INTERESTING TIMES

I'm a 49 year old childless woman. I might have been fertile at one time but I am not anymore. I look at people with children and think they must have a lot of guts, to have babies in a world like ours. And then there's the chaos of childrearing, the diapers left by the side of the road, the screaming brats in the grocery store, the traffic jams taking each child to their designated lessons and teams and events. There haven't been a lot of experiences that have made me regret not having children. A few moments of lingering and merging, but not enough to carry it through.

Even childless I want to give something to new generations, because it seems so sad to send young people out into the world without direction or inspiration. Where parents fail, family or community sometimes steps in. I see the baseball teams training in the park and the kids there are learning something useful. Coordination. Teamwork. I see a strong young woman on the tennis court who is obviously an ace, but who is toying with her two competitors, and idly watching me who is watching her. Will she have children? Perhaps not. Today I heard the daughter of a coworker say that she won't have children. Why not? Will she regret not having children? What will be her creative work in this world, if not baby making?

In many cultures a woman is of little or no use if she does not serve to birth and raise a brood of offspring for a man. Put the food on the table. Clean. What is a woman if she does none of this?

*new tag: legacy

http://www.infowars.com/track-officials-disqualify-high-school-runner-for-thanking-god/

This seems far fetched to me. Anybody know more? There must be more than this reason for the entire track team to be disqualified. And if it was simply because he pointed at the sky, I have to agree with the father. They would dismiss most basketball players and football players for their little victory dances if this were the rule everywhere. We should let people celebrate, even if the celebration is religious. Some would say especially if the celebration is religious due to our legal freedom of religious practice.

Market traders make more money on days when their morning testosterone is higher. A great article entitled "What Traders’ Testosterone Tells Us About Markets" explains the details, or you can scan my notes behind the cut.

Market participants aren’t the rational automatons of most financial theory. They are biological organisms responding with a neural and physiological apparatus designed millions of years ago. If what happens in markets affects hormones, these in turn alter behavior and feed back into the markets.

( notes on the article )

Go to time 1:50 on this national geographic video to see two kayakers running rapid #9 on the Zambezi. The amazing thing to me is how many strokes he gets in while going down the ramp into the whitewater. Big.

The Zambezi runs on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, and 100,000 CFS is considered to be low water there. It runs, I have been told, as high as a million CFS. They say in the video that it's high water, but not how high.

Here's a blog with good info and pictures of the Zambezi. I only know of it because some guides I have worked with also worked there. I have no intention of going to run this whitewater. I prefer little creeks and lower risk.

Pain is temporary.
It may last a minute, or an hour,
or a day, or a year,
but eventually it will subside
and something else will take its place.
If I quit, however, it lasts forever.
--Lance Armstrong

Children born today with a diminutive level of worry--those whose emotional physiology underreacts to stress, novelty, and threat--grow up to become criminals much more often than average. Criminality has long been known to be partially heritable, and a worry volume set to "low" in the reptilian brain is part of the mechanism.
--Lewis, Amini and Lannon in A General Theory of Love p49

What interests me in their assessment of the value of risk aversion and its opposite as mentioned above, is that these physicians note no value in being a risk taker, only increased criminality. They mention that "Many of our ultralow-anxiety ancestors were bitten by snakes, gored by tusks, and fell out of trees. Those premature deaths shifted the gene pool toward higher trepidation." By my own observation, people who are less risk averse are more likely to be found in sports such as whitewater kayaking, backcountry skiing and paragliding. This is where I've found several of my dearest friends, and they are not, by and large, criminals. Also, Dr Thom continues to tell us that entrepreneurs are risk takers, much different from the rest of the population. The statistics show us that most entrepreneurs are male, which begs the question, are men more likely to be risk takers? I think so. And I don't think that this disposition is any guarantee of criminality, though it certainly does increase the odds that rules and laws will be taken with a grain of potassium. Another question: if it is so, then why are males less risk averse? I think evolution offers answers to that one also.

Alert from the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians
**McCain/Dorgan Legislation Threatens Access to Supplements**
Contact Your Senator Today! Go here to send an email.

The fact of the matter: in the US we have good laws to insure safety, quality and consistency in our supplement supply, but the FDA has not funded or enforced those laws. Rather than passing new laws that limit consumer options, we need to enforce the laws we have on the books.
( more info )

My mind is officially BLOWN.


(on nunchaku)
(PS: thanks to Mercola for posting this)