Driving My Girl To Work On Our Tandem Bicycle. Takes Me 15 Minutes To Drop Her Off And 45 Minutes To

The thief that only borrows in a sea with out the shark, But who protects the shadow from the dark?

All social media discourse basically boils down to, "Your moral argument is based on a gross oversimplification, but if I point this out, people will accuse me if defending the bad thing"

This is so incredibly stupid I love them

you can aim for my heart, go for blood but you would still miss me in your bones

Imagining Garak and Bashir in a fucked up survival situation. Garak getting injured somewhere intimate like the thigh or lower abdomen. It severs an artery and he's bleeding out. Forcing Bashir to reach inside and apply manual pressure to the artery while he repairs it. Garak, conscious and whimpering, as Bashir puts his whole hand inside him :) Bashir whispering softly, gently how well he's doing, just a little more :) :) :)

No offense to British people as a whole, and their entire culture, but when they’re mad all I can picture is an angry little cartoon character going ‘oi oi oi’

"The transition from [the barter system to currency] is hard to understand; how can human cravings be fetishized into pieces of metal? The answer is elegant because it reveals not only the origin of money, but its character even today. Money was and still is literally sacred: 'It has long been known that the first markets were sacred markets, the first banks were temples, the first to issue money were priests or priest-kings.' The first coins were minted and distributed by temples because they were medallions inscribed with the image of their god and embodying his protective power. Containing such manna, they were naturally in demand, not because you could buy things with them but vice-versa: since they were popular, you could exchange them for other things.

The consequence of this was that 'now the cosmic powers could be the property of everyman, without even the need to visit temples: you could now traffic in immortality in the marketplace.' This eventually led to the emergence of a new kind of person, 'who based the value of his life — and so of his immortality — on a new cosmology centered on coins.' A new meaning system arose, which our present economic system makes increasingly the meaning-system. 'Money becomes the distilled value of all existence ... a single immortality symbol, a ready way of relating the increase of oneself to all the important objects and events of one's world.'

If we replace 'immortality' with 'becoming real,' the point becomes Buddhist: beyond its usefulness as a medium of exchange, money has become modern humanity's most popular way of accumulating Being, of coping with our gnawing intuition that [the ego does] not really exist. Suspecting that the sense of self is a groundless construction, we went to temples and churches to ground ourselves in God; now we ground ourselves financially.

The problem is that the true meaning of this meaning-system is unconscious, which means, as usual, that we end up paying a heavy price for it. The value we place on money karmically rebounds back against us: the more we value it, the more we use it to evaluate ourselves."

- David Loy, from "Buddhism and Money: The Repression of Emptiness Today." Buddhist Ethics and Modern Society: An International Symposium, edited by Charles Wei-hsun Fu and Sandra A. Wawrytko, 1991.