thelerner

Pendulum work is interesting. I tend to see it as a non psychic phenomena. That it provides access to the subconscious.

Putting aside quantum mechanics, I think Anna Wise has done some great work on brain waves and meditation. She spent years researching and measuring brain waves of various masters in meditation from Southern faith healers to zen masters to yogi's. Her books and guided meditation series are excellent. What I found interesting was her finding that the top practitioners showed several brain waves happening simultaneously. For info: http://annawise.com/awakened-mind-the-work-18 her guided meditations: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/annawise (I like 1,2,4, 5 & 9)

yay, more for me. I'll admit it can make digestion harder, and usually I'll go with room temperature or a little cooler, but icy water is nicy water. A small cup is most refreshing, especially on its own. On the third hand looking at the video on youtube you see quite a few 'the world ends this year' posts. The assumption being the ALS challenge wasn't just a random brain storm from professional fundraisers at ALS foundation that caught on as a fad. Rather it's a satan inspired plot, that happens to help people with a nasty disease. I assume the year will end without Satanic apocalypse and the hardcore commenters will have to look elsewhere the first part of 2015 to find another internet meme that is proof of Satan's control and love of the internet.

Omg, I've been drinking ice water too!

In 2005, I wrote this in a part of my introduction here. Maybe it had relevance. It "short answer to leaving the rat race: Own a business where you can find value in other peoples garbage(very Taoish). Find the Big customers. Live well but cheaply. Best business advice, The best business deal is not the one that gets you the most. Its the one where both parties leave happy. Thats the way to long term deals and relationships. Best Sales advice. Candy, keep Halloween type candy in your pockets. Hand it out liberally to secretaries as well as decision makers. Accepting food has much deeper connotations then you might assume. Decision makers will buy from friends all things being equal or slightly inequal, be friendly. Best Management, be lavish w/ the little things, buying lunches, snacks, extra time off, while keeping the big things (salary & benefits) under control. No one will ever think they are being paid enough, but they will remember the lunches provided, free small loans, ability to come and leave early when needed."

I think the profound truth here for longevity and wisdom, know aggressive but abide in yin, quiet, receiving, humble, gathering, intuition.

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As the Ice Bucket Challenge thread was spinning out of control Marblehead wrote this and I thought it might be a good launching point for a discussion. Not another Save the World thread, but a what makes sense, and how does ethics enter into Our and the Worlds future actions. He wrote: First, I must state that I am an omnivour and I have no problem with some animals eating other animals because that is the way nature designed the planet. In an ideal world, animals could be bred in a controlled environment for the sole purpose of using for testing. And the Chinese could stop causing the extinction of various species for the purpose of tribal medicines that don't work. And all humans could control their birth rate so that the population is sustainable without causing the destruction of habitates that other species need in order to not become extinct. In reality, morality has nothing to do with it. It is simple logic and common sense.

Nice technique, great spirit. Thanks for sharing the clip.

I agree with the conclusion, 'be nice be happy', but along the way make things better. We can use animal testing (within reason and under humane regulations) to understand and find cures for diseases. We may not last forever but the next 100 years will be particularly challenging for our species and most of us will live through at least half of it. These days I'm concerned with the sweet spot. If we're not concerned with living longer, we may eat poorly, live in poor health and die younger. Yet we don't want to live as monks either. There's a sweet spot, where we can find healthy passions that improve our lives. Same with the environment, I don't believe in obsessing, but there are simple things we can do to minimize our footprint.

If "God" exists, has he always created? Definitely Yes. Ever since he was a young toddler sitting in his playpen, he'd create and create and create. He'd never stop, it was a real passion for him. Hopefully that puts the that to rest. Next question, please. Michael 'there is no spoon, its a spork' Thelerner

I'm thinking of using this as an OP for a new thread in Off Topic. Wonder what it should be called? Ethical Pathways & Predictions for the Future? (seems a little clunky) any ideas

Let us know what its like. I'm sure it will be quite a spiritual experience.

