Open Thread TUE 8 JAN 2019 ~ Mindfulness Matters

Submitted by QMS on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 4:10am

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The reality manipulators are treating us as though we are brain-dead zombies. While pretending to have the moral authority to feed our minds with 'vetted' truths. Pressing us to believe, without questioning, more outlandish tales. Steep assumptions. Sorry man, the mind is full already. Would rather free up the synapsis' for useful cogitations. So, will disassociate with that unnecessary noise.

~

Nicolas Monterrat via Colossal

nicolas-6.gif

Not sure the title, but evokes a mental tune-up. Sure doc, just lube the shocks.

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Welcome to today's episode of Open Thread for minds both open and otherwise. Tales of truth and fantasy are encouraged, though not required. Limited only by your imagination. Let's see who / what is driving and who / what is being driven. For some reason, seem to have 'mind' on the brain here today. So, hear as we go...

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A bit out of sync, but still fun to watch.

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The fantastic illustrator Victo Ngai via Colossal

VictoNgai_04.jpg

What's in your mind? Or, do you mind there is a butterfly in your brain? Kinda tickles. Try and zoom-in on the face of the spider. Ahh, the webs we weave behind.

~

Got a kick out of all the nice old Chinese ladies' greetings while in Asia. The first things they wanted to know: what is your marital status; and: what are the contents of your stomach? Just being friendly, I guess. Sort of like matchmaker / dream weaver / hunger solver all wrapped up in one fun, spring roll.

~

Water Song--best heard in head phones or using sub-woofers--strong bass tones.

Cheers!

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Submitted by janis b on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 5:45am
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but will listen again when I’m back home with headphones.

Definitely had butterfly on my mind today after collecting an explosion of Monarch caterpillars on swan plants with too few leaves. You’ll be happy to know they were transported to swan plants with sufficient leaves to feed them to maturity.

Thanks QMS for a wonderful open thread.

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Submitted by QMS on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 7:53am

@janis b
So glad you could help the little critters. Seems they need all the help they can get. Remember watching a huge migration one fall. Sitting on an Atlantic shore. Looking around on the dunes, noticed many thousands limbering up on the sea grass. Then poof! They headed up into the sky, fluttering south over the ocean. Hundreds at a time. Brave little souls to journey far out to points south. Some go as far as Central and South America. Amazing determination. Now we see very few.
Best wishes!

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Submitted by Centaurea on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 6:18am
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Your first graphic there reminds me of Jim Henson's 1982 movie "The Dark Crystal". Specifically, the scenes in the Skeksi scientist's lab, in which the life essence of Podlings (a particular race of people) is drained off to feed the Skeksi general.

I find the scene brutal and difficult to watch, but I've often thought it's a perfect metaphor for what the oligarchy is doing to the rest of us.

Actually, the entire movie might be worth watching again at this juncture in time.

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Submitted by QMS on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 8:01am

@Centaurea
Good morning Centaurea. Creepy clip. Makes me wonder if this is what happens to the kids watching TV too much. Getting dark crystals as a prize in the cereal boxes advertised between cartoons.
Cheers!

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Submitted by enhydra lutris on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 8:08am
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Too much going on right now and I need a week I don't have and I don't need the headache I do have. Off to Sonoma for an overnight a bit later, which may help, or maybe the opposite. dunno. Meanwhile, the Hot Tuna helps get things rolling and back into place creating some sort of order. Muddy always helps too.
Thanks for the OT and have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Submitted by QMS on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 8:52am

@enhydra lutris
Sorry about the foggy conditions you are experiencing. Hope it clears up enough to detect something on the horizon worth grokking.
Good Luck

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Submitted by detroitmechworks on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 8:10am
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that PUTIN does Judo last night when I answered where the kids and I were going. (Specifically with regard to the large gym bag.

