Taomeow

Sumerian weight measures were derived from the average weight of a fully formed, ripe barley grain. 1 grain -- sheu -- 0,046 g 180 sheu -- shiklu -- 8,4g 60 shiklu -- manu -- 504g 60 manu -- bitlu -- 30,3kg

I haven't read the previous part of the discussion but I beg to differ on this one. I used to have Einstein's job once, at a patent office, and it was largely a sinecura, so I had plenty of time to just read all kinds of obscure patents for fun. So did my colleagues, and we would share our precious finds on a daily basis. And that's how we all wound up with polished copper coins stuck to our foreheads, and even a couple of cases of applying magnets (just don't ask me for the technicalities) to a couple of unwanted pregnancies (one happened to a co-worker and another, to a co-worker's wife). I've seen hundreds of patents dedicated to various medical uses of copper and magnets. But since they are not drugs, cost pennies, and can't be protected from homemade imitations, of course there was never any reason not to bury all that research. Long ago, far away...

What made me laugh yesterday and again today when I re-read it on FB: the story a Russian opera singer, Maria Ostroukhova, told the press about being mugged in Venice, Italy, and losing her wallet and her passport to the thief. She didn't speak any Italian except for the opera roles she had learned by heart, so she had to scramble for Italian opera phrases to explain to the police what happened and urgently ask for help. She hit the astounded cops with approximately the following speech: "I implore you, kind lords, bring justice to this cruel world! What am I going to do without a passport? (She managed to substitute "passaporto" for "Eurydice" of the original.) Oh where can I go without a passport? My fate is dark peril and devastation!" So, the cops understood her (sort of) and showed her some mugshots of the known or suspected pickpockets. She recognized a young woman who "accidentally" bumped into her earlier on some bridge, and exclaimed with great operatic emotion, "There she is, that accursed woman! I swear I will dismember her!!" The cops were beginning to feel a bit uneasy, but then the happy ending arrived, in the form of a boy who came in bringing the goodies he'd just found -- Maria's wallet, emptied of cash but still containing the credit cards, and her passport, which the mugger discarded in the vicinity of some public restroom. The cops handed them to Maria who then proclaimed, "Oh noble knights, may the almighty reward you for your exemplary virtue!" Seeing her off, one of the cops said, with much respect, "Your Italian is truly exquisite." Here's what she looks like:

This is exactly what I'm talking about -- creative fantasies passed off for life sciences -- and they don't even bother to look at the fantasies of other sciences and get their shit together in terms of some uniformity of the plot. According to those other sciences, "early hominins, living 3 to 3.5 million years ago, " who according to the article you linked "got over half their nutrition from grasses, unlike their predecessors, who preferred fruit and insects," grasslands did not exist at the time. Grasslands, that other sciences' narrative goes, came to replace forests later, with the advance of the ice sheets on the African continent beginning 2.8 million years ago. Which made the climate colder and drier. Although this doesn't make sense either because generally forests withstand colder and drier climates much better than grasses do -- have they ever been to a fracking forest in winter in their lives?.. Have they ever had to water an herb garden? only to kill it if you skip three days in drought conditions?.. while the cedar nearby asks for it, like, never?.. And if we were so enamored with insects, who the hell hunted the mammoth then?.. Oh.. right. "Someone" may or may not have been eating insects. But the wooly mammoth is wooly because it needs a winter coat. I haven't heard of many wooly insects of winter which we could have preferred but chose to go to all that trouble instead of hunting, in cooperating groups, the largest, meatiest, fattest, and hardest-to-get animal in the environment. Weird, huh? and those people, humans, sapiences who made this dietary choice -- they, indeed, were us. They, indeed, are the ones who matter when we talk about "what humans are fit to eat."

"One set of early hominids" who didn't survive (no grasses when it gets cold and stays cold for tens, hundreds of thousands of years, remember?) while other sets did survive (plenty of animals when it gets cold, for tens, hundreds of thousands of years) proves that "mankind" always ate grasses?.. How are they mankind?.. Or human at all for that matter? There's an obligatory carnivore killer mouse, the Grasshopper Mouse, that also howls at the moon like a wolf. So it exists. One could even speculate that it is the very mouse Douglas Adams was talking about in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when he asserted that Earth was commissioned, paid for, and run by mice. But what about 99.9999999% of all other mice who are herbivores? Does the existence of the carnivore mouse prove they are "all the same" and cut out for the same diet? And it is much closer related to its other mouse contemporaries than "one set of early hominids" is to us. What we have come to selectively breed as the "scientist species" does seem to have a sweet deal. A mandate on "conducting a study" without "deriving an understanding" -- and getting paid for fantasizing or insinuating the implications instead. Study and publish and get your reward. Study and publish and get your reward. Study and publish and get your reward. What a simple animal it is, a grant eating scientist.

