Owledge

I saw them on two restaurant menus and got curious, and online OCR is failing, probably because they are so stylized and fat-stroked. As a layman, I don't even know whether these are traditional or simplified and whether they are mandarin or cantonese. (Do I assume correctly that the 3rd character in Text 1 and the 4th character in Text 2 are the same, just written differently?) Text 1: Text 2: Thanks! P.S.: I am not sure whether I should have posted this in Daoist textual studies for better success in finding someone versed in this.

You typically address a Chinese martial arts teacher with "sifu" and the Chinese martial arts teacher typically adresses you with "stfu".

As I understand the special nature of the Dao De Jing, things may be more prone to be lost in translation than in interpretation. (I think that is what you hinted at with the rest of your comment: Taking things at face value would be completely missing the point.)

Do you want to help people by removing their money from them? If so, you will end up with a lot of their money. I will gladly help you then. I am strong. I can handle it. And I can do energy conversion. Just keep that damn ring away from me. I don't live anywhere near a volcano.

If you acknowledge that contents from your dream can bleed into the waking state on the transition, then you should understand your test doesn't work reliably with that. It's not like a projector burn-in. In the waking state dreams are called hallucinations. The stuff that is going on in both cases works with the same processes that allow you to perceive the world normally. Consider that everything you perceive has a portion of yourself in it. (The more you awaken, the more you may understand the gravity of this principle. Barriers start to fall away.)

There are more skillful ways.

The cover can still give valuable insights; more so to very knowledgeable people. That being said, we're judging the title here, heh.

So, half a year has passed and I see Karatgold Coin is indeed doing great so far. Grew 5%, from 1 cent to 1.0161 cent. Surely it's gonna skyrocket to its "guaranteed" 500 cent value shortly before end of 2020, haha. (Is there a hindsight joke hidden in there?) Just wondering why it's at one cent when that was only the special early-bird intro price (that surprisingly got extended) and others were supposed to get it for a much higher price. They'd be a long way off before leaving the red. Well, the bright red. African gold mines aren't profitable anymore, so people come up with wacky ideas of how to still make use of them. Ironically, it's the principle of diminishing returns at work, just like with mining of remaining Bitcoin. Funny what parallels we discover in the area of mining, between physical and virtual.

African melee combat techniques can be quite intimidating. Brought to you by an intergalactic mind...

I watched videos of a foreigner in China who said: If you want to see China, Beijing is merely easymode and not the real China. And I thought... In neigong, bae jing is first base, bae chi is second base, bae shen is third base.

Read this in a Youtube comment yesterday - slightly improved: A tourist visits a monastery and sees an old man peeling potatoes. Tourist: "Are you the Head Friar here?" Old man: "No, I am but a chip monk."

An imaam, a priest and a rabbi walk out of a bar. ... Sorry, you missed the joke. It was hilarious. But you just had to be there.

@King Jade I would prefer not to go into joke-explaining.

Required watching. How many more wakeup calls are needed? The video adds some heavy footnotes on the systematic omissions and deceptions that are abundant in the imperialist propaganda sphere.

Some information is worth checking out and then it might captivate. But I am aware of the Reddit Syndrome: "We don't have time to watch a 10 minute video, we need to watch 100 animated GIFs." Time is so very relative when you add quality to the picture. That video I linked doesn't give John Oliver the limelight he'd like. He's just a sideshow of the true message. But that might also require deductive capacity, and missing the point is so easy when the mind is preoccupied. Enlightenment comes through awarness, not information processing. Maybe there is nothing that should be said about the video. (Except that the HTML5 player allows video speedup, haha. But I don't know whether that's making things better or worse.)

I am not gonna respond to lazy minds anymore who are only interested in sending their rigid belief system and refuse to consult the video(s) I posted. I posted it particularly so that ignorant-laughable broken-record sending would not occur. People are willing to spend so much time defending their view and so little on learning something new.

