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also, "spring water" is usually tap water from Texas

Get me proof of that and I'll give you a cut of my settlement. 

I know there's a company which takes tap water from Concrete WA and bottles it.  Cascade I think but I'm not certain.  I've seen them doing it and I had a friend who lived in Concrete who said they do it regularly. 

OTOH  Concrete has really good tap water.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-18549569

A psychic is facing jail after he was found guilty of duping young women into performing sex acts.

Karl Lang, 49, was convicted of 12 counts of causing women to engage in sexual activity without consent at Newport Crown Court.

Lang, of Newport, targeted two women in their 20s who sought him out in the belief he could contact dead relatives.

The judge said jail was inevitable. Lang, who denied the charges, will be sentenced at a later date.

The court heard that both women were encouraged to perform sex acts in front of him and pressed to act more and more outrageously as his influence increased.

One woman told the trial she was conned into acting like a "porn star" in the belief that it would boost her own spiritual powers.

I'm struggling to not mock all of the involved. Important lasting lessons hopefully learned all round. Unlikely, but today I'm feeling optimistic.

How is this even a crime?

He raped them with his mahjiqual mind lazors.

did you see the video?

to me it seems like it was a good strategy, it saved the library ffs

I agree.  I was applauding it.

Shrek is absolutely a reformation of the classic tale.  Another movie that came out around the same time "Happily N'Ever After" tried to do the same thing but didn't do it as well.  And, of course, Shrek drowned in endless sequels that don't capture the theme as well as the original.

I think the bits about zen being a negation of the individual, in the same way as military training, is pretty interesting.  It's something that Westerners have a hard time grappling with and I am curious about what sort of judgement the author means to imply toward Zen.

http://www.upworthy.com/burn-the-libraries-down-kidz-can-learned-stuff-on-there-oan?g=4&c=cp1


Reminds me of a few of the political facebook things.

The last problem gambling training I went to basically broke it down like this.  If you are gambling to have fun, y ou are fine.  It's no different than dropping dough on a concert, movies, a fancy restaurant, whatever.


But if you are seriously doing it as a way to generate income, to make money, you most likely have a problem.


And it's like only 8 or 9% of people who gamble that ever develop any level of addiction or dependence.

Ironically, you could replace 'gambling' with 'weed' in that statement (well, we'd have to change the bit about making money to 'coping with everyday life', but still) and it would be just as true... even the numbers related to 'addiction are in the same range.

(couldn't find the dead horse emoticon)

I would disagree.  Legitimate users of medical marijuana are, by definition, using it to cope with every day life.  Otherwise they wouldn't have a legitimate medical need.

Why? Why is it awkward to be the only person of your gender in a class?

Did their female classmates make fun of them? Ask them why they were in the class? Insinuate things about their body parts or sexual orientation? Treat them poorly in social situations?

Did this treatment translate to the work place?

There doesn't need to be explicit harassment to make minorities feel unwelcome. To the extent that we are socialized in gender-specific ways, there are real differences in the shared experiences that a person would expect to have with another person of the same vs. a different gender. It's always easier to strike up a conversation with someone feel you'll have more in common with. And then there are topics and conversations that are more comfortable to have when it's "just the guys" or "just the girls." People of both genders moderate themselves more or differently in mixed company - and someone of the minority gender picks up on that and feel less included. It might just be that the one guy in the class gets fewer opportunities to bond at a deeper level with his female classmates, or maybe they come to think of him as just one of the girls. Then at least he's included, but the group's acceptance is implicitly conditioned on his not reminding them that he isn't a girl. Even when no one's trying to be sexist, that kind of thing happens.

True, but all of my questions were based explicitly on my first-hand observation of the treatment of women in a certain engineering department with which I am quite familiar. So, I suppose what I'm getting at here, is that while you are correct that there is inequality in numbers in the field of primary education, it does not necessitate discrimination. Personally, if someone feels uncomfortable saying certain things or acting a certain way around a certain gender, then that's THEIR problem. Also, I am not a fan of the "just one of the guys/girls" mentality, as it is both outdated and counterproductive categorization.

To be blunt, I have far less sympathy for men who choose to go into education than I do for women who choose to go into Engineering.

My mom  worked in education administration for the majority of my childhood.  There were more female than male teachers, especcially at an elementary level, but the male teachers were in no way victimized by the system.  They had no trouble achieving seniority or pay raises, or positions within the union, they were not harassed at work as far as I am aware, and my mom tended to share all the drama and gossip with me.  Male teachers have nothing to complain about.

ILU FREEKY.


Please provide me with a situation where "female privilege" would exist, Dingo (I'm looking for stats on your assertion regarding the "bi/homosexual females are less likely to be assaulted for being queer" and I gotta tell you, the results are not supporting it. And that's not even including the rape statistics).

In Ohio women are FAR more likely to get custody of children in divorce cases or breakups of non-marriage relationships.

That's the most stark case of female privilege I have seen.  The anecdotal evidence I have that it is not always justified is my co-worker, he works full time, doesn't do drugs or break the law, the only mark against him is that he is heavily tattooed.  His ex GF meanwhile is a regular drug user who keeps being arrested for breaking and entering.  The only reason my co-worker currently has custody of his daughter is because his ex is actually in jail, and as soon as she gets out she gets her back.

