#there are also subgroups which feel more intuitive and others which feel less so

[quatregats]

Thoughts in head about a Venn diagram of the Lord of the Rings, The Left Hand of Darkness, the Aubreyad, and Les Mis where the center is stories which are about flawed characters yet fundamentally hopeful about human nature and which also completely throw you into their specific time and place in a way few books manage to do. Not sure what the other overlaps would be although I have some thoughts but I believe with the power of Tumblr we can fill in all the gaps

[jess-do-it]

(Transcribed w/ Permission from @jessfromonline) Thread: Many people are now out on the streets for the first time. as such, let's talk very basic, everyone should know this, 'this should be general and not sensitive knowledge' protest, action, and street tactics. let's get organized and be effective!

Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/jessfromonline/status/1268620358950649858

(Note: I am not this person, this is a transcript of their twitter thread I made with their permission)

Have a protest buddy. do not go to a protest without a buddy. preferably have a crew. 

if you have a crew, it should still be split into buddies. crews should choose a spoke (spokesperson) who calls movements and communicates with people.

if you have a large crew, you should have a spoke + lieutenants/LTs/whatever you wanna call them. their job is disseminating calls but more importantly, to track the people grouped under them. when shit pops off, it's easy to lose people. LTs watch to see if anyone in their subgroup is missing, and spoke checks for the LTs. a system of accountability. STILL buddy up in subgroups. 

If you've got a good bloc on the ground, you can call 'spokes' to get a spokes council together and make larger decisions about what to do.

Your crew should have a basic, 1-syllable, generic word, that changes at every action, which you can call and each crew member replies with the word. feels dorky but worth it. arrange all this ahead of time. this allows you to quickly count your crew & check no one dropped.

You should have an offsite person, preferably two. Here is a guide for doing offsite.

designate 1-2 comms people. they have phones and retrieve info on cop movements from offsite via signal. on a vpn, burner phone if you can.

ideally no one besides comms should have a phone on them. easier to track. tradeoff: if you lose someone makes it harder to figure out what happened. consider battery-out phones for non-comms people. 

write a number for legal support hotline in your area on body in sharpie

Before a protest, work out with your crew what your risk levels are. you can have different levels but try to avoid buddying across levels. will you brawl with fash? cops? risk arrest? loot? burn? graffiti? dont make those decisions in the moment.

I have no easy advice for what happens if you lose someone. have comms immediately report to off-site who can try to track them down. if you're large you can send an lt+subgroup to look, but they may have just gotten out and left. they could be arrested or with medics. off-site can start checking jails and hospitals for them. see off-site guide for what info you need for this and how to collect. if you have better advice for when people drop unexpectedly, put it in the replies.

Never talk to cops never talk to cops never talk to cops never talk to cops. if you're arrested dont talk. if they approach you during dont talk. you can yell harassment but dont do it once you're arrested. you can sing if you want. group singing in jails keeps spirits up. (Singing is a super spreading activity for covid, pointed out at end of this thread).

If you can, know your local PD. some departments publish whitepapers on their tactics. talk to local protest veterans in your area to learn about what your city's cops do. every area is difference and this can make the different between success or failure.

Use all the gear you got. helmet, goggles, gloves, umbrella, etc. carry water if you can (ONLY ONLY WATER TO FLUSH EYES. ONLY.) you gotta stay hydrated too. generic clothes, packs, etc. if possible. more common the better. Don't carry too heavy but it's really worth it. helmets feel ridiculous? you'll regret not taking it when you take a round to the head.

Consider having handles for your crew. it's a lot better to yell someone's handle than their name when you need their attention. Handles should be short (1-2 syllables) and minimally linked to the person. practice using only a person's handle. let's move on to broader thinking (might jump back if i think of stuff)

Situational awareness. you can practice this all the time but it's v important during an action. What are your exits? have they changed? what are your numbers vs. their's? what's their posture? what's behind, in front, sides? what gear to they have? re-evaluate constantly. i'm going to say it again. exits exits exits. where can your crew go if it gets too hot. if you dont have a clear exit try to move as soon as possible.

Extending on that: police will often try to kettle, aka surround you and trap you in. keep the bloc moving to the cops' weakest side to avoid a kettle. don't be afraid to tell people what to do. they'll thank you if you avoid a kettle. move without em if you have to but dont isolate your crew too much or you're easy to pick off and arrest. Also, be careful: cops may take advantage of this to get you to slowly push farther and farther from your objectives. sometimes you gotta stand your ground. know your numbers and know your strategy. sometimes it's time to stay. a spokes-council might be able to decide. talk about this ahead of time.

