onoway

Listened to a discussion the other day on the radio which I found thought provoking. It was about the use of the "mosquito" which is a small device which emits a highly irritating if not very painful noise which can only be heard by people under adult age..somewhere around 19 appears to be when it becomes inaudible apparently. It was unclear if kids under the age of about 9 can hear it or not. The school using the Mosquito was in the news as someone had vadalised IT so they were discussing whether or not to get another This was being used in a school playground which had suffered a lot of vandalism and litter of various unhealthy sorts, and it had led to a rather dramatic and immediate drop in the incidence of both. So the person from the school was very much in favor..it was only being used between the hours of 10 pm and 6 am, when the city bylaws made it illegal for anyone to be there anyway. Sounded reasonable and quite a good idea. Then a human rights watchperson entered the discussion and it became a bit more complicated. There wasn't any argument about the need for some sort of method of dealing with the problem but.. the main premise was, is it somewhere we want to go to physically punish people for doing something we don't want them to do, AND> would this be equally acceptable if it was used vs another segment of society. For example, what about seniors in nursing homes being given a painful electric shock whenever they did something the caregivers didnt want them to do, like tried to stay in a common room watching tv or playing cards or whatever instead of going to bed at whatever designated time the caregivers thought they should? The implications for controlling any sort of protest, such as the G-8 summit, Wallstreet or antiwar protests are clear; governments could easilly develop such things to simply stop any such protests instantly. Some might argue that would be a good thing, but surely protest is something a healthy society must be able to accommodate? Apparently convenience stores are fairly commonly already using this technology. Although my first reaction was "what a great idea!" now I am not at all sure. It's a bit reminiscent of Tazers, which because they were supposed to be nonlethal,(turned out to be not true) have led to all sorts of abuse by police using them without justification. And all governments would love to promote the image of a population perfectly content under their administration.

There is some very good basis for his ideas. Some author whose name I forget wrote a book some time ago analyzing the raw foods we eat and found that most of them were very defiicient in the vitamins and minerals earlier versions of the same foods were rich in. Potatoes were one example he cited as now commonly having essentially no food value at all. So people could be eating lots of them and still not getting the nutrition that smaller amounts would have provided before. The "farro" this author mentions is a very good example. It is considered a sort of primitive wheat which has not only up to 30% more protein than modern wheats but doesn't require the inputs for growth that modern wheats do. It's also known as emmer and some reports say it will grow in gravel quite happilly. But it is hard to thresh out and it's tall (compared to modern wheats) so it has a tendency to fall over in high winds or heavy rain when it's heavy with seed so scientists developed modern wheats which are easy to thresh and don't fall over as readilly because they have been bred for much shorter/stronger stems. However, they lost a lot of the nutritional value along the way. They also lost a whole lot of toughness as most modern wheats are (must be?) chemically sprayed and fertilized to a fare-thee-well. There is a very good reason aside from nostalgia that many gardeners are going back to "heritage" varieties and it isn't just for the taste. They are often also more nutritious. So although it is virtually always preferable to eat non processed foods,(especially commercially processed ones) there is still room to improve from the usual supermarket offerings; growing your own heritage varieties is likely optimum. It is quite amazing how much more satiating truly good food is than the nutritionally feeble stuff generally available.

Outfits like Stumbleupon which email with a message, " it's been so long since you've visited us, please come back we'd love to see you again"; then when you click on the link you get an insistent message, "who are you? log in." I leave, but it's irritating, as clearly they already know exactly who I am and when I am on the site. Also sites which demand you log into Facebook to make a comment. Don't do that either. Why is so much on the internet now under the direction of control freaks?

I really enjoyed the English version of Junkyard Wars. Especially the one where various countries tried to make an all purpose vehicle which would triumph over all the various obstacles, for if I remember a maximum of $3000 and a month of time. Totally other end of the spectrum from other "car" shows but lots of fun to watch ingenuity at work.

I see a lot of info to explain what GIB is doing with the bidding but where oh where is there some sort of explanation about GIB leads? It seems that bidding a suit is the surest way to make sure that a GIB partner NEVER leads it, often preferring to lead the trump suit if not the first lead then the second, no matter what it has or hasn't got in trumps. In the last month or so I have played with them, my GIB p has led my bid suit exactly ONCE. Even when getting the lead after the first round it will dodge around all the other suits before it will lead the one I bid. I have never been able to figure out how to signal because it seems no matter what I discard GIB goes its merry way regardless. Is there some sort of method to the GIB play that I just haven't found yet and if so, PLEASE point me to it as this is extremely frustrating, and now fairly often leads to me just snarling at it and going off to do something else.

