I walked a neighbor’s dog today.

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A visit with a local dog, I have a goggie companion, Jack Russell Terrier named Maggie

A dog named Maggie needs a home for a few days in September and her human friend suggested that she stay with Debbie and me for about five days while they are away. Today we went over to Maggie’s home for a visit and walked her over to ours to see how comfortable that would be for her. The hope was that we would find the whole experience acceptable to everyone concerned.

Maggie is a Jack Russell Terrier which is a breed I have no experience with, but she is very dog-like and responded well to my leash inputs and physical actions. It was about four blocks from her house to mine by a round-the-block route so we had some time for personal interaction. At first she tended to pull hard on the leash and my tugs were met with a firmer pulling on her part. I tried intermittent short pulls and she responded briefly, but soon was back to strong pulling. I began showing interest in various things along our route like trees, bushes, rocks and other things that I thought might interest her too. I would stop and inspect those things for about ten seconds and then move on to another one. She respected my stopping and demonstrating interest and would not pull away while I was still. When I started walking again she would begin pulling again but after several cycles of stopping and starting at those points of interest, she was beginning to walk with me instead of pulling me.

When we got to my house we entered the front door and went directly to the back door and out into the fully fenced in back yard. While still on the leash I let her lead me and inspect the entire periphery at her own pace of interest, but more or less I led the procedure by walking from one point of interest to the next one. One of the events was our neighbor’s dog Jade coming over to the wooden fence where they could sniff each other’s noses through the gaps between the vertical boards with about a two-inch gap. That was surprisingly brief, about ten seconds total. We had inspected the whole yard by the time her owner arrived.

Maggie and my whole private encounter was about ten minutes but she seemed perfectly comfortable being with me and I with her. I am looking forward to her visit with Debbie and me.

How to get along with people who disagree with us

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Getting along with others, Getting along with strangeness, Seeing an alternative reality, Seeing the unseen but seeable

Everyone is going to disagree with us about something. Some people are going to disagree with us so profoundly that they will have strong negative emotions toward us simply because they perceive that we belong to some particular category they hate. As soon as any defining label can be attached to us there will be someone who hates us. For example, politicians simply by choosing to be associated with a party, which is necessary to gain enough support to be effective, will automatically be a competitor to members of the other party and therefore be hated by the black-and-white thinkers of that other party.

Some people become so filled with resentment at perceived mistreatment from some other group or situation that they will refuse to even tolerate listening to objective facts being presented about that subject. Ideas that are not in absolute accord with their position are automatically hated. These days, with easy access to the propaganda that agrees with us, it becomes easy to fill one’s mind with highly sifted facts that prove we are right and everyone else is wrong and hates us. Therefore, it becomes legitimate for us to automatically hate them. This attitude comes from a personal history of bad treatment and resultant pain. Some people have been so subjected to chronic pain since their infancy that they have never experienced anything pleasant coming from some category of people. Thus it becomes easy for them to totally reject anything coming from that category and very easy to accept all information that makes them evil. Even direct observation of simple reality presented by those evil ones will be rejected because it will be seen as manipulated. Any carefully presented argument that includes a trifle of suspect information will be seen as coming from an evil place and rejected.

Everyone has their point of view, and we can assume that everyone has some things that we would agree with. Therefore, it makes sense to find those things we hold as true and value in common and continue our conversations on those points of agreement. Even people who hold us in contempt and disgust may have personal property that they would trade for personal property we possess. On that we can begin to form a bond of mutual interest.

Some people may choose to find personal satisfaction in holding unrealistic ideas because it gives their life a point of personal meaning. It feels better to them to cling to false hopes than to have no hope at all. Perhaps it is more effective when attempting to communicate with these people, perhaps everyone, to always totally accept them exactly as they are without any hesitancy, totally without reservation. To assume that I have the capacity to place my point of view anywhere in the universe, at least temporarily and therefore …

I accept you exactly as you are! I totally accept you and your opinions.

I seek to treat people better.

