Playing The Carrot

 

Bitcoin and Paypal

PayPal customers in the UK will now be able to use the platform to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency, with investments starting at £1.

But PayPal payments can still not be made in Bitcoin, for example, directly.

Instead, the cryptocurrency will have to be sold for traditional currency and its value then used to make a cash purchase.

PayPal is initially working with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.

But the currencies cannot be sent to friends or family or transferred to or from of any other digital wallet.

Entry point
PayPal launched its cryptocurrency service in the US, in October, hoping to make them more accessible to a wider audience.

But they remain volatile in value and unregulated - meaning investments are not protected by the authorities, if something goes wrong

"The tokens and coins have been around for a while but you had to be a relatively sophisticated user to be able to access that," a PayPal spokesman told CNBC.

"Having that on a platform like ours makes a really good entry point."  READ MORE

Reflexes

 

Having Sex Positivity

Lately, it seems like anything and anyone can mention sex and earn the label ‘sex positive’: social-media apps, celebrities and ‘girl bosses’, brands selling intimacy products. But when applied in such a variety of contexts, the idea of sex positivity seems to almost lose its meaning – or at least, its definition gets muddied.

Just as businesses and brands liberally use terms like ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’ to appeal to ethically conscientious consumers, “the same thing is happening with either individuals, celebrities, endorsements, organisations or companies saying that they're more sex positive”, says Emily Prior, executive director of California-based NGO Center for Positive Sexuality. While some “definitely are”, she adds, others “use it as a buzzword to get people in the door”.

But how can you tell the difference, when there’s no single, agreed-upon definition for sex positivity? While sex educators, academics, sex workers and pornography directors all tend to agree that the liberal use of the term indicates both taking advantage of a buzzword and a true embrace of its ethos, based on the context, they all have slightly different interpretations of what it means and where it came from. Depending on whom you ask, sex positivity encompasses everything from anti-racism to male nudity in the movies.

Across the board, however, those who talk about sex positivity note that at its core, the term is about openness to a variety of sexual orientations, interests (or lack thereof), identities and expressions. They find that the term has evolved to become both more popular and more nuanced over time, and that its influence extends well beyond the realm of sexuality into society at large.

The (many) origins of sex positivity
While many credit the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich with coining the term ‘sex positivity’ in the mid-1900s, as part of his discourse on sex as a healthy aspect of humanity, other groups embraced a sex-positive ethos well before he did.

“In the 1920s, there were already communities like ballroom culture in Harlem, New York, and feminists of the Village who were part of sex positive and queer communities,” says Swedish erotic filmmaker Erika Lust. Their experiences have just “often been left out of discussions”, she says.  READ MORE

Playng Ball

 

Selfish Mindfulness

Mindfulness is said to do many things for our psyche: it can increase our self-control, sharpen our concentration, extend our working memory and boost our mental flexibility. 

With practice, we should become less emotionally reactive – allowing us to deal with our problems more calmly.

One ‘benefit’ that you might not expect to gain, however, is heightened egotism. 

Yet a recent study suggests that, in some contexts, practicing mindfulness really can exaggerate some people’s selfish tendencies. 

With their increased inward focus, they seem to forget about others, and are less willing to help those in need.

This finding, alone, should not be a cause for you to cease meditating, if you do find it useful in other ways. 

But it adds to a growing body of research suggesting that mindfulness training can have undesirable side effects as well as potential benefits – and many psychologists now believe that the potentially negative consequences of certain meditative practices should be advertised alongside the hype.

The ‘me’ in meditation
The study comes from Michael Poulin, an associate professor in psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who wanted to investigate whether the effects of mindfulness might depend on its cultural context and the existing values of the people who are practicing it.  READ MORE

Umbrella Toss

 

A Few Cartoons

 

Wakey... Wakey...

CO2 is the Future

 

Biden's Gun Regulations

20 GOP states push back against Biden gun regulations

Attorneys general say Biden's proposed gun parts rule is unconstitutional

Attorneys general of 20 states are fighting back against an "unconstitutional" Biden administration proposal to regulate gun parts.

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich led the 20-state coalition in authoring formal comments urging the rejection of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) proposed new rule on firearms parts that followed President Biden's effort to regulate so-called ghost guns.

"Private individuals and businesses have the right to assemble firearms for their own use — a fact borne out in early American history and expressly recognized by the Gun Control Act," Morrisey said in a statement. "The Second Amendment is a core tenant of our Constitution, and this regulation would treat the activity of assembling firearm parts as a problem to be stamped out, rather than a right and tradition to be respected."

Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this year proposed further regulations of ghost guns to stem gun violence in America. Ghost guns are homemade firearms that aren't marked with a commercial serial number because such parts have been exempt from federal laws.