There is also the point that (I believe) BIL tourneys award partial points just for playing in them. So although admittedly highly unlikely, THEORETICALLY it would be possible to get up to a 7, say, without ever having played anyone but intermediates and beginners, and possibly even without ever having won a tourney. So the numbers are not really any more reliable than the self ratings. Someone has now put up a site with BBO ratings based on the results of the previous month's hands. No idea how they adjust for the level of competition but they say that they do. It pretty much agreed with what I would have said of the people I know that I looked up as long as they had played quite a few hands. They were perhaps a bit generous with me, but nobody's perfect:). I'm not sure any rating should be given even provisionally for someone who has played only 6 hands as that gives a really skewed picture, but that's quibbling. They note how many hands have been played by the person in question and people can come to their own conclusions based on just that. http://bboskill.com/index.php I wish I could figure out how to scroll down the "wall of shame" though. It aroused a morbid curiosity but I couldn't get past the first page. The comments on "how this site works" about cheaters was right on the money.

I did the monthly rental thing for GIBS tonight but when I tried to use them they wouldn't do anything. They apparently loaded..they showed in the seats..but I kept getting a message that the "GIB could not be started". I tried leaving the seat and opening another table 5 times and every time I got the same message.....and if I waited..nothing happened, they didn't bid or anything, just sat there. I even left BBO entirely and then went back and tried again and got the same message. Now what? It's pretty discouraging when even the GIBS won't play with you!! :blink: Update: The third time I logged into BBO the GIBS would play. No idea what that was all about but apparently it's fixed for now

It'd be nice if you actually read something before complaining about it. Nothing was said even remotely about the one hand or the other hand, and a simulation is hardly a study though you seem to be confused about that. They are called simulations ie not the real thing because they involve pretense, studies hopefully do not but deal in fact. In any case no suggestion was made about another one of either. I suppose if you know before you start you are going to whine it saves time to just get on with it, even if without actually having a clue what you are whining about.

It always astonishes me how frantic that people get when they talk about Iran having nuclear capabilities..not that this is a good thing but that there isn't any way to stop it. Teenagers in the States have built nuclear devices..the first one I am aware of was some years ago. His wasn't exactly workable but it most certainly was highly radioactive and he hadn't finished with it when he got caught and everything confiscated. Now there is this one http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/01/living/teen-nuclear-scientist/index.html who has had a somewhat more positive reaction ( !! couldn't think of another suitable word :P ) to his endeavors. If civilian teenagers can put together such things then I can't understand how anyone could honestly imagine that a nation would be unable to do so. Scale is certainly an issue but as Mike says, it wouldn't need to be a BIG one to do unimaginable damage. There is a whole lot of plutonium missing and some of that may have ended up in the hands of people who would love to see the US, Israel and Iran duke it out..what better way than to toss a small nuclear bomb somewhere in the mix and let the ASSUMPTION that it came from x take things from there. We really need to start thinking of ways to interact with others which don't rely on threatening to or actually beating them over the head with a stick, possibly encouraging them to stop thinking that having a bigger stick and beating us over the head with it is the only way to deal with us. Can't get anywhere positive long term by playing brinksmanship with war, especially with nuclear capabilities at stake. Nuclear capability is like genetically modified seed..once it's out there in the real world (or in the case of nuclear stuff, the knowlege of how to make it is out there) it cannot any longer be contained or even really controlled entirely effectively. Not a happy thought, but it's reality. We need to find ways to deal with it that don't rely on posturing that worked when people still fought with swords and clubs. I once knew a political science prof who for a number of years annually ran a simulation with students acting as the leaders of countries. Time was of course tightly compressed, so that may have had an effect on the results. But. Every single time without exception it ended up in nuclear war, and often the instigator was not one of the expected countries, although if I remember correctly, retaliation strikes were always automatically launched against those countries. He eventually stopped running simulations as it got to be too depressing and scary.

clicking on the cc at the bottom of the video will give some semblance on english translation http://www.buzzfeed.com/eixo/bubble-football-soccer-e9k

Nobody is talking about your mother who may well have been a saint. Your comment reminds me of a neighbor I was talking to the other day who was shrilly declaiming that everyone in a certain group (none of whom she knew anything about or had ever had any even peripheral dealings with) were arrogant and nasty people. This teacher may have been working for years and tried to help and had simply burned out as people do do. Neither you nor I know the background there and it is astonishingly beside the point in any case. How am I insulting anyone? Agribusiness spends literally millions of dollars trying to promote the idea that all food is equal; that there is no difference nutritionally between a frozen t.v. dinner and the same menu produced from fresh food grown and processed in a healthy and sustainable way (or, for that matter, a big Mac)It isn't their fault they don't know it isn't true. You have said repeatedly you don't believe it but that doesn't make it untrue. -- I think you just proved my point.

