The Last Psychiatrist explains the lessons that the myth of Narcissus holds for parents: If you want a child who knows himself and can achieve, surround him with mirrors:

“How do you make a child know himself?  You surround him with mirrors. “This is what everyone else sees when you do what you do.  This is who everyone thinks you are.”

You cause him to be tested: this is the kind of person you are, you are good at this but not that. This other person is better than you at this, but not better than you at that.  These are the limits by which you are defined.   Narcissus was never allowed to meet real danger, glory, struggle, honor, success, failure; only artificial versions manipulated by his parents.   He was never allowed to ask, “am I a coward?  Am I a fool?”  To ensure his boring longevity his parents wouldn’t have wanted a definite answer in either direction.

He was allowed to live in a world of speculation, of fantasy, of “someday” and “what if”.   He never had to hear “too bad”, “too little” and “too late.”

When you want a child to become something– you first teach him how to master his impulses, how to live with frustration.  But when a temptation arose Narcissus’s parents either let him have it or hid it from him so he wouldn’t be tempted, so they wouldn’t have to tell him no. They didn’t teach him how to resist temptation, how to deal with lack.  And they most certainly didn’t teach him how NOT to want what he couldn’t have.  They didn’t teach him how to want.

The result was that he stopped having desires and instead desired the feeling of desire.”

H/T to Cheshire I, in the comment section of Patheos for pointing out this gem from Chesterton:

The Song of the Strange Ascetic

If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have praised the purple vine,
My slaves should dig the vineyards,
And I would drink the wine.
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And his slaves grow lean and grey,
That he may drink some tepid milk
Exactly twice a day.

If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have crowned Neaera’s curls,
And filled my life with love affairs,
My house with dancing girls;
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And to lecture rooms is forced,
Where his aunts, who are not married,
Demand to be divorced.

If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have sent my armies forth,
And dragged behind my chariots
The Chieftains of the North.
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And he drives the dreary quill,
To lend the poor that funny cash
That makes them poorer still.

If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have piled my pyre on high,
And in a great red whirlwind
Gone roaring to the sky;
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And a richer man than I:
And they put him in an oven,
Just as if he were a pie.

Now who that runs can read it,
The riddle that I write,
Of why this poor old sinner,
Should sin without delight-
But I, I cannot read it
(Although I run and run),
Of them that do not have the faith,
And will not have the fun.

(G. K. Chesterton – 1913)

From National Garden Clubs Inc.

Protecting Our  World

“The amount of water on Earth now is about the same as it was millions  of years ago.  Water regulates the Earth’s temperature.  It also regulates the temperature of the human  body. Less than 2% of the Earth’s water supply is fresh water.

Of all the earth’s water, 97% is salt water found in oceans and seas.

Only 1% of the earth’s water is available for drinking water.  The remaining 2% is frozen.

The human body is about 75% water.

A person can survive about a month without food, but only 5 to 7 days without water.

Every day in the United States, we drink about 110 million gallons of water.

Landscaping accounts for about half the water used at home.  Showers account for another

18 percent, while toilets use about 20 percent.

Showering and bathing are the largest indoor uses (27%) of water domestically

There are 7.48 gallons in a cubic foot of water.  Therefore, 2000 cubic feet of water is 14,560 gallons.

An acre foot of water is about 326,000 gallons.  One-half acre foot is enough to meet the needs of a typical family for a year.

It takes 3.3 acre feet of water to grow enough food for an average family for a year.

A leaky faucet can waste 100 gallons a day.

If every household in America had a faucet that dripped once each second, 928 million gallons of water a day would leak away.

One flush of the toilet uses 6 ½ gallons of water.

An average family of four uses 881 gallons of water per week just by flushing the toilet.

Avoid flushing the toilet unnecessarily.  Dispose of tissues, insects and other such waste in the trash rather than the toilet.

An average bath requires 37 gallons of water.