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Diary, I seek to treat people better., I walked the labyrinth twice today

Today I attended the memorial service for David and Judy Paulsmeyer at the UU Fellowship Church. I didn’t know them well, and our Sunday conversations had always been short and very pleasant. Generally, I spend my time there at the UU finding things to do. Easy little things like greeting people at the door, filling the dog watering bowl, wiping the dust of the benches, opening and closing the huge sanctuary doors, and picking up the collection. Also, I almost always bring a rock for the labyrinth and place it near the front door and pick up an earlier rock left there and take it to the labyrinth and place it in an appropriate location. My ten-minute walk in the labyrinth is a simple pleasure and gives me a bit of time to think in a noncommittal way about life in general.

Today was a special service for the Paulsmeyers who both died in a driving accident while coming back from visiting their grandchildren in Colorado. The service made clear what wonderful people they had been and the kindly service they had provided to their various local clubs, friends, and relatives. They were the salt of the earth in the kindness that they spread everywhere they went. True peacemakers.

I had parked my car a distance from our building but near the labyrinth and so I walked it both before and after the service. I needed the extra time to think about how I can be nicer, kinder and more helpful to those whom I encounter. Actually, I’m pretty good about that already, but I want to be much better, much kinder, and more accepting of people for who they are. I do post this blog with those thoughts in mind for the public to potentially benefit from, and I do lots of tiny things for the public benefit but when I heard today about David and Judy’s life I realized I can do much more.

I seek to treat people better.

Have we evolved to tolerate human stupidity?

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Evolution of society, Evolution of tolerance

The Eveish selection theory creates a plausible method for humans to have evolved the ability to speak and understand sentences. With the ability to generate sentences about one’s environment and thoughts, there arise conflicts with other speakers of the language representing different ways of speaking about the same thing.

We are aware that elephants will probably feel different, look different, smell different and taste different depending upon how they are approached, even though most of us have no close-up experience of elephants. As we grow to adulthood we realize that other people’s perceptions are different from ours and to maintain harmonious relations we tolerate their expressing themselves in ways incompatible with our perceptions. Most of us also learn to appreciate these different ways of seeing things, like elephants, because we realize a different point of view might be valuable to us at some time.

With a spoken language the problem of the foolishness of a person’s behavior comes to the fore in two main guises. First is some foolish behavior because of not knowing some particular piece of information, and that is usually forgiven when the facts are made available and whatever foolish behavior that came about because of the lack of information stops. The second kind of foolishness comes about when a person has available correct facts and for some unaccountable reason still maintains some form of counterproductive behavior.

Does our tolerance for the second kind of foolishness, the stupid kind, come about because of our tolerance for the first kind, the lack of correct information kind? Is this tolerance a wholly learned attribute we associate with our culture and limit to our own tribe? Or, is there a genetic component to tolerance? Not a hardwired genetic response, like a reflex, but more like the DNA that humans have that permits us, as children, to learn a language easily. We learn tolerance for our own kind of people easily and intolerance for outgroups just as easily. This trait seems so universal it seems there must be a genetic component to it. How could that arise?

Women in their mate selection must make a similar balance when they choose a man who will defend them but not be so aggressive that he will harm them. A man who will defend the tribe but not combat excessively with tribe members. A man who is sensitive to verbal truths and acts upon them but is willing to tolerate unknowable speculations about things and hesitates to act.

We have evolved to tolerate human stupidity because it makes society possible?

I had a strange thought on human physical beauty today.

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Creating more beautiful women, Creating more beauty, Strange thoughts

I was chatting with my geriatric dudes at the Looney Bean coffee shop this morning when one of the beautiful girls that frequent this wonderful place walked by. I mentioned to R, a retired professional artist, how great she looked today. He looked, he smiled, and we chuckled and lusted in ways only mid eighty-year-old guys can understand. Yes, it’s pathetic! All the same, we both have eyes long practiced in appreciating beautiful things, including women. About this time an obese young woman walked by, and then another. We both looked at them and then one another,  and I noticed a trace of sadness drift over R’s expressions.

Over the previous few weeks, my thoughts on creating a new form of food diet and planning to publish it as a book within a couple of months came up. Thus we were primed to rehash what might be done to help these women regain a more beautiful and more healthful form. We have already hashed over the ethical arguments of interfering in other people’s lives and have come to the conclusion that the fact that American people are spending thirty-three billion dollars on diet plans per year indicates that these people are pleading for help. I have been carrying that thought a bit further and felt that my not sharing my methods with this suffering public would itself be immoral behavior. That feels a bit arrogant and pretentious but while expressing those concerns to R I had another thought.