It was an art teacher in I believe an elementary school who said she was going to resign from teaching and when asked why so, told him this. No reason to think he made it up, and I don't believe he is in the practice of lying. Aside from anything else, he has no need to do so. If you had watched the Jamie Oliver video of the kids in school who had no idea what ANY of the vegetables were that he showed them you would find this entirely believable. The comment about nobody willing to donate a cooking pot is really a non sequiter, nobody ever suggested anyone ever asked for one. The POINT is that apparently these families don't feel the need for one. Ripping a package open and heating the contents in the microwave is hardly what I would call cooking. And...it is interesting, perhaps, that in the schools in England where Jamie Oliver has managed to change the food choices to healthier ones, although there has been some grumbling, it's reported that both the absentee level has dropped significantly, presumably because kids are sick less, AND the level of accomplishment has risen (as shown by test scores in relation to other schools and their own previous records). Both of these results seem to me to be worth thinking about. Aside from most parents wanting their kids to do as well as they can in school, governments everywhere are yowling about health care costs,and it is a bit naive to think only kids are impacted by their everyday food choices.

In a talk Joel Salatin gave to Google, one remark came up that amazed me. He said that an art teacher in Washington had asked 22 students to bring a cooking pot from home to use as an art model and all 22 looked at her blankly. When asked what the problem was, they said they didn't use/have such a thing, when cooking at home they just opened boxes and "cooked" everything in the microwave. No wonder kids are growing up thinking that white cows=white milk and brown cows=chocolate milk and primary school kids can't identify common foods such as potatoes and broccoli. I'm not dissing all fast food, by any means, but to have no concept of anything else is just weird to me. Preprepared foods are MUCH more expensive..(a single potato french fried in a fast food place=a 1pound bag of frozen potatoes = 5 pound bag raw potatoes or even a 10 pound bag in fall harvest sales). Also, the nutritional values are doubtful at best. This isn't even considering the flavor or texture, or the chemicals used for preservatives and to enhance the flavor/color. I would venture a guess that these kids came mostly from "disadvantaged" backgrounds who most need both the money and the nutrition of "real " food, but that certainly might not be the case. Anyone have any ideas/opinions about this? Should anything be done and if so what/how?

If you haven't already done so, you might check out the places that carry veneer wood. This place has very nice photos of veneer wood so maybe you would find a match if you browsed through it http://www.woodveneer.com/veneer.html There are also other such sites. Good luck.

If we are making suggestions about individualists (even if he didn't build his own house as far as I know, but I bet he could have had he needed to) may I suggest Joel Salatin http://www.polyfacefarms.com/ I believe that one of the many labels he uses for himself is libertarian

I certainly didn't mean to suggest it would be easy or fast either, but was responding to this "would know on their own how to build a house, produce electricity from running water, construct wire to carry electricity, create central heating, air conditioning, clean water, sewer systems, safe food, and on and on and on..." Even the people who do know how to do these things would likely agree in a heartbeat that it would be better to have other people around so the work and knowledge can be shared..even just for company! Even more so that different people could share different expertise..herbalism is a pretty extensive study for example, if no modern medicines would ever be available, it would be helpful to have someone who was knowledgeable in that area. My point was that there are people who wouldn't be at a loss for knowing how to proceed, which was what I thought was the question. I'm not sure that even "rugged individualists" equate that with being isolated from all human company indefinitely. Is that really what you mean? Btw I hadn't considered the question of salt, nor had I seen it discussed anywhere so it was an interesting point. So I looked for some information. Quote: . Meat as a source of protein has arguably been cited as an important component of man's diet, However it was the salt content, whether due to the preserving characteristics employed in sacrificial processes, or the blood serum salt content of the animal before being drained from the animal which was clearly critical x x x x x x In regions of the world where the population lives mainly on meat or fish, there is no difficulty in satisfying this physiological need as animal food provides enough salt. Salt-deprivation does however, become a hazard in vast areas where meat is scarce and many depend primarily on a vegetable diet. End Quote. Always assuming you aren't near the ocean or some other salt source.

Aside from constructing wire to carry electricity you might be very surprised at how many people know how to do all those things and much more. Though most of them would focus on building houses which required little or no central heating or air conditioning. And more are learning all the time, as they look around at how things are shaping up in the great wide world. They'd pretty well all be able to find wire even if they couldn't make it. You didn't even mention running your vehicles and so forth on homemade wood gas or methane. The hard one is refrigeration in hot climates and even that can be handled with very low tech as long as not too much stuff needs to be cooled or kept cold at once. Higher tech stuff can be done too, but tends to be dangerous:). You just don't move in those circles, obviously :) There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio....