I didn't feel the need to talk anymore. And really, that's the danger with overreach. Not that people will push back, rather that people will just ignore you. Because all that comment made me do is doubt the speaker's intelligence, free will and morality. It made me realize that 100% of that person's opinion is generated by the media. A media I do not share faith in.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpYW3qng78E]

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Submitted by QMS on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 8:49am

@detroitmechworks
Didn't know Mr. Cash did the personal jesus. Very cool sound. Way better than the more recent version. Yeah, hearing that media generated mentality people parrot too often. Seems original thinking is becoming another lost skill. Like carpentry, plumbing, wiring, farming, ... A different future is developing. Makes one feel old.
Cheers

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Submitted by detroitmechworks on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 9:15am
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@QMS the Urban Mob... A bunch of citizens who spent their lives toiling then being catered to with promises of free bread and circuses...

Oh man, Now I'm getting depressing.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLE6_F7bjcw]

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Submitted by Lily O Lady on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 10:58am
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@detroitmechworks

might explain why that person is so full of it. Don’t want to do anything Putin would do!

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

Submitted by detroitmechworks on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 11:06am
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@Lily O Lady Who believe that everything that we do must be monitored for micro-aggressions and potential offense. It gets quite tiring learning to tune out the constant drone, and just enjoy what I like. It helped when I stopped CARING what people thought of me for disliking or liking things.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-cPo1wqxD8]

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Submitted by eyo on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 8:20am

Good morning clinical depression, mindfulness can bite me. Before I say what is really on my mind, I have that diagnosis since 2003. Lost every thing I was working hard to keep because I'm not mindful enough. Some brain chemical doctors tried to balance with pHarma, over and over until I just couldn't take anymore. Now I am bankrupt, Medicare is useless, have been punted to the County Health barrel with a referral for Electroconvulsive Therapy. bzzzzt! Not this lone monkey. I don't know wtf to do, so do nothing.
A debt collector rang my phone at 5:25am, no message. How nice.

Plutocracy and hypocrisy are on my mind this morning. Last couple of walks my neighbor kept talking about a documentary called Plutocracy, I think they call it Red Pill or something, she had a sudden paradigm shift (after 8 hours of TV) heh. So I had to find it, and then I downloaded and watched it, all four parts over four days. Labor history galore.

http://metanoia-films.org/plutocracy/

Parts 3 and 4 have the story of the frame-up of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, which made me drag out the old documents and news clippings left by my grandpa Judge Griffin, and his daughters. I unfolded and read the copy of Oxman's lying statement again, it is on three pages of 102 year old legal paper. Inherited injustice is a bummer.

There is also history about the Wobblies, the one big union IWW. Judi Bari was a wobbly, I met her during the Timber Wars, and now I live in Cloverdale. It is still a beat down mill town, despite everything. She was bombed and framed for her labor activism, but she sued the FBI and her estate eventually won a few million dollars of judgement. The bomber was never caught, just like Mooney/Billings. No justice.

https://www.iww.org/history/library/Bari

Perhaps it is my proximity to the Bay Area, born here never left, but YouTube watching makes me feel quite the hypocrite. Google is evil, TV is stupid. Their investors don't give a shit about anything but money, goog destroyed the Internet by flooding it with commercial advertising and speech censoring robots. They are the surveillance economy. Their workers are overpaid mini-plutocrats, destroyers of labor unity. San Francisco is shitty. Them there in the shiny city offices are the real danger, why support their propaganda? feh I am weak-minded. The old film clips of The White House during The Great Depression had sheep grazing the lawns around the grounds. lol and baah

Peace

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Submitted by QMS on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 9:05am

@eyo @eyo
The pain in your brain sounds debilitating. The science trying to understand brain function hasn't progressed much since the 70's, from what I see. Techs take pictures and locate activity, but have yet to collate a wholistic approach to mental health. Just more machines.
Can relate to ancient injustice. Some of the better minds I've known just walked away from the system after realizing it is a very ill-eagle.
Numbs the word.

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Submitted by enhydra lutris on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 9:57am
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@eyo
your absence. Some article is something like the Bay Guardian made a convincing case for a specific FBI asshole being Bari's attacker. The guy had actually attended a seminar om bomb making and placement, ostensibly as training in how to ferret out and spot them and their makers. As an exercise they built ones essentially identical to the one used on her. Said feeb was also a pro-logging fanatic. Never investigated, of course, because feeb.