Definitely there's no such thing as "workers" and "soldiers" possible without them. But I have a crazier idea. They themselves, cereal grains, may have been manipulating us. It's well known that certain species are masters of manipulation of other species and are capable of completely changing their behavior in order to propagate. Here's how the parasite toxoplasma gondii does it, for instance: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-parasite-that-makes-a-rat-love-a-cat-86515093/ -- completely rewiring the rat's brain and its most basic life functions and instincts toward its own goals. So I look at thousands of years of deforestation toward ever-greater parts of earth being taken over by cereal grains, and wonder what those cereals know about our endogenous opiate receptors which allow them to manipulate our behavior with their opiate-mimicking proteins...

All cultivated plants have a very recent history. None were cultivated in the ice ages. The date palm, the first known tree to have been cultivated for its fruit, was cultivated only for the last few thousand years. (A mystery in and of itself, how that came about... perhaps for later for my Sumerian thread.) By the way, people still talk of neanderthals as our progenitors -- they weren't, although we did cross-breed a bit, some of us more than others, but none of us have more than 2.1% Neanderthal genetic material. The bulk of what we are is what "human" has become by 400,000 years ago. We haven't changed since then. The only new genetic adaptation that happened since then was the acquired ability, in the populations inhabiting the islands of Japan, to digest seaweed. Otherwise, nothing new. So it's fair to look at our life in the midst of hundreds of thousands of years of ice ages (a fact, not a speculation) when we are trying to figure out what it is that we are truly adapted to eating best. Yes, selective cultivation and cross breeding, for many varieties (not for all), is not "unnatural in the sense GM stuff is. But again, all of it is a very late afterthought with a very short history of implementation. We don't know if we might not go extinct from it yet, it's not been long enough to tell. Also, I still have a problem with a "natural" explanation for the cultivation of cereal grains. The genome of wheat is much larger than that of humans, and most of what its 17 billion nucleotides are up to is completely unknown to humans who only have 1 billion. Cultivated wheat does not seem to be a product of selective breeding unless one jumps to the convenient conclusion that "it has to have been because how else could it have happened." Whereas the very traits that make it possible to cultivate wheat rely on two rather uncanny and unlikely mutations both of which had to happen simultaneously in order to keep the wheat seeds attached to the sheaf waiting to be harvested in order to reproduce -- instead of falling off and scattering in the wind, the way all wild grasses ensure their existence. So some 15,000-years-ago Monsanto or other seems to be, strangely enough, the only explanation that makes any genetic sense. Everything else can only be a product of faith. Our ancestors at the dawn of our modern civilized history are to be believed in as master geneticists who could do shit modern ones can't begin to fathom how. But since this nonsensical explanation comes from authoritative sources, everybody buys it. Those authoritative sources, however... I wonder what their source really is.

What was the weather like in Australia 100,000 years ago? How about 300,000? 400,000? What we eat during interglacials is a moot point. Everything. What I'm talking about is the bulk of our history as a species, not the last minute of it. And even Australian Aboriginals are a last minute human culture in the grand scheme of things... so... what I said, stet. Those ants do look yummy though... have you tried them?

Not me, alas. A modern Ukrainian artist I like a lot named Evgeny Leschenko.

