OK, so what kind of individual-in- group behavior will be selected? That behavior which most benefits the group.

Imagine an 18-year-old child crouching in a muddy ditch somewhere in France. Someone blows a whistle. He leaps out of the ditch and runs headlong into a Maxim gun and is blown to pieces. Why did he do it? Because the willingness to die for an abstraction, or someone he has never met, increased the fitness of his ancestors.

People are NOT "born to be good," OR "born to be bad," people are born to act in ways that increased the fitness of their ancestors. What they do tomorrow depends upon genes/environment (not genes).

We are entering a many-decades period of declining resources. Capitalism can't run backwards. When the supply lines collapse, people will arm themselves and take to the streets.

Now the Unites States will look like 1933 Germany. Rush Limbaugh-types will form personal armies and march on Washington. The people who are running our government must either take what they need from another country by force else or they will be overthrown.

Now the Unites States will look like 1939 Germany. Perhaps we will invade Canada like Hitler invaded Poland. Ultimately, it will be a global war of all against all for the remaining resources.
- Jay Hanson

It seems feasible that over the coming century human nature will be scientifically remodelled. If so, it will be done haphazardly, as an upshot of struggles in the murky realm where big business, organised crime, and the hidden parts of government vie for control. If the human species is re-engineered it will not be the result of humanity assuming a godlike control of its destiny. It will be another twist in man's fate.

John Gray

"How is everybody?"

"How is everybody?"

Yeah, this was California flair that I had this evening. I attended a back bending workshop with Todd Tesen from LA, California. He is a tall man with a lot of muscles. He must have been a weight lifter in his former life, I thought. So many strong muscles. Really.

He said the first words in a for me rather strong US accent and I knew at once - this is not an intellectual. He is a light-hearted man who brings a lot of fun. So it was.

Suddenly this healthy man stood behind me while I was doing downward facing dog. I do not know what he did, of course it was an adjustment, a new one for me. My hands lifted up from the floor. I felt like a feather. OMG, such a strong man, I thought, he can lift me up so easily.

Todd is a comedian: He showed us how people usually do hanumanasana (split pose) and how wrong the hip position usually is. He pretended to be a sort of ballet dancer, while showing the pose to us. It really made me laugh. Then he did it the correct way. Afterwards he bound together his long hair.

It was a show. I liked it to see, how he went on his knees when he came out of urdhva dhanurasana.
- Ursula

I wish I could drink because I would probably be drunk too.

I am originally from Finland, but now lliving in Kyoto, Japan. I am going to be a Buddhist monk here. My studies include Buddhism, Japanese, and Classical Chinese. For work, I do nothing, because I have enough gold to sustain myself until I am a monk who does not need money to survive (many Japanese temples are self-sufficient communities). For fun, I study Chinese characters.

"My long sickness of health and living now begins to mend, and nothing brings me all things."

~Timon of Athens, Act V Scene I

Money is the new secret of a happy job

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: December 14 2008 19:59 | Last updated: December 14 2008 19:59

Last week, I sent an e-mail to a friend who had just lost his job. “I’m so sorry,” I wrote. “Your bosses are morons to have got rid of such a genius as you. I can only suppose a queue will shortly stretch round the block as less brain-dead employers clamour to take you on. Hope you are OK.”

The e-mail was heartfelt except for one word, and that was “shortly”. I don’t expect a queue to form for my friend shortly. Even geniuses are not getting snapped up quickly – unless they happen to be security guards, social workers, accountants or teachers.

In a trice, I had a message back. He said he had had a brief panic about the mortgage and school fees but otherwise was really rather cheerful. Indeed, he was in such high spirits that he even sent me a funny anecdote*.

I could not help comparing the tone of his message with one that I got the very same afternoon from another friend who works for a company that has also been celebrating Christmas with some savage job cuts. Never, she said, had her morale been as bad. The weight of work was crippling as she was now doing the jobs of three people. There was talk of pay cuts. The office was spookily quiet, too; since most of her friends had been sacked, there wasn’t even anyone around to moan to. Worst of all was the fear that her job would be next.

