Encephalon

Greetings!! Pedantic Asshole here with another friendly reminder that the subject at hand - End Times, if you will - is readily comprehensible without resorting to metaphysical speculation, intergalactic messiah mythology, conspiratorial asshattery or right-wing bullshit market fundamentalism. Performing what Chomsky calls an "institutional analysis" of our contemporary social and economic institutions yields readily ascertainable facts about the nature and trajectory of global forces at play. Reading is an astonishingly viable means of becoming informed, believe it or not. Anything on the subject of Peak Oil by Richard Heinberg is worth the effort. "The Long Emergency" by James Kunstler spells out our crises in N. America better than any other single work. And "Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World" by Michael C. Ruppert can pretty much lay to rest any lingering doubts about Western Triumphalism escaping the bounds of ecology for another go at unbridled consumer culture. I would recommend Chalmers Johnson's trilogy on the collapse of the American Empire to anyone strong enough to resist the urge to put a bullet in one's brain upon the reading. Please allow me once again to argue that traditional Taoist communities modeled on today's Transition Town movement will most likely ensure the continuity of humankind into the 22nd century. All my earning power is now focused on moving to BC or the Yukon and either starting my own small off-the-grid community or joining one already established. A strong MCO, a rifle, and a handful of pre-industrial skills are all you need to make it, as long as you do not try to make it on your own. See you in the upper latitudes, folks (you know who you are). And yes, you can commit your earning potential to the nurturance and well-being of your friends and family without selling your soul. Cheers.

All the best. See you on the smart side of the moon!

I'm starting to feel another 20 week fast from TaoBums coming on again... with a vengeance.

Corporate-owned media have always been cheerleaders for the Powers That Be. http://www.postcarbon.org/blog-post/109323-deepwater-horizon-the-worst-case-scenario

We may never stop the oil leak. http://www.floridaoilspilllaw.com/shell-oil-ex-ceo-whole-casing-system-is-deteriorating-were-just-getting-a-gusher

Interpreting reality through the lens of American partisan politics is a meaningless and futile practice, Joe. I can't recall a single event in the last year and a half where you didn't chime in without first channeling the spirit of Karl Rove or consulting the oracle of Fox News. The American political spectrum is so pathetically narrow now anyway, as Orwell long ago warned, that we've lost the ability to even discuss issues meaningfully. Yin yang is not "Left/Right." It's about balance. Every thinking person I know, professionally or from grad school, students and professors, vote the liberal ticket almost exclusively. This is not because we are enamoured with the Democratic party, or even subscribe to all their views. Virtually all of us possess value systems that are culled from the throughout the political and philosophical spectrum. We have libertarian and conservative views on a range of issues. We vote liberal because the political center of gravity has shifted so far the to Right that we've become unbalanced in the way the culture conceives challenges and solutions. It's up to you, but you might want to go on a corporate news fast, and maybe get an education(?). I was a high school dropout, a runaway, and a raging alcoholic, so there's hope for anyone. Sincerely, Your pedantic Ass "reeking of haughtiness"

"This is it" (the final nail in the coffin of our brief 200-year old love affair with cheap oil and everything else we've taken for granted). http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/BreakingNews.html