Don't yell where the exit is with cops around, but do disseminate it in a crowd. your crew, minimum, must always know.

Keep your crew looking in all directions and regularly switching. dont get snuck up on.

Don't get picked off. cops will arrest 1 person quicker than 10, 50. non-covid times, the advice is to "tighten up!" the bloc, so they cant snatch and grab. YMMV during these times. evaluated based on the situation.

Banners rule for this. theyre not just propaganda. if you have a heavy banner (tarp, etc.) in the front, they can't as easily grab through and arrest. stay behind it if you can. 

Learn to communicate clearly and tersely under pressure. people underestimate this skill. you dont need 'please' or extra words.  Don't chatter. learn to give a 'sitrep' (situational report) in which you report all the info from 16. spokes, ask you LTs for sitreps. give them when new folks arrive.

Back to the individual: if you can't keep up, DON'T GO. hard lesson to learn. as a person with chronic digestive issues, i've fucked this up. if you're incapacitated you're a liability. consider learning to run offsite, or going to less intense actions. know what to expect based on recent police activity, level of risk planned for the action, the capabilities of your crew, etc. i know you might feel obligated to be in the streets but if your crew has to care or slow down for you instead of acting, that's hurting not helping. but try not to let this discourage you from trying if you can. unless you're sure with your health and/or fitness you can't, it is good to try. we need numbers. but dont push yourself when you cant. there's more to the work than the streets.

Dont share unconfirmed info. dont repeat info from people you dont trust. ive seen so many actions where someone thinks they see a cop and then everyone is yelling "cop" and freaked out and scattering and theres no cop. be careful. misinfo is worse than no info.

Some of this is gonna feel ridiculous and tryhard. being good at this takes trying hard. be vulnerable and push your crew to do this. you'll be safer and more effective because you do.

Eat well, plenty of protein rich food the day before. hydrate well day of. physical condition matters for this.

Sometimes you gotta pee. you can pee in an empty bottle, or you can pee on the ground. MANY people wear diapers. this isnt the time for shame. do what you need.

When you gotta do something like pee, change, sometimes even drink, if you're in bloc, you gotta hide. get to the center of the bloc if you can. call 'cover me' or 'flag' (if the crowd has flags) and they'll wrap you. kneel and do what you gotta do.

Some of this advice is for when you have a coherent bloc, but there's been less of those in this round of protests. still, keep it in mind.

If you're in bloc, consider bringing generic clothes to change into in a bag. gym clothes and local team sportwear are great. either do 28 and slip out somewhere under cover, or scatter and hide, and change in your hiding place. bring a bag to put your bag in.

How are you getting in and out? can you pay for public transit in cash (this still means being on cameras, keep your hat down)? can someone drive you in (drop off far, so they cant see plates)? lock up your bike somewhere?

This is counter-intuitive, but unless it's a covert action, where your goal is to get in and out without ever being noticed, keep your ID and a bit of cash in your pocket. ID will get you in and out of jail faster. again: NOT FOR COVERT ACTIONS. and dont drop it.

Try to know your success and failure conditions before your crew goes out. when is it no longer worth it and time to bail? what are you trying to accomplish and how do you know you're doing so? try to create criteria if you can

in large, multi-site protests like we're seeing rn, if all you're doing is occupying cops, you're helping a lot. standoffs mean they arent somewhere else. looting they HAVE to respond to because property > people for cops. small groups can make big differences here.

Share your sitreps with other spokes if you can. if you notice a kettle, tell everybody and try to move everyone. have some chutzpah: you can do it.

DON'T LEAD PEOPLE INTO FENCED IN PARKS OR ENCLOSED ALLEYS PLEASE JUST DON'T PLEASE I'M BEGGING YOU. HAVE MANY EXITS.

Consider carrying print maps of the area. dont mark them with objectives in case they get taken. review maps of the area ahead of time.

We already talked offsite and comms, i won't cover offsite much here, read the guide

Scouts! a good scout team is invaluable. especially bike scouts. get a signal chat and people on bikes in strategic locations reporting movements.

Don’t put everybody in the scouts chat. keep a few offsite people reading the scout chat and relaying in to comms people.

If somebody gets arrested that you're in a chat with, put 'dead the chat' and everybody should immediately leaved. someone should contact the person that killed the chat to find out who got picked up and exclude them from the new chat.

If y'all are super coordinated and have a ton of planning (not happening much right now) consider having a marshal in charge of calling moves for the whole bloc. spokes-council should still be convened and can challenge, but even the spanish anarchists elected military officials. in the field, you need a chain of command to operate quickly and effectively and outcompete cops.