It is tempting to conclude from these two messages that, if there is one thing worse for hitherto successful, well-paid people than being fired, it is not being fired. Those who have been axed don’t need to take the sacking personally, and not working in the days before Christmas can be rather jolly. Whereas for those who have not been fired, the not-so-festive season this year is an orgy of fear and drudgery.

There might be some truth in this now but it is not going to stay true for long. The grimness of the unemployed will get worse as no queues form to take them on, while the grimness of those in work will, in time, start to recede. This is not because the economy will improve – it is because the grimness itself will bring on a sounder and altogether more realistic approach to work.

Over the past decade, the rich, professional classes have developed an increasingly unhealthy attitude to their jobs. We took our jobs and our fat salaries for granted and felt aggrieved if our bonuses were not even bigger than the year before. We demanded that the work be interesting in itself and, even more dangerously and preposterously, that it should have meaning.

The result of all these demands was, of course, dissatisfaction. We had climbed to the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and discovered that, at the top of the pyramid, the air was very thin indeed. As an agony aunt, I found that by far the most common problem readers submitted came from rich and senior professionals who had all their basic needs more than catered for, leaving their souls in torment. Help me, I’m bored, they cried. Or, worse: what does my work mean?

In the past few months, anguish of this sort has vanished. When one’s job is at risk and one’s savings are a shadow of their former selves, the search for meaning at work is meaningless. The point of a job becomes rather more basic: to feed and house (and, at a pinch, to educate) one’s family and oneself. If we can do this, then anything we manage over and above this is a bonus. Once expectations have fully adjusted to this new reality and we see earning money as the main reason for work, greater satisfaction will follow.

Low expectations have an awful lot to be said for them. In surveys women turn out to be more satisfied at work than men, in spite of earning less for the same jobs and doing most of the work at home too. The reason is simple: women’s expectations of working life are lower. Similarly, Denmark is the happiest country in the world in spite of having a cold, dark climate and a top tax rate of 68 per cent. The stoical Danes do not expect so much of life and, expecting less, find what little they have rather nice.

The last two years of the decade while Europe enjoyed a rich fat afternoon, were the quietest. Nineteen-ten was peaceful and prosperous; with the second round of Moroccan crises and Balkan wars still to come. A new book, The Great Illusion by Norman Angell, had just been published, which proved that war was impossible. By impressive examples and incontrovertible argument Angell showed that in the present financial and economic interdependence of nations, the victor would suffer equally with the vanquished; therefore war had become unprofitable; therefore no nation would be so foolish as to start one. Already translated into eleven languages, The Great Illusion had become a cult. At the universities, in Manchester, Glasgow, and other industrial cities, more than forty study groups of true believers had formed, devoted to propagating its dogma. Angell's most earnest disciple was a man of great influence on military policy, the King's friend and adviser, Viscount Esher, chairman Of the War Committee assigned to remaking the British Army after the shock of its performance in the Boor War. Lord Esher delivered lectures on the lesson of The Great Illusion at Cambridge and the Sorbonne wherein he showed how “new economic factors clearly prove the insanity of aggressive wars.” A twentieth century war would be on such a scale, he said, that its inevitable consequences of “commercial disaster, financial ruin and individual suffering” would be “so pregnant with restraining influences” as to make war unthinkable. He told an audience of officers at the United Service Club, with the Chief of General Staff, Sir John French, in the chair, that because of the interlacing of nations War “becomes every day more difficult and improbable.”

Germany, Lord Esher felt sure, “is as receptive as Great -Britain to the doctrine of Norman Angell.” How receptive were the Kaiser and the Crown Prince to whom he gave, or caused to be given, copies of The Great Illusion is not reported. There is no evidence that he gave one to General Von Bernhardi, who was engaged in 1910 in writing a book called Germany and the Next War, published in the following year, which was to be as influential as Angell’s but from the opposite point of view. Three of its chapter titles, “The Right to Make War,” “The Duty to Make War,” and “World Power or Downfall” sum up its thesis.