My point would be that there should be no need to do that.And as far as I can tell "comfortably numb" is not at all the way to describe the experience believers have, although like anything else I feel fairly sure that such things are experienced by different people in different ways. Damn that social studies teacher anyway!! I wasn't even speaking of the interaction between religion and outside politics, I was speaking of the politics within the religious structure itself. This seems to me to be an achilles heel of organized religions..it has nothing whatever to do with the religion itself but in the very human activity of trying to gain personal power, prestige, whatever. Through some period of time, the easiest and fastest way to achieve these things was through church..and somewhat less dangerous perhaps than other avenues open...so an ardent belief was perhaps less important than the ability to fake something of the sort to the degree necessary while being very capable in other areas of administration, so to speak. Seems to me, although I could well be wrong, that the priests and nuns who actually lived the sort of lives supposedly honored by the church seldom if ever got to be the chosen to lead the church. This might be (in the case of christian churches), not so much for the Society of Friends for example but otherwise a vow of service and a life of relative simplicity if not actual poverty has seemingly been found by most of the various religious hierarchies to be more admirable in theory than practice. Of course you also find the people for whom religion is ONLY a good business to be in. The fact that many of those live(d) very comfortable lives suggests that they were meeting some sort of need felt by a whole lot of people. To suggest that people shouldn't feel that need or try to meet it is offers to me the image of someone who doesn't have scurvy scoffing at the need others might have for vitaminC. I don't know how Buddhism fits into this criteria..can you enlighten me? B-) I certainly don't know enough about a whole lot of religions to have much to offer here. Throughout this whole thread, the discussion has been off center..I am trying to dissassociate the messengers from the message, to a large degree, because imo most of the messengers have messed it up. Otoh, you and others are maintaining that the message and messenger are NOT separable, a sort of Marshal McLuhan view of things. I am holding to the idea that the better bits of the original message as being what's important. Because it makes sense to me as the best basis we have to find a way to meet an obvious need most people have. After a couple of thousand or more years, it may still be a rough draft which needs to be updated, and it will never appeal to people who look to some form of organized "religion" to justify their hates and prejudices and pettiness, but holds the seeds through which man can be grow to be as much as he can be. I don't think science alone can offer that. And as you seem to be convinced that I am some sort of personal god believer,perhaps I should tell you that no I'm not. I lost whatever faith I might have had when my mother died in terror and anguish truly believing she was going to hell because she married a divorced man. I still have a very hard time forgiving the Catholic church for that, although I was too naive to understand she needed to hear a priest tell her either that wasn't so or at least that she had been forgiven. I had not known until then that she held any strong beliefs one way or the other about religion..my father was the son of an anglican minister and I don't remember either of them ever particularly discussing anything of a religious nature. I'm not sure I want to get into what I have settled into, except that in some ways I feel wistful about people being able to believe in a personal God and wish at times that that was possible for me. I have known some people quite well who are such believers and they take a great deal of comfort from both their religion and the support of other church members in times of trial. Some of them have been involved in a number of charitable enterprises such as helping small farmers in Africa, building hospitals, and roofing or upgrading houses for the poor. The fact that they belong to a group makes such enterprises possible, that it's a church group means (in their cases) that they regard doing such such things as a social responsibility. This is not to suggest that other non church groups aren't also doing good things, Habitat for Humanity being one of them, but it's much HARDER to organise when you don't have a ready made group who are already committed to the idea of a responsibility for people beyond those in their immediate circle. These are the sorts of things I mean when I think we need to find a way to keep the good bits. OTOH I am silent with dismay when I hear some of their fellow church members snorting with derision at the idea of evolution. Sometimes there has been a degree of pressure to participate in this or that church by such friends, I have sung at funerals and so forth in Catholic services and attended Christmas concert services in other churches because why not? I enjoy those things and everyone feels good about it. What's to be gained by harrassing them in what would unquestionably be a futile effort to change anyone's mind? Besides, what works for me clearly wouldn't work for them so I have nothing to offer to replace what they now have and that's always a bad bargain to offer anyone. I feel no need to tell them they are wrong, nor to defend my position. They have shaped their lives around their belief system, and by and large, those lives are good lives, often offering somewhat more of themselves than most people do to the larger world. So I DO feel the need to respect them for that and to see them treated with respect as well.