Good to see you posting again.

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Submitted by eyo on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 11:51am

@enhydra lutris have fun in Sonoma, hope their goods are good today. My first comment here was in one of your number 7 essays, and you have never made me feel unwelcome despite all my griping. Thanks a lot.

The LP mill that closed in Healdsburg moved up here to Cloverdale, it is their yard whistle I hear all the time. Often I look out at the busy traffic and a flatbed goes by with a yuge saw blade on the back, and I remember that guy who was injured by one breaking in his face, after hitting a spike which they blamed on EarthFirst! because of course.

When I first moved here in 2013, a worker at the north mill got killed by defective machinery, he got trapped trying to unblock the de-barker. Let me know when a boss or a plutocrat gets stuck trying to unclog some machinery.

peace
and lol the whistle just blew again, so that took 15 minutes to write? 20? lol

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Submitted by mhagle on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 10:59am
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@eyo

Always thought provoking.

Currently on sort of a mind healing journey myself. Just read a book, "When the Body Says No" by Dr. Gabor Mate about the connection between trauma and illness. He is in a bunch of youtube videos that I appreciate as well.

And then I found this chick on youtube, Syma Kharal http://www.flourishinggoddess.com/ whom many here will think is insane. However, I find her videos helpful as well. They are outside the bounds of my experience - but - trying to be open to other approaches.

Thanks again for your info and stories about the bay area. Never been there so you are a looking glass into a different world. Smile

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Marilyn

"Make dirt, not war." eyo

Submitted by eyo on Wed, 01/09/2019 - 6:01am

@mhagle thanks for all your kind words and links, the Dr. Mate vids are great to see. They restored my faith in psychiatry a little bit. He's in Canada eh, with a different system of care. May all beings discover their inner goddess.

I noticed yesterday the Paul Chefurka website has gone dark, wah. Thankfully it is in the wayback machine, with license to share. He stopped writing but the site kept going and now it is gone. RIP Overshooters Anonymous.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181130123006/http://paulchefurka.ca/

For the last half dozen years this web site has served as my "explorer's notebook". It documents, in a very personal voice, my journey of discovery through the worlds of energy, ecology, economics and human culture. It describes my point of view on the largely unrecognized, widely misunderstood and potentially tragic predicament facing humanity as a result of our refusal to accept limits on our activities or aspirations.

I no longer see any point in singling out individual aspects of the human experience for special attention or criticism. Population growth, climate change, global corporatism, chemical pollution, resource depletion, species extinctions, ocean overfishing and acidification, global financial instability, mounting social disparities and injustices are all merely symptoms of a system that has been out of control for centuries (despite our earnest attempts to convince ourselves otherwise.) We have no choice left - or perhaps we never really had any other choice - but to ride the dragon until the human overshoot corrects itself, as overshoots always do.

The silver lining I see is that all the pressures coming from this process of correction can be useful goads toward personal self-development. "In all matters, strive to do the right thing." What does this mean to each of us? What does mindful living in the midst of the whirlwind entail, what does it require of us in terms of personal growth, in the development of wisdom and self-awareness? How might each of us resolve our alienation - from each other, from our societies, from nature, from our own place in the universe? How may we find the re-connections that are essential if we are to emerge from this tumultuous, careless human adolescence into individual and collective adulthood? These are deep questions for dark times.
Paul Chefurka

peace

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Submitted by HenryAWallace on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 9:53am

more so. That reminds me:

Recently, I developed a distaste for china decorated with some of the things that I would not want to put in my mouth, like butterflies or pine needles. (Flowers are ok. I deliberately don't look up which flowers are edible and which are not.)

It's weird and not even consistent, as I have plates depicting a live turkey outdoors that I like and use throughout November. I'm not in the market for china, and being turned off by certain china patterns does not require much of me or anyone else, so I guess my new, weird reaction is neither harming nor helping anything.