Phoenix3 quoted a post of mine from before (see above) where I touched upon that a bit. I might add that I don't see eating some fruit as a problem for most people -- of course those who do need to watch their sugar, weight, or yeast infestation problems more closely, or those who need to go way stricter with their "zerocarb" eating, might not qualify as fruit eaters with impunity. E.g. Mikhalia Peterson, whose lectures and interviews are on youtube and IMO worth giving a listen to (regardless of what one thinks of her dad's politics -- incidentally she got him to follow the same zerocarb protocol, and then her mom.) She had severe autoimmune problems since early childhood, got juvenile arthritis while at it and had two of her joints, hip and ankle, replaced because of that by age 17 -- the list goes on and on -- she fixed all of her health issues (dozens, each of them by itself enough to make it a losing bet that she would see her 25th birthday) with zerocarb, got super healthy, got married, had a child, founded two companies, yada yada. She's one of the people who are better off not taking any chances. https://www.youtube.com/user/mikhailapeterson1 But for most, I don't think it's necessary to exclude fruit. When one keeps one's carb intake low though, it becomes quite obvious to the senses how excessively sweet and "flat" modern fruit is. More often than not a lot of it tastes like sugar water to me. Whereas the real thing... but don't let me get myself into another food-nostalgic diatribe. So, if you can seek out what is not overly sweet, not overly sprayed, and not ripened by gassing (like bananas), I don't think it's a big issue. Fruit trees are sprayed extremely aggressively. Do you ever see wormholes in any fruit where you live? Here, I never do... whereas in any non-factory-farm-style garden it's a seal of approval for anything real and good -- worms understand about nutritious and delicious and safe to eat... I used to always check for the wormhole and at least half the time it was there for me to cut out -- easy peasy. I don't think I've seen one in years and years. And so what is labeled "organic" is probably also... but don't let me digress again. I think we did eat some plant food even when the oceans were frozen to the bottom and the surface of the earth covered with ice 3 kilometers thick (which is to say, for most of our developmental history as a species). I judge by the fact that in the tundra, they do get a handful of very sour, very frost-resistant berries and incorporate them, in small amounts, in the diet to this day. Wild cranberry, not the commercial variety, is very small, very bright red, thin skin, juicy inside, and sour to the unimaginable extent. I believe it may have served to tenderize meat, the way we use some acidic media for the carne asada or shish kabob today. Of the other frost-tolerant berries, I only had a few -- who knows, there may have been more in prehistory. I had cloudberry as a sour fermented drink, could be made alcoholic too. Lingonberry, native to the Arctic, also small, on the sour side, but I just had it as a preserve with sugar so don't know what fresh is like. Honeysuckle (not the flower, a variety of berries in Siberia), sea buckhorn. None of these could be a staple food, of course, but our ancestors are likely to have eaten some. They are all very, very low in sugar in their natural state.

Thanks for noticing

Thank you, Phoenix3. Oh, the stories I could tell about how and why I got to learn everything under the sun about nutrition and then everything hidden from the light of the sun too... The stories I could tell about my real-life schooling and real-life teachers, gurus, ex-gurus, faux gurus, true masters I apprenticed under... The stories I could tell about people I met, problems they had, solutions we found... Not today though. Today it would tantamount to Giordano Bruno's lawyer asking the Holy Inquisition to abandon its teachings. He would promptly join his client at the stake if he did.

What lemon juice? I put wasabi on my sashimi. Always ask for some extra too. Wasabi kills parasites and bacteria. Please don't shoot the messenger... This whole line of thinking is junk science at its worst, a virulent meme with a life of its own that has no basis in reality. There's no such thing as "acidic" or "alkaline" body. There's very strict parameters of the acid-alkaline balance of different fluids maintained in the human body. What one of them is like at any given time tells you absolutely nothing about the rest. The hydrochloric acid that is produced by the human stomach to digest proteins is as acidic as it gets (or we wouldn't be able to even digest mother's milk at the breast, let alone whole bones some taoists swallow to train themselves from the inside), and the production, sadly, declines with age (most probably not so much from aging itself as from inadequate lifelong diets), which can cause many problems. (The body also downregulates hydrochloric acid production if its owner is not eating enough protein -- that's the case with all digestive enzymes too, what you're not exposed to gets downregulated, the body doesn't want to work for nothing.) In some cases people suffer from low or even zero adicity of their stomach juices, the condition is a spectrum from unpleasant to debilitating. In other cases there's stomach hyperacidity, but it is usually the outcome of a complex metabolic problem, in many cases related to stress. Now then, the blood is the one fluid that can't go "acidic" or "alkaline" outside a very narrow range. The normal blood PH is very tightly regulated between 7.35 and 7.45. It can't, and does not, respond to your diet with any wide fluctuations. Any deviation from these parameters is dangerous and can be life-threatening. Acidosis -- when blood gets more acidic -- is usually the outcome of kidney or lungs disorder and often demands urgent medical attention. Its opposite, alkalosis -- when blood gets more alkaline -- is usually the outcome of metabolic, hormonal, or respiratory illnesses and often demands urgent medical attention. Then there's a wide range of acidity-alkalinity of the urine. With a ketogenic diet, you don't just change the acidity of your urine (although measuring it can help determine if you're really in ketosis you' re shooting for -- not to be confused with ketoacidosis, a dangerous complication of some illnesses, e.g. diabetes). You actually switch the pathways whereby your body gets energy, from burning glycogen (sugar and starches derived) to burning ketones (fat derived). Before this post grows into a dissertation (which I could write on the subject anytime if someone paid me), let's just leave it at, "for every complex process, there's a simple explanation -- the wrong one." What those hippies measure in their mouth, i.e. the acidity or alkalinity of their saliva, has everything to do with the indigenous bacteria (a very individual population) in one's mouth, which can change it in response to the foods it likes or dislikes, but it's useful to remember that the food preferences of your mouth bacteria may have nothing to do with what's good for you. They are the ones responsible for you dental bills after all, so you can safely assume that they maintain their own acidity or alkalinity with nothing like your best interest at heart. Oh, and it gives you zero information about anything I've talked about above -- any of the body fluids and their PH and whether it's good, bad or a non-issue.