[pp. 24-25 THE GUNS OF AUGUST, Barbara Tuchman]

"Personally, if I do get a nuke or several dropped on or near me -
which is reasonably likely if I don't relocate off Oahu - and if I'm
not, y'know, vaporized - I'll use broken glass to sever an artery.
Once thing about suburban rubble, you'll be able to find shards of
broken glass, and it's the sharpest edge there is; it's what they use
to cut cells in half for electron microscopy. Broken plate glass has
a single-molecule edge, I think. And I can attest that bleeding to
death is not only painless, but even slightly euphoric - I lost 60+%
of my blood once to an arterial bleed."

-DJ

A youth must have seen his blood flow and felt his teeth crack under the blow of his adversary and have been thrown to the ground twenty times. Thus will he be able to face real war with the hope of victory. Without practice the art of war [does] not come naturally when it [is] needed.

- Roger of Howden, 12th Century

"I'm in show business, why come to me?"

"War is show business, that's why we're here."


- "Wag the Dog" (1997 film)

‘People skills’, by the way, just means they smile while they lie.

- Elberry

Have a helluva dieoff everyone.

- Richard

Export Land Model of Oil production. Everyone knows about it but look at the ramifications

In just 5-10yrs we could be looking at an almost total cessation of oil exports. And from what I've read the US might only be producing 3MMBD instead of the current 5MMBD.

That is the end of America. Period.

And people here argue about whether there will be war soon. You can bet your firstborn there will be war. BIG WAR. When this fucker kicks off it will be the last BIG war of mankind. Nukes and all. Everyone will give it all they got because whoever is left standing at the end will get the prize....oil. The losers will starve.

- Korg

One of my favorite books on remote viewing was written just three years later (1930). This book is titled Mental Radio and was written by the American novelist and social activist, Upton Sinclair. It describes a series of experiments he conducted over a period of three years with his psychic wife, Mary Craig Sinclair (MCS). Although the Sinclairs refer to the phemonenon they studied as telepathy, modern readers will recognize it as pure RV. Mental Radio has descriptions of over 100 sessions the Sinclairs conducted. Chapter 21 of this book provides a detailed description by MCS on her method for remote viewing. It can be summarized simply as relaxing the mind and body and entering a slighty-meditative state and then simply describing the mental images one develops.

Some of the best remote viewers involved in the early RV research at SRI and the government's RV program--Pat Price, Hella Hammid, and Joe McMoneagle--all used unstructured methods. Russell Targ, both in his books (such as Mind Race and Limitless Mind) and workshops (which I have attended twice) strongly advocates a "keep it simple" approach, stating "All that is necessary to remote view is to quiet the mental chatter and describe the images which come to mind."

- Banded Krait

Now when you have that power, the best technique is to ignore all of that discussion, ignore it totally, and to eliminate it, by the simple device of asserting the opposite. If you assert the opposite, that eliminates mountains of evidence demonstrating that what you're saying is false. That's what power means.

- Noam Chomsky

What I took away from this book: The beautiful ugliness with which the CIA and FBI operate. One of the things Sander's book intentionally highlights is the usage of moles and spies who already have questionable histories. It's something that never occured to me, but it explains alot--why people who naysay the government wind up in jail, or easily ridiculed. It's because even though they may be telling the truth, they were all screwed up people to begin with! On the FBI and CIA's part, it's a beautiful scheme.

- somebody's amazon book review

“It has no existence as an independent concrete entity. It designates a highly developed category of Western covert operations designed to secure destabilization through the creation, multiplication, mobilization, and manipulation of disparate mujahideen groups. The evidence suggests that this was certainly the case on 9-11.”

