topher_orange

What could we offer these people? In terms of psychological counseling. How could anyone possibly relate to their suffering?

But you know what all these people talked about? once they could see a counselor? it was all: I met this guy when I was living in the refugee camp, and we fell in love. I thought he really loved me, but then we were separated on different boats and he took up with my cousin. Now he's married to her, but he says he really loves me, and he keeps calling me, and I know I should tell him to go away, but I still love him and I can't stop thinking about him. And I want to know what to do...

This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species. This is our emotional landscape. I met an old lady once, almost 100 years old. and she told me "There's only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me, and Who's in charge?"

Everything else is somehow manageable.  But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war and grief and suffering. 

But is it such a bad thing to live like this for a little while?

Is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?

In a world full of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.

To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, can be a serious business. Not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking away into rhetoric and plot.

Be welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

An emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junky. When the drug is withheld you promptly become sick. crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore - despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere goddamnit, because he used to give it to you for free.)

Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in a corner, certain that only you will sell your soul and rob your neighbors just to have that thing even one more time. Meanwhile the object of your adoration has become repulsed by you. Looks at you like someone never met before, much less like someone they loved with high passion.

The worst part is you can hardly blame them. I mean check yourself out, you are a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes.

• You have to know some metaphysics to be a good ruler.
  • know what "the good" is.
  • know what true justice is.
  • know what virtue is.
    • Or even if you don't know what virtue is, at least be asking the question.
• from the above criteria, create an extended family of rulers.
  • elite intellectuals held to the same standard as we chose our physicians to rule the polus.
    • A doctor never sees his patient as a weakened patient. And is not to inflict his will on the patient. Doctors see the patient as one to be regarded with humanity. To be considered with genuine interest.
  • this extended family of rulers would be a minority in the community
  • will not own private property
  • abolish the nuclear family. With spouses property and children in common.
    • rulers not tempted by nepotism or posessiveness.
    • not be preoccupied by the needs of themselves or their family but of the needs of the state. 
  • put them in absolute power, with no checks or balances.
    • It is the view of power that is important. Lust for power must be replaced by something higher and rulers should recieve power as an obligation and reponsibility to the whole state as a common interest not a selfish one. 
       

The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conduction conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own father or mother.

--

You can arrive (mayan arrivan on-when) for any sitting you like without prior (late fore-when) reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were, when you return to your own time (you can have on-book haventa forewhen presooning returningwenta retrohome).

This didn't of course deter the crews from wanting to fight the battles anyway. They were trained, they were ready, they'd had a couple of thousand years sleep, they'd come a long way to do a tough job and by God they were going to do it.

This was when the first major muddles of galactic history set in, with battles continually reerupting centuries after the issues they had been fought over had supposedly been settled. However, these muddles were nothing to the ones which historians had to try and unravel once time-travel was discovered and battles started preerupting hundreds of years before the issues even arose.

Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though.

A 4 year old asks "Where do babies come from?"
Is the subject matter just really to awkward for the parents to be able to explain it properly?

I can see other things, causing anxiety in a child. "When a father and a mother love each other very much, they close their eyes, and they make a wish." For a child that may seem pretty convincing. but I'd worry about misunderstandings. "If Mommy and Daddy love each other very much, can they close their eyes and wish for just anything? And if so, why don't they get me everything that I want? Maybe they don't love me!"

If a small girl asks, "What is rape?"
I could make an honest statement about her being too young for the subject, but it seemed pointless to make her feel disrespected, or do I dodge the question with an "i don't know" and let her go on wondering about the matter.

...
I bet Sarah knows the answer to this.

Why? 
Is it rational? Is it logical for anyone to be expected to be afriad of this work they felt they were put on this earth to do?

Do not be eager to deal out death and judgement.
For not even the wisest can see all ends.

My eyes told my mind about him.

My mind send a message to my hypothalamus, told it to release the hormone CRF into the short vessels connecting my hypothalamus and my pituitary gland.

The CRF inspired my pituitary gland to dump the hormone ACTH into my bloodstream. My pituitary had been making and storying ACTH for just such an occasion. And nearer and nearer the zeppelin came.

And some of the ACTH in my bloodstream reached the outer shell of my adrenal gland, which had been making a storing glucocorticoids for emergencies. My adrenal gland added the glucocorticoids to my bloodstream. They went all over my body, changing glycogen into glucose. glucose was muscle food. It would help me fight like a wildcat, or run like a deer.

And nearer and nearer the zeppelin came.

My adrenal gland gave me a shot of adrenaline, too. I turned purple as my blood pressure skyrocketed. The adrenaline made my heart go like a burglar alarm. It also stood my hair on end. It also caused coagulants to pour into my bloodstream. so in case I was wounded my vital juices wouldn't drain away.

Everything my body had done so far fell within normal operating procedures for a human machine. But my body took one defensive measure which I am told was without precedent in medical history. It may have happened because some wire short-circuited or some gasket blew. At any rate, I also retracted my testicles into my abdominal cavity, pulled them into my fuselage like the landing gear of an airplane and now they tell me that only surgery will bring them down again.

I've started a daily photo journal. trying to come up with one picture for one significant thing in my day, OR, one picture to sum up my day. 
With a little caption below describing.

www.boybrain.com

The Robo-Magic was going to cheer them up.

It wasn't true, incidentally that most women did their laundry on Monday at the time the Robo-Magic was invented. They did it any time they felt like it. 

The Robo-Magic dream was interrupted by world war two. the old works became an armory instead of an appliance factory.  All that survived of the machine was the brain itself. which had told the rest when to let water in, when to let the water out., when to slosh, when to rinse, when to spin dry, and so on.

The brain became the nerve center of the so-called "BLINC system" during the second world war. It was installed on heavy bombers, and it did the actual dropping of bombs after a bombardier pressed his bright red "Bombs Away" button. The button activated the BLINC system which then released the bombs in such a way as to achieve a desired pattern of explosions on the planet below. BLINC was an abbreviation of "Blast Interval Normalization Computer"

I have been slowly putting money into a retirement savings for a few years now.  I took a portion of that today and put it into a sort of mutual fund. A corporate community stock fund.  

The way I gather whats going on in the stock market the past few months. Anyone that has previously been invested in anything was completely screwed over, and that sucks. But it left this great place for anyone who wanted to start, everything is a great deal.  Kind of the positive side for a failing economy.  

I don't really know what I'm doing.  But I certainly am learning.  I'll let you know if it pays off.  

After all it seems reasonable that the earth, large and motionless, the sun small and mobile.

Tell me, why did people always say it was natural to assume that the sun went round the earth, rather than that the earth was rotating?

Obviously because it just looked as if the sun was going around the earth.

But what would it have looked like if it HAD looked as though the earth was rotating?

My website tells me what people searched for in google that led them to my website. And a common one is "Black and white photography" or "trees in black and white" and I assume it references this picture. But when I search for that, it doesn't come up. I can't explain it.  And it's the only real one I have on their. So. Undeserved traffic? 

Off to do my grocery shopping. Dentist tomorrow. Yuck.