Read this thread. remember, you dont have to be able to go toe-to-toe with cops. you just have to make your group not worth the consequences of dealing with.

Where are you going when the protest/action is done? are you all rallying at one point? have a plan.

Everyone check in with offsite when you get back. you all need to know everyone got home safe, or start checking jails/hospitals.

Offsite should know who is organizing jail support so they can pass that off when needed.

This is all easier if you know folks ahead of time.  show up to your local left orgs. even if it doesn't feel like you're doing a lot yet, those relationships matter.

WHITE PEOPLE: put yourself between police and people of color. they are much less likely to be as brutal with you. this should be established policy in your crew, esp if your crew is (as it ideally should be, if not ask why) multiracial.

WHITE PEOPLE: while Black opinion isnt a monolith & you dont have to regard the scolding of every Black liberal (see thread): if there are Black people/other people of color around and they're not escalating tactics, you shouldnt be unless its agreed. See this thread.

What does your crew and your bloc do if someone is injured? for some blocs, if medics have them, you leave them behind with medics and keep moving. it can be bad to jeopardize and trap the whole bloc for one person who is with medics who they are gonna be with anyway. on the OTHER hand, some blocs reasonably dont want to leave anyone behind and want to stay to cover people with medics (police sometimes respect medic neutrality, sometimes don't.) most important is: KNOW WHICH Y'ALL ARE DOING. DONT WAFFLE BACK & FORTH, DONT SPLIT THE BLOC.

Quick addition cuz it shouldn't be missing: if you're carrying a phone dont have touch ID on your phone, police can legally compel you to activate touch ID but they can't compel a password. also turn off location services and wifi unless you absolutely need them.

diff cops have diff legal options as well! in the middle of old city in philly, there's a federal park with park rangers. if they nab you, it's probably a federal charge, way worse. we're more scared of the rangers lol. know local uniforms if you can.

While we're here, some other extremely useful threads:

buying shit and not getting caught

riot control projectiles

take shifts! i didn't think to include it because it's longer term, but it's vital. we've certainly been dealing with it in philly.

this is a good COVID-19 specific tip. need to be a lot more careful about singing in custody during the pandemic.

having regular check-in times with offsite are a good idea

there's 50 tips for being effective in the street. might come back and add more later. i'm not the 'expert' and YMMV and you can disagree and your city might operate differently. that said:

i can tell you these are learned lessons from years out there & if you use them you'll do a lot, lot better than if you dont. you and your crew will be safer, and youll achieve your objectives more often. ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure. put in the work, and let's win.

---

End transcript. People should take a look at that thread because it is being constantly updated with a lot of good information. Stay safe out there and fight this shit.

Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/jessfromonline/status/1268620358950649858

[fabulousquel]

GreedFall: Tips + My Review

So I picked up this game out of curiosity because I’m currently working on an RPG style historical fantasy that draws inspiration from a similar time period. I wanted to see how someone else handled the ‘flintlock’ genre and told a story with elements of this era. I am in no means a pro game reviewer but I completed the entire game yesterday and I have a lot I want to say.

There are some spoilers in this, so if you’d like to avoid reading them, don’t read the "Story” section. 

Tips:

Do your companion quests early and as soon as they pop up. There are some incredible lore bits and development of your character as well as your companions within them. Also if you sideline a companion for too long, they might leave your party in ways that might surprise or unsurprise you.

Certain dialog options will give you more quest content. For example, you’ve caught a criminal and you are given the choice to kill them on the spot, or capture them for trial. If you kill them, your quest line ends there. If you decide to trial them, another quest line opens up and you get a lot more flavor.

You can essentially just follow the main quest line if you want to speed-finish the game, but you lose a lot of context and additional dialog options if you do so. You will also wind up fighting the final boss at a much lower level, thus making the fight harder, but not impossible. They may have made this an option for people coming back wanting a challenge or to try a different build. But in my opinion, they should’ve made the side quests a mandatory thing because it’s a huge disservice to the context of the main story without them.

Don’t forget to give your companions gear upgrades- especially if you’re playing on more challenging modes.

If you want to avoid bloodshed and sneak into a camp, make sure you put on a chest piece of that faction. 

Put some skill points into Stasis no matter what build you roll with.

The Soundtrack:

It’s amazing. The snare drums going off in combat sequences create a very distinct and powerful mood. The zone music is very well orchestrated. It’s now up on spotify as well! 