Mismanaging Contraction By James Howard Kunstler on June 21, 2010 8:53 AM www.kuntsler.com Lesson of the Macondo: Blowout preventers don't prevent blowouts. This comes as a shock to people attuned to the on-schedule arrival of techno-miracles. Now, all the acronym-studded invocations of techno-mastery by men wearing interesting hats will not avail to put the schnitz on an epic horror show in the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama's speech to the nation a week ago was designed as a kind of blowout preventer for the legitimacy of the federal government. It did little to stop the hemorrhaging of confidence in political leadership. A nation foundering in a crippled vessel in the horse latitudes of collective purpose on a sea of red ink looks to its captain - who puffs a few platitudes into the tattered sails and retreats belowdecks to pace and stew. This is a society truly lost at sea, where even the friendly dolphins are turning belly-up and the dying seabirds stare accusingly under their cloaks of crude oil. The feeling grows that we can't do anything right. Will someone please turn off the TV? In 2008, the voters turned to a lanky newcomer from Illinois to rescue itself from just the sort of technocrat jerkoffs who had run the nation into a ditch with their invocations of "mission accomplished" and "Good job, Brownie." Change was in the air. Alas, consistent with the apparent fact that history rhymes but doesn't repeat, Barack Obama proved to be the reincarnation of Millard Fillmore, not Abe Lincoln. Sometimes history works in free verse and this stanza was off by a few syllables. It turns out that change was exactly the one thing not really in the air. America does not want change, except from the cash register at WalMart. The last time America faced a convulsion as profound as the present one was the late 1850s. The internal contradiction of slavery was driving the nation crazy. The Whig party had been running things for a couple of decades. The Whigs were the party of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. They tried everything possible to finesse the expansion of US territory around the inflammatory issue of slavery. Fillmore came along just in time for the Compromise of 1850, which was intended to settle things and did absolutely nothing to settle things. By the time the election of 1852 happened, Both Webster and Clay were old men preparing to meet their maker and the Whig party absolutely fell apart. Scroll forward a few years and we're in the slaughterhouse of The Civil War. A hundred and sixty years later now, and the USA faces a new and very different set of internal contradictions. We've ramped up a living arrangement that has no future, just as slavery had no future. We're uncomfortable with the mandates of reality, which is trying to tell us we have to live differently. The American people don't want to hear this. The president doesn't want to tell them. It's possible that he is not tuned into the reality radio station that is broadcasting its mandates. You'd think the Macondo Blowout horror show was coming across loud and clear. Right after President Obama gave his vapid speech last week, he traveled to Ohio to brag about how much federal stimulus money was going into "shovel-ready" highway projects there. I sincerely believe that the last thing we need right now in this country is more and better highways. Every president since Jimmy Carter has acknowledged that there's a problem with our extreme oil dependency, but none of them have made the short leap to understand that we have a more fundamental problem with car dependency. Someone paying attention to the mandates of reality would get the choo-choo trains running from Dayton to Columbus to Cincinnati to Cleveland - and he would tell General Motors to get into the business of making railroad cars so we don't have to import them from Canada. Reality is telling us to downscale and get different fast. Quit doing everything possible to prop up the drive-in false utopia and all its accessories. Get local. Tighten up. We have no intention of doing that. The idiocy that passes as informed opinion wants the US money managers to kick out the jambs handing out more money created out of thin air to promote a fantasy called "recovery." To what purpose? To keep the tailgate parties going down at the Nascar ovals? Over at The New York Times Monday morning, the fatuous Paul Krugman says that "stinting on spending now threatens the economic recovery." Earth to Krugman: we're mismanaging contraction. Further expansion is just not in the cards right now for the human race. We don't need more people on the planet and we don't have the means to accommodate them. There will be no 'recovery" to "growth" - especially by means of pumping more oil into the system. There is no techno-miracle alt-fuel panoply waiting in the wings to take over from oil. And there is no research-and-development program that will make it happen, no matter how many acronym-studded incantations we drone out. I admit that contraction is a hard reality - but so is the recognition that we don't get to live forever, something every child begins to grapple with around age seven. The inability to face comprehensive contraction will only insure that its side effects are more debilitating. ____________

For all Taoists who contemplate the future with wide-eyed sobriety... I would like to think that Mike Ruppert can do his part to eliminate the fuzzy thinking about life on earth in the 21st century. Metaphysicians and conspiracy theorists be warned. trailer http://www.collapsemovie.com/ Like the inhabitants of the first ancient Taoist villages, we are called upon to refine our skills of independence and self-sufficiency in preparation for things to come.

James Lovelock's estimate also leaves 500 million to see the 22nd century. Lovelock doesn't trade in conspiracies. When I brought up Lovelock's estimate with his friend Stephen Batchelor ("Buddhism Without Beliefs") here in LA awhile back, Batchelor seemed genuinely sobered and frightened. There are thousands of respected academics in Earth Sciences who feel the same way. Rather than waving the conspiracy banner, people may want to consider their premises for unreflective optimism. Things are much, much worse than the average person knows, and the only possibility for avoiding this calamity would be the discovery of an alternative to fossil fuels or a spontaneous explosion of human social evolution. Don't hold your breath for either scenario.

