What am I trying to do?

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Diet strategy, Goals for diet strategy, Writing a diet chapter

The goal of the new book I’m working on is to publish some ideas for public consumption on how to live one’s life more abundantly. The first chapter is about diet. That may seem a strange way to begin a book about life, but without a proper diet leading to a healthy body, there isn’t much chance of having a healthy brain with a fully functioning mind capable of adapting ideally to its whole body’s environment.

It is estimated that a billion people are presently obese to the point it is interfering with their present health. There may also be an equivalent number of people who are underweight from an absolute lack of sufficient nutrients. Those are obviously very generalized numbers but they are indicative of a truly massive problem for humanity. The world food situation for humans at present is probably better than at any time in the hundred thousand years that modern humans have been living on Earth. The evidence for that assertion is the rapidly expanding world population, which could only occur if there was an abundance of food. Until there is some form of fertility control that is acceptable worldwide, nature will assert itself with occasional famines. What I hope to accomplish with the new diet strategy is fewer people becoming obese or emaciated.

Hopefully when people understand what they need to do to best overcome either obesity or emaciation with the resources available to them, they can at least nudge their behavior in the best direction. When the population being offered a solution to a problem is two billion, then even a tiny change in the behavior of a small percentage of them is impacting a vast number of people.

Clearly, the current diet industry that purportedly grosses a half a trillion dollars per year is failing their public because the percentage of obese people is growing rapidly. One of the strange misconceptions our current public has is the idea of beginning a diet on New Year’s Day. It is going against a billion years of evolution to begin a diet during the time of year when food is becoming most difficult to obtain.

There are other obviously wrong ideas we can easily change with correct information. 

The grind continues.

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Diary, Minor disaster recovery, Ponderosa trees, Workman in our house

Nothing intellectually challenging happened today but there is still a struggle with having various workers in our house. They are good people and I do enjoy talking with them but all the same, it is invasive. The ceiling is now patched and the first coat of mud and sanding accomplished so the living room and the two bedrooms look okay to a very quick walkthrough. The furniture is still off to one side so those rooms have a reduced functionality. The external things are fixed and their major features such as the fences are all up and the roof is reshingled and the solar panels are reinstalled and working. Another three days and all the major interior work will be finished. Then we can call some gardeners and housekeepers to clean up things and make them more livable again. Quite frankly I’m not feeling up to doing those things. Our back yard has fifteen foot wide and one foot high mounds where each of the former Ponderosa trees were living. It would require major physical work to flatten those things out and professionals would probably bring in some equipment, and besides the whole back yard needs to be rototilled to make it more ready to replant grass after the hundred years of pine tree detritus has been chemically rebalanced to where grass will grow. With the trees gone and more direct sunshine, we could probably have a large garden rather than just a few rows of vegetables.

This afternoon the wind blew strongly for a few minutes, and the neighbors beyond the one whose house was destroyed last month by a falling Ponderosa tree came over and said the tree next to the destroyed house was swaying dangerously. There has been no effort to rebuild that destroyed house yet and it is still under a big tarp. The lady that was living in that house was taken care of for a few days by the Red Cross but I haven’t heard what happened to her since that day.

Five big trees fell within striking distance of our house but only one of them hit us. There are still about five that could hit us but only two that are really dangerous. The worst one is my favorite tree in the whole world at this moment. We named it Moe from the three stooges. Curly was removed a year ago; he was sick. Larry fell last month in the windstorm, and Moe has been cracking our foundation under my feet, so, I hate to say it but it looks like it’s either him or me. Like Oscar Wilde said about the ugly wallpaper in his room in Paris, “One of us has got to go!” Oscar lost that one and died. I like Moe and he’s lived a good life for two hundred years and he would probably outlive me if I let him alone, but …

Sometimes I must take care of my own probable future.

 

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.

Clockwork Purple – Hurrah for Horemheb!

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Clockwork purple, Pharaoh Horemheb, Writers prompt

Clockwork Purple prompt of May 8, 2017, 10 AM

The Secret Places of the Lion by George Hunt Williamson

page 105, line 9 – prompt – 45 minutes –

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“If we must have a ‘Pharaoh of the Oppression,’ it would be Horemheb, for he persecuted his own people as much as the Hebrews.”

I don’t need no stinking pharaoh ruling over me. No oppression either. Horemheb got civilization off to a really bad start with all of that stacking up of stones into a gigantic pyramid to please his egotistical maniacal monstrous hallucinations. He gave human individuals, and humanity in general, a taste for brutal submission to an idea which even nowadays, some four thousand years later we haven’t gotten over. Some of us have dedicated our lives to trying to solve this problem, that of liberating our human minds from the oppression of a supposedly greater being than our own mind telling us what is good for us, and what we should think and what we should do.