- Nafeez Ahmed (author: The War on Truth), speaking about Al Qaida

BOXING DQ’S FOR SELF-DEFENSE

Boxing AKA the Sweet Science, as we all know, may be a science but it’s not all that sweet. Let’s face it; what’s sweet about a sport that has as its ultimate goal to render you unconscious via blunt head trauma? As sour-intentioned as the “sweet” science is there is an even more unsavory side—the area of illegal blows, disqualification shots (DQs). These DQs have no place inside the ring (sorry, but you’ve got to keep your teeth to yourself, Mr. Tyson) but for the street, well, that’s another story altogether. Pure boxing, with zero illegal shots added to the mix is already a formidable self-defense art; add the DQs and you’ve got a leaner, meaner street ready animal.

Below we set forth a primer on how to take the already efficient standard boxing arsenal and add the bad intentioned shots back into the mix to make it a street-ready self-defense option. We’ll only touch on a few of the higher-percentage shots; for a great deal more information on this topic see our exhaustive instructional set The Complete Pugilist.

1. Location, Location, Location—Just as in real estate, where you land a blow can spell all the difference between man-stopper and a missed opportunity. You can take any of the blows in the standard boxing arsenal (the jab, cross, hook, uppercut) and target “verboten” areas on your opponent and have a nice effect. Aim for the soft targets of the throat and kidneys; these are far easier to hit than most imagine.
2. Below the Belt—Outside the sport rule-set but no need to exclude it from the street arsenal. A well-placed uppercut south of the border is mighty effective.
3. Rabbit Punching—Blows to the back of the head are particularly damaging and forbidden in the sport of boxing, which means this is a prime tool for the street-boxer. Rabbit punches are best delivered while engaged in a clinch. To deliver an effective rabbit-punch, think of a short choppy hook hitting your opponent directly on the back of the head or neck. BTW—The term rabbit punch comes from a technique used to kill rabbits caught in traps. Once the live rabbit is removed from the trap a sharp blow to the back of the neck and our live rabbit is now a past tense live rabbit.
4. Roughing Inside the Clinch—Once two boxers are clinched the fight is strictly regulated for the sportsman, but for the street-boxer a whole new world of hurt opens up. We’ve got the previously mentioned rabbit-punches, knees to the groin and/or thighs, foot stomps, short-choppy head-butts, you’ve even got Mr. Tyson’s ear lobe hors d`oeuvres available. There is a wealth of mayhem to be inflicted inside the clinch; dish it out well.
5. Thumbing—Modern boxing gloves are manufactured with the thumbs attached to the body of the glove to prevent “accidental/incidental” thumbs to the eyes. The street-boxer has no such glove restricting his fifth digit so; he should utilize this opposing appendage with extreme prejudice. Thumb the eye while roughing inside the clinch, fire your jabs with an open palm and your thumb extended targeting the eyes and/or throat. Another nice little roughing use of the thumb inside the clinch is to jam it hard up and into your opponent's armpit—it won’t stop the fight but it’s just one of the many disconcerting multiples you can throw.
6. Combinations, Combinations, Combinations—The best of the best in the sport of boxing throw combinations; the street-boxer would be wise to emulate that tactic. Be overwhelming in your offense—be overwhelming in your defense. Be overwhelming in your counters. Do not look for the Sunday punch or the KO, instead strive to be the proverbial buzzsaw, strike fast, strike often, and then strike again.

There are many (many) more illegal shots/inserts that we can cull from the boxing arsenal but these half dozen will serve you well when the game is not inside the ring, there is no referee to stop the fight and the stakes are higher than a mark on your record. Train hard; train safe!

Thanks everyone and have a great weekend!

Mark Hatmaker

That this social order with its pauperism, famines, prisons, gallows, armies, and wars is necessary to society; that still greater disaster would ensue if this organization were destroyed; all this is said only by those who profit by this organization, while those who suffer from it – and they are ten times as numerous – think and say quite the contrary.

- L. Tolstoi