Ah, yes, I do think nearly everywhere in Europe "average" people eat better than in the US. Well, it's good that you have access to good dairy (and not too many issues with it -- there's quite a few people who don't seem to handle it well, I do thrive on it when it's all-natural, but "ultra-pasteurized" gives me the creeps -- to think that I used to have an issue with just "pasteurized," now I always try to look for it and usually with little success, they "ultra-pasteurize" even most organic dairy now, what a travesty... and "raw" does cost an arm and a leg at a local HFS. Still, I buy raw kefir and raw butter on occasion, and raw cheeses from Europe when I can't help myself -- they do cost a fortune here.) Still, "protein" is only partially the name of the game. There's more to the game... speaking of game, I'd love to lay my hands on that, but... Sigh. I also eat raw fish only as sashimi, but find it very satisfying. And I know many ways to cook fish so it's nothing if not delicious -- but my fish choices are limited here to ocean varieties, whereas the best tasting fish is river and lake fish... Sigh.

May I suggest an eye-opening book.

I think you could try to plan your food budget around what you can afford toward some more options, and I would favor (if you have access to it) some inexpensive fish over cheese as a staple. Of course "inexpensive fish" is another item to hunt down. Where do you shop? Trader Joe's has inexpensive frozen fish, and for fresh, I'd try to discover an Asian supermarket if they exist in your area, they typically have a large choice. Cheese I don't find particularly economical if it's good -- in fact, really good is quite unreasonably expensive, and really cheap may have stuff on the label you don't want in your body. Also, you don't need huge portions of meat if you keep your saturated fat intake high (a prerequisite for success with low carb diets, otherwise you will be hungry and craving carbs). And don't overlook organ meats if you can find them. Chicken livers are very cheap, e.g., and could be a nice addition to your food plan. Bones for broth -- a bone broth goes a long way. And I make real Native American pemmican out of the marrow. And then add it to my eggs. It is a pain to prepare but then it lasts forever.

May I suggest a self-education course. https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/ I don't eat like that though, and didn't say I did. I might experiment with it someday, or not. I'm pretty satisfied with a close-to-paleo but not always strict regimen of my own, the outcome of a lifetime of explorations and a whole bookcase dedicated to the subject of nutrition, from various epochs and continents. My current thing is, and has been for years, high fat, moderate protein, low carbs, and mostly no grains, no legumes and no starchy vegetables. Absolutely no junk food, unless you count an occasional Haagen-Dazs butter pecan ice cream. I do eat fruits (avoiding the sweetest among them) and berries, non-starchy veggies (often fermented -- kimchi, raw sauerkraut, homemade pickles), and put a spoonful of sugar in my coffee. I don't avoid alcohol either, nor tea, nor an occasional bit of chocolate. This is sort of average for me, it can go to either extreme from there and occasionally does -- to very strict when I'm in the position and in the mood to do thorough planning (if you're going to do strict paleo, you can't just grab "whatever" at the store, you have to plan the hunt and the gathering and the storage, and then hunt and gather and store -- and cook like a machine!!) -- or to very lax (e.g. when traveling, eating out, going to a party, and then typically dealing with the aftermath of being dragged after the wagon for a while after having fallen off it. )

"Taoist" is something you become if you do what taoists do. If you are initiated and do what taoists do, you are a taoist. If you are initiated but don't do what taoists do, you are not a taoist. If you are not initiated and do what taoists do, you are maybe a taoist. If you are not initiated and don't do what taoists do, you are most definitely not a taoist. What do taoists do? There's a number of ways to go about it. E.g.: First, they do what their teacher tells them to do. Later, they do what they tell their disciples to do. Only much better. Or: First, they learn a procedure, an art, a practice, and do that. They don't compete but they shoot for perfection for its own sake in whatever they do -- how else can they embody tao? Next, they find they've been transformed by that practice so that now they embody tao and don't have to do shit. Or: You're born that way. Masters and teachers come to you in your sleep and transmit the tao directly. You wake up and hey presto, you are Neo and you announce, to everybody's surprise and your own, "I know kung fu." And project your chi right through the wall and then have to turn some lead into gold to pay for the repairs. Or... Bottom line is, taoists do stuff. Don't believe them when they tell you that they do nothing, want nothing, and are at peace with everything. They may or may not be all these things, but it matters little. What matters is, they do things. Weird things.

