Life is a holistic experience. Of course we all want to avoid the parts that cause us pain, but to deny half is to deny the whole. When we share our all is the beginning of a wondrous journey.
"Joy is in the ears that hear." Do we deny the raucous sound of a semi-truck and listen only to birdsong? Eventually, if the semi-truck doesn't move, we'll end up eating that bird...
When you make yourself into a doormat, don't be surprised when people wipe their feet on you.
"No" is probably the shortest word in the English language. Amazing how hard it is for some people to say AND mean. Especially to people we love.
"I have often heard it told that women want a man who is sensitive and is not afraid to express his feelings." When women say this is what they want, they are only stating half of what they mean.
Look at the last part. "...not afraid to express his feelings." That includes the bad with the good.
If you don't like something that is going on, say so. That way you'll keep the respect of your partner as well as being able to respect yourself once the storm is over. They may not like what they hear, but they'll respect you for speaking your mind.
Suffering in silence isn't macho, it isn't attractive, and it damn sure isn't healthy. Don't confuse kindness with weakness. The strength of an oak is in its roots, not in its leaves. Having a backbone doesn't mean you have to be mean, it just means you have to stand up straight and be consistent in your actions as they are derived from an inner strength and conviction.
Mountains made by moles, Bosses and a**hole, By the end of the day, Is there evil in your way?
When sleep will rise and Give us reprieve from Hard-edged industry, In a sterile-machinescape.
Laboring, poor in spirit For no dignity awaits But in our dreams at night. By the end of the day.
There's something to be said By the silent, sarcastic dead Walking in the graveyard Broken dreams on every marker.
Lying, untroubled in eternity The long sleep that waits, That waits, for you and me, Silent susurrus of waiting, Waiting for all of us, By the end of the day.
"How did it happen?" Bess wanted to know, breaking me away from my scarlet reverie.
"He died quick, Bess." I assured her. I wanted to spare her the details of the incident. Mostly out of guilt. It was my fault Jaru was dead, after all. "Painless, I promise."
"You're hiding something, Lance." She peered out of her green eyes at me, every inch the Seeress that she denied she was. She had born Jaru three very powerful Prescients in her womb, and that talent didn't all come from Jaru. "What happened?"
"You know how it is..." I shrugged; to many backwater planets ferreting out creatures that were completely invisible to normal people. And then I had a thought. "No, you don't. Jaru never talked to you about the job, did he?"
"He always said it was better I didn't know." She said, a far-off and vague look coming into her eyes. Private memories. "That the ways of Anima were a two-edged sword and he didn't want me to get cut."
"Jaru was a wise man." I said. I was suddenly holding back tears. "He was the best of us."
"But I want to know." She said, tears in her own eyes. "I want to know who my husband was finally. All of it."
"Bess...no, don't make me do this..." I said; avoidance. It's hard to be a druid. Every memory is embedded like fire into our soul while we're in the flux, coordinating chaos, channeling the quantum foam, shaping realities. I remembered all of my battles fought next to Jaru, in detail. I could never forget. Guilt slammed into my soul...even the last battle; especially the last battle...
"Is that why you never got married?" She asked suddenly, her eyes widening. "You didn't want anything you cared about getting cut by the chaos out there." And she gestured at the universe at large.
"I never found the right girl." I said. But I had. And then the chaos came...indelibly etched into my soul...there was the eidolon of Rebecca's face as the weres tore here to shreds, and me bound to a tree with ropes of twined mistletoe, my Anima bound to the tree as surely as my body.
Jaru wouldn't be just in time for me ever again. The tears came in earnest from my eyes now.
I have lost so much in this war. This senseless carnage that doesn't even have the power of Religion behind it anymore. Just ritual, and the knowledge that by whatever name you give it, entropy is always at the door, ready to take it all away...
She was understandably distraught. But strangely relieved at the same time.
The lady is round. Plump is a mild way of describing her obesity, and will not accept gene-therapy to correct what she sees as no fault at all.
"I like food. I don't like doctors." She told me once, smiling. "I accept the consequences."
Now, she sat at the kitchen table, quiet tears leaking out of her eyes, but she was otherwise calm as she observed how long she had loved Jaru. "...since the first time I laid eyes t'his face."