Well hell, now I'm feelin' sorry for 'em. But seriously, Joe, I've not been in agreement with anything you've said since I signed on a little over a year ago, but I'll give you credit for being consistent, and I'm willing to concede that there are corners of your mental universe that remain uncharted by the rest of us, particularly, RightWingLand. With a little work I could dust off what I read about Edmund Burke and conservative intellectual history and would still fall short of the post-Adam Smith capitalists and their ilk which you seem so adept at channeling. (Of course, I could trip up the peasants by leaving behind a puddle of regurgitated postmodern globalization esoterica from my urban studies grad program, but that gets old too!) But I have to ask; What is the appeal of Taoism? It is a fundamentally ecological philosophy that can reveal itself in a number of ways, certainly through the body, but it is also radically consistent with ecology and general systems theory. It would be No Great Leap to argue that market fundamentalism, as it has manifested within the conservative and capitalist tradition, really doesn't have a hell of a lot in common with ecological and environmental models. Treatises on economic development, the Laffer Curve, revolving credit, not to mention extractive industries, do not make a bit of sense within a closed system of finite resources (and even Adam Smith, one of the darlings of the capitalists, new this and wrote about it unequivocally). So what's the appeal? Is it just about learning how to become a better fighter, a more efficient soldier? This is like Sting and his legion of adoring fans practicing Tantra and power yoga in order to achieve better orgasms. Yoga is so much more than this. Are you not at risk of missing out on the bigger picture? What a blast.

I just spent 40 minutes trying to find a source OTHER than a conservative/libertarian author/newsource that could back up this allegation that Obama's beholden relationship to the unions is exacerbating the oil catastrophe. Typically, an issue so blatantly obvious will register on the radar of all media outlets, regardless of political orientation. After all, there are plenty of left-wing journalists and media who do not dig Obama at all and generally recognize that the last piece of meaningful progressive legislation emanating from the White House was under Nixon, when the political center of gravity was farther to the left than today. But I cannot find any evidence of this Jones Act hooplah anywhere except the Fox News noise machine and their compatriots. If you run a "Jones Act" search on Huffington you won't get a single thing. Huffington is not an unimpeachable source, but jesus-*u*ki*ng-christ, if this subject only registers on one end of the political spectrum, suspicions can be legitimately raised.

No apologies necessary... I'm a reductionist at heart, but can still experience awe. I do have oscillations between feet and crown and feel it on the outside of the arms as they go up and down, but I'm likely creating pathways that are highly nontraditional.

Could you elaborate on the "bounce" sensation a bit? Eternal Student used the same term with regard to leg energy. What is the trajectory, speed, meridian course, etc. Thanks.

Thanks for the feedback. I agree with you that it's better than most, but you're right;the magic really does begin with the feet. I only have my nei kung practice for personal reference (as taught by Master Chu @ www.chutaichi.com), and 20 minutes of "Embrace Horse." Chu nei kung is very specific; toes in, knees out, with most of the weight on the balls and outer ridges of the feet. The weight of the body is directly above the heels, to avoid bending too far forward, but it is not sinking through the heels, the way you would root downward if you were doing 200 lb deadlifts in a gym. I'm coming up on three years of consistent nei kung practice. My MCO opened last September, and my legs have begun to awaken gradually since then. I can dissolve the gates of the legs a la Bruce Frantzis style, but don't yet have a palpable difference between anterior and posterior leg meridians, so I'm just sticking with deep bone corridors. I would be grateful if you know of any prohibitions against running the current up one leg, and down the other, through the floor, in a circular motion. I find this route intensely pleasant, but I'm aware that this is not always the best criteria for doing something. Thanks.

Would you concur that the ZZ advice on the youtube tutorial below is consistent with what you have described here? Thanks in advance.

It's a fairly simple question. What reason(s) did you have for posting this quote?

For what purpose did you post this quote?