As I write these thoughts on our Western traditions of submission to powerful human-like figures telling us what to do, I realized it was ever thus with all civilizations. It appears they all got their start with piling up various pieces of Mother Earth. It was a totally separate society in Japan that made the Key Hole pyramids, erected to please some sort of deity, but that effort had to be driven by some egomaniac human being with despotic fantasies. Horemheb wasn’t unique in his oppressions.

Just north of modern Mexico City there are some magnificent pyramids. I’ve been inside of Teotihuacan’s enormous Pyramid of the Sun, and a hundred miles to the east of there are reported to be the biggest pyramids in the world still buried under a thousand years of overgrowth. None of these pyramids were built by the gods, or the rulers; they were built by myriads of now unknown people somehow being compelled by their overlords to make big piles of stones and dirt.

Even in remote South America, which was until recently the most remote place from human origins, there are the Moche pyramids, some of them still buried but now being exhumed for the tourist trade.

It seems everywhere I cast my thoughts to the beginnings of history and of civilizations there is someone, somehow, compelling multitudes of people to pile up rocks and dirt and do other absurd stuff.

Even here in the United States we seem to have this strange need to pile something up toward the heavens. What rational need is there to organize millions of people to put a man on the Moon to take a few steps and collect a few rocks and bring home some dirt?

Our mind-manipulating leaders have sent us ordinary people on wild goose chases from the beginning of history. It appears we humans have a genetically built-in need to strive for something preposterous. All it needs to get this crazy DNA thing going is an idea that touches the human stupid button.

Horemheb was one of the first, but we presently have new masters of the absurd running our American government and our minds. It appears that other people of other countries of our current world have the same need because they are choosing people for their leaders who have the need to oppress them with idiotic ideas.

If we must have a “Pharaoh of the Oppression,” it appears we have elected the perfect man. He is famous for his great wall of a “pyramid” that is now being stretched out over a thousand miles of desert. For the present moment, he is just building his Great Wall but what’s next? It’s like the Great Wall of China, which was a vast collection of stones strung out to promote and protect some maniac’s ego. Why don’t the slaves just ignore the ones who get these stupid things started? The not so obvious answer is … because it is built into the human DNA to want an unreachable goal to strive for. To struggle as a group, as a whole society, as a whole civilization for something so unattainable in reality, that a physical symbol is postulated by the god-like leader that organizes everyone to submit. An idea that is so compelling that it becomes okay, even the law of the land, to compel everyone to … SUBMIT.

If we must have a “Pharaoh of the Oppression,” it would be Horemheb, for he persecuted his own people as much as the Hebrews. And now it is not only the Hebrews and his own people being compelled to submit, it is everyone on planet Earth, and everyone that will come into existence forever more who will be persecuted. The new super-duper-computers and their webs and links to our minds will see to that.

Hurrah for Horemheb! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

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.

More simple than money

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A soldier needs his salt, A writer's group prompt, More simple than money., Salt is worth its weight in gold

More simple than money, he sat back in some spilled salt.

Markus had received his week’s allotment of salt, which for a Roman soldier was in no small part his pay. Sure, a man can use the little gold coins with Caesar’s picture on it; they are what most of the young guys are working for, but being an old soldier Markus knew that sometimes it’s the salt that’s the essence of life.

Without salt, a man can’t sweat, and if a man can’t sweat he can’t physically exert himself, and he can’t even think clearly. Civilians don’t know how important salt is to a soldier or to a farmer for that matter. If a Roman soldier must go on his thirty-mile march once a month, with his weapons, armor and a forty-pound backpack to maintain his status as a centurion and get his pay, he must be able to sweat. For the younger guys who haven’t learned the routines, there is also the problem of failing to sweat properly and thus to complete the march with the cohort. They get a couple of overnights in the brig as punishment and they learn; a Roman soldier needs his salt. Without the salt, he can’t fight well when it comes to a battle.

Salt is life to a soldier and sometimes it is more important than food. If it comes to a combat situation he must be able to dependably exert himself to his uttermost. If he cramps up from lack of salt it means a real risk of his death and the death of his combat buddies. Thus salt is life.

Without salt, a hard-marching soldier will discover that after a couple of days of constant sweating he just can’t do anything that requires effort. If you don’t get your salt, and thus can’t sweat, your body temperature rises to a fever and then your muscles cramp up and your body becomes a worthless lump of stiff pain. If you rest for a few minutes the cramps will go away, but without getting some salt into your system you will quickly cramp up again with even the slightest exertion. When his muscles cramp a fully armed and powerful man can’t move and can’t fight and thus is easily killed. Getting one’s pay in gold coins is great to have for fun and the many other desirable things, but on a long march on a hot day the old saying “Salt is worth its weight in gold” sometimes becomes a life-and-death reality.