Gandra was a small planet in the Hydra constellation, very rural, not much liquid water. All lakes and dry tundra, mostly. Bess had been born there, never left what Jaru had sometimes called "...that dry little mud-ball". Never where Bess could hear him. He loved her, loved her simplicity in what was an otherwise complicated universe for him. At least that's the way I thought of their relationship.
"The magic scared me at first...that was over 90 years ago, you know that?" She shrugged, looking at her hands, seemingly mystified by the youth that still radiated from them. "The rediscov'ry of Anima sure changed everythin' didn't it, Lance?"
I nodded, staying quiet, letting her talk. Longer life, or shorter, if you were on the front lines. But that's the price humanity paid for faster-than-light travel. God's indeed. The Tree of Life as a bribe for military service.
Haha. Anima. The Force That Binds. Or Liberates. Magic was energy. The mysteries of the Old One's were still held hostage and parceled out as bribes for service.
Laughable. I was starting to think like Satan. Blasphemy! Haha!
It wasn't funny. I was treading on dangerous mental and spiritual soil. That thin, grey line...
The grass was green. The trees were green. The bees were yellow. The sunlight was red. Somewhere in between everything turned black.
My list of grievances grew longer as I struggled against the pull of red thoughts in a green world, marching resolutely up the driveway of a house on a planet far from where I was used to being; the entire landscape felt hostile. It was hostile. I was a druid far from my home eco-sphere, and the anima was a stranger, and extremely xenophobic.
A druid who had a job to do. And not an easy job, either. I had to tell a woman her husband was dead.
Dead. Just like that. In this day and age.
A druid to boot. My partner.
Revenge is red. Red thoughts can lead to black magic in the heart of a druid. Considering who I am, that's a dangerous thing, a line that cannot be crossed. A thin, grey line.
Human's were not alone in this universe, and it took them going out into space to rediscover the basic truth of the universe about their own planet. Magic was universal. When the Great Expansion met the mysticism of the Old Ones, a whole new paradigm had to be embraced.
Old Ones. What an understatement.
Jahweh, Satan, Annunaki, what once passed as gods until humanity matured beyond this definition. And this wasn't the first war to be waged in their names by humans, and Jaru wasn't the first soldier to die, but it still didn't make things any easier as I came up the stairs to ring the bell and tell Bess the damn demons had gotten him this time...
I still say #3 Ain't no racer That you'll ever see Better than Dale, Earnhart, Sr. Best Driver ever. It ain't racing anymore, its just something on TV.
What really gets your goat? How do you think that reflects on you?
Okay. I'll start. What really gets my goat is when people don't allow each other the dignity of being human. They don't accept each other, they don't agree with one another, and they don't respect each other. It pisses me off.
I shouldn't be angry really. I'm just as guilty as everyone of suffering intolerance at times. The peeve of mine above shows my intolerance. I should just accept stupidity, greed, and anger as human nature and go on about my selfish, unconcerned life, right?
Perhaps if people allowed each other this dignity, the world really would end, because human nature just can't imagine harmony. They said it well in the Matrix, "Humans define their reality by suffering."
I don't know what my anger at this says about me. Perhaps, in the long run, I'm just an idealist, but I think change can come about by the earnest action of just one person. The first step has to be made. And I'm from pioneer stock so I say, I'll be the first.
There's always more than just two ways of doing things, and I shall be remembered as the one who said:
Lately I've been doing a lot more reading than writing. I've gone through my entire collection of Frank Herbert trying to gain some inspiration for writing a holistic sci-fi saga.
Many writers outside the genre don't quite understand the difficulty in writing good sci-fi.
Two words that may get my difficulties across: World-building.
What most mainstream fiction writers don't quite understand about spec-fic is that they (the mainstream writer) have already got a whole world around them with real people and events to inspire and instruct.
The idea of being God is all really exciting until it gets down to the nuts and bolts of creating a completely imaginary world. Too many options, and lots of decisions and they all have to fit. Anything less and the work gets away from you.
With spec-fic it takes a hell of a lot longer than six days. And one day of rest seems like a mere nap.
And by this tone you expect to win people over to your way of thinking? With this sort of mocking ascerbiscism?