Combat & Talents:

Of the RPGs I’ve played, this most reminded me of a combination of Red Dead Redemption, Final Fantasy with the option to semi-turn style with spells & traps, and a very versatile talent tree system that is really...fun. It’s the first time in a while that I felt I could make an effective solid build and playstyle around what I wanted to do most. Combat takes getting used to but I set up my keybinds to be a lot like ESO and I adapted very quickly. I went shortsword / gun tactical and it was immensely satisfying. 

The Story:

[SPOILS AHEAD]

The difference between historical fiction and historical fantasy is that a historical fantasy does not seek to retell history accurately, but rather take inspiration from it. How heavy this inspiration goes varies from story to story. This is how I approached interpreting the story, even in its very realistic parts. As I played through, there were several themes that became very clear to me. Keep in mind that I played through the game with De Sarde taking the Neutral Good alignment choice in most dialog options. 

The Elephant in the Room: Colonialism. This is one of the big criticisms I see with the game, and truth be told, it is a point of criticism for myself. The game treats the colonizing factions exactly like colonizers of real history, and it’s a subject that still rightfully touches nerves. One faction seeks to profit, another nation seeks to convert, and another seeks to experiment on. While there are subgroups of these factions that are more extreme than their leadership- the leadership seems complacent about it until condemning evidence is brought up. While extremely problematic this is, it is very true to what has happened in history surrounding colonialism, and places you in one uncomfortable situation after another in a frighteningly realistic way. It makes your decisions as De Sarde in some instances painful but it can be satisfying to see how your actions affect justice in these matters.

Some critics have said that De Sarde’s choices do not always condemn truly objectionable events enough. I agree that more depth could have been added. But in my playthrough, De Sarde’s role starts out as a truly neutral party looking for truths, and they gradually became more adamant on stances as the game progressed. By the end, my De Sarde was about to 1v1 Theleme, and drag out the Bridge Alliance governor. So I am unsure if this is a perspective coming from those who haven’t completed the game in its entirety with all side quests which influence reputations more & seem to flesh out more dialog options. 

Humanity Has a Sickness This was written both physically and metaphorically in how humans are as susceptible to committing atrocities as they are to growing ill. Throughout the story as De Sarde, you play almost a detective in uncovering the truth about the people you were raised to believe were benevolent. De Sarde does not take these accusations of corruption lightly, but they also treat it very seriously. Piece by piece, De Sarde learns more about each factions true intentions, and the lies, corruption and greed that intertwine. But at the same time, the story attempts to reveal the potential for all people to ‘do better’ and change- and some of this is seen when you use De Sarde’s charisma + intuition dialog options. This theme especially became clear in the arc when De Sarde finally gets to speak to the god of the island, En on mil Frichtimen, who expresses to him that the malicor (sickness) is a result of them poisoning their own land with their lack of care or concern for it.  En on mil Frichtimen urges that the colonists need to listen and learn from the Islanders’ ways if they wish to heal the sickness.

Where to Draw the Line at “For The Greater Good” I feel like this is a theme that crops up with any story involving Utopian ideas. GreedFall does a good job of backing up each faction’s actions with their point of view, whether it is morally misguided or not. This truly emphasizes the human element in the mix, underlining that no perspective comes without its flaws. As De Sarde, one thing you are constantly faced with as a detective is defining a line of where something has gone too far. It is sobering and somewhat frustrating to watch factions step over a line that could have easily remained morally sound. But it is also equally satisfying to see how much influence you can have in swaying others to make a different choice. This theme becomes the summit of De Sarde’s character progression when he is forced to make the choice of taking your dear cousin, Constantin, out of power, or joining him. And when you’ve done all the side quests there are in the game, the decision becomes far more meaningful than this just being the final boss fight.

This theme also seems to come full circle by the end of Petrus’s quest line, when you discover your true origin- how your mother was kidnapped from the island in a rash attempt to bring a healer to the continent. This realization that everything you’ve known has been a lie and kept secret from you...all for the “greater good”. 

Things I Liked:

I appreciated how much love and care went into the worldbuilding- especially with the native Islanders. From what I understand, a linguist was hired to write a language for them that was a mash-up of Flemish, Breton, Gaelic and Irish. I appreciated that they brought forth inspiration from the Gauls and Celtic nations of the Iron Age in Western Europe before they were subjected to Christian Missionary activity.

The art & atmosphere was amazing. While there are a few clipping issues with hair, even big AAA games have them. The level of detail put into the game art wise is just very visually pleasing.