What if a large percentage of obese and overweight women actually used my diet plan and returned to a healthier condition—wouldn’t they look better? Wouldn’t the two of us former artists enjoy our few remaining years even more just by seeing more beautiful women walking around in our favorite coffee shop? Furthermore, wouldn’t all the young men around here be more appreciative too, and wouldn’t the formerly obese women feel better being thought of as beautiful rather than … ignored?

Publishing this “Love Our Life – diet” plan seems like a win-win situation for everyone.

You and only you are in charge of what you eat.

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LOL diet is a lifestyle, Love Our Life - diet, You choose

Other people may have a lot to do what is on your plate, but you and only you are in charge of what you eat. Also, you and only you are in charge of what you do. There is an infinity of things that influence everything we do and much of the time we have very little influence over what that will be. There are forces like gravity to which we must submit, and many people will complain about how arbitrary nature seems to be. And yet, nature operates under the most fine-grained laws of behavior. It is beings with a choice of action that are arbitrary in their relationship to us, and humans are the most arbitrary of all. Yet, even with human beings, there is a lot of predictable actions and reactions that we can depend upon in almost all situations. Generally, people follow the Golden Rule, and if we treat them well they will treat us well.

It is when we come to our relationship with our own selves that we have the most flexibility and the most problems. The specific problem I have been thinking about these last few months is the food we people eat and tend to overeat. Why are people overeating and at the same time are reported to be spending five hundred billion dollars per year to eat less? Famine is the natural thing being avoided by overeating, but nearly all of the billion obese people are not facing a famine at present, and probably have never faced one in their entire lives. That they don’t want to be obese is proven by the fact that they spend so much money trying to drop the excess weight. They are asking for help. Desperately asking for help! They are not getting help, they are getting advice, but the advice is impossible for them to follow as is proven by the obvious fact that billions of people are clearly getting heavier every year. They know what is best for them but they can’t do what is best for them. Why? Their advisors spread the guilt deep and say it is because of these people’s lack of willpower. And yet, people of normal bodily weight are exerting no willpower at all to maintain their healthy status. It isn’t willpower that is lacking, it is a totally wrong approach by the diet and medical industries that is the problem. People are being told the wrong things to do.

“You and only you are in charge of what you eat” is an obvious statement and would seem to be spreading even more guilt upon obese people. It is the total number of calories eaten versus those burned by the person’s body that determines the gain or loss of weight. Probably true to the last calorie, but you can’t see calories. So what is the problem, and more important, what is the solution?

I will get to that and it will be easy and fun.

Presenting the Beatitudes to my atheist friends.

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Sermon on the Mount, The Beatitudes revealed

I have mentioned this before to my atheist group of friends that Jesus was by some definitions an atheist himself. This would not be accepted by most believers, but if you read with an open mind the beginning of his only recorded sermon, called the Beatitudes, you will understand that it is a possibility. Read lines 7, 8, 9, 10 as a progression to a higher state. Lines 4 thru 7 describe a progression to a more developed state of being, but he doesn’t mention heaven. However, in line 8 we have people who have developed spiritually to the condition he calls pure in heart and they are rewarded by seeing God, but only as spectators. Line 9 – those who are peacemakers are called children of God; that is, the males could be called sons of God and the females daughters of God. What could possibly be higher than being a child of God? To be Gods themselves! And that is the zinger implication in line 10. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The clear implication is that children of God when they behave properly become the Lords of Heaven. What else could the unambiguous phrase mean? – Theirs is the kingdom of heaven!

Matthew 5 King James Version (KJV)

5 And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him:

² And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying,

³ Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

⁴ Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

⁵ Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

⁶ Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

⁷ Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

¹⁰ Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

When the Beatitudes are read as suggested above, Gods and Heaven become a very different thing than visiting with an old dude sitting on a Golden Throne listening to harps and singing angels forever and listening to a hundred billion dead humans confessing their guilt and lamentations.

Being persecuted for righteousness’ sake is the highest state and it is being punished for doing the right things for other people, meaning humanity as a whole. That it is other people being helped is stated in the previous line where those doing that are called children of God because they are creating peace between contentious people. The higher thing beyond helping individual other people is helping the whole of humanity. That is the highest form of helping and thus the highest reward is granted to them and theirs is the kingdom of heaven. They have become … God.

This approach to Jesus is too practical and real-world for the otherworldly inclined.