:) that's pretty close to what I was trying to do; only perhaps oranges and carrots might be closer to the mark; very different ways to nourish, but either one insufficient; both important for health. And..although they ARE entirely different, they can work together to make something more complex and enriching. Yippee I figured out how to do the quote thing..time and a little poking at things to see what they do can do wonders:) well the thing is that seemingly all societies have some sort of spiritual leader, whether it be shaman, druid, witchdoctor, priest lama or whatever. I would call that a religious leader as often they were not the same as the nominal leader of the group. So I would suggest that rather than showing we as a species DON"T need any such figure in our lives, most if not all previous societies have come to the conclusion that they DID. I suspect that it is fairly commonplace to assume that people take a sense of security?identity? comfort? in ritual, and these people were, as I understand it, generally in charge of such things as well as often being the one with whatever medical knowledge the group had. Unlike much modern thinking, older societies often saw a direct connection between the mind and the body, or so it seems. Many if not most had rituals which involved "the spirit world" in some way, whether it be through visions introducing them to their totems or whatever. If you know herbal plants, you will find that hallucinagens of one sort or another are to be found and were both known and used in all parts of the world, and not often used entirely casually, as some of them could be fatal if not handled and prepared correctly. This suggests needing a serious reason for using such a thing. Only two such reasons come readilly to mind. One is some sort of trial or punishment. I have heard of no evidence or anyone suggesting this was so, except perhaps in Jamaica. There witch doctors apparently actually could create concoctions that could put people into a sort of zombie state of suspended animation where they became totally immobilised and their body processes slowed down to the point of being indiscernable BUT they were still conscious. People were sometimes actually buried and then dug up again a week or so later, still alive but considerably changed. However, this seemed as though this was sometimes even just a vendetta type of thing rather than used as a "correction device" so to speak. My understanding is based on a fascinating book written by an American anaesthesiologist (sp?) who investigated this and others maybe 30 years ago. He suspected there was also an emotional aspect to this, in that people believed it would work so it did, but the physiological effects were unquestionable, and the psychological effects of having this happen to them were marked and long lasting. He was unable to learn what all of the ingredients were, but the ones that he did learn about were basically poisons. The other option is the intent to have some sort of out of body experience, and the meaning of what the person experienced was considered to be important. I would call this a religious practice as it was an attempt to establish communication between the known physical world and the unknowable spiritual world. I'm not sure why you think I argue that religion shouldn't be blamed for the Crusades and the Inquisition. I'd maintain that it does have to take responsibility not because religion promoted such behaviour but that it allowed such a perversion of what it should be, to occur. As far as the invasion and destruction of Central and SouthAmerican societies by Columbus and his cohorts..consider who was on those ships..the misfits and malcontents, mostly pressganged or released from jail for the trip, from what I gather, as nobody else wanted to go on what was considered a mad trip which would end by falling off the edge of the world. The missionaries who followed were indeed convinced they were doing the right thing, just as in later times Canada took children from native populations and put them into institutions, supposedly so they would be better able to assimmilate into white culture. Or the Americans took the land of the Cherokee and forced them to march on foot to Oklahoma without allowing them time to provision themselves for the trip,which killed so many of them that the trip was renamed the Trail of Tears. The missionaries and the Canadian government of the day had at least a modicum of good intentions in that they believed they were doing the right thing as well as the convenient thing; the American government of the day wasn't so worried about that, they just wanted the land so kicked them out. It's always been considered a bit crass to say "I want loot!" as that's the sort of thing a common thief might say, so to say "I am killing you and taking your gold for God", is much more acceptable. It's like it wasn't ok for Bush to say, I am annoyed with Saddam and I want him dead, he had to make up nonsense about weapons of mass destruction, and then it was ok, in fact, encouraged. Different triggers for different times. The result is the same of course, as God has no particular need for gold and possibly no particular wish for Saddam but both guys are just as dead and everyone can feel better about it. When religion and politics get mixed up there tends to be a disaster in the making, and that's one thing I feel is a problem which has led to much of the nastiness done in the name of religion. Who exerts influence, who is owed a favour etc. Nothing whatsoever to do with religion, that's just business and politics. But it's all wrapped in a religious flag, as a sort of camoflage. The Inquisition is very hard to understand. It's like some sort of mass hysteria overtook Europe (and parts of the US) and allowed all the psychopaths not only to represent the church but to do so in any horrendously cruel way they could devise. I don't understand how that could have been allowed to happen. Certainly the church of the day was entirely responsible for that. But to take another example, we don't hold the government of today responsible for the governments/philosphies which led to world wars 1 and two. That's pretty feeble but it's the best I can do with no sleep :) The point was is that Truman wouldn't have had a bomb TO drop without Einstein and others who developed it. That doesn't absolve him of responsibility at all, but my point is that it is a shared responsibility and in this example, perhaps another where religion failed. Scientists keep coming up with more and more horrendous ways to kill people from further and further away so as to minimize the number of traumatised soldiers returning home. As far as that goes, science has now figured out how to desensitize soldiers fairly effectively; the only problem is once you've got them conditioned to be unconcerned about killing you need to keep them busy somewhere as you don't want then wandering the streets at home with rifles and an attitude..you might get more of the sort of thing that happened at the Maryland gas stations. Did you know that they think as many as one in ten soldiers in world wars 1 & 2 either never actually fired their rifles at all, or if they did, they tried NOT to hit anybody. And didn't the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima commit suicide? But now we have videos of soldiers laughing as they use civilians for target practice. I feel quite sure we need something more than science.