The Biden administration effort aims to crack down on individuals buying partially-finished frames and receivers, referred to as "80% receivers," without undergoing background checks or recordkeeping practices with traditional commercial gun sales. Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control group, has argued that the lack of regulation of ghost guns is the fastest-growing gun safety problem in America.

But the GOP-led states contend that federal law authorizes the ATF to regulate complete firearms and receivers, not the individual parts of an incomplete receiver, and new regulations could put certain gun parts manufacturers out of business. READ MORE

The Universe

 

Cats & Ancient Egypt

Along with hieroglyphics, obelisks and geometric patterns, cats feature prominently in ancient Egyptian art, reflecting the animal’s unique status among the people who dwelled along the Nile River. The animals were initially adopted as useful predators in ancient Egypt and gradually became symbols of divinity and protection.

“Though it is hard to say the Egyptians thought one thing or another, since so much change happened across their 3,000+ years of history, the ancient Egyptians, in general, did not worship animals,” says Julia Troche, an Egyptologist, assistant professor of history at Missouri State University, and author of Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt: The Old and Middle Kingdoms. “Rather, [they] saw animals as representations of divine aspects of their gods.”

Whether or not they were worshiped as deities, cats were an integral part of ancient Egyptian life. And, based on mummified cats discovered in tombs alongside humans, they carried an important role in the afterlife, as well.

Cats Provided Companionship and Pest Control
For most of the civilization’s history, ancient Egyptians saw cats as mutually beneficial companions, according to Troche. “Cats might come inside when it was hot, and they in turn would chase away dangerous animals, such as snakes—many of which were venomous—and scorpions,” she explains.

Some of what we know about the function of cats in ancient Egyptian society comes from scenes of everyday life depicted in paintings on the walls of tombs. “In tombs scenes, cats are shown laying or sitting below chairs, chasing birds and playing,” Troche says. “In some mortuary texts, they are shown with a dagger, cutting through Apopis: the snake deity who threatens Ra (the sun) at night in the Underworld.”  READ MORE

Heights

 

What We Are

“We’ve barely begun to understand our place in the cosmos. As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right here where we stand.”



“Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe,” the aging Marcus Aurelius instructed.

“Any live mind today is of the very same stuff as Plato’s & Euripides,” the young Virginia Woolf meditated in her diary two millennia later. “It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind.”

Two years earlier, in the first year of the twentieth century and the final year of his life, the uncommonly minded Canadian psychiatrist Maurice Bucke had formalized this notion in his visionary, controversial book Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, which influenced generations of thinkers ranging from Albert Einstein to Abraham Maslow to Steve Jobs.

Bucke himself had been greatly influenced by, then befriended and in turn influenced, Walt Whitman — a poet enraptured by how science illuminates the interconnectedness of life, who contemplated the strangest and most paradoxical byproduct of consciousness “lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal”: our sense of self.

Science was young then — it still is — and the world was old, and the mind was old, its dwelling-place practically unchanged since the cranium of early Homo sapiens began accommodating a brain comparable to our own some three hundred thousand years ago. 

With neuroscience yet to be born, it fell on the poets and the philosophers to meditate on the complexities of consciousness — the sole valve between reality and our experience, made of the same matter as the stars. Today, neuroscience remains a young and insecure science, as crude as Galilean astronomy — and as revolutionary in the revelations it has already contoured, yet to be shaded in with the nuances of understanding that might, just might, one day illuminate the fundaments of consciousness.  READ MORE

It's Just Math

 

LIVID

 According to the internet, 

livid 

means Furiously angry...

I have been vacationing at Myrtle Beach, SC all week and have been listening to FOX NEWS in the mornings before going out to my lounge chair and umbrella on the beach...  and, each day I get angrier and angrier at PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN and his INCOMPETENT LEADERSHIP as it pertains to withdrawing Americans and our Allies and our Friends out of Afghanistan...  It appears this fools did every ASS BACKWARDS...

First - he withdrawals the military and gives up the military airport and then decides to remove the Americans...  and, realizes he needs to send the military back in to get the Americans out.  In the meantime, the TALIBAN seize millions and millions of dollars worth of US military assets some of which are highly classified like the BLACKHAWK helicopters...

And, if this isn't bad enough, he bows down to the TALIBAN and lets them tell US what the hell we are going to do or not going to do...  NOBODY in the history of this country has ever order our PRESIDENT around like the Taliban are ordering Biden.

Second...  mainstream media is not bothered at all by his incompetence even after the British PARLIMENT refused to support any future military actions by the USA as long as Biden was our President...  AND...  that has never happened before either...  not with one of our CLOSEST ALLIES...

Third. our illustrious President REFUSES to take questions by the press after making public statements...  Who the hell is he trying to hide from...

WAKE UP AMERICA...

Ice Cream

 

Biden's Buck

Down Under