I happen to have some very conservative views, or maybe you are too busy listening to yourself talk to pay attention to what other people have to say. Ultimately not my problem. But, I am a Goldwater Conservative, not a Pat Robertson Conservative.
You and Palin can take your religious convictions and shove them down someone elses' throat. I'm not interested. I happen to know from first-hand experience about Geological Study, radio-carbon dating, and how the USGS was hobbled during Bushes presidency much like many other scientific endeavors that weren't critical to the "New Crusade".
Do I seriously think that you think anything? Not if you bring up Ben Stein. Don't worry about retorting. I shall not sully myself with your threads again.
There's a lust for power in the Irish as there is in every people, a lusting after the Ascendancy where you can tell others how to behave. It has a peculiar shape with the Irish, though. It comes of having lost our ancient ways--the simpler laws, the rath and the family at the core of society. Romanized governments dismay us. They always resolve themselves into widely separated Ascendants and Subjects, the latter being more numerous than we former, of course. Sometimes it's done with great subtlety as it was in America, the slow accumulations of power, law upon law and all of it manipulated by an elite whose monopoly it is to understand the private language of injustice. Do not blame the Ascendants. Such separation requires docile Subjects as well. This may be the lot of any government, Marxist Russians included. There's a peculiar human susceptibility you see when you look at the Soviets, them building an almost exact copy of the czarist regimes: the same paranoia, the same secret police, the same untouchable military, and the murder squads, the Siberian death camps, the lid of terror on creative imagination, deportation for the ones who cannot be killed off or bought off. It's like some terrible plastic memory sitting there in the dark of our minds, ready on the instant to reshape itself into primitive patterns the moment the heat touches it. I fear the shape of things which may come from the heat of O'Neill's plague. Truly, I fear, for the heat is great.
In what way am I different from the ghetto poor? Oh, yeah, my lack of expectation that the government is here to help me and thus my actions which predicate my own independence. And no, I believe healthcare is the responsibility of each individual to provide for themselves. I think the focus shouldn't be on universal coverage so much as efforts to keep the greed in healthcare under control and thus the costs reasonable for everyone by making the market truly competitive. I don't want political bandaids I want true healthcare reform, with efforts to make the industry more ethical and cost-efficient, and thus, affordable. Get the greed out, and you have health care again.
I'm sure when doctors begin their licensed practices, they swear a Hippocratic Oath, do no harm! I consider this oath to extend to the body politic and the economy at large. If they're so godly and all-knowing, where's the lese majeste?
I think the government should begin to encourage modular local economies which are inter-dependent and yet self-sustaining. Small business rather than Too Big to Fail. I'm no expert, but I think our government grants could be much better spent researching this idea than things like super-soldiers and $300 Toilet brushes. Just an idea.
So you think someone who believes in Dino and Fred Flintstone is qualified to make decisions on the allocation of public funds for Scientific Research and Environmental Study?
Young Earth Creationists are not qualified to hold office and make decisions that affect such organizations as the USGS or the USFS and many other organizations that depend on facts and not beliefs.
If you refute the truths of Geological time, then I guess the white house pet will be a Unicorn.
If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain the you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual. --The Dosadi Lesson: A Gowachin Assessment
Sophistry is twisting the truth to fit your own definitions. It is not lying. Not in the strictest sense. Literally it is a clever but misleading argument. It is my opinion that you attempt to mislay the meaning of what I have to say in order to fit the definitions of my character into your own perceptions of me. If you take that as name calling, than I have no further input into that that would be productive.
This is forever a struggle to get those who reap the most to contribute to the welfare of those who helped them achieved that enormous wealth. Scroll back through the thread and you will see I'm not at all happy with elitism, I just recognize the reality of it within human nature. We should all forever be vigilant to injustice in whatever form it takes.
I have been unemployed. Numerous times. They were short term things, and I did get assistance from the state in terms of food assistance and unemployment checks. But I didn't sit on my butt and reap rewards. I was out every day, looking for work. As soon as I had a job again I cut myself off from these things and good riddance. As I implied, it is the goverments' intention to foster dependence. If we didn't depend on them, we wouldn't need bigger and bigger government.