This has been the main argument for years; the finest health care technology in the world, and one of the worst healthcare delivery systems in the world. But where would we be without a thriving insurance company making choices about delivery?

I was a CT junkie as an undergrad and was lucky enough to attend the campus that hosts the annual CT conferences; always had a chance to volunteer and attend for free. Whether it's about overhauling our educational system, communicating effectively in a forum, or managing our thoughts and feelings about the Gulf oil catastrophe, CT offers as much if not more than the otherworldly philosophies. I'd be eager to discover any elements of the following traits that could be construed in any way as antithetical to spiritual values. From http://www.criticalthinking.org/articles/valuable-intellectual-traits.cfm Intellectual Traits Intellectual Humility: Having a consciousness of the limits of one's knowledge, including a sensitivity to circumstances in which one's native egocentrism is likely to function self-deceptively; sensitivity to bias, prejudice and limitations of one's viewpoint. Intellectual humility depends on recognizing that one should not claim more than one actually knows. It does not imply spinelessness or submissiveness. It implies the lack of intellectual pretentiousness, boastfulness, or conceit, combined with insight into the logical foundations, or lack of such foundations, of one's beliefs. Intellectual Courage: Having a consciousness of the need to face and fairly address ideas, beliefs or viewpoints toward which we have strong negative emotions and to which we have not given a serious hearing. This courage is connected with the recognition that ideas considered dangerous or absurd are sometimes rationally justified (in whole or in part) and that conclusions and beliefs inculcated in us are sometimes false or misleading. To determine for ourselves which is which, we must not passively and uncritically "accept" what we have "learned." Intellectual courage comes into play here, because inevitably we will come to see some truth in some ideas considered dangerous and absurd, and distortion or falsity in some ideas strongly held in our social group. We need courage to be true to our own thinking in such circumstances. The penalties for non-conformity can be severe. Intellectual Empathy: Having a consciousness of the need to imaginatively put oneself in the place of others in order to genuinely understand them, which requires the consciousness of our egocentric tendency to identify truth with our immediate perceptions of long-standing thought or belief. This trait correlates with the ability to reconstruct accurately the viewpoints and reasoning of others and to reason from premises, assumptions, and ideas other than our own. This trait also correlates with the willingness to remember occasions when we were wrong in the past despite an intense conviction that we were right, and with the ability to imagine our being similarly deceived in a case-at-hand. Intellectual Integrity: Recognition of the need to be true to one's own thinking; to be consistent in the intellectual standards one applies; to hold one's self to the same rigorous standards of evidence and proof to which one holds one's antagonists; to practice what one advocates for others; and to honestly admit discrepancies and inconsistencies in one's own thought and action. Intellectual Perseverance: Having a consciousness of the need to use intellectual insights and truths in spite of difficulties, obstacles, and frustrations; firm adherence to rational principles despite the irrational opposition of others; a sense of the need to struggle with confusion and unsettled questions over an extended period of time to achieve deeper understanding or insight. Faith In Reason: Confidence that, in the long run, one's own higher interests and those of humankind at large will be best served by giving the freest play to reason, by encouraging people to come to their own conclusions by developing their own rational faculties; faith that, with proper encouragement and cultivation, people can learn to think for themselves, to form rational viewpoints, draw reasonable conclusions, think coherently and logically, persuade each other by reason and become reasonable persons, despite the deep-seated obstacles in the native character of the human mind and in society as we know it. Fairmindedness: Having a consciousness of the need to treat all viewpoints alike, without reference to one's own feelings or vested interests, or the feelings or vested interests of one's friends, community or nation; implies adherence to intellectual standards without reference to one's own advantage or the advantage of one's group.

Warning: My fan club consists of perverts, cretins, and scoundrels.

Just for the record, this is not my love letter. As originally stated, it's cut/paste. This is just one of several documents that have been composed over three decades of work in the academic CT community. How one to come to such a dismissive conclusion without any background or experience or, as you say, even interest, is intriguing at best. It's too late to submit a proposal for this years conference, but perhaps you'll have the opportunity to enlighten them on the fallacious nature of their life's work in 2011. The website is www.criticalthinking.org