Taking your own money out of the bank is something that might help YOU (or not, depending on what you do with it) but it won't help "bring down the banks" or do anything else your bank is likely to even notice, unless you're a billionaire.
If EVERY American debanked themselves, that'd have an effect, but that ain't gonna happen until AFTER the Precipice -- if even then, IMO.
I'd give you an updoot just for the countdown clock on Qagg; I didn't even know the site was back up. But as others here have said: awesome, high-effort dig. And I agree: there's gonna be some wild stuff coming out soon. It's already started, I'd say.
children are brought up by different people
Exactly! Life is not fair, and not only because some of us have terrible parents: people can be traumatized by things outside a parent's control, for instance (war, death of a family member, etc). Trauma is simply more pain than can be fully felt and integrated at the time. Trauma, if left repressed, is emotional damage.
Some people can open back up to their feelings, at least partially and sometimes more than that -- they can get in touch with their healthy nature. That is part of what a spiritual awakening means to me -- becoming more the person you were meant to be. And I believe it's one thing Jesus' teachings were meant to encourage.
I see Jesus' ministry as, in large part, an attempt -- an AMAZING and courageous attempt -- to bring more emotional health into the world (more love), by helping people focus on that and by reminding adults that LOVE is important, and in particular that how CHILDREN are treated is important.
The ACE Study -- a very large study about childhood trauma (over 17,000 participants) and the results of that trauma -- is one of the best descriptions I've seen of the importance of childhood events. Some snippets from the article in that link:
When the first results of the survey were due to come in, Anda was at home in Atlanta. Late in the evening, he logged into his computer to look at the findings. He was stunned. “I wept,” he says. “I saw how much people had suffered and I wept."
This was the first time that researchers had looked at the effects of several types of trauma, rather than the consequences of just one. What the data revealed was mind-boggling.
The first shocker: There was a direct link between childhood trauma and adult onset of chronic disease, as well as mental illness, doing time in prison, and work issues, such as absenteeism.
The second shocker: About two-thirds of the adults in the study had experienced one or more types of adverse childhood experiences. Of those, 87 percent had experienced 2 or more types. This showed that people who had an alcoholic father, for example, were likely to have also experienced physical abuse or verbal abuse. In other words, ACEs usually didn’t happen in isolation.
The third shocker: More adverse childhood experiences resulted in a higher risk of medical, mental and social problems as an adult.
To explain this, Anda and Felitti developed a scoring system for ACEs. Each type of adverse childhood experience counted as one point. If a person had none of the events in her or his background, the ACE score was zero. If someone was verbally abused thousands of times during his or her childhood, but no other types of childhood trauma occurred, this counted as one point in the ACE score. If a person experienced verbal abuse, lived with a mentally ill mother and an alcoholic father, his ACE score was three.
Things start getting serious around an ACE score of 4. Compared with people with zero ACEs, those with four categories of ACEs had a 240 percent greater risk of hepatitis, were 390 percent more likely to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema or chronic bronchitis), and a 240 percent higher risk of a sexually-transmitted disease.
They were twice as likely to be smokers, 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide, seven times more likely to be alcoholic, and 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs.
People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, more auto-immune diseases, and more work absences.
“Some of the increases are enormous and are of a size that you rarely ever see in health studies or epidemiological studies. It changed my thinking dramatically,” says Anda.
Two in nine people had an ACE score of 3 or more, and one in eight had an ACE score of 4 or more. This means that every physician probably sees several high ACE score patients every day, notes Felitti. “Typically, they are the most difficult, though the underpinnings will rarely be recognized.”
The kicker was this: The ACE Study participants were average Americans. Seventy-five percent were white, 11 percent Latino, 7.5 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, and 5 percent were black. They were middle-class, middle-aged, 36 percent had attended college and 40 percent had college degrees or higher. Since they were members of Kaiser Permanente, they all had jobs and great health care. Their average age was 57.
I'll say this: Jesus' teachings on how to treat children are rarely given anywhere near enough attention.
Here's one to ponder:
Luke: 17:21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
WHERE is HEAVEN? It's always seemed odd to me that Luke 17:21 doesn't seem to be the answer for that to most people. It's a direct quotation from Jesus, after all.
and while we're at it, these:
Matthew: 18:1: At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? 18:2: And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, 18:3:And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. 18:4: Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 18:5: And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. 18:6: But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
Mark: 10:13: And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. 10:14: But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. 10:15: Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.
the connectedness we all share as human beings
Yes! My feeling is that Jesus' ministry was focused on exactly that: we are all connected, all family, and "love one another" -- the new commandment Jesus brought to us (John 13:34 - 35) -- is the most important of the commandments. Heaven would never be a place of hatred, cruelty, or other unlove, would it?
And you're right (again): that lesson is in healthy religions and teachings throughout history; Jesus didn't mean people had to "believe in Him" as a particular deity, imo (not the most popular belief, I know), but rather he wanted us to believe his TEACHINGS, including especially about love and compassion. That's why I don't believe ppl who never heard of Jesus "are going to Hell" -- that would be cruel and bizarre -- but rather that without love in our hearts, we are already LIVING in Hell.