More simple than money, Marcus thought as he sat back in some spilled salt and rejoiced, for he knew that those enemies his cohort were pursuing were now in desperate trouble. Their supply sergeant must have been crazy because he had dropped their unit’s salt bag when being pursued, but apparently, he had kept their army’s pay bag filled with gold.

After this hot day, they wouldn’t be able to fight tomorrow when they ran out of the personal allotment of salt they all carried. They would probably be forced by lack of salt to give up without a fight. Their officers would command their men to desperate charges and retreats but it wouldn’t work, Markus thought, because our commanders would urge us to bluff-charge them and then retreat slowly and to back away and stay just out of their arrow shot range. The enemy charges would be short, probably less than a hundred steps, and then because they lacked salt some of their men would cramp up and their assault would become disorganized and they would be compelled to halt. By tomorrow afternoon, their army would be lying prostrate on the ground begging us for water and salt.

We would, of course, take their weapons but not kill them, not even hurt them. Instead, we would securely bind them and then give them water and treat them well. We could now sell these perfectly healthy men for a great price in the slave market. A good man’s price on the market will bring a couple of years of pay to a common soldier.

More simple than money. Marcus sat back on the spilled salt and thought about how to help his soon-to-be slave become perfectly healthy again. And, of course, when healthy how he would bring a great price at the market.

She wanted the couple to be comfortable

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How to experience pleasure, Unearned pleasure

Ahonu and Aingeal’s writing group, March 6th 2017, Bend, Oregon

The 45-minute prompt comes from The Reincarnation of Columbus chosen by Ahonu, random page 92, random line 7

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She wanted this couple to be comfortable but more importantly, she wanted them to stay long enough for us to get all the answers we needed so desperately.

Charles LeRoy Scamahorn’s feeble effort.

Charles asked, what is the real question behind the question, “What is it that you need to know and do to help another person be comfortable?” Everyone often says they are seeking happiness and comfort, and many of them go to hear an off-the-cave-wall reply from some guy with long hair pulled into a ponytail, or perhaps left to grow and flow and get horribly tangled, or perhaps wearing some really weird clothes, or perhaps sitting near naked conspicuously situated in the middle of the marketplace, or sometimes living in a barrel, sometimes on a tall column, sometimes standing on a box with a hangman’s noose around his neck in Hyde park in London. All of those gurus are giving us their truths, giving us their ultimate realizations spoken from a place more extreme than a normal person’s moment of personal desperation.

The wild words come from those who not only know they are going to die in the long run, in the abstract distant future, but now. These are the people speaking from the edge of oblivion and they know it’s their time to vanish into the void of eternity and for them, it’s now.  Right NOW. Their end will come right at the moment they finish this sentence, perhaps even before they finish it, perhaps this very inst … !

Are these desperate folks at the moment of their death giving us the answers we need for living our daily lives?

And yet … what do they know that is going to be helpful to us, to me? Probably I’m not going to die in this very instant. After all, I’m in good health and statistically, I have maybe ten years to live, and if I act on the advice these desperate people are offering me in their last moment of life, most of my future life is going to be miserable. If I live every instant for instant gratification all my money will soon be gone and I may be living in a barrel being rolled around the town square, or if I satisfy my instant desire for candy or sex or other people’s fancy stuff I will soon find myself about to be killed for my moment of instant self-gratification for violating someone else’s rights and the local laws.

The answers we will probably find most helpful are not the ones spoken by those people living at their extreme moments, but from those people who have found the way to sustain comfortable lives. Thus it appears more reasonable to turn away from those with considerable experience in desperation and seek out those living in tranquility and humor. To talk with mild mannered people in coffee shops about the things they enjoy doing, and not spend much time with the guy hung over a liquor bar, or living in a barrel, or standing on an executioner’s box. Oh, yes, we can occasionally listen for a few minutes but then walk away and go to our garden and grow some vegetables and flowers. Or go to a social gathering where people are working on a public works project, building a new highway, or fixing potholes in the old highway. That is, to seek out and find people who are doing something that they enjoy doing for the whole community’s good and something that everyone can participate in with helpful actions. That is, they are not fretting about various personal resentments and social injustices, but are treating their fellow human being better than they treat themselves. They are making everyone’s world a better place by their actions. Perhaps those actions need to be motivated by kind thoughts, but it is the external actions that have the meaning. Thoughts and feelings that are not expressed in actions go to the grave if the actions are not completed.