Well, a couple of things about that....tell someone who is extremely depressed to "act enthusiastic and you will be enthusiastic" and he will likely impolitely tell you to take a hike, if he can find the energy. It's certainly not always that simple. Severe depression is a terrible thing and telling people they can talk themselves out of it is like telling someone they can talk themselves out of a broken arm. To be sure, people who are in a relatively stable frame of mind CAN affect their behaviour and emotions by practicing more productive thought and fostering positive emotions; one study found that deliberately considering the things they have to be grateful for for 15 minutes each day, helped heal people who were moderately depressed. But then, so does prayer help to heal, according to other studies (that's an aside I couldn't resist:)) I'm not at all sure you would find many competent mental health professionals agreeing with you that emotions can be "false" though they most certainly can be based on false information. I am assuming we are discussing truly felt emotion, not the crocodile tears sort which are deliberately presented but have no emotion whatever behind them. Emotions are what they are, and you suppress and deny strong ones at a risk of developing all sorts of other little or not so little problems. Here is a quote about just one of several recognized medical conditions relating to this question. Quote: The Harvard psychiatrist Peter Sifneos originally coined the term in 1972 to describe people who had extreme difficulty in emotional cognition. The word “alexithymia” literally means “no words for mood.” People with this problem lacked the ability to understanding, processing or describing their feelings verbally. As a result, most people who have the problem are largely unaware of their own feelings or what they signify. As a result they only rarely talk about their emotions or their emotional preferences, and they are largely unable to use their feelings or imagination to focus and fuel their drives and motivations. People with alexithymia seem unable to fantasize and many report multiple somatic symptoms. However, alexithymia is also associated with a number of other complaints, such as hypertension, irritable bowel syndrome, substance use disorders, and some anxiety disorders. Their speech is often concrete, mundane and closely tied to external events. So they will describe physical symptoms rather than emotions, and don’t understand that their bodily sensations are signals of emotional distress. (my emphasis) Alexithymia lies on spectrum... For some people it is little more than an inability to get in touch with their emotions. But at the other end of the spectrum are a number of illnesses in which alexithymia may occur, including schizoid personality disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, anorexia nervosa or Asperger's syndrome. It is also much more common in victims of trauma. End Quote I am not suggesting that people should ACT on their rage, for example, maybe by going out and popping that annoying neighbor in the nose, but they do need to recognise what they feel .and more importantly, often, what is causing the emotion in the first place, and find ways to deal with it. Sometimes it isn't even the neighbor that is the root of the problem, but only the final straw on a load of undealt with other problems. One thing I ran across the other day was an interview with a Dr Amen who had some fairly compelling things to say about how the health of the brain affects behaviour (and, incidentally, the concept of free will!) People who have damaged their brains inadvertently or otherwise can undergo quite remarkable changes in their interaction with the world. And these changes can sometimes be reversed if the brain is restored to a healthy condition. This makes me wonder about some of the historical monsters and how much misery may have been caused by literally!! an unhealthy brain. I also wondered what the brains of some of today's politicos might look like ...full of holes, some of them, I'm guessing. Anyway. Science has done a remarkable job in learning what triggers behaviour and it isn't logic or reason. Successful marketters don't give much weight on promoting rational reasons for why you should buy their widget, they give you social proof "everyone else has one and they LOVE it..here's Bob to tell you how his life has become WONDERFUL since he got it!!" _ or the reverse - "be the only one in your neighborhood to grown these unique and fabulous roses that all your neighbors will envy" or they give the potential customer something to make them feel gratitude and the need to reciprocate, or they provide some authority figure to lead them to the right path of buying their widget and so forth. They have tracked eye movements so they know where to place different bits of copy or a graphic and which colors to use where for optimum effectiveness....and they test constantly to check and compare results. By manipulating the environment in sometimes virtually unnoticeable ways, they can alter behaviour and make people more likely to buy. The product is the same, it's only that when it's presented in one way people are much more likely to buy than if it's presented a different way. Logic would suggest that somehow the changes make the product more attractive..an emotional response. Of course, some people are more susceptible to some sorts of techniques than others. Some people have or develop a sort of immunity through overexposure, sort of the boy who cried wolf too many times sort of thing. That said, highly successful marketters likely know a whole lot more about human psychology and what makes people do things than some psychologists and psychiatrists as far as I can tell. Of course it would be ludicrous to suggest that people operate ONLY on emotion. But people ignore the emotional responses they have to the world around them at their peril.And this aspect of humanity is valued..to describe someone as "a cold fish" is instantly recognized as denigrating. The forums for people suffering from PTSD discuss their frustration with "being numb" and wondering what others have tried or done in order to "feel" again and will they ever be able to. Apparently a totally nonemotional life is a fairly bleak one. But they undoubtedly do make decisions and they do manage from day to day. It's emotion, not reason, that makes people buy houses that they can't possibly afford, emotion that makes people shoulder rifles and go off to war and do other such things that are at the very least a hazard to their well being and even their lives. Rats. I can't figure out how you break the quote up into pieces. So just left the quote intact and refer to it. sort of. b)I don't think you can blame religion for such things as the crusades and then absolve science for the human experiments done in concentration camps. That's a double standard if ever I saw one. The crusades went forward under the banner of Christianity and the experiments went forward under the banner of science. As far as the GMO experiments go, the only emotion I see in those particular corporate offices is greed. c) Are you referring to me as an authoritarian sort of person? really?