Personally, I'd like to have Starjumper back. He's been out for a while, he's prickly, but imo he walks the walk, knows his stuff and is more authentic in anger and practice then most.

<I can see your point. There are times when life is overwhelming and there's simply no time for such 'lift yourself up by the bootstrap' style advice. Hopefully at some point life gives us a breather and we can get enough slack to gain some momentum to put us on a better path> His advice can feel pessimistic, but its suppose to be a kick in the ass, wake up call. Keep in mind, imo, the what you did yesterday is a short hand for- how your spending your time. He's really repeating the old rag, We will Reap What we Sow, as we'll become what we spend our time doing. Karma'ish. There's no secret code, no fairy godmother, who'll magically give us what we want. If we want to head somewhere it'll only happen if we're heading there now. On that path, now.

I don't know about proper, but to avoid political correctness and because a little poison can be strengthening, my view on hate speech is to give a warning or two, then suspension. In a limited way there may even be a place for it in The Pit. Its part of our reality, we should be able to discuss it like adults and lock it up when it gets heated. Often such conversations crash and burn but on some occasions good things arise. We've had some extremely misogynistic people here and they've sparked some good conversations. Part of embracing everything is being comfortable with the dark. On the third hand, no wants to see shit where they live. A Forum for Female Cultivation - great. Especially with a good steward who keeps it in line and on focus. (hmmnn, in some ways thats the opposite of my first answer. hmnn. I still stand by it).

FWIW here is the article 'A 60 Second Guide to Learning the Awful Truth About Yourself' http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/the-60-second-guide-to-bullshit-free-life/ A 60 Second Guide to Learning the Awful Truth About YourselfBy David Wong July 16, 2014 This won't take but a minute, and I promise this won't be a waste of your time. It's three steps ... Step 1: Get out a pen and paper. You don't need much, an old receipt or something. Write down, in just a few words, what you did yesterday. Leave out the sleeping, eating, pooping, etc. And be totally honest, nobody is going to see it but you. So maybe it's something like: 8 am - 5 pm: working 5 pm - 7 pm: browsing the Internet, catching up with everybody on facebook, masturbating 8 pm - 9 pm: talking on phone with a friend 9 pm - midnight: playing an iPhone game, scrolling through Netflix menus Perfect, you're half done. If you want to stop and take a break, enjoy this animated gif: Feel refreshed? Good. Step 2: On a separate piece of paper, write down in just a few words the five things that are most important in life. Roughly in order. Like, right now if I look out my window I can see a dude in the parking lot about to climb into his pickup truck. If I ran out and forced him to do this, he might come up with: 1. Serving the Lord 2. Raising my family 3. Being loyal to my friends 4. Growing my business 5. Preserving freedom Our readership tends to be a little younger and more liberal, so for a lot of you, your list of life priorities will look something like: 1. Being loyal to my friends & family 2. Advancing my career (or education) 3. Finding my soulmate 4. Making the world better for the future (ending pollution, racism, etc.) 5. Learning to play guitar Both are perfectly fine lists, I'm no one to judge. Now, if you write above the list, "I believe in ..." then that is in effect your Philosophy of Life. If somebody asked you what your philosophy of life was, like if you were the finalist in a beauty pageant or something, you could read that off. "I believe in being loyal to my friends, advancing my education ..." and it'd sound pretty good. Now ... Step 3: Go back to your log of things you did yesterday, and re-arrange it in order of time spent, from most to least. So for our hypothetical person it'd be working, then playing the iPhone game, then browsing the internet, then talking to the friend. Write "I believe in ..." at the top. That is your real philosophy of life. Take the other piece of paper and throw it away. It's meaningless. "Bullshit!" you might say. "You can't judge me based on yesterday! I was really tired when I got home from work, and just wanted to chill!" Hey, I'm not judging you! I once lost an entire Wednesday afternoon trying to get a hat to stay on a rabbit. But if you think yesterday was an outlier, then go ahead and tally up the last month. If you're like me and every single person I know, your two lists -- the things you said were important and the things you actually spend time and energy on -- bear no resemblance to one another. The pickup truck guy up there who ranked it Religion, Family, Friends, Career, and Freedom? Log his time and you'll find his waking hours are 70 percent working at the car dealership, 20 percent Chicago sports fandom, and 10 percent avoiding conversation with his family. His service to The Lord consists of tolerating one hour of church a week and hating gay people; his dedication to freedom involves spending five minutes a day posting anti-Obama image macros on Facebook and voting once every other decade. And just to be clear -- the good-sounding life philosophy list he posted earlier wasn't intended to make himself sound good to other people. It's what he tells himself. That guy you saw at Whole Foods really does think in his own mind that "saving the environment" is right at the top of his list. But his total time and energy spent on the cause adds up to occasionally spending an extra dollar on the brand with the picture of leaves on the label. So there you go. If you want to know where you'll be five years from now, you don't need a crystal ball. Just look at your philosophy of life -- your real one, the one based on actual time spent. That's who you are, and that's who you'll be five years from now, or 10, or 20. You are what you spend time doing. And nothing else. Were you surprised by the result? Or do you know somebody who probably would be? Give it a share on Facebook with the button below. But beware: Some people's reaction to this is, uh, less than positive.