The average 5-minute shower takes 15 to 25 gallons water – around 40 gallons are used in 10 minutes.

Take short showers instead of baths.

You use about 5 gallons of water if you leave the water running while brushing your teeth or shaving.

The use of water-saving toilets, showerheads, and faucet aerators can result in a 45% savings in water use.

Each person needs to drink about 2 ½ quarts (80 ounces) of water every day.

Store drinking water in the refrigerator rather than letting the faucet run every time you want a cool glass of water.

You don’t need to buy bottled water for health reasons if your drinking water meets all of the federal, state and local drinking water standards.  Bottled water can cost up to 1000 times more than municipal drinking water.

You can refill an 8-oz. glass of water approximately 15,000 times for the same cost as a six-pack of soda pop.

A dairy cow must drink 4 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of milk.

Run your dishwasher and washing machine only when they are full.

A top-loading clothes washer uses between 40 and 55 gallons of water per load.  Front-loading models use roughly half that amount.

When washing dishes by hand, fill one sink or basin with soapy water.  Quickly rinse under a slow-moving stream from the faucet.

Never put water down the drain when there may be another use for it such as watering a plant or garden, or cleaning.

An automatic dishwasher uses 9 to 12 gallons of water while hand washing dishes can use up to 20 gallons.

Use a bowl of water to clean fruits and vegetables rather than running water over them.  You can reuse this for your houseplants.

If you water your grass and trees more heavily, but less often, this saves water and builds stronger roots.

Water your lawn only when it needs it.  If you step on the grass and it springs back up when you move, it doesn’t need water.  If it stays flat, it does need water.

Water lawns during the early morning hours or evening when temperatures and wind speed are the lowest.  This reduces losses from evaporation.

Running a sprinkler for 2 hours can use up to 500 gallons of water. Up to 90% of water used to sprinkle lawns can be lost to the atmosphere through evaporation

Use a rain catch system (rain barrel) and use natural rain water for watering in the yard

Do not hose down your driveway or sidewalk.  Use a broom to clean leaves and other debris from these areas.  Using a hose to clean a driveway uses about 50 gallons of water every 5 minutes.

When washing a car, use soap and water from a bucket.  Use a hose with a shut-off nozzle for rinsing.  As much as 150 gallons of water can be saved by turning off the hose between rinses.

Public water suppliers process 38 billion gallons of water per day for domestic and public use.

Approximately 1 million miles of pipelines and aqueducts carry water in the United States and Canada.  That’s enough pipe to circle the earth 40 times.

About 800,000 water wells are drilled each year in the United States for domestic, farming, commercial, and water testing purposes.

More than 13 million households get their water from their own private wells and are responsible for

Treating And pumping the water themselves.

Industries released 197 million pounds of toxic chemicals into waterways in 1990.

300 million gallons of water are needed to produce a single day’s supply of U. S. newsprint.

One inch of rainfall drops 7,000 gallons or nearly 30 tons of water on a 60’ by 180’ piece of land.

No drips

A dripping faucet can waste 20 gallons of water a day.  A leaking toilet can use 90,000 gallons of water in a month.  Get out the wrench and change the washers on your sinks and showers, or get new washer less faucets.  Keeping your existing equipment well maintained is probably the easiest and cheapest way to start saving water.
Install new fixtures

New, low-volume or dual flush toilets, low-flow showerheads, water-efficient dishwashers and clothes washing machines can all save a great deal of water and money.  Aerators on yours faucets can significantly reduce water volume; water-saving showerheads can cut the volume of water used down to 1.2 gallons per minute or less.  Splurging on a low-flow toilet could save another 50 to 80 gallons of water a day.  Together, those changes could cut the household’s daily use of water by nearly one-half – saving a considerable amount of water and money.
Cultivate good water habits

All the water that goes down the drain, clean or dirty, ends up mixing with raw sewage, getting contaminated, and meeting the same fate.  Try to stay aware of this precious resource disappearing.  Turn off the water while brushing your teeth or shaving; wash laundry and dishes with full loads; take shorter showers, etc.
Stay off the bottle