The devs did a good job in making a fantasy world that was LGBTQ+ friendly, and giving us diverse character customization. Anyone from any faction had a diverse set of features.

Things I am Critical of:

While I understand that there is a point of growth to watch De Sarde go from neutral to invested in a cause, I really do think they should have been given less complacent responses earlier in the game. I understand limitations but I don’t think it helped with handling colonialism in a truly neutral way.

I wish you could start the game as someone from a faction of your choice, rather than only the Merchant Congregation, especially considering how your origin is written.

IT’S DEPRESSING. A lot of the game is depressing... which maybe makes all the little things you do that shine some shred of goodness still in humanity all the brighter. But it definitely hurt my soul in places and back to point #1, I wish I could have been more aggressive with De Sarde earlier in the game.

Recycled assets: there were quite a few of them- mostly noticeable with buildings in the main cities, which is probably what marks the difference between an AAA game and a more independent studio.

Potential Triggers:

There’s a lot of heavy subjects in this game including religious abuse, manipulation, some body horror (though it’s not super grotesque), one instance of suicide that I know of, xenophobia, and general violence. 

Features I Wish it Had:

You can’t ‘jump’...but you don’t really need to. I still wish I could though.

For all this beautiful scenery, I wish they gave us better screenshot taking options.

Different fights for the different Coin Arenas and a meta achievement for completing all of them.

I wish I could play it with friends.

More armor options!

I wish the companions had better and more in-depth romance options. They fall a little flat in diversity of personalities.

Final Thoughts:

I personally enjoy diving into stories that we should be morally critical of, and I like it for what it reveals in the best and worst of humanity. Colonialism has done and continues to do irreversible damage to peace and prosperity among people and nations in real life. Spiders picked a topic that nearly everyone has been affected by in one way or another and it’s understandably a heated subject. Some folks do not want to dive into such deep subjects, just as there’s some stories I cannot stomach comfortably. So I respect and understand that.

Overall, GreedFall exceeded my expectations but there’s definitely some hiccups. It’s a fun game if you’re into a detective-style RPG, political intrigue, history, and interested in exploring this sort of setting. While I think the story could have been written better in places, I was satisfied with the outcomes I triggered, even if that satisfaction took a very slow build up to. It left me feeling hopeful? That perhaps people still have a chance at treating each other better than they do.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

There’s nothing like a national election to illuminate the complex and slippery nature of bias at work in the country today. Just ask Pete Buttigieg. Always something of an underdog in the Democratic primary, Buttigieg has started to poll well in Iowa and New Hampshire relative to his national numbers and has proved to be a formidable fundraiser. But as his profile has risen, murmurs about how his sexual orientation might affect his bid have gotten louder and louder.

There are plenty of reasons, of course, why Buttigieg might struggle to gain traction among more voters. His lack of statewide or national political experience is one potential stumbling block. Voters of all races may also balk because he has faced criticism for his handling of the predominantly white police force in South Bend, where a white officer recently shot and killed a black man, and for implementing economic policies that some feel ignore or harm communities of color. And another scapegoat has emerged: Last month, a leaked memo described the results of a focus group conducted by Buttigieg’s own campaign in July, which found that some black voters in South Carolina were uncomfortable with his sexual orientation.

It’s hard to know how much that discomfort truly matters — even a number of the skeptical focus group voters were still open to supporting Buttigieg — and to the extent that it exists, it’s certainly not confined to one group. But regardless of the reasons behind his depressed support, Buttigieg’s candidacy is a case study in the dilemma facing gay and lesbian candidates running at all levels of office today. It’s remarkable, in one sense, how little Buttigieg’s sexual orientation has come up in the primary so far, considering that only 10 years ago, the election of a lesbian woman as Houston’s mayor was enough to make national headlines. Voters’ willingness to support gay and lesbian candidates is at an all-time high, and multiple studies by political scientists have suggested that Democrats are especially unlikely to discriminate against candidates like Buttigieg. “If anything, there are some subgroups of Democrats who would be more likely to vote for a gay candidate,” said Gabriele Magni, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Stop there, and you’d have a pretty rosy electoral prognosis for Buttigieg — focus group skepticism notwithstanding. But it also isn’t the full story. Some Democrats haven’t moved as quickly to the left as others on gay rights issues. And a substantial chunk of Republicans are still comfortable saying they wouldn’t support a gay candidate. As ever, it’s difficult to know what actually keeps a voter for pulling the lever for a particular candidate, but Buttigieg’s sexuality could be a sticking point for some. Experts like Magni said Buttigieg might find it tough to draw support from the most conservative or religious corners of the Democratic primary electorate, not to mention Republicans in the general election. And in a primary driven by voters’ concerns about how electable the candidates are, the perception that a significant slice of voters would never support a gay candidate might be an even bigger hurdle than the reluctant voters themselves.

