In the center of our chromosome 2 there were telomeric and subtelomeric DNA sequences (normally present at only one end of chromosomes, but not in internal areas) (2). This made it clear that the fusion of the two chromosomes had been complete, that is, from one end to the other. Nowadays, the availability of human genome and the genome of large apes has revealed how the genetic content of our chromosome 2corresponds to the sum of the two chromosomes of our ape ancestors. Image: comparison of the band pattern in human chromosome 2 (HSA2) and chromosomes 12 and 13 of the chimpanzee (PTR12 and PTR13, respectively). 2q21;2q13; 2q11.1 are the regions in our chromosome 2 that, in the fusion area, correspond to chromosomes 12 and 13 of the chimpanzee. HSA-Homo Sapiens; PTR-Pan TRoglodites, e.g.; chimpanzee. / Source: Molecular Cytogenetics. However, it has also been found that the fusion area that originated our chromosome 2 lacks some regions and sequences that correspond to subtelomeric areas present in the two chromosomes fused in our species. In other words, the fusion must have involved loss and rearrangement of part of the genetic material of the two originally separate chromosomes in the ancestors we have in common with the large apes. DENISOVANS, NEANDERTHALS AND LARGE APES: WHEN DID WE SEPARATE? Analyses being performed currently on genomes of extinct species that are directly related to us, such as Denisovans and Neanderthals, reveal that these species already presented the chromosome fusion that originated the long chromosome 2 that is characteristic of humans (3). Therefore, this rearrangement of chromosomes goes a long way back in time: estimates using various methods date this from 0.75 to 4.5 million years ago. The fact that Denisovans and Neanderthals had the same chromosome number as we do may explain why the descendants from inter-species cross-breeding with our species were viable and possibly fertile. This would also explain why traces of their genetic characteristics remain in our genome, as shown by the comparative genomic analysis of the three species. However, the hypothetical descendants of breeding between the three hominid species mentioned (46 chromosomes) and their large ape ancestors (48 chromosomes) would have had problems of chromosome incompatibility and would probably not have been viable. In fact, no traces of specific genetic characteristics of the large apes have been found in our genome. Therefore, the chromosome fusion may have acted as an efficient mechanism for reproductive isolation that isolated us from the ancestors of the large apes. (for full article: https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/bioscience/the-origin-of-the-human-species-a-chromosome-fusion/ )

To your question mark: I think this illustrates the unnaturalness of sex in the civilized shape and form (which is what the animals must have felt -- and fled because of that): sex disconnected from what its essence is really about, a shared life and what arises from that, intimacy of the souls, not just bodies. You don't share a life with a prostitute, she shares her body with you, but your souls don't communicate. Wild animals don't view other animals as sex toys, they may be polygamous but sex serves the purpose of reproduction in this case, so it is still geared toward a shared life -- or they can be monogamous and then it is part of deep intimacy, part of friendship, loyalty, devotion, responsibility for the young and for each other. Besides, none are physiologically equipped for prostitution -- which makes me wonder where human ability to have sex disconnected from everything else, including procreation, comes from. Not in the sense whether we should, but in the sense why we can, why do we dedicate extraordinary amounts of inner resources to being able any day of the week. Producing sex hormones for decades is very taxing on the body and nature is not usually this wasteful. The whole civilized sexual story is physiologically insane. But even our species-specific physiology in this regard is, come to think of it, unbelievable. What's the function of the hymen? Outside civilization, none whatsoever. So why would nature install one? Was it even nature that installed it?.. And menstruation -- what exactly would a wild animal bleed every month for, to be smelled out and eaten by a predator? And then the clash between the length of the reproductive period of a human female (decades -- while for most animals it's days in a year) and the civilized attitude toward it that changes like the weather -- now she's not in the position, socially, to have children till she's close to 40, but back then in some societies she could be too old to marry by age 18, without it meaning she could have a child out of wedlock. And the sheer number of children we can have because there's no restrictions on our sexual activity and few on our ability to conceive -- while the human child is the most helpless and in need of the mother's undivided attention for the longest time of all animals. How would nature account for a baby factory early civilization turns the woman's body into? Or for the sketchy fertility of late stages of civilization (1 out of 7--9 conceptions happening today ends in spontaneous abortion at the earliest stage -- within days -- as it only does in a dying population of animals, e.g. in a doomed flock of sheep that the farmer knows he will soon lose because they have become too sick to reproduce)?

Thank you, Mr. Jim D. I'm not a scholar of anthropology, just an interested dabbler. And my objections were aimed specifically at a couple of folks in the thread who know who they are. I was a bit annoyed by their persistent "contributions" of monkey wrenches, hence the "prayer" -- but I definitely don't ask for any particular level of scholarship. Interest in the discussion is the ticket to the discussion -- while interest in something entirely else is a ticket to some other discussion, altogether elsewhere. Of course asides and tangents are bound to arise, nothing wrong with that. As a "side effect," not as a strategy, they are fine. You're welcome to just listen, jump in with an idea or ask a question.

Interesting. Definitely the kind of dog equipped to handle extreme cold temperatures still exists, and some are employed just the way they may have been employed 18,000 years ago. (A note to anyone who would own a husky, or knows someone who wants to own a husky: please don't. Don't -- unless you can engage that dog in shared activities all day long. Huskies are like wolves, tribal, they don't do well on their own, they have to be part of a pack, a team, and have plenty of activity, or they start losing their mind. It's not the dog that can be home alone just doing nothing, they are social and need a purpose. A husky belongs where it comes from.)

Some are taking themselves seriously, and nothing and nobody else. So they might destroy the flow because they don't know how to jump into the flow that is not about their pet peeve, yet refuse to go elsewhere without urinating into it first. Marking the territory, so to speak. The point begins with the OP exploring Sumer and other related civilizations of Mesopotamia vs. the way of life that went earlier that they somehow replaced -- forever. And looking for similarities therein (and dissimilarities, and parallels, and unique features, etc.) to some more generic features of "civilization" and its opposites. So, it's either about, "Sumerians did/believed/initiated/invented etc. this and that -- here's an item for your consideration" or about "do we still do things the way they first did it in Sumer? -- here's an item (or an idea) to look at," or about "is civilization natural, or did someone merely domesticate us as cattle and brainwash us into believing it's a grand thing, and that we couldn't survive without it, and that we are in a perfectly natural process for our species?" and so on, stuff like that. The OP's position is anti-civilization, she believes designating its opponents as "savages" is the ugliest projection ever undertaken. She is suspicious of an extraneous intervention believing that as a hypothesis it explains our predicament better than either creation or evolution or a combo of both (without however excluding either as something that went before the intervention). She is intolerant of any views that single out a nation, religion, race as the culprit (an ignorant self-serving idiocy, a fruitless and often cruel and extremely unjust cop-out that replaces an honest quest for answers because it is, well, an easy sleight-of-hand cop-out when answers are not easy to obtain.) She is also not a fan of verbal diarrhea and of walls of unrelated pictures erected all over the barely visible path she's trying to discern. Everything else is welcome.