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Submitted by gjohnsit on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 10:36am

bloomberg

The lesson seems clear enough: Banks should raise capital while they can, and before they have to. The Federal Reserve apparently hasn’t learned it.
...The question is when to add to the buffer. In the U.S., now seems right. The economy has been expanding for nearly 10 years, inflation is close to the Fed’s target, and forecasters expect annual growth to peak this year at about 2.9 percent. Business lending standards are deteriorating even as corporate debt levels hover near record highs. Across the Atlantic, the U.K., France and eight other European countries have already raised their buffers.

The Fed hasn’t... On average, the six largest U.S. banks have less than $7 in equity for each $100 in assets. That’s more than they had before the 2008 crisis, but probably not enough to avoid distress in a similar situation. Economists at the Minneapolis Fed, for example, have estimated that banks need more than twice as much equity to make the probability of government bailouts as low as it should be.

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Submitted by magiamma on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 10:46am
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Going with the already bumpy flow just got bumpier. My friend martha just had a massive stroke and the pulled the iv out yesterday. Just retired two years ago. Head of ubc geriatric psyc. Amazing human good to the core. She will be missed. Om. Be here now. And now... sigh

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Submitted by mhagle on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 11:02am
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@magiamma

Oh my . . . another reminder of how every moment counts.

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Marilyn

"Make dirt, not war." eyo

Submitted by QMS on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 11:16am

@magiamma
So sorry magi for the bumps. I find it shocking that highly actualized individuals are suddenly gone. Knowing a whole posse of persons with no apparent positive impact on this planet, casting shadows almost indefinitely, seems upside-down, backwards, inside-out. Difficult to figure. Like to think the good ones have achieved their purpose, making life better for us, so can go on.
Sending hugs.

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Submitted by mhagle on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 12:35pm
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@QMS

. . . the good really do die young.

[video:https://youtu.be/6mMuhs4Jjvk]

He is not advocating that we be bad it's more a matter of repressed anger and trauma. Being individuals who cannot say no.

In my family, many of the good have died young. Maybe the case with Martha? Sad

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Marilyn

"Make dirt, not war." eyo

Submitted by QMS on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 12:43pm

@mhagle
With hopes of releasing the chains. If we are old, then it just takes some of us longer to get there.
Remember when you were young?

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Submitted by magiamma on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 3:44pm
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@mhagle
early 70s maybe. given that people are living into their 90s, yes. good, yes. she did a lot of good work in her life. she probably knew gabor and no doubt worked with him as most of her patients were over 80 and she was at ubc. Canada has as many people as CA. so, not so many. helps to talk. thx.

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Submitted by eyo on Wed, 01/09/2019 - 6:17am

@magiamma {hugs} I looked up her page at UBC, another good soul gone too soon.
She had amazing career, did important work. Thanks Martha. way to go
https://psychiatry.ubc.ca/person/martha-donnelly/

peace be the journey

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Submitted by mhagle on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 11:00am
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Lots of good stuff here. Smile

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Marilyn

"Make dirt, not war." eyo

Submitted by QMS on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 11:55am

@mhagle
Loggins and Messina circa 1971

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Submitted by Raggedy Ann on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 12:03pm
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I learned about mindfulness seven years ago when my daughter and I had a falling out. I was devastated so a friend recommended this book on mindfulness, to me, which turned my life around. My daughter and I have since reconciled, but the book still plays an important role in my life.

Have a beautiful day! Pleasantry

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Submitted by QMS on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 12:19pm

@Raggedy Ann
Self compassion. Glad it helped get you thru. Meditation on positive is directed mindfulness. I wonder how the schism works sometimes. Who's zooming who? Matters not if we are both in the same brain. It's an inside job. Wink

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Submitted by dystopian on Tue, 01/08/2019 - 4:08pm
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I saw Hot Tuna about 1980 at the Starwood, a little club on Sunset in L.A. Twenty feet or so from the stage. They did Water Song... and Hot Jellyroll Blues. The thrill is not gone. Jack Cassady and Jorma K. are pretty hard to beat. It was love at first hear for me.

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Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein