thelerner

I don't have faith in Karma. I tend to doubt there's a being or thing that's keeping score. Often one reaps, what one sows but not always. There are vast disagreements over the what's, why's and necessity of one's action. Helping Karma along, I think 'bad guys' are into that as often as the good. Mankind being more rationalizing then rational. So for justice, I make rules, based on do the least harm, support life, freedom and prosperity, follow them and bend them where compassion allows. addon> For all that, while I don't believe in Karma, I generally live as if it did exist. Tends to make life better, simpler and more ethical.

Go Fire Monkey, Go. Monkeys are chaotic. Fire monkeys probably even more so. sigh, I could of used some boredom this year.

That I knew. That is WTF. I was always warned it'd be the damn dirty apes that did us in. Time to start an immigration embargo on Australians and there bad ass birds.

Yeah, right, that's it.. I thought they had really big bal... peaches.

I like'em. Is it me or do they look a little bottom heavy?

They hold a special place in many mythologies. Clever, opportunistic birds, a group of them is called an unkindness. So its best to keep your eyes open when they are around.

Ahh, getting the hard work over first..

Possibly (imo) because a large part of UFO and alien abduction are psychologically induced. Either Interpreted from real phenomena or from internal workings, ie what past generations interpreted as angels or demons, we in the scientific era label Aliens but the same dynamic is at work. Course, its a big universe out there. It'd be pretty boring if there weren't more people at the party.

And I agree with you 3Bob, its a scary world with lots of people living paycheck to paycheck or worse.

FWIW, Astronaut (and engineer) Ed Mitchell died recently. He was on the Apollo 14 mission and was the 6th man to walk on the moon. I bring it up here because he was a UFO enthusiast. http://lightsinthedark.com/2016/02/05/another-moonwalker-gone-apollo-14-astronaut-ed-mitchell-has-died-at-85/ Here he is talking about UFO's

Skillful means.. Live life in a way so that you have skills that can earn you a living. Put away money, if you can, for the future. Shit happens and we can be prepared for it, sometimes. I was being slightly flippant when I used the word sponge, but its very important have good friends and good relations with your family, a powerful side affect is that they'll love and care enough about you to help you when you're down. Invest for a rainy day. Invest in learning needed skills, invest part of every pay check (if you can), invest in knowing, helping and hanging out with family and friends. It pays off during the rainy season. Enjoying the sun, the sky, the air isn't transcendental, its real and right now (a little more real yesterday). Billions can step out right now, feel it, be thankful and smile. It's good. To take a vow of permanent sadness seems like a waste of life. Enjoy life, do what you can to help others.

I wrote my post while 3bob was writing his. What they have in common is to ground. A puppy is in the moment, they just hang out. To make great oatmeal you have to bring the milk to a just before a boil without scalding it, then watch and minimally stir to the point each individual grain is properly hydrated coated and plumped without being too hard or wimpy. Planting.. again is slowing down, grounding and watching. In college I was reading too much getting way to top heavy. For me it was very important to get out of my head and into martial arts where too much thought meant a fist in the gut or more likely told to get down and do 20. addon> in a way we all have split personalities. Personas we take on. While in them we tell ourselves stories that act like a bellows keeping them alive. Maybe its fine for the good states, but for the angry, the anxious ones, it might be better not to fuel them. Best of all is to let the mind settle.

Drop it. Drop it all. The dreams of glory. The plans for future greatness. Your hopes, your fears Drop'em. Cook something. maybe oatmeal. trying to get oatmeal, particularly steel cut oatmeal just right, is a difficult task. maybe work on that, or some other dish. cook something really well. maybe in the spring plant some seeds. don't worry about other people, just oatmeal and planting some seeds. the answer to life, sometimes, is keep it simple. oatmeal and seeds.

While I like this sentiment and there's truth to it. There are the day to day nuts and bolts of an economy. And Capitalism- private ownership of businesses, land, productivity with bosses, workers in conjunction with market forces get the most goods out of the system. Human nature means people work harder when they can get personal gains out of it. Without benefits from working, there is stagnation, less is produced. In my view the best countries are Socialist and they use capitalism. The worst were communist which devolved into brutal dictatorships. The US is fairly socialist to be honest. Not as far as Western Europe but more or less evolving in that direction, mostly-ish, in the long run. And I'm glad of that. The U.S is wealthy enough to have a better social net and our medical system pays twice as much and gets 10th place care for it. Still Socialism runs the risk of letting the people vote for so much bread, circus and leisure that it kills the engines of production. If you like modern living don't diss the engines of production. The U.S has vitality, creativity.. capitalism has its fruits but (imo) if uncontrolled its nasty side of moving toward feudalism and social imbalance. To me there's a sweet spot, I think some of the Northern European countries have found it. Keeping the two most important things good living standards and freedom. later addon> Owledge I highly get the feeling you're not from Venezuela. Correct me if I'm wrong. If you were I get the feeling you'd be much less a fan. also, while I rarely agree with Karl, he undoubtedly has an excellent education (misused, sorry) in world politics. The OP article about bringing in "Millions of pounds of provisions, stuffed into three-dozen 747 cargo planes, arrived here from countries .. But instead of food and medicine, the planes carried another resource that often runs scarce here: bills of Venezuela’s currency, the bolivar." was inevitable. Chavez's policies destroyed that nation from the toilet paper on up. Sorry, for the Venezuelans but that's the way it is. And until they take painful economic measures that EMBRACE CAPITALISTIC realities, they'll continue to be very bad. Thankfully intelligent compassionate socialist concern and capitalistic creation can work hand in hand.