The chaos is finally easing up

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Our house is almost done., Walking a dog named Beauty

The painter finished with our living room an hour ago and the ceiling looks just like it did a couple of months ago. Having a fully mature Ponderosa pine fall on one’s house is not a recommended event. Interesting at times, and if it happens to you, you will discover that your neighbors are okay people. Probably not the ones you would seek out at your coffee shop but basically okay for short conversations.

A totally unexpected thing happened. After I got back from my morning chat with my old cronies I asked the house painter if I could walk his dog. “Beauty,” a one-year-old sort of German shepherd mix, had been tied up all morning and seemed to be comfortable with that but all the same she would probably like a walk, so I volunteered. Debbie and I took our usual walk around the neighborhood with Beauty on a leash, as required by local law, and we all had a fantastically good time. We had such a good time that about two hours later I asked if we could take another walk. We were all a little calmer this time but we had even more fun.

I haven’t had a dog since Tiger died, essentially of old age, in 1984. I still feel an absolute loyalty to the memory of the best friend I ever had and probably will ever have. Other than Debbie of course, but there was something of a companionship that no human can ever provide that a dog can and often does.

Debbie and I walk over to the local dog park a couple of times per week and know quite a few people and dogs there. Often we play with them, but it is always with the owner’s permission, and thus even though I have a good time as do the dogs, there is always the owner overseeing the whole event and other dogs distracting the flow. Those problems didn’t exist today and the fun of being alone with a dog was like the fifteen years I spent with Tiger.

Perhaps it’s time to get … another dog.

I have a bit of a cold.

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I have a cold

Yesterday afternoon I started an uncontrollable tickle-induced coughing. It wasn’t much, only once about every five minutes. I attributed it to the dust that had been stirred up by the various construction projects in and around my house, even though the coughing spells were away from home. Perhaps it was just some particle of who-knows-what finding its way to a triggering nerve.

Between six PM and about ten PM, there weren’t any symptoms, but about four AM I woke up with the clear feeling that I had a cold. Should I begin my hot bath routine, or should I go back to bed and start doing it about nine AM? I chose to go back to bed; however, I didn’t go back to sleep and was slowly feeling even more like I was sick. Soooo, I got back up and began my usual hot bath sequence, with a small exception: I only raised my body temperature to 100.5° F. The usual routine is 102° F. The reason for the lower temperature is that I’m getting older and getting some arrhythmias occasionally, about one per minute when my temperature goes up to 100.5° F. My normal sitting in front of my computer temperature is 96.8° F., which is two degrees low for a normal adult but is average for an eighty-two-year-old.

Today I feel okay but I did take two baths as per my normal routine and I have been avoiding my friends so I won’t give them a cold.

I need help!

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Laugh-out-loud diet, LOL is not a diet its some easy habits.

I have decided to write a short book for the Laugh Out Loud diet. The problem becomes that it is necessary to create more than a book to make this non-diet idea work. It needs a whole new industry to promote it if it is going to be successful. And I want it to be super successful because literally billions of people’s lives are at stake. My desire sounds outrageous; after all, I am just one person, but there are approximately a billion people currently reported to be seriously overweight, and their condition brings them health problems and an early death. If I can do something to prevent those people’s deaths it is imperative that I do so. Right? Most people would simply sluff it off and say, “Why bother. It’s their personal problem. Forget it.” I’m accused of being arrogant for even thinking I can do something.

I believe the current diet industry, which is reportedly consuming a half trillion (five hundred billion) dollars per year is a failure because if there was a diet that worked everyone would soon know about it and do it. And yet, it seems those figures must be wrong because it would mean every person was spending a hundred dollars a year on a diet plan. Whatever the spending on diets is, it must be dwarfed by the amount spent on medical bills and lost wages because of the failure of the diet plans and the resulting obesity epidemic.

It isn’t because those people want to fail. I can’t imagine people squandering half a trillion dollars per year doing something they don’t like to do so they will fail. Can you? I don’t know, maybe you can. The problem is that the diet plans that exist are asking people to do things they can’t do and then blaming them for not doing the impossible. The promoters then think and say things like, “It’s your own fault you’re so fat and ugly!” “Obviously, you should eat less and exercise more.”

The Laugh Out Loud diet is laughing at the diet industry’s failure.