I like his writing, he's got the Wong stuff. Here's a recent article by David Wong. 5 Ways You're Sabotaging Your Own Life (Without Knowing It) By David Wong 8/11/14 (http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-youre-sabotaging-your-own-life-without-knowing-it/) When you were little and people asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, what did you tell them? Did you stick with the standard "doctor" or "veterinarian," or did you shoot for the moon with "pop star" or "astronaut"? Whatever it was, I'd say for about 95 percent of you the answer is hilarious in retrospect (I told my parents I wanted to "out-funk Prince"). Now, here's the question: When people ask you the same thing now (phrased as, "What are your long-term goals?" or, "Where do you see yourself in 10 years?") will your answer look just as stupid 10 years from now? For most of us ... yeah, it will. Somewhere along the line, that train always gets derailed. Well, fortunately I've had the opportunity to study numerous such derailings up close, and here are the most common causes: #5. Focusing on How to Accomplish Something Instead of Why Try something for me. Get up and go to an empty part of the floor, and position your body so that it's like you're riding an invisible motorcycle. Knees bent at about a 90-degree angle, arms out, you can make engine noises with your mouth if you want. Look at the clock, and hold that position as long as you possibly can, until the pain in your thighs becomes too unbearable. Note how long you lasted. Some of you won't last 30 seconds, because why would you? This is stupid and it hurts. We'll come back to that in a moment. Now, let's say you want to help somebody quit smoking. Which do you think would be more effective, of these two: A) Showing them a scare-tactic ad talking about why they need to quit -- photos of tumors on diseased lungs, all that shit. Showing them a video full of good advice about how to quit, including tons of helpful tips to walk them through it. "By day three, you'll have the urge to use a crutch to cope with the nicotine withdrawal. Don't." Which one do you think works? The second one, right? The first is just manipulative bullshit, the second is imparting actual, helpful knowledge. But you're wrong -- a recent study found the "why" ads made a huge difference in helping people quit, where the "how" ads did nothing whatsoever. Here's the reason, and this is crucial because a huge portion of the modern economy is hoping you don't figure this out: No one who wants to change their habits fails because they don't know how to do it. No one. See, if they want to do it bad enough, figuring out how is nothing more than a trivial first step. And with most things, the method is unimportant -- that's why diet fads come and go every few months, and we never stumble across the one magical method that works better than all the others. The method is never the issue, we just focus on it to hide the fact that we don't really want to do it. "I know a guy who lost 40 pounds on Atkins!" No, you know a guy who wanted to lose weight bad enough that he was willing to tightly regulate what he ate every day -- if he'd chosen to just cut calories, that'd have worked, too. Allow me to illustrate with a particularly ridiculous example: the fitness industry. Exercise machines are a $4.5 billion industry (treadmills are the top seller) and health clubs account for another $27 billion. How many of those people paid the money because they convinced themselves this would be the thing that would finally turn them into the type of person who exercises? Here's a hint: Two-thirds of people with gym memberships never go. This shot was supposed to be filled with people, but even stock models don't want to do this. It's not just a lie that we're telling ourselves, it's a ridiculous lie. A toddler could see through it. You know damned well that it doesn't require one penny's worth of equipment to get in shape -- you can do every single necessary exercise on your floor, right now, in the nude. Remember when you were sitting on your invisible motorcycle, and your thighs screamed for you to stop after, like, one minute? That searing pain in your legs is the same thing you'll feel with a thousand-dollar elliptical machine -- I just gave it to you for free. "But that was incredibly tedious and painful! I don't want to spend every day doing things like that!" I know! Me neither. So stop fooling yourself. Now try this: Go back and do the invisible motorcycle pose again, only this time, hire a stranger to point a gun at your skull, with instructions to blow your brains out unless you double your previous time. Pretend it's a Sons of Anarchy episode or something. You'll do it, no problem -- you'll blast through all of those "impossible" to tolerate pain thresholds like the Kool-Aid Man. See, because now the "why" is taken care of -- you're doing it so you don't get shot. 
