The closest thing I have to a religion is Buddhism. I practice it. I meditate daily. I read about it. As far as belief goes, though, it doesn’t ask you to have faith outside of believing that if you follow the practice you will see the results they say you will. The millennia old texts that it’s based on are called Suttas. One of them, the Kalama Sutta, explicitly tells the villagers of Kalama not to believe it just because they are told it is so.

"Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another’s seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, ‘The monk is our teacher.’ Kalamas, when you yourselves know: ‘These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,’ enter on and abide in them.

Personally I have seen the results of my meditation in my life. I’m still early on the path, but it seems to be progressing as they say it will. I have developed, through a few years of practice, the ability to focus on the present moment and still my mind to the point that, at least for a short time, thoughts don’t arise. I’m fully aware of where I am and what is happening, but my mind is still. It doesn’t last for long, but with more practice it will. I’m developing what’s called samadhi, a type of concentrated focus where, eventually, nothing interrupts your concentration and you can maintain it as long as you like. I have a ways to go, but it appears to be progressing as expected.

So to answer the question, I believe it because I have experienced it. Many of the parts I haven’t yet experienced I suspect are true, though I will only understand and believe them when I do experience them for myself.

Well, I didn’t mention tomatoes. And I’m slowly replacing my grass with a sort of food forest. It may not be native wildflowers, but I don’t think I’m lost.

The point in the article assumes you are solely reliant on rain for watering your plants. Where I live it doesn’t rain for like three or four months in the summer, so that argument is invalid. I use irrigation in my orchard every couple of weeks to deeply soak the area around a tree. The wood chips around the trees do help prevent the soil from drying out because they keep it cool. It takes heat energy to evaporate water. And since the mulch blanket keeps the soil cool I only have to water the orchard once every two or three weeks.

I’m 57 and I started running this year. Overtraining is the biggest issue for me. I’m up to about three miles maybe four times per week, but most of those miles are zone 2 HR, really slow and easy runs. On the weekend I’ll do a tempo run, or intervals, alternately. If I maintain that schedule for more than a month or so I end up a little more sore every time I go running and my time starts to drop. So I have to take most of the week off every four or six weeks. I also take a lot of supplements; creatine, L-carnitine, Beta-Alanine, protein, etc. They help. I feel I can exert myself more since I started taking them. I also take EFAs for joint health, collagen for connective tissue recovery, and sometimes MSM, though evidence on that one is spotty.

Yeah. It was a lot like that. She’d find a recipe to try, or want one of her favorites, and I’d just ask her how she wanted things chopped and prepped.

She is. She has cancer and spends a lot of time resting. She has more energy in the morning. She makes her breakfast. But I do all the cooking at night and usually lunch too.

eh, it can work. when my wife was well enough to cook we’d divide it like she washes, I chop and prep, and she cooks, then we split cleaning. Now I’m doing all of that and I really appreciate the occasions where we have a friend visiting who is willing to do some prep and cleaning. I usually do the cooking even when I have help, mostly because it’s rare to find someone who knows how to cook what we eat. But I’m always eager to have help.

They are, but then you’re pooping out of your vagina, and that’s something that one would notice.

But that’s not the goal of the health care system, at least in the US. Pharmaceuticals, hospitals, insurance companies, they are all part of a larger capitalist system that prioritizes profit above all else. It’s a conflict of interest, with the owners of the business on one side and the customers on the other. One guess which of those two gets to make the decisions on how the business runs. So, no, it’s not designed to keep you healthy, it’s designed to make a profit. And if the largest profit comes from making us healthy, then good for us. But either way we don’t get a say.

I played The Last Campfire recently. It’s a small puzzle game and the only voice is the narrator, Rachel August. Maybe it’s just her accent but I think her voice has a haunting otherworldly beauty that just makes the game.

I wonder if that includes drug overdoses.

One thing to bear in mind is many of these plants don’t grow true to seed. Avocado, peppers, tomatoes, etc., you may get a plant that produces a fruit that resembles the one the seed came from. You may not. I’ve even grown peppers from seed packages that weren’t true to the variety on the label. All it takes is one bee to fly in from a hot pepper plant, for instance, and while the fruit made from the flower that bee pollinated will be true-to-type, the seeds of that fruit won’t be.

I think the shooter was good, but not a professional. They knew enough to sight in their scope accurately, but not enough to account for bullet drop. Nobody aims for the neck. Odds are he was aiming for the head. If you zero in your sight for 100 yards, the bullet can drop 3 or 4 inches once it gets to 200. And he seems to have disappeared without a trace, so he planned it well. I assume he cleaned up after himself. Odds are they’ll never find him.

When I hear Nazi I think of concentration camps and killing Jews. Kirk was a big supporter of Israel. Does Nazi just mean conservative fascist now? And if so is B. Netanyahu a Nazi? That seems weird.

Probably Thai and Indian, since they both have a strong vegetarian side.

“Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”

He didn’t say anything specifically about the ethics of human reproduction. He taught that craving sense pleasures leads to suffering. The monks that followed him were celibate. But he knew few would follow that path. So he taught a simplified code of ethics for householders (don’t kill, don’t lie, etc.) and assumed that there would always be people who want to make more people. Rebirth was an important part of his doctrine. The volitional actions you perform in life create karma which then, after your death, produces another birth. Escaping the cycle of karma and rebirth by letting go of the concept of self, of the idea of me and mine, was the ultimate goal of his path. And it’s only possible to get there in a human body. So in that sense he was not an anti-natalist.

Buy all the corporations and convert them into worker-owned conglomerates a-la Mondragon. End global capitalism. Sponsor legislation in all governments to end the wealth disparity plaguing the world.

Let me explain. Our health care industry is part of our (mostly) global capitalist economy. That means investors demand the maximum profit the industry can produce. Imagine that this industry had the choice of providing an inexpensive one-time cure for cancer, or a long-term expensive treatment. Which option would generate the most profit for the industry? It doesn’t matter if there are people in the industry who would like to find a simple inexpensive cure. The board of directors is elected by the shareholders, which really means the largest and most ruthless capital owners. If the CEO or any officers approve research on an inexpensive cure that will threaten the profits of the corporation they will be ousted and replaced with someone who “sees the wisdom of using existing proven treatments”. So the built-in conflict of interest of a for-profit medical system means we will always be stuck with a system that extracts as much cash as possible from its patients.

Are there alternatives to this approach? Of course, but they depart from a pure capitalist system, and so, at least in the US, we will never see them as long as we accept our current economic structure.

It’s too bad that curing patients is not a sustainable business model. Even if this did work we would only ever see it developed if you had to take it twice a month for the rest of your life in order to survive.

Edit: sorry, I just noticed this is in Uplifting News. So, let’s be optimistic. Maybe global capitalism will collapse and governments will start trying to take care of people.

Newly discovered? I get that it’s Australia, but how could they have missed a two foot long insect that hangs out in trees?