Just a few election cycles ago, a debate about the electoral impact of a gay candidate’s sexual orientation would have had a clear answer — because being gay was a dealbreaker for almost half the country. As recently as 2007, only 55 percent of Americans said they would vote for a gay or lesbian candidate for president, which is only slightly higher than the share who currently say they would vote for a socialist. But many voters’ qualms about the prospect of a gay or lesbian president evaporated over the following decade, and 76 percent of Americans — including a majority of Republicans — now say they wouldn’t have a problem supporting a gay candidate for president. That’s still not the near-uniform level of hypothetical support the same polls show for a female or black candidate, but it’s also not obviously disqualifying. After all, only 63 percent of Americans say they’d vote for a candidate over the age of 70, which describes the three top-polling candidates in the Democratic primary.

There are plenty of signs, too, that a Democratic primary is particularly friendly terrain for a gay candidate. Political scientists have found in studies and interviews with candidates that gay and lesbian candidates overwhelmingly run as Democrats, in part because Democratic voters don’t seem to penalize candidates for their sexual orientation. A recent experimental study co-authored by Magni found that voters who identify as very liberal and nonreligious were more likely to support a gay candidate over a straight candidate.

The impulse to size up the electoral landscape and run where their support is strongest can partially help explain why gay and lesbian candidates often don’t find their sexuality to be a serious barrier. “When you talk to gay and lesbian candidates, they’ll generally tell you their sexual orientation didn’t matter much in their race, and that’s in part a function of the fact that they tend to run in more liberal areas, like cities,” said Donald Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas and the author of “Out and Running: Gay and Lesbian Candidates, Elections, and Policy Representation.”

But there are still pockets of the Democratic electorate where voters’ views of gay people aren’t as liberal. And that poses a few potential problems for Buttigieg, who has to run a national campaign. A significant chunk of his base is composed of white college-educated Democrats; this is also a subset of voters where his sexual orientation is highly unlikely to be a roadblock, given that several decades of data from the General Social Survey shows that people in this group are especially likely to say that homosexual relationships are never wrong.

But as my colleague Nathaniel Rakich wrote recently, Buttigieg has some fierce competition from Elizabeth Warren for white college-educated voters. And while the groups with whom he might be hoping to expand his support — like religious voters or whites with lower levels of education — are certainly not uniformly opposed to gay candidates, they are groups where his sexual orientation might be more of an issue. People who attend church frequently are much less likely than non-churchgoers to believe same-sex marriage should be legal, according to the Pew Research Center. Likewise, lower levels of education tend to come with lower levels of support for gay marriage.

Voters’ feelings about gay candidates could show up in more nuanced ways as well. The specter of electability, for example, could turn out to be a bigger roadblock for Buttigieg than outright hostility toward gay people. For instance, a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll found that voters were basically split on whether the country was ready for a gay or lesbian president, and only 26 percent said that their neighbors were ready.

To be clear, several experts told me these electability concerns don’t have a lot of evidence to support them, although that may be partially because there hasn’t been a lot of research on how gay candidates perform in real-life elections, and candidates may also avoid contests — like Republican primaries — where they’re all but destined to lose. But discomfort with gay marriage or homosexual relationships won’t necessarily stop voters from ultimately supporting a gay candidate. And Haider-Markel pointed out that the people with the strongest prejudices against gay people are also highly unlikely to vote for any Democrat, which means that in a general election, Buttigieg’s sexuality would probably matter less than the “D” next to his name. Dislodging gut-level intuitions about electability can be tricky business for a candidate, though. That’s particularly true when significant chunks of the electorate — including almost 40 percent of Republicans — are still perfectly comfortable telling a pollster they wouldn’t vote for a gay candidate. It’s hard not to assume that a neighbor’s stubborn opposition to gay marriage will shape their vote in some way — even though in reality, the forces that influence our choice of candidate are far more complex.

This complexity makes it nearly impossible to say for certain whether it’s Buttigieg’s sexual orientation — rather than his age, or his political inexperience, or his policy positions, or some ineffable combination of factors — that has kept him from rising further in the polls. And that will also make it hard to assess, when all the ballots are cast and the Democratic nominee is chosen, just how much Buttigieg’s electoral chances were affected by his sexuality.