Misogyny and sexism in general are pretty rampant in the town I am in.  it ranges from basically what is being mentioned (slut shaming and she needs to get laid) to assumptions about the capability of the sexes (women can't drive, men can't control their anger, men can't clean, women can't understand computers)  a lot of it comes from people using the stereotypes as an excuse for their own gender, presumably as a way to avoid accepting fault for their own personal shortcomings.

The fact that they had "key nitches" justifying - even in part - anti-semitism is reasonable?

The quote in isolation would read to me as predicting, rather than justifying.

Just as you can say that it is likely that in the US there is a distinct possibility that bankers will be targeted by lynch mobs if things fall apart much more.  That doesn't mean you are justifying the lynching of local mortgage brokers and functionaries, who aren't the ones guilty of crashing the economy.    Germany went to shit after World War I, the average German was reduced to a pretty shitty existence very quickly and Jews, by and large, were not reduced anywhere near as badly.  This was partly due to the fact that German Jews took care of one another and built up networks that patronized other Jews.

It doesn't justify anything the Germans did, but it does help to predict it, if you are part of a privileged group in a place that is going to shit you can expect to be targeted as part of the problem pretty quickly. 

It is weird the way the piece jumps from reasonable

Galtung believes that historical anti-Semitism is based at least partly on Jewish behavior: On the rise of anti-Jewish attitudes in Germany during the 1920s,  he says that it was "not unproblematic that Jews had key niches in a society humiliated by defeat at Versailles."

He distinguishes between predicting anti-Jewish behavior and justifying it: "In no way, absolutely no way, does this justify the atrocities. But it created anti-Semitism that could have been predicted." In the same way, he argues that medieval pogroms were motivated by the role of Jews in usury: "The Jews played a role in demanding payment from indebted peasants."

to apeshit bonkers

"Six Jewish companies control 96% of the media," wrote Galtung. He included the names of journalists, publishers, TV networks, and movie studios, that he claims are controlled by Jews. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch was also included on the list. "He's not Jewish, but many of the people under him are," wrote Galtung, in reference to Murdoch. "Many of them are fanatically pro-Israel," he pointed out. Immediately following these claims, Galtung wrote that "seventy percent of the professors at the 20 most important American universities are Jewish." Galtung bases his doctrine on an article written by William Luther Pierce, founder of the "National Alliance," a white supremacist organization.

I could see Galtung himself taking a more careful path from the first position to the second and managing to convince someone.

http://www.businessinsider.com/average-family-net-worth-collapses-40-in-three-years-2012-6

The median family networth decreased 40% between 2007 and 2010. 

...what exactly is the difference between Obama's "kill list" policy and the policy of the Serbian Army at Srebrencia?

Just thinking about it, the policy of the latter was that any "military-age" male be seperated from the population at large, then killed as a possible enemy combatant.

Obama's policy is that any "military-age" male in a "strike zone" (defined as: most of the Middle East and South Asia) is a combatant, unless it can be proven afterwards that this is not the case, and that drones be used to do the killing.

Except for scale, I'm having problems finding the point of departure between these two methods.

I'm seeing pictures of dead toddlers supposedly killed by drone strikes being passed around facebook with captions like "Suspected Terrorist".

How factual is this?

According to the NYT article only men of military age are considered to be combatants, so dead kids would count as civilian casualties.  However, according to the Telegraph there have been 168 kids killed.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8695679/168-children-killed-in-drone-strikes-in-Pakistan-since-start-of-campaign.html

This part in particular disturbed me

In just a single attack on a madrassah in 2006 up to 69 children lost their lives.

A madrassah is a school.  Sending drones to blow up a school is pretty fucked up.  You have to know you are going to be killing children in that case.

The telegraph article is also nearly a year old, so there may be quite a few children who have been killed since then.

Riffing a bit off the archetypal aspect of Bly's Jungian connection, I'd like to mention the four masculine archetypes presented in Robert L. Moore's and Douglas Gillette's book: King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

From the link:

They define the four mature male archetypes - the King (the energy of just and creative ordering), the Warrior (the energy of self-disciplined, aggressive action), the Magician (the energy of initiation and transformation), and the Lover (the energy that connects men to others and the world) - as well as the four immature patterns (Divine Child, Oedipal Child, Precocious Child, and Hero).

I also found a nice illustration to describe how the immature patterns manifest in the mature male archetypes. 
Here that is:



The authors, too, think that the initiation rituals present today such as military, gangs corporate structures are inadequate for a healthy masculine Individuation.  You know, if you're into that sort of thing.  (Relatively).

What do you folks think of these archetypes and immature patterns?  Can we use these archetypes to grow in other ways aside from making a male ritual space where old dudes recite poetry and spout fairy tales?

One place I would disagree with this is calling the coward the immature form of the masochist.  Masochists are not cowards, they choose to experience pain, they put themselves in a place to have pain inflicted on them, that's sort of the opposite of cowardice.  Not that some masochists are not also cowards about other things, but I don't see any correlation between the two.

Been thinking about this. Is obsession always necessarily a bad thing?
I read a biography of Jimi Hendrix once. That guy was obsessed, that's how he got so good. He practiced nonstop. There's stories that he slept with his guitar in his paratrooper days. Footage I've seen shows him smiling a lot, when he wasn't in rapt concentration. That's not a bad way to live.

Umm, didn't that guy OD and die young?

Yep, on sleeping pills that he took to go to sleep.  Not as a suicide or even as an accident with recreational drugs.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/18/newsid_3528000/3528692.stm

Not really related to his passion and his approach to guitar playing.