Seeking and getting the pleasure of instant gratification, while exerting no personal effort, may work for an instant, but that instant will soon pass and be followed by difficulty and the confusion of trying to bring on another moment of unearned pleasure.

Experiencing unearned pleasure is the path to permanent pain.

The Tao Teh Ching – #35 – Revealed by Lao Tzu – Rendered by Charles Scamahorn

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The Tao Teh Ching

35

When people see attractive things, they approach;
When they see repellent things, they depart.
—
Offer beautiful music and tasty food, and people will flock. Yet
The secret way cannot be heard, and
It can neither be seen nor tasted, but
When you use it, it never fails.

36

How do I get the lines for the Seven Sages Mosaic analysis?

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Making sense of the Seven Sages mosaic, We must believe what we can see and test.

Last week I posted the Kom Ombo and the Alexandria analysis lines and since then have had several opportunities to explain them to friends. Some people readily agree that the lines clearly form alignments that were obviously created by the artist of the mosaic. Others see only a blizzard of nonsense lines and think I am making up the alignments. Anyone can draw lines between any two points, so what’s the fuss? They say, even if a few spots sometimes do line up, that doesn’t mean anything beyond the fact that an artist lined up a few things for an unknown artistic effect.

What I must demonstrate is that each and every line for every one of the geographic locations identified has a minimum of three points of interest accurately forming the line. In fact I have insisted that there be at least three parallel lines and horizontally flipped lines too. Each of these original lines must be meaningfully aligned while standing alone before they are related to anything else that can be linked to them.

In the two posted analyses all those alignments were shown, but they were shown while in relation to many other lines. Before these alignments can be appreciated by a person new to them there must be an unambiguous demonstration of their precision. What I did show with the Kom Ombo and the Alexandria lines on the mosaic, already posted, is that the latitudes indicated in the mosaic were within six miles of the locations of those places important to the Romans in the year 79 AD.

Unfortunately, those alignments on a modern geographic map mean nothing to someone who doesn’t accept the precision of the original alignments on the Seven Sages of Greece mosaic or the necessity of those positions being carefully located on the mosaic for this analysis to work.

Why are the seven sages of Greece interested in a globe?

All the lines in all of the analysis charts are as accurate as is the white line descending from the sundial at the top of the column. That white line is perfectly vertical; it descends exactly from the tip of the sundial. It goes exactly through the eye of the sage wearing the brown shirt. It goes precisely to the tip of the pointing stick, and it goes precisely to the tip of the toe of the sage holding the pointing stick.

At this time I don’t assert anything other than these four points line up over a distance that is more than halfway across the mosaic. So what? That doesn’t mean anything! True enough. Standing alone it only indicates a particular alignment of four points. All I am asking a viewer to do at this time is to agree that those four points line up. If a person is unwilling to admit that those points line up then there is no reason to progress further because this whole analysis is based on the alignment of points on this mosaic.

Some people prefer to believe that extraterrestrials created ancient things rather than humans.

I try to get back into my groove.

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A world of premeditated lies, lies, Yes Virginia there is a Santa Claus

After four full-grown Ponderosa trees choosing not to fall on me and one twelve-inch diameter spruce fending off the worst scenario there came a blizzard of people. All well intentioned, but all the same it was a lot of social interaction. Then with talking to the neighbors and meeting the many people who live within a stone’s throw of where I sit, assuming there weren’t any walls in between them and my desk, I’m tired.

Today I went down to the Looney Bean coffee shop and poured out my sad story to my old buddies. They were interested enough to look at my photos of the events, but then we got back to important old dude talk. In this case, it is an ongoing batch of riffs on lying. I being vehemently against lying in all its forms and most everyone else trying valiantly to explain to me how lies help soothe the social flow. The greatest argument comes from the old Christmas lie that people tell little kids. “Yes, Virginia there is a Santa Claus” being a wonderful thing for children to enjoy, believing in that nonsense. And the fun the adults have in watching the confusion wrought on their childish minds. I insist that it does the child permanent harm. That the lie becomes part of their character and that it warps their perception of reality, forevermore.

These old dudes laugh at me, but I say their lying creates a permanent distrust of all people in these children’s minds. If they can’t even trust their parents to tell them the truth, there is no one they can trust. By creating a society of liars we set us all on a road to social collapse. It has happened to our society before and created a millennium of Dark Ages after a smoothly operating society based on truth, that had lasted nearly a thousand years, was destroyed by a new set of ideas based on fantasy and perpetrated by a blizzard of complex lies.

We must communicate with the greatest possible candor or watch our society wither and die.