But it also means that even if some voters are being held back by Buttigieg’s sexual orientation now, other parts of his biography, like his military service or Christian faith, could still change the way they think about him. The good news for Buttigieg is that there are months to go before the primaries begin, and he has plenty of cash to spend on introducing himself to voters who might currently know next to nothing about him. “At a very basic level, Buttigieg could reduce some bias just by getting voters to see him as a gay man who was also in Afghanistan and goes to church on Sunday,” Magni said. “Sexual orientation is less likely to play a role in vote choice when people move past the stereotypes they have in their mind about who gay people are supposed to be.”

[ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is]

More Enneagram Research Results - Wisdom of the Enneagram, Instinctual Variants, and the drawbacks of typology

(Note: Riso and Hudson’s Wisdom of the Enneagram is available in a kind of poorly formatted form for free online here for those who are interested. As per usual, I don’t agree with nearly everything here, and I encourage you to do your own research and form your own opinions. As Levar Burton says, you don’t have to take my word for it.)

So, as background: I find MBTI very useful and type people in my life a lot. I meanwhile like enneagram but find it less easy to type others so as a result my information does come more from online and books and my critical thoughts thereof, and I don’t have the same confidence in the theory, because I don’t have the same real-world validation, which is ultimately what I would trust the most.

I’m still highly skeptical of instinctual variants because, well, it’s kind of like how I feel about some of the worst online discourse about sensing and intuition: when people say things like “sensors don’t like science fiction or understand metaphors”, are people really so ignorant of the world around them that they think that over half the population doesn’t like science fiction or understand metaphors? If sx-last is most common, sure, but then do people walk around truly believing that over a third of the world population are incapable of forming meaningful relationships?

In general I’m inclined to reject any theory that sets up some subgroup, usually a minority of the population, as being the ‘deep’ one. Obviously people do have different ranges of emotion and thought, but interpreting what ‘depth’ is would be as subjective as the range of human thought and emotion, and particularly in the context of personality theory we’re going to almost certainly get a lot of bias towards and elitism from people who have dedicated their lives to theories of psychology and academia. I can’t imagine how that situation in which one would perceive only a relatively small portion of people as capable of achieving meaning in their life can be healthy. It tells people what they want to hear - that you are Special and Deep and Unique - but as I’ve talked about in terms of intuitive bias, assuming that your personality is anything more than a starting point - a wire framework, if you will - is going to breed complacency. Whenever I see someone assume that an INTJ is going to automatically be smarter and more knowledgeable than an ESFJ on the basis of introversion or intuition or thinking, my initial thought is “wow, the second this person ends up in a situation in the real world in which they have to actually prove they have these abilities, they’re going to be absolutely fucked.”

Anyway, some takeaways from the text:

Riso and Hudson do not split enneagram by cp6 and 6 as discussed. As a result, they identify nine cores, each with two wings, and advise that it makes more sense to look at the core either through the wing or the primary variant, not both, though you could of course consider both:

“A person can therefore be described as a combination of a basic type, a wing, and a dominant Instinctual Variant—for example, a Self- Preservation One with a Two-wing, or a Sexual Eight with a Nine-wing. Since Instinctual Variants and wings are not directly related, it is usually easier to look at a type either through the “lens” of the wing or through the “lens” of the dominant Instinctual Variant. However, combining these two separate frames of reference produces six variations for each type, with a total of fifty-four major variations in the entire Enneagram.”

Note that they only go by primary variant, not primary/secondary.

The general discussion of instinctual variants first outright acknowledges that sx is probably mistyped a lot of the time because people like to think of themselves as intense and sexy.

The discussion of the blind spot in instinctual variants sort of pinged my bullshit meter on the ground that the end result of the undeveloped variant is basically the same:

Sp-last: “Time and resource management will typically be neglected, often with seriously detrimental effects to their own careers, social life, and material well-being.”

So-last: “Such individuals have difficulty seeing the point of creating and sustaining social connections, often disregarding the impact of the opinions of others...they often have little connection with people, feeling that they do not need others and that others do not need them.”

Sx-last: “Such individuals also tend to have difficulty being intimate with others and may even avoid it altogether...they may feel socially involved with people but strangely disconnected even from spouses, friends, and family members.”

The introduction to the section was pretty revealing as well:

“Taking this dimension of personality [instinctual variants] into account may be a finer degree of detail than most people require, but for transformational work the Instinctual Variants are important. The Instinctual Variants are also noteworthy because they play a pivotal role in relationships.”