By many measures, bottled water is a scam.  Bottled water is not as well regulated as municipal water and often is not even particularly pure.  Much bottled water is just tap water anyway.  Bottled water is more expensive per gallon than gasoline and incurs a huge carbon footprint from it transportation.  The discarded bottles are a blight in the landscape and the landfill.  If you want to carry water with you, use a refillable bottle.
Go beyond the lawn

Naturalize your lawn using locally appropriate plants that are hardy and don’t need a lot of water.  Water in the coolest part of the day to minimize evaporation.  Drip irrigation is a better choice than using a sprinkler system.
Harvest your rainwater

Put a rain barrel on your downspouts and use this water for irrigation.  Rain cisterns come in all shapes and sizes ranging from larger underground systems to smaller, freestanding ones.
Harvest your grey water

Water that has been used at least once but is still clean enough for other jobs is called greywater.  Water from sinks, showers, dishwashers, and clothes washers are the most common household examples.  (Toilet water is often called “blackwater” and needs a different level of treatment before it can be used.)  Greywater can be recycled with practical plumbing systems (such as Aqus) or with simple practices such as emptying the fish tank in the garden instead of the sink.  The bottom line?  One way or another, avoid putting water down the drain when you can use it for something else.
At the car wash

Car washes are often more efficient than home washing and the water is treated rather than letting it go straight into the sewer system.  Check to make sure that they clean and recycle the later.
Keep your eyes open

Report broken pipes, open hydrants, and excessive water waste.  Don’t be shy about pointing out leaks to your friends and family members, either.  They might have turned out the dripping sound a long time ago.
Don’t spike the punch

Water sources have to be protected.  In many closed loop systems like those in cities in the Great Lakes, waste water is returned to the Lake that fresh water comes out of.  Don’t pout chemicals down drains, or flush drugs down toilets; it could come back in diluted form in your water.

Source:  Planet Green – A Discovery Company

National Garden Clubs, Inc., believes it is imperative that we support and undertake proactive initiatives for the protection, conservation and restoration of the quality of the nation’s coastal waters, wetlands, aquifers, watersheds, lakes, rivers and streams, through educational programs, conservation efforts, increased advocacy and partnerships with related government agencies, and state and national grassroots water coalitions.”

–

National Garden Clubs, Inc. Water Conservation Platform

Adopted October 4, 2008

Lila RajivaDecember 25, 2013 at 11:39 PM

Merry Christmas to Bob and Chris Rossini and thanks for much hard work over many years.

I appreciate your allowing me to post, though I have been highly critical of many of your colleagues on my blog.

I also appreciate that you run an open forum and don’t delete comments in totality like some (nameless) libertarian sites, thus rewriting 4 years of history in a rather Stalinist way that calls into question their already questionable integrity.

Lila RajivaJanuary 8, 2014 at 11:56 AM

Well, it is European, but it’s not based in Europe, necessarily.
It’s a private firm devoted to futuristic technologies.
Just trace the connections, folks.

The name is a dead give-away that it’s NOT Japanese.

Reply
Lila RajivaDecember 26, 2013 at 12:01 AM

@Chris Rossini

Have you solved the puzzle of SATOSHI NAKAMOTO?

NWO creation from defense research.

When you figure it out, give me a buzz and we’ll compare notes.
But don’t keep trying to convert your flock.
Some sheep are meant for shearing. Leave them to it.

[Note: This picture isn’t intended to offend Islam or Muslims.]