I should be grateful to have food for my family? Yep. I'm highly grateful to have the ability to trade my labor for the ability to feed my family. And I do feel bad for these people that can't feed their family. But the welfare program should be geared toward the axiom, "Give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime." Not enabling; EMPOWERMENT!. Otherwise, I'm against the rich taking my money when I cant afford to give it, and giving to people who don't want to earn it. If that's what they want to do, do it with their own money, not mine.
I perfectly realize there are other perspectives, and I'm willing to debate those and learn. What I'm not willing to do is waste my time debating sophistry. Again, before you think that's a personal slam, reread the opening section of this post and you'll see its not personal. Don't try to sway me with emotion, because I rage against the machinery of all suffering, but I rage against codependence even more.
Please point out the post wherein I called you a name? I have not resorted to ad hominem at any point in our exchange that I am aware of.
Appeals to emotion. Please point out the binding natural law where it is my responsibility to take food out of my family's mouth in order support people I don't even know.
I know more about State run health-care then you may actually know, being an Oregonian and suffering under the Oregon Health Plan. Because I made $4 more than some Bureaucrat said was the cutoff for coverage, I have enormous medical bills now, and the State refused to help me because of REGULATIONS. So much for the public option. And so much for being a working-class beneficiary of Democratic Support. I guess if I were chronically unemployed and didn't give a crap about taking care of myself, having my hand out for every freebie I could get, I might have qualified.
Sorry, I didn't want to make that into an appeal to emotion. I'll do fine on my own without government enabling.
Yes, you have that right. That doesn't make your opinion right and not mine. Maybe we're both right, maybe we're both wrong. Again, it is opinion; so, we don't agree. So, what now, want me to leave the country because that's your right to say?
Yes, I did dissent against George Bush as well. For the same reasons and for the resultant gains. And that is the third way that you cannot see. You must have absolutes in order to support your theories. I don't require them for my personal peace. Everything is, at heart, chaos, here or in my imaginary pioneer times. And emotionalism is not going to work to convince me that I have to allow your absolutes to rule my reality. You don't set the warrants I believe in, nor does anyone else besides me. That is my freedom, regardless of your sophistry.
Your arguments are fraught with appeals to emotion. These proceedings were not transparent as was promised, nor were they bipartisan in any way. The rights of ALL have been trampled when the rights of the minority are completely ignored. There's no way around that in what is SUPPOSED to be a Republic, as you mentioned. When proceedings are unethical, I have no obligation to have any respect for the results, in fact it is my duty as an American to dissent, as I see it.
My dissent is entirely non-violent however. I am merely a freedom-loving American that prefers local to federal regulation of the majority of items currently considered criminal by our social contract. It comes from being pioneer stock originally from Ireland by way of the Show-me State.
To run away to Sudan is to surrender my obligations to the flag I swore allegiance to every day in school. In essence, I don't accept your either/or options. I prefer a third option, as there is always one, or this isn't America anymore.
We of the Sabotage Bureau remain legalists of a special category. We know that too much law injures a society; it is the same with too little law. One seeks a balance. We are like the balancing force among the Gowachin; without hope of achieving heaven in the society of mortals, we seek the unattainable. Each agent knows his own conscience and why he serves such a master. That is the key to us. We serve a mortal conscience for immortal reasons. We do it without hope of praise or the sureness of success. --The early writings of Bildoon, PanSpechi Chief of BuSab, The Dosadai Experiment.
Most laws are intended to do one thing but in the process of applying those intentions realities intervene on the ideal. As the saying goes, "the devil is in the details".
I have every right to speak my piece as to what I see as flaws within the current system, as I was born here. Dissent is not disloyalty, or we've learned nothing from McCarthy.
You're right, this is a Republic. And when the representative portions of that implied separation of powers ignores the will of ALL of the people based on a violent partisan seizure of power within that structure, what we have is the primary danger in any democracy, the tyranny of the majority under a powerful and charismatic demagogue.
Violence. Unchecked by any minority checks or balances. You decide. I only supply my own view.
At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminable place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.
* Analysis of the Tyrant, the Taraza File: BG Archive
Galactic_bodhi Forum Posts (9,196)
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RE: do you have a 6th sense.....?
Yep. I see dead people. Every time I walk through a graveyard.