Re: He Grasps the Sky with Both Hands
Hi there,
Your GW handle, u/Nurarihyon_no_MAGA, gets truncated on the "To" line when creating a message, so let me know if you receive this as such. Just in case, I'll also post it as a comment at your new post. And thanks for messaging me about it. (I've tried removing the u/ and then adding the A that gets truncated, and I keep getting error messages. I may not be able to send you anything via the Message function). Now, on with what I wanted to send you:
I thought you'd enjoy these short excerpts from Iain McGilchrist's The Matter With Things. Any typos or errors are my own.
According to an ancient Iroquois legend, the gradual fading of eternal power and light in the cosmos made necessary the activity of a creator god whose task was, for the sake of the whole universe, to bring into being the earth and all its creatures. His name in the Onondaga language, De'haehiyawa'kho (I'm unable to include all the correct character symbols ~ Narg), means "He Grasps the Sky with Both Hands", and in the legend, he represents the power to remember one's higher identity in the midst of action in the world. He has, however, a twin brother . . . ~ The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, p. 1238
This extraordinary legend appears to me to be one of the most remarkable intuitions of the structure of mind and its influence on human destiny ever brought forth from the depth of the human imagination. (Emphasis mine ~ Narg) There are many close parallels between its message and the account of hemisphere difference expounded in the course of this book, as will be obvious to the attentive reader.
Further, though a creation myth, it is one with an important difference. It is not merely a myth of a completed act of creation, dealing solely with origins, but an account which also looks forward: to creation as continuous. What's more, being an account of creation (of how worlds are brought into being) provided by a legend that intuites the structure of the mind, it concerns not simply 'the world' in a more limited sense, but the phenomenological world, the world that comes into being by the engagement of the human mind with whatever-it-is-that-exists-apart-from-ourselves: the only world we can ever know. At the risk of encroaching on the beauty and wisdom of myth, I will, with some misgivings, point to it from time to time as being a more vivid expression of an understanding of the world that also finds less vivid expression in the hemisphere hypothesis and in the efforts of various philosophers to put in in a more abstract form.
And there is another layer of meaning in the story: the dynamism of exchange between good and evil, the question of how close together they can become and how far apart they need to be.
~ Ibid, p. 1242
At the foundation of everything is the opposition, recognised from Empedocles to Goethe, between Love and Strife: the opposite dispositions embodied by He Grasps the Sky With Both Hands and Flint. A harmonious world comes into being only if the forces of love and strife are undivided: He Grasps the Sky allows Flint his degree of independence, but needs to retain a degree of oversight; without it, 'Flint will forever attempt to destroy his rule.' We need the union of division and union, of multiplicity and unity; the left hemisphere needs ultimately to act as servant to the right hemisphere master, since, unbridled, the left hemisphere is capable of destroying the world. ~ ibid, pp. 1281-1282
Great reply!
There are nuances (which I would like to explore with you) around the significance and role of Jesus, what being 'saved' means etc.
I agree, interesting topics. To me, "being saved" means getting as much of one's real and healthy self back as possible. It means being in touch with one's feelings and being free, to the extent one can be, from repression of feeling and the negative consequences of repression. It means knowing and feeling the importance of kindness to others, of connection with others, and where necessary working to put healthy behavior into practice despite any habits and defenses to the contrary.
I don't know if there's anything more to it than that; I never believed in the supernatural aspects of religion and don't feel any need for "life after death" or anything else; this life is what we have, and it IS a miracle. I'm open to the possibility of something else but don't yet see it; my lack / my loss, perhaps.
As to the significance of Jesus: He put the importance of love out there in plain language and in His own humble, courageous, and remarkable actions -- and captured the attention and devotion of millions for two thousand years now. In a world of violence, emotional pain, hardship, and ignorance, Jesus has kept the idea of LOVE and of a compassionate, healthy world alive in people's hearts even as they struggle to understand it. If a person has experienced very little love in their life and has enough repression to be out of touch with their deepest feelings, what can that person actually hear when someone speaks to them of love?
One cannot truly know what one has never experienced. THAT is why two thousand years of Christianity has had such patchy success at bringing love into the world. Not NO success, but far less than one could hope.
-- I'll forgo more detail right now since part 2 of my earlier comment, which I'm here to post, is already over-long and still only a portion of what I've written. Here goes:
When Jesus says "Love one another", he's talking about true love, and not about false love, don't you think?
Yes.
Think of a puppy, or a healthy young child. LOVE is the default; they don't need to be TAUGHT to feel love or to express it; love is the most natural thing in the world, like breathing. Love from a child (or a puppy) encourages a positive, loving response back from others -- assuming those others are emotionally healthy enough to respond in a healthy manner.
In the violent, blood-thirsty natural world of predators, parasites, and diseases, LOVE is the gift -- to other animals, but particularly to humans -- that protects life and perhaps more importantly, makes life worth living.