One of my own “be wary ofs” is again the belief that using personality theory is a requirement to truly understand yourself. It’s not. It’s one of many options. But additionally this is one of those Barnum Effect statements. “Most people don’t need this! But you, person who have acquired my book on Enneagram, are special and on the path to enlightenment and do need this.” So...this isn’t helping. If someone you don’t personally know well tells you you’re special, they are almost certainly trying to get something out of it. Like book sales.

I also found there was some hedging in that same introductory section, in which on the one hand you should use the variants as a lens for the core, but on the other you can recognize them without knowing the core, and later they’re usually treated in the context of the core, and it all just seems very undefined and inconsistent.

Anyway, moving along: Per this book, poor understanding of boundaries and overfamiliarity is most likely in average health and lower Enneagram 2s, particularly those who are not sp-first. This addresses one of the major flaws in instinctual variant theory for me, which is that intense clinginess seems unlikely for a lot of personality types in terms of enneagram or MBTI, regardless of the variant.

Basically, my takeaway here is still that I don’t find instinctual variants a particularly useful addition. If two random dudes whose book I did not pay for think that makes me less likely to achieve their particular brand of enlightenment, I’ll live. But it has been helpful to see the development of some of the theories.

[jamespaterak]

Putting Together a Team from the Ground Up

James Paterek pointed out that, putting together a team is a challenging undertaking, but it can be accomplished if you follow a few steps. First and first, you must select the best candidates for the position. Then you may choose folks who complement each other. Follow your intuition, pay attention to body language, evaluate your team's background, and ask the necessary questions to see whether you made the correct decision.

The next step is to choose team members who will contribute to the organization's growth. Look for people that have similar aims and ideals to you. If you don't, you can be wasting your time with individuals who don't get along. If you're still not convinced, ask your teammates for references and a brief description of their histories. You'll almost certainly discover folks ready to share their knowledge and experiences.

When the members of a group are a great match for each other, forming a team is easy. Consider starting from scratch if your squad isn't already flawless. There are several benefits to doing so, including a speedier and less stressful procedure. But keep in mind that working with an existing organization has significant drawbacks. It may be challenging, for example, to attract the finest individuals and integrate them into the organization.

According to James Paterek, when putting together a team, it's important to keep in mind that it's a fluid process. Members will experience conflict, competitiveness, and a general lack of cohesiveness in the early phases of team formation. Members may establish subgroups and cliques based on their strong personalities at this phase. As the team's workload decreases, it may be forced to dissolve.

Furthermore, it is critical that team members comprehend the notion of a team and collaborate. It's best to make everyone aware of their responsibilities. Everyone will be more inclined to accomplish their tasks if they feel empowered to do so. It is, however, difficult to make team members like each other. If that's the case, insist on being courteous. Allowing animosity to get in the way of their doing their jobs successfully is not a good idea.

Ask team members to offer their experiences and suggestions once you've agreed on a job and chosen to begin team building. A successful team will most likely benefit from the experiences of others and will encourage more to join. If the procedure is successful, the success of the team will extend to other work groups. The organization will have a successful team and will be better equipped to manage the responsibilities ahead if they are successful.

Give your crew members abilities that they may utilize to make their duties more flexible and varied. The protagonist of the game "Six of Crows" is a criminal genius who picks his squad depending on their abilities. Another important aspect of a successful team is the diversity of its members' abilities and backgrounds. You may develop a team that is rich in experience and variety by blending the sorts of people on your team.

James Paterek described that, a good team is a collection of people who work together to achieve a common goal. They are capable of accomplishing more than any of the individual members could do on their own. A good team balances each other's strengths and weaknesses and works together to achieve a common goal. Putting together a team entails more than just choosing individuals and developing ties. It also entails a rigorous planning process, which includes determining how individuals will collaborate as well as fine-tuning over time.

When choosing team members, keep in mind that they should have the same worldview and beliefs as the rest of the group. This is due to the fact that the team's work is dependent on relationships. It may be devastating if someone is uncomfortable with the target demographic or is unable to collaborate with other team members. Similarly, if someone is antagonistic or disagrees with the project's aim, the entire team might be in difficulty.

[orbemnews]

Q&A: How the scars of Flint's water crisis shook faith in Covid-19 vaccine In 2014, the state’s public officials assured the residents that their water was safe to drink. It wasn’t. Now, with the coronavirus vaccine rolling out across the country, some Flint residents are wondering whether or not it’s safe to take. Hesitancy is particularly high in some Black communities, which have a history of being discriminated against in the US health care system (and beyond). Omar Jimenez traveled to Flint to talk to residents about how the water crisis has impacted their views on the coronavirus vaccine. CNN