Zahir Ebrahim analyzes the John Perkins of the world:

“Should the conscionable John Perkins be donating the monetary proceeds of his Confessions to the nations and peoples he helped rape and plunder, in restitution, just as he is now presumably helping them with forensic information on how he covertly did it to them? Selling books on one’s con-game in the name of helping future victims only imputes impure motives to the enterprise: First be highly paid for orchestrating the rape, then get paid again writing about it, while also winning praise and fame in the process! Furthermore, it is interesting to observe another blatant dichotomy in crime and punishment. Adolph Eichmann was the harbinger of cataclysm to some six million Jews for a short span of 3 to 5 years with just the stroke of a pen or the drop of a word, and he was hanged in Jerusalem. Whereas the EHMs are the harbingers – with the same stroke of pen and some button pushing on calculators and fancy spreadsheets – of the continued entrapment of entire nations in inextricable systems of poverty and misery for generations that is no less cataclysmic for these victims. And yet, the EHM walk free among us in suits and ties, sometimes even heading prestigious economic institutions, and of course, nations. As the prime-mover DNA – the ‘legal covers’ – should we do something about this root cause that enables the multi-color-collared crimes against humanity by the emperors? Where else are we seeing such “legal covers”? Would it be pertinent to point to “shock and awe”, “Economic Sanctions”, and the “UN Security Council Resolutions”, to subjugate entire nations? To know right from wrong is indeed not too complex – the Bible has already taught it to us through the Golden Rule “Do unto others as you have others do unto you” – there are few shades of gray for the commonsensical un-hypocrite! Thus I have little sympathy for the cat who goes for Hajj after eating 900 mice! Crimes are not absolved or made less abhorrent by confessionals. Nor its victims restituted by the voice of one’s conscience! Payment still needs to be made in full. Thank you.”

From Life News.com

“Although abortion is undoubtedly a controversial issue, there are significant areas of abortion policy on which Americans broadly agree. For instance, a 2011 Gallup poll found that an “especially large percentage” of both “self-described ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ Americans” supports making abortion illegal in the third trimester.[i] However, against this area of clear common ground, Planned Parenthood has worked vigorously to oppose late-term abortion bans.

In so doing, Planned Parenthood is more than just outside mainstream American values. Its effort to preserve an abortion-on-demand policy through all nine months of pregnancy is out of step with the global community.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (and its companion case Doe v. Bolton) “constitutionalized” abortion, nullifying the abortion laws of all 50 states. As a result, the United States is currently one of only nine nations that allow abortion after 14 weeks of gestation.[ii] Even among this group, however, the United States is one of the most permissive in its treatment of abortion, placing it in the company of China, North Korea, and Canada, the only countries in the world that permit abortion for any reason after fetal viability.[iii]

From 100abortionpictures.com

Graydon Chiapetta writes about anti-Hindu activism in American institutions and ends with this insight about the real agenda behind prominent strains of Western scholarship about India today – the effacement of Hinduism – Sanatana Dharma –  as a living 6000 (plus) year tradition from the world. In other words, cultural genocide:

“One scholar, facing the complexity of increasing Harijan, Christian and Muslim sympathy for Hindutva, echoed the true feelings that most Western scholars have always exhibited towards India. Asked how he could analyze such a complex civilization, he replied: “When Hinduism dies, We’ll do a better job.”

Comment:

My first question is – who is “we” in the last line?

Whom/what does this scholar think he represents?

Is he so politically aware that he openly refers to the major foundations that finance university research?

Is he a conspiracy researcher who approves of the agenda of the money-power, which is to subvert religious beliefs that stand in its way?

Or does he believe that he and his fellow sociologists can really do better for a billion people than their own six thousand year old religious heritage?

Frighteningly, I think this latter is the correct answer.

2. 
   Lila RajivaJanuary 22, 2014 at 3:52 PM

Women are the great protectors of children, physically and morally.

Once that protection is gone, the child can more easily be inducted into the service of the state.

Without the experience of a loving mother, the child can more easily be turned into an expendable killing machine for the state.

By trivializing motherhood and family, by exaggerating the value of market place work, a larger tax-base is created… more tax-serfs…

The CIA is fully invested in the radical feminist-gay rights agenda and all its many minions will say their piece, as needed…”