I'll talk about psychopaths (people with particular brain damage or lack of function) later. But aside from that small percentage of people, LOVE -- true love, as you put it -- is, once again, the default. ONLY trauma (beatings or other cruelty, emotional coldness, or other traumatic pain) can lead a healthy young child into what you are calling (if I read you correctly) false love. THAT is why Jesus made the point about not offending children so strongly. Trauma leads to repression and to physical and emotional defenses -- an infinite spectrum of them -- which cause harm to the traumatized person (alcohol, tobacco, and drug use, high blood pressure, suicide, etc) and to others -- physical or emotional cruelty, outright violence, lies, and so on.
The bad news is that nearly all of us have SOME repressed early trauma that blunts, to some degree, our openness to feeling and thus our ability to fully experience love. Most of us also have repressed anger as well as hurt (anger is a defense against pain, as well as a survival tool against threats in the environment), which works against our openness to love even more actively. And LOVE isn't the only thing damaged by early trauma.
The ACE Study (cohort of ~ 17,000 adults) shows what this actually means in the real world.
A short look at the Study: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/MediaLibraries/URMCMedia/pediatrics/training/plc/documents/PLC_10-ACE-Study-Handout-MSL-5-2014.pdf
To partially convey the impact of early trauma, here's a longish excerpt from https://tatlife.com/the-adverse-childhood-experiences-study-the-largest-most-important-public-health-study-you-never-heard-of-began-in-an-obesity-clinic/ --
When the first results of the survey were due to come in, Anda was at home in Atlanta. Late in the evening, he logged into his computer to look at the findings. He was stunned. “I wept,” he says. “I saw how much people had suffered and I wept.
This was the first time that researchers had looked at the effects of several types of trauma, rather than the consequences of just one. What the data revealed was mind-boggling.
The first shocker: There was a direct link between childhood trauma and adult onset of chronic disease, as well as mental illness, doing time in prison, and work issues, such as absenteeism.
The second shocker: About two-thirds of the adults in the study had experienced one or more types of adverse childhood experiences. Of those, 87 percent had experienced 2 or more types. This showed that people who had an alcoholic father, for example, were likely to have also experienced physical abuse or verbal abuse. In other words, ACEs usually didn’t happen in isolation.
The third shocker: More adverse childhood experiences resulted in a higher risk of medical, mental and social problems as an adult.
To explain this, Anda and Felitti developed a scoring system for ACEs. Each type of adverse childhood experience counted as one point. If a person had none of the events in her or his background, the ACE score was zero. If someone was verbally abused thousands of times during his or her childhood, but no other types of childhood trauma occurred, this counted as one point in the ACE score. If a person experienced verbal abuse, lived with a mentally ill mother and an alcoholic father, his ACE score was three.
Things start getting serious around an ACE score of 4. Compared with people with zero ACEs, those with four categories of ACEs had a 240 percent greater risk of hepatitis, were 390 percent more likely to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema or chronic bronchitis), and a 240 percent higher risk of a sexually-transmitted disease.
They were twice as likely to be smokers, 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide, seven times more likely to be alcoholic, and 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs.
People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, more auto-immune diseases, and more work absences.
“Some of the increases are enormous and are of a size that you rarely ever see in health studies or epidemiological studies. It changed my thinking dramatically,” says Anda.
Two in nine people had an ACE score of 3 or more, and one in eight had an ACE score of 4 or more. This means that every physician probably sees several high ACE score patients every day, notes Felitti. “Typically, they are the most difficult, though the underpinnings will rarely be recognized.”
The kicker was this: The ACE Study participants were average Americans. Seventy-five percent were white, 11 percent Latino, 7.5 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, and 5 percent were black. They were middle-class, middle-aged, 36 percent had attended college and 40 percent had college degrees or higher. Since they were members of Kaiser Permanente, they all had jobs and great health care. Their average age was 57.
I'll say this: Jesus' teachings on how to treat children are rarely given anywhere near enough attention.
By far the most important thing we can do to encourage emotional health in people is to provide love early in life to each new generation -- from conception on. A healthy pregnancy, a safe and gentle birth, a loving childhood with plenty of social contact to help learn respect for others naturally, etc. FIXING emotional damage later is much harder and never completely effective.
More another day --
Terrific post, /u/VaccinesCauseSIDS, and a great Thoreau quote.
Here's another, from Civil Disobedience:
I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe--"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
I haven't visited all your links yet but I really like your commentary.
I'll contribute this: for a detailed look at how CIVIL SOCIETY -- i.e., a voluntaryist society without forcible taxation for ANYTHING -- can not only work but work better than the tyranny of coercive government -- consider Morris and Linda Tannehill's The Market for Liberty, available at Amazon or free at the Mises Institute and elsewhere. It's a memorable read.
Congratulations!
You're already on this, I'm sure, but do bank enough of YOUR OWN BLOOD or other non-vaxxed blood of the correct type before the Big Day and make sure you know you'll be GETTING that blood and not something else . . .
"Hi, I'm John Xavier Smith, and I'm here to bribe you to drop out of politics."
Not likely. I'd guess a no-name lackey delivered the request without revealing (or knowing, more likely) the name of the person who paid them (or intimidated, bribed, or whatnot) to make the offer.
Well . . . can't have THAT, now can we?