Ok but high speed rail isn’t for connecting you to New Orleans, it’s more for connecting New Orleans to Chicago.

We’re unlikely to wind up as train connected as Japan, but let’s look at the shinkansen. It goes between major population centers and sometimes stops at decent sized cities on the way. When I had to go to a smaller town in Japan I took high speed rail from Tokyo to the nearest major city, then I took their local rail to a town, then another line to the place I was going.

For comparison this is the equivalent of flying into New York from Europe, taking high speed rail to Chicago, taking an Illinois rail network to Peoria, then taking it again to say Lincoln. Northeastern states have the rail network to do that last mile stuff. But even just having the ability to drive into your nearest city and take a high speed rail to a city your friends live in or that you want to vacation or do business in would be huge. That’s why the main proposals for high speed rail are to connect New York to Chicago or San Diego to Seattle. The latter would make it convenient to go from any major city on the west coast to any other one, even if you have to take BART or a bus or whatever first and last mile transit you need to get there

Weird for a devout catholic, but I wasn’t going to stop him

Tbh it’s kinda like intentionally disassociating, but not exactly. A lot of meditation aims for intentionally entering a trance.

A way to think of it may be as the mental equivalent of not feeding in to reflexes. Your body will sometimes act without conscious thought and a person who is in tune with their instincts might follow through on the unconscious actions, this type of meditation is like doing the opposite of that. You allow thoughts to come and go, but you don’t interact with them.

For example you may be trying to meditate and think “oh crap I don’t have dinner planned”, then where normally you might go into planning dinner, here you say “that’s ok, I can plan it when I’m done” and let it be.

If you’ve ever seen the litany against fear from Dune, this style of meditation is basically that but for all thoughts and emotions. Rather than resisting thoughts you allow them to pass over and through you and embrace that you aren’t your thoughts.

That said not all meditation techniques work for everyone. Visualization meditation has some people who love it because it works really easily for us, but others hate it.

I recommend further research if you’re interested in meditation but struggle with it

Aww but the kitty was the best part of my stay there

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It still doesn’t make sense to me making it the day before April fools day

It’s weird to me as well. A base understanding of their history shows that while they’ve been having a really bad time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, for most of history they’ve been one of the major cultural, financial, and generally civilizational hubs of the Eastern Hemisphere. Discounting them is like discounting China or India.

A common claim is that they’ve been at war with each other for thousands of years. This is really funny coming from Europeans and their descendants, considering we were the savage backwater hell bent on killing the shit out of every neighbor we saw and also them for the entire middle ages, meanwhile they spent the period with some armed conflict against each other, but far more focused on peaceful trading.

I think that op is referencing the style that’s about observing the thoughts dispassionately and allowing them to flow away. The goal is to empty the mind, but the observing is used as an alternative to interacting or engaging.

You let it be obnoxious, observe it dispassionately, and allow it to go once it is finished.

Mine is loud and obnoxious as well. When I meditate it attempts to demand my attention, dredging every thought it can, but I don’t feed it, I don’t encourage it, I observe and allow it to pass. It’s definitely a skill and it takes a lot of practice, but it’s a skill worth learning.

We also shouldn’t be certain he’s queer. Like don’t get me wrong, repressed egg is on the list of potential explanations, but he could be a cishet guy who developed this kink through other ways.

I’ll pray for them, but they won’t like it if my prayers are answered

Yep, for more information on that read Debt: the First 5000 Years, it goes pretty deep into it from both anthropological and political perspectives

Fucking hell, Iran and Iraq were working together and not even really against anyone we dislike and we got mad at that too…

Why can’t we just treat the middle east better‽ Things would likely improve for their citizens if we treated them well. And they wouldn’t hate us if we didn’t keep fucking killing them, especially if we did shit like helping.

Of fucking course we’re just bombing Iraq now too.

It really needs to be a punishable offense to attack a country without congressional approval, treaty mandate, or proof of immediate threat

Yeah it’s medical malpractice plain and simple.

I hope all 8 die of natural, but divinely inspired causes. They legalized the torture of children. Child abuse is not protected speech

Ah well I hear it’s very difficult so I assume the only people who do it are those who really want it

Have you considered freeing yourself from desire?

It’s still important to prove it. It takes it from something obvious to his opponents to historical fact.

“We need new democratic leaders who are centrists unlike Hillary ‘third way’ Clinton, Joe ‘tough on crime’ Biden, and Kamala ‘the cop’ Harris.”