"I got rid of the cigarettes and pizza. This is the only joy I have left." So here's the secret, the thing that has been plainly obvious all along: Those people out there who are accomplishing great things and seem to get 50 hours' worth of work done every day? They're doing it because they have that gun to their head. An imaginary gun, pressed against their temple all day, every day. #4. Not Thinking About What Part of You Will Die What I hate about articles like this is that they're always trying to guilt you into bettering yourself. "What are you doing sitting on your sofa eating ice cream, you lazy bag of Dorito farts! Get off your ass and go become the high-achieving superman you know you can be!" That pisses me off because I know exactly why I'm on the sofa eating ice cream. It's because I've had a hard day and this makes me feel better, so fuck you. Even if what I'm doing is a frivolous waste of time, I'm doing it for a reason. But that is another thing that almost everyone ignores when trying to fix something in their life, and it always comes back to bite them. Let's stick with the theme and say you decide to get in shape (if you're already an athlete, replace it with "learn to speak Japanese" or whatever). Let's say you're going to take up running -- you've read the above entry, so you picked one that doesn't cost anything, unless you don't already own shoes. You figure you'll run around the park every morning, and motivate yourself with the knowledge that you're going to lose weight, you're going to have more energy, you're going to feel better, and it won't cost a dime. And, when you steel yourself for this task, you anticipate most of it fairly easily -- you know you're going to sweat, you know you're going to be sore. But what will trip you up and make you quit isn't any of that. It's the one thing you didn't think about: What you lose by running. Because what you will lose is whatever you were doing instead of running, and whether you know it or not, every single thing you're doing right now is valuable to you. "But I spent two hours yesterday staring at my ceiling and making fart noises with my mouth!" Right, but you did it for a reason. You were filling some need. Maybe it's just stress relief, I don't know -- but I know that you did it because in that moment, you didn't want to do anything else. So our runner says, "I'll run in the mornings, before work!" OK, so you're getting up two hours earlier than you are now. You don't need that two hours of sleep? I beg to differ -- if you're sleeping, you need it, that's how it works. "I'll just go to bed earlier!" OK, so what have you been doing during those late-night hours? Hanging out with friends? Browsing the Internet? Watching TV? Reading a book? Whatever it is, you'll miss it. It sounds obvious, like most of the things I say, but I literally never hear people phrase it this way -- everybody takes on a project and expresses it as a pure addition to their life. It's, "I've decided I'm finally going to learn the saxophone!" Instead of, "I've decided I'm going to learn the saxophone instead of hanging out with my girlfriend!" "If we got rid of her permanently it could be just us, Mark. Always." Now go go find the most successful person you know. Talk to them about their average week, and listen closely to what they don't have. They either don't have friends, or kids, or hobbies, or they don't keep up with pop culture, or something that you actually consider very valuable to your own life. Their day is only 24 hours long, just like yours. There is no such thing as adding to it -- just sacrificing one thing for another. This is why the "STOP WASTING YOUR TIME AND GO IMPROVE YOUR LIFE, MAGGOT!" method doesn't work -- you're fooling yourself if you think you can find a bunch of extra time by drawing from a pool of hours you're "wasting" right now. It doesn't exist. Instead, you have to make the cold calculation that you're going to do this instead of that: "I'm going to go back to finish my degree, instead of spending time with my friends." "I'm going to spend more time with my partner and spend less time working, understanding that this will make me poorer." "I'm going to go climb a mountain and neglect my family while I train." 
"Nah, it's cool. I left the boy 20 bucks for a pizza last week." Otherwise, it's no different from planning a budget that assumes you'll have twice as much money as you actually make. If you want to become a different person, part of it is deciding which parts of you need to die. #3. Pretending You'll Magically Become Someone Else I recently wrote this 60-second quiz (http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/the-60-second-guide-to-bullshit-free-life/) that I would encourage everyone to go try if they haven't already. If you don't like clicking on links, I'll give you a spoiler alert: Most people have an unspoken belief that, in the long term, they'll be a completely different person than they were today. "Anything ...""... is possible." The guy with a dead-end customer service job says one day he'd "like to work in IT" but didn't spend even one minute today learning about computers, or yesterday, or the day before. He hasn't signed up for a course or made plans to. He just has a vague notion that in 10 years he'll be at a desk with a well-paying computer job, with the unspoken assumption that at some point during the nebulous haze of the intervening decade, he'll have evolved into the type of person who devotes a lot of energy to learning computer things. That guy I'm describing is me, of course, circa 1998. But every obese person imagines themselves a decade from now having become thin, every coward imagines they'll be brave, you get the idea. There's never a defined plan for how to get from Point A to Point Z, and never an acknowledgment of the unbearable truth, which is that who you're going to be 10 years from now is just who you are today times 3,652. If you spent a good part of today playing iPhone games, then 10 years from now