That's still not getting to the core. A big government can be just as unappealing to corrupting forces than a small government if the big government is under tight control by the People. Small government is a defeatist attitude in that regards. And as I tried to convey, corruption is not a systemic thing. It's a personal thing. Any single person, wherever they are, can act selfishly to the detriment of the common good. And no system can solve this problem because systems emerge naturally from the People. Work on the people is the most important, the crucial and unavoidable activity for a better future. This is why spiritual care is needed for a healthy society. Promotion and cultivation of love, if you will. I see some very interesting, potentially enlightened (I say potentially because there might be pragmatic necessity in the mix) approaches from Russia and Venezuela. Not even putting people guilty of treason in prison, but realizing that the country is strong enough to not give them power and if they keep trying they are only sabotaging themselves further, is very risky and requires additional sacrifice, but it is an attempt to not play into the hands of the core driving force - fear. It's not personal, but always seeing fear as an actor, and also kinda conveying equality for a country's citizens, even if they 'went astray'. Russia is applying a strong peace-promoting stance, too, almost infuriatingly so sometimes. But there are higher virtues than justice or mere righteousness, and some countries have understood that and the power in it. Look at how Russia reacts to the land disappropriation of Boers in South Africa. Not as a righteous crusader like the USA would pretend to be, but by inviting them and their agricultural know-how to move to Russia, thereby not feeding the tensions that may be to some degree understandable. (For once, the situation is the other way round, not colonial invaders reaping all the benefits.) Now South Africa carries all the responsibility for making something good out of that, and they won't have to struggle with an ugly conflict that could potentially serve as some kind of excuse. (Although the USA will likely intervene as soon as their approach shows to be working. The USA just can't allow a good example for the world, and they have already established their drone assault base in the center of the continent.)

Not even that. They are both ideas of how to organize social conduct. They can be applied to economies and governments.

At the root of all 'evil' is fear. We can never fully get rid of it or this realm would not exist. But the pursuit of ridding oneself of it is most worthwhile, albeit potentially perilous when not shared among peers. It's not about reaching a goal, but about making the journey more pleasant.

Corruption has opportunities to hide anywhere. And you, too, made the flawed association of free market = capitalism and big government = socialism.

those bank bailouts were of course not socialism, underlining your claim that people like that have no clue about it. The bailouts were a bribery by banks having too much control over the system. Having them fail would have been socialist, because then the government would have decided to let them play their capitalist game not to the detriment of social interests. Various measures can be imagined, but the government bending over for the banksters is certainly not socialist. The government taking ownership of those banks, now that sounds a bit more in the right direction. Holding them accoundable for antisocial activities. In socialism a business is expected to comply to the original idea that capitalists love to put forward when it's not reality: serving a social function. Venezuela for example has been very forgiving towards criminals like that, but not been bending over. As is shown in the video. That's the right way.

Well, duh, why do you think social, society and socialism sound so strikingly similar? At the root, capitalism means material possession (in the form of money but not exclusively) rules and socialism means the well-being of people rules. And somehow this no-brainer choice is still too difficult. A group of people with zero socialism at work is not a society, but a jungle. And I'm still waiting on some commentary on the video(s) this thread is all about. It seems like people haven't even given them a try.

Undemocratic socialism is like national socialism or non-corrupt capitalism: It is a perverted form that is unsustainable.

The argument in the USA is always the same worn-out libertarian platitude: Big government becomes oppressive, so put all power in the market. - Ignoring how the situation arose to begin with that the government became so corruptible. And the obvious answer is that that government is capitalist, i.e. it concerns itself with money, is enslaved to it, and is not controlled by the People. The USA can have free heathcare for everybody and it would still not be a socialist government, because that could indeed be used to control the masses, albeit that fear is also often exaggerated, because the People don't get free healthcare unless they exert more power over the government, which would reduce its corruptibility. Corruption always happens when individuals care more about their personal enrichment than about alleviating the suffering of others, and that personal enrichment is the main pillar of capitalism and thus also of the USA's libertarianism with its obsession over indiviualism. It is simply the fear of not being able to live well when caring about others, too, by putting own interests aside for a bit to be able to do that. People's fear of being controlled by a central authority brings that about. Spiritual teachings are telling us that for ages. Fear-motivated action creates more fear. If you don't unite is shared common interest, you are dividing and fracturing yourself (fueled by that individualism myth), which gives more power to the wealthy few who then actually control you. Many people don't want to see this because they themselves aspire to become such a controller by playing the existing system in their favor. What they call "success".

OMFG - THAT's why you think the USA has a debt crisis? Could it not maybe be because of a traditionally powerful plutocracy leeching off all the wealth and the arms industry sucking the country dry with an ever-bloating war budget for imperialist adventures sowing chaos in the world? Oh no, SOCIALISM is at fault. Because without that damn socialism in the USA, people would be allowed to work 18 hours a day and then the USA would be productive enough to pay off their debts. And they'd also die younger, so no pensions need to be paid. Everybody wins. This stubborn adherence to a selfishness-fueled belief system is why humankind will keep suffering horribly. Man, this is a daoist forum and people don't even get the most blatantly obvious beginner lessons from the Dao De Jing. I have to ask you, too: Did you even watch the video? Because you talk like you didn't. Here's more necessary material: "America's Unofficial Religion, The War on an Idea" "Understanding Marxism and Socialism with Richard Wolff"