Perhaps the only problem with this is that humans are not rational creatures, but emotional ones..and a good thing too imo or we'd be little more than fleshy robots. As an example, you can tell a very small child he cannot have that treat because it's too close to dinner and he will accept the edict because he can't do anything about it, but he won't be happy. And if he gets the chance, he will likely snag it anyway. Reasons mean nothing ..unless they are backed up by other reasons such as he will get smacked if he gets caught or some such, and not wanting to gets smacked has a bigger impact than wanting the treat. So it isn't reason at all that affects his behaviour but his reaction TO the reasons..the not wanting overrides the wanting. That small child within us doesn't go away just because we get older. Our wanting X while wanting to avoid Y becomes more sophisticated and complicated is all. I think that in the best religious teachings that I'm aware of, and I'm certainly not claiming any expertise, there is a basic degree of social responsibility held in high regard. Do Unto Others and all that. There is nothing whatever in science to promote anything but pure knowledge for its own sake. Thus in the Holocaust aside from the gas chambers themselves you find horrific things being done to people in concentration camps in the name of science. More recently and less directly we have companies now promoting all sorts of technology such as rampant use of genetically engineered plant material without regard to the possible long term effects simply because it makes money for the companies and scientists. This has been labelled as one of the ten things which may bring about the destruction of human society and is strictly a scientific and commercial endeavor without regard for the repercussions. This is another example of where I see science as failing to provide a framework needed if society is to survive at all, and it's interesting that several scientists reportedly have left their involvement in such jobs because they weren't comfortable with the potential results. So what was reasonable for them and reasonable for other scientists in precisely the same endeavor is entirely different. I suspect that many people feel overwhelmed about understanding some of life's more complex questions. Humans want to be part of a group, we are social creatures, a herd animal as it were. So as humans, they look to see if they can find a group they can relate to and be comfortable in. They are looking for a group which has come to similar conclusions they have for many of the questions they feel a need to have answers for. When they find such a group then they are at peace, relatively speaking, about where they stand on those issues at least, and can get on with other things. Most people are not comfortable feeling entirely alone in the world. It has nothing to do with the rational understanding that in the end we all are entirely alone in the world. It has to do with a powerful innate need most people have to connect with other people on the basis of shared values, experiences and beliefs. "Social Proof" is a byword of successful marketting; and especially now with facebook and twitter and so forth, people are looking more and more to find out what others are choosing and how happy they are with the results of their choices, because otherwise the choices are too many and varied and they feel overwhelmed. There has been some suggestion that the incidence of depression (now reportedly regarded by WHO as epidemic in scope) and suicide is often at least partly the result of a feeling of isolation - of people being unable to find a group or even person they can connect with and get support from. Typically, religion historically has provided an opportunity for such connection. Such a connection certainly can't prevent people from having questions, thus you often get people in what is termed a crisis in faith; when they have to to come to terms with how to balance possibly conflicting information. There's a sort of spectrum, I suppose, in how each person might resolve such questions. Not counting the people who don't think about such things at all.. At one extreme they might become nihilists,(about which I know almost nothing) working across through atheists to agnostics, some switch to another belief system such as Christian to Buddhist, some agree to accept a degree of dissonance because on the whole, the fit works better for them than any other alternative, and I suppose on the other extreme you have the fanatics who cannot tolerate any questions at all about their belief. But most people seek to find some sort of group that shares their core belief, whether that be that God is personally involved with their wellbeing or there is no god of any sort or anything in between. Many, especially on either end of the spectrum are mightilly upset at anyone who doesn't share their vision of how things are; but I imagine it to be something like someone with one sort of colourblindness trying to argue about colour with someone else who has a different sort of colourblindness. The reality is that the world is simply not the same for them as it is for others who don't share their perception and it never can be. There is no basis for communication, other than through an acceptance that different people experience the world in different ways. None of us can ever KNOW what if anything lies beyond death. I think that in its best forms, religion teaches social responsibility and empathy and gives a focus for it. In its worst, some religions can be used to teach that only your group deserves to be treated with responsibility and empathy. At its best, science teaches that questions are interesting and should be investigated. At its worst, it has no sense of accountability.