Karl and I may be sipping capitalist propaganda, but your swigging Chavez's revolutionary crazy. And that stuff is poisonous. I'm in the middle here. I think socialism as done in Europe can work, bumpy but there's no perfect system and at least during the bumps most people are doing pretty well. Chavez was charismatic leader who had no economic sense. I'd argue he was more a Russian style communist then European style Socialist. You can blame banks and corporations all day long but Chavez set in place conditions that would destroy his (or any) nation economically. Price controls creates shortages, always, sometimes slowly if you have an economic sugar daddy like expensive oil, but eventually price controls spin out of control. Just as gravity brings things down, price controls create black markets, crime and shortages. He nationalized companies, and competence was a distant second to complete dedication to him. In any company or nation that's a recipe for disaster. Even before the oil prices dropped, Venezuelan's oil profits were heading down. Repairs and infrastructure weren't being made. In an industry that requires experts he had employed friends and ideologues who had little experience. With the right tax structure, you don't need to nationalize, keep the profits, but also hold on to experts from other countries who know how to run it. He continually blamed his failings on Western boogey men, but in truth, no country could survive Chavez's policies. He wasn't all bad, he raised the living standard for the poor, but in the end, he crushed everybody economically and became a paranoid dictator, closing down the free press, imprisoning the opposition and stifling democracy.

Not sure your complaining and belly aching does them a whole lot of good either. Does it? Are you helping anyone or just a fast furious typist on the net. Expressing your feeelings. Though if it makes you feel better, keep doing it, see how many problems you solve.

Won't all you guys and your nasty comments have egg on your faces when NASA and a great majority of the worlds scientists, engineers, explorers, pilots, geographers and cartography people admit it was all a hoax and Moonnite is right. It's flat. We live on a great Frisbee thrown into space by god himself.

I don't think Venezuelan economic policies needed outside influences to result in chaos. When windfalls of oil money was flowing in times were good but the extreme socialist/communistic/personality cult driven laws and economic policies are damning. State run cronyism killed off golden gooses, price controls lead, as always, to shortages. Nature played a roll too. Nasty drought hurt agriculture and devastated the hydro-electric plants.

Seems a bit pessimistic. Hopefully I'll always have Parents, wife, sisters, friends, cousins, nieces, nephews and one day successful children to sponge off of. The simple bitter truth is I'm not going be able to change the fact of suffering. Though I might question your number of billions. Through Western eyes which too often equate $$ and things for happiness, yes, but through other eyes, the numbers might be much smaller. I have no magic to change the life course of others, but I can give to charity, some ducats here and there, a flock of chickens through Heifer to some family each month. We can all do something. For example tomorrow my family will make a dozen or two brown bagged lunches for the local needy. Maybe enough somethings adds up. Today, the sky is blue, the sun is bright, the grass is green and air is crisp. To not enjoy the blessings we've been given, seems to me, would be a horrible waste.

One solution from a different angle. For concentration nothing beats the martial arts, particularly weapons training. I wonder if there's a dojo near you? If so, check it out, see if it clicks. It may include some meditation and form work also.

sonofabitch, I've got that book. When I got it I wasn't up for 'doing' another system so I skimmed the first few chapters and never really digested or practiced from it. I'll have to go back and see if I can dig up the sleeping meditations. Though I've found working on sleep meditations, exotic or not, lften leaves me with greater insomnia.

I thought the easiest and best evidence in disproving flat earth model is simply observing the sun, ie under most FE theories it stays the same height and goes around in a circle around the middle area of Pancake Earth acting like a flood light. Under that scenario it wouldn't rise or set, it would come closer then recede further. No going above or below the horizon, just coming and receding. Yet it clearly doesn't, it rises and sets. Staying at a ball shape when it should kind of go elliptical if it was receding. The latest round of video's present a world where the sun is even closer then 'classic' FE theory, where its 31(!) miles away, not 3,000 or the 72 million that fits into our modern science for generations. I can see having these arguments in a nontechnological society. With no computers and where planes are mysterious objects, but our society we get on planes going 600 miles an hour, cross the continents and oceans. We have telescopes and strong binoculars, we can see other planets with moons around them. See for ourselves the complexity of our solar system. We can make models (Orrery) of it and the confirm that our model matches reality. For example it shows and predicts why planets seemingly move backwards in there orbit every now and then in retrograde. The Adler Planetarium in Chicago has a beautiful one. You can see the moon circling the earth every month and how it relates to the outer fixed circle of the constellations. Its fascinating to see. It works like clockwork because the laws of universe are constant. This kind of anti-science, anti-intellectualism is very dangerous. It's tinged in dark conspiracy theory where the video's presented lay out the vast Luciferian plot over the past 1,000 years to keep people in the dark about the shape of there planet because.. that's what Luciferians do. They do science, work as engineers.. they create progress which means change.

Actually, I think its a good day when 50% of all beings are happy

I get the feeling that 'May all being be happy' is more about 'us', then 'all beings'. It's not a magic spell across the universe. Its a reminder to Us to.. um.. not be such assholes.. ie after saying it a few hundred times, the hope is we work on the skillful means to add to the happiness around us.

We, personally relive much of our species evolution in the first few months after conception.