you'll be a person who's super good at iPhone games. Or as good as your wallet will allow you to be. That's not a judgment; there are worse things to be (have you played The Room and its sequel? They're both great). But the point is, if you're kind of a laid-back, low-energy type today, you're not going to suddenly turn into a human dynamo next year or the year after, unless you start doing meth or something. If you have anger issues today, you'll have them 10 years from now. If you don't know kung fu today, you won't know it in 2035. But if you're learning kung fu today, well, then we've got something. "But I do want to learn kung fu! I just don't have the time!" Nope. Stop. Don't make be backtrack. If you had the gun to your head, you'd goddamned well find the time. If you can't make yourself start in the next 24 hours, you wouldn't do it even if you had 24 lifetimes. And that brings us to ... #2. Focusing on the Whole Instead of the Next Step You go to the doctor and he tells you that you have a bacterial infection that will never, ever go away. It will literally eat away a crucial part of your digestive system unless you do a chemical treatment twice a day, every day, and do painful semiannual follow-up treatments with your doctor ... for the rest of your fucking life. Sure, it's not a death sentence, but the sheer weight of it kind of makes you want to give up -- you can just see this burden stretching out in front of you, forever. But, of course, I've just described brushing your teeth. You don't regard dental care as a crushing burden, because you don't sit around every day contemplating the unfathomable mountain of teeth-brushing you must scale before you die. You only think of it as that thing you do in the morning because you have to, because you don't want your teeth to fall out. You manage the long-term goal (having teeth) by thinking only of the very manageable daily goal. Well, guess what: If you can apply that technique to other things, you can conquer the motherfucking world. Seriously, someone took that technique and used it to invent machines to make brushing even easier. Any great long-term project that seems impossible to most people -- from building a house to writing a book to becoming an actual ninja -- is possible to the people who do them only because they don't just focus on the end goal. There's only what they have to do today. Don't misunderstand me -- it's not that they ignore the goal, it's that they don't regard what they do today and what they want to have 10 years from now as separate things. The future isn't a fanciful wish, it's just the logical end of a long chain of todays. What they do today and what they want to be long-term are the same thing. I hate to use myself as an example, because I've led kind of a boring life aside from the time I went on a trip to Europe and got mixed up in that diamond heist, but I have done something that a lot of my aspiring writer friends find amazing: I've finished not one but two books that are 300,000 words combined. If that sounds easy, just try writing the same word -- say, "fart" -- 300,000 times and you'll see how quickly you tire of it. (Fun fact: The aforementioned books contain 435 instances of the word "fart.") Friends and family love to ask how it's done (usually phrased as, "How do you think of that shit?") because they know I have no substantial education on the subject. Well, I learned how to do it by fixing up a meth lab. At least it looked like one. It was 10 years ago and I was an apartment-dweller whose only tools were a set of bright plastic ones that I found out later were intended for a small child. We bought a dilapidated rental property with a back door that was still smashed from where somebody -- presumably the police -- had kicked it in (yes, just like in Fight Club). We decided to pour our life savings and an enormous amount of borrowed money into renovating it because it was 2003 and we knew that the housing market would only go up and up, forever. When I looked at the place and saw 10,000 things that needed fixed, I had a month-long panic attack. It was this mountain of work looming overhead, making me wonder if I should instead just hunt down some chemistry equipment and break bad. But on the first day on the job site, my father-in-law says, "OK, we have to take up this old carpet, because it's full of animal urine and/or meth residue." And then I realized, no, we didn't have to fix up an entire old meth lab. All we had to do was tear up this old carpet. One, single task. Then, when that was done, there'd be another single task. String enough of those together, and you can build the goddamned Death Star. And this is what happens when you get lazy and skip "install vent cover" on your task list. That experience is the reason sitting down to write a novel doesn't scare me -- I now know that I don't have to write a whole novel. I just have to do this one little part I've decided to do today. Tomorrow, it'll be some other part. And the days will march forward and the shit will get done. It's not magic, it's just adding "work on the novel" to the To-Do list for that day. And if instead your goal is to become a guitarist in a death metal band, it's no different -- you just have to add "practice guitar" to today's list and ... practice some guitar. Slow. Boring. Like brushing your teeth. It's not like I invented this idea -- addiction programs have been living by this creed for as long as they've been around. You don't have to quit drinking forever, they'll say. You just have to not drink today. #1. Lying to Yourself About What You Actually Want Off the top of your head, say something you've always wanted to do. Then, follow it up with why you've never done it. So, maybe you said something like, "I've always wanted to start a little business selling cupcakes! But I wouldn't even know how to get started!" Aaaaand ... 