Not at all. There isn't any question that she was human and had her own biases and convictions which led her to make some decisions which weren't the best by a long shot. Nevertheless, would the people in her care have been better off dying alone in at least as much agony..the only differences being that a)nobody was there to see them and b) nobody was there to at least try to give some sort of human support for their final days? Aside from numerous stories about western hospitals ALSO refusing to give enough medication to dying patients "it's addictive" being one asinine comment made to a woman pleading with the doctor to allow her dying mother medication on demand..it seems a bit unfair to criticise her for not providing the same level of care you and I might expect and hope for, for people who otherwise had no hope of having anything but a lonely and at least equally anguished death. In the wikipedia article " Sanal Edamaruku, President of Rationalist International, criticised the failure to give painkillers, writing that in her Homes for the Dying, one could "hear the screams of people having maggots tweezered from their open wounds without pain relief. " So they should have been left in the streets with the maggots eating their flesh, rather than have them removed without painkillers? Would the children have been better off living (or dying) in the streets?There used to be reports of desperate parents sometimes deliberately maiming their children in order for them to be better beggars. This is preferable to what her orphanages provided? She didn't take the money and buy alpha romeos and mansions in Greece with it; she didn't live a sybaritic life feeding on the misery of the poor, as many of the founders of so called charitable organizations do. As far as I know, she also didn't do what is apparently becoming increasingly common nowadays, which is to sell tours of orphanages so tourists can come gawk at the children, like a sideshow freak tent in an old time circus. What have the people or organizations such as the news magazines criticizing her done to help anyone? When and where have they provided medication and human comfort for the poverty stricken dying or orphanages for the orphaned or abandoned? All they have done is scream about how what she was doing didn't live up to THEIR standards. Which they themselves only demonstrate in theory, since they generally never actually do anything themselves except complain how unsatisfactory other people's efforts are. She was starting with people who had nothing, she wasn't stripping away everything people had because they were sick and then refusing them adequate care because they couldn't pay for it. She took in people who had nothing at all to start out with, no access to medical care at all, and very likely no emotional support either. She may not have done it in optimum fashion or for reasons you like, but neither of those is the point. By your logic,it's better to do nothing at all than to do something that doesn't meet every sort of outside expectation. That's not a logic I subscribe to.

Your bias against any sort of information which might threaten your belief system is showing. There never has been anywhere, anyone who has done anything of note who hasn't had their detractors..it's so much easier to criticize and be anti something than to live up to a positive goal or to do something of note themselves. Reality check....... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa though I suppose you would suggest that wikipedia writers and readers are also all just dupes and none of what she is credited with accomplishing really happened as a result of her efforts. Mother Teresa had a profound affect on the lives of a huge number of people and it seems you are one of a very elite few who knows they were ALL buffaloed by her. Such a lot of nonsense. Reading over the discussion about morality, it's interesting that wars have frequently been brought forward as an example of how religious people do horrendous damage in the name of religion. It struck me that the capacity to do damage has been fueled by...wait for it...science. Science has given us bombs both physical and biological which could wipe humanity off the face of the earth. Humanity is likely to use any toy it gets, just to see if it really works. So who, in the end result, is actually more responsible for the perilous times we live in? The people who might use these things in the name of whatever religion, or the scientists who invented/developed them TO be used? Seems to me pointing fingers about who is to blame is not very helpful either though. It might be more useful in the long run to see how the positive from each, religion and science, can be brought to bear on today's problems. At the very least, the idea of having some sort of positive involvement in something outside your own existence and concerns surely has to be a good thing. For one thing, rumor has it you'll live longer( unless, of course, you're a suicide bomber, but then that's not generally regarded as a positive thing except by a relative few) :)

How then, can a person compete with a hand opposite a preempting partner? I was under the impression that aside from feature asking, the preempter was supposed to be silent after the initial bid, on the premise that he had already shown his hand. In any case, even if GIB did think it was forcing to game, 3nt is a game so GIB had no call to overcall yet again, surely? I use the GIBs to help with bidding..the alerts are often useful but fairly often they do things that seem contrary to what I understood...this one has me very confused now.

Very frustrating hand here..one other table played this in 3♣ (with three GIBS) and it was top board, most other tables the GIBS rebid the ♥s to some degree. 3nt also goes down, bidding it with one stopper is likely silly but I'm human and therefore get irrational, I expect better of the GIBs B-). Besides, when the GIB keeps bidding I expected a running 6 card+ suit in ♥. But why doesn't the GIB shut up once it has preempted? Surely 3♣can't be considered as forcing here? If it is, it results in meaning a preempt hamstrings partner more than the opps, no? [hv=pc=n&s=sa97h8daj7caqj983&w=st3h964dk986ckt42&n=s42hkqj732dq43c65&e=skqj865hat5dt52c7&d=n&v=0&b=1&a=2h2s3cp3hp3np4hppp]399|300[/hv]