Occultism is way older, not particularly Western in its origins, and, like shamanism (which is much older), almost universal -- but at a different stage of our history. Shamanism ends with the city-state phase of social innovation, as tribal and nomadic life gets gradually or abruptly, and in most cases thoroughly and irreversibly, replaced by the agricultural Sun-King empires. From there the sun of occultism rises, heralding the dawn of modern history. From there it unfolds its "tales of power." Shamanism is not concerned with power for the sake of power -- whether for an individual as occultism does with its king, priest, sorcerer, or a group whose interests coincide on the goal of a power grab explicitly toward, or else invariably leading to, its abuse. In fact, these are the two consecutive main currents through our history: the natural human collective, i.e. a tribe, versus an individual (or an individual heading a group of minions toward the same power-grabbing goals) climbing on top of the natural human collective and reshaping, intermixing or dissolving, demolishing or abolishing, converting by force or by cunning, this natural group into something else: slaves. Sheeple. With the shepherd on top. This is the core difference between shamanism and occultism -- despite a bunch of similarities between them and despite a bunch of widely dissimilar practices and methods within each. Siberian shamanism and African shamanism, on the surface, are quite different, and by the same token occult Voodoo sorcery and occult Jesuit secret societies may seem very dissimilar. Yet at the core of the first two is the shaman as the intermediary between the tribe and the spirit world, serving the tribe -- in the second two cases, the sorcerer, priest, General serving themselves and their own power-amassing goals. I have this in my notes, from an article I liked and lost: (to be continued when time allows )

I have reasons to believe that 1. Only occultist amateurs, who are self-educated or else educated by the self-educated, who try to seek out their path, typically away from this or that religious or atheistic tradition they were born into and were left dissatisfied with, feel that occultism and shamanism are sort of up the same alley, one esoteric brotherhood with common practices and goals. As opposed to professional occultists, born into occultist bloodlines, who are, and have always been, anti-shamanic and are indeed one esoteric brotherhood in vehement and deadly opposition to the shamanic tradition. 2. Oppressive governments are, and have always been, deeply, expertly, professionally occultist. 3. Shamanic traditions are not, and have never been, part of oppressive governments. Reference literature available upon request.

Me too, but I noticed too late that I sort of responded to the opposite of what liminal luke was talking about -- more to a thought in my head than to his conclusion that we might run out of wars. Decided to leave my response intact though, for its general wisdom.

That won't help. Wars can't be meditated away. May I suggest reading some Sun Tzu instead... very helpful toward choosing your battles. Once you see you have no dog in a fight, or too many dogs against yours, or one or two but vicious, rabid dogs you just want to avoid all contact with lest you contract the disease, or... ...in other words, "choosing your battles" is an education worth getting. Oh, and the main message of The Art of War is IMO this: don't go to war until you've already won. Generally speaking, I'm seeing fewer and fewer wars that can be won (too many losers produced by some hi tech loser-making machine -- of course the biggest losers are often labeled "winners" but a close look at what they've won and what they've lost may cause one to doubt that label.) More and more situations where one's only chance to win is to desert. Even if all you win by staying the hell out of it is your sanity.

I don't read mopai threads because I don't read any threads that get inserted into too many unrelated threads and hijack them and proceed thence as a mopai tug of war. So I don't have the foggiest who's right and who's wrong there. I'm not simple but I'm easy -- it's easy to get me to ignore any subject by bringing it up in response to every other subject under discussion and using any discussion in progress as a launching pad for one's own one trick pony. I don't care one way or the other if mopai discussions stay or go, provided they stay where they belong or go there. A propos, not just mopai -- of course it's the internet and tangents happen and they should, we're not a single-minded task force on a mission here -- but anyone who consistently posts long rants from the bottom of their hearts while hijacking the bottom of someone else's heart toward the purpose winds up ignored by me. I don't officially "put on ignore," I just learn to skip over the name if it has taught me that this person shows up in a thread exclusively toward a hostile or friendly (as the case may be) takeover of same. I wonder how many do likewise.