90 percent of you just lied. I know you did, because if you actually wanted to do the thing, then the second part -- the obstacle -- wouldn't exist. For example, if that person up there actually wanted to start their cupcake business, they wouldn't be confused about how to get started. They'd be a freaking walking encyclopedia of information about how to get started, because they'd have spent every single day reading up on it and calling other cupcake-shop owners for advice. They don't do that because they don't actually want it. They don't have the invisible gun to their head. "The cupcake is a lie." This, right here, is at the heart of every unfulfilled ambition in your life. We use the same word -- "want" -- to mean two completely different things, and the constant confusion between those definitions is why so many people are disappointed in how their lives turned out. Depending on the context, "want" can be: A) A statement of intended action ("I want to mow the lawn before it rains.") A statement of general preference ("I want everyone to live a long and happy life.") It sounds simple enough, but the confusion of those two uses of the word is everything. We switch between the two definitions sometimes in the same sentence. This morning, I was driving to Five Guys to get a burger and an entire grocery bag full of french fries to go with it (that is, the "small"). I passed a guy who was jogging, shirtless, who had a torso like Matthew McConaughey. I said to myself, "I want a body like that!" And, if I'd pulled over and asked the guy why he runs and works out, he'd have said the same thing, almost word-for-word -- "It's because I want a body like this!" Same phrasing, meaning two completely different things. I used "want" in the same way I say I want world peace -- a wistful statement about something I actually have no control over. If it's the same effort either way, sure, I'll take the rock-hard abs -- give me an ab pill and I'll swallow it. Otherwise, no, it ain't happening. That jogging guy, on the other hand, used "want" as a statement of intended action -- he "wants" to run five miles every day because he "wants" to be fit. 
"Also because there's a guy with a gun pointed at me. Please, call the police." Now look around you -- look at all of the minimum-wage people who "want" to be rich and/or famous, with some vague notion of, I don't know, being on a reality show some day or getting "discovered" for some talent they didn't know they had. Now look at all of the MBAs working 100-hour weeks on the trading floor because they "want" to be rich. The difference in the two is night and day, but in many cases the former group doesn't realize it. They just stay poor while the other group starts shopping for vacation homes. And I'm starting to think that the world really is divided between those who have a clear idea of what it means to want something -- including the total cost and sacrifices it will take to get it -- and those who are just content to leave it as an airy "wouldn't it be nice" fantasy. The former group hones in on what they want and goes zooming after it like a shark. The latter looks at them, shakes their head and says, "How do they do it?" As if they have a cheat code, or a secret technique. "What, you're saying we should all be douchebag stockbrokers working hundred-hour weeks?" No. I'm saying that while some of you are sitting around the coffee shop talking about how you "want" the system to change, that douchebag is accumulating money so he can actually run for congress. Because when he "wants" something, he doesn't sing a song about it. He prices that shit and makes a down payment. And when that relentless BMW-driving douche has kids, he'll teach them, too, what it really means to "want" something -- to be single-minded, and voracious, and to pursue it to the ends of the Earth. Instilling that lesson goes just as far toward preserving wealth and power in a group as the actual inheritance they'll leave behind. Are you scared of those people? Are you imagining them as cold-blooded stock brokers and lobbyists and swindlers, the Wolf of Wall Street types who are eating away at the world like a cancer? Well, they scare you because it's a glimpse at what accomplishing great things actually costs. You know Steve Jobs was a fucking psychopath, right? So the next time somebody asks you if you want to be rich, really stop and think about it. Think about what it will take. Think about what kind of person you'll need to become. And that's the point of all this -- I've found, as time goes on, that everybody gets what they want. Not what they say they want in order to make themselves look good to others, or what they tell themselves they want so they feel better about the current state of their life. No, I'm talking about what they really want. And to find out what they really want, you don't need to ask them. You just need to look at what they did today. You want to change, start there. <Me> I don't agree with everything he says. But the gist of it is important. Some wisdom is bitter.

bounce up more?

I thought this article had semi good news on the possible cures. Problem being what's most promising is in very short supply (zero at the moment). Ironically its from genetically altered tobacco plants. Still, if its as promising as shown it'll get funding and be created en mass but not in the immediate future. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/30/world/africa/study-says-zmapp-works-against-ebola-but-making-it-takes-time.html?action=click&contentCollection=Europe&region=Footer&module=TopNews&pgtype=article

When someone uses Count Dante's secret techniques in a fight, only one person walks away!* *usually not the Count Dante practitioner

Also, lets face it, this is internet fad/meme 101. It's cool and making the rounds now, but in a month, it'll be forgotten.

Maybe I'd balance out my concerns by filling a large cup up with water and ice, dumping it over my head and telling the camera, "Don't Waste water. Cure for ALS".

last page of comments are male male male male male male. I suggest we be quiet and for a few pages just let the ladies speak. we've asked questions, made statements.. now lets just listen. ladies..

No. Yes. Yes. Maybe its my own bias's and filters but I don't think it runs rampant. It happens, but I'd agree that dots the landscape and most often ends up in The Pitt. Sometimes not as quickly as hoped it usually makes its way there. The whole thread is snowballing into other areas. Soon it might get too large and unruly, finally becomes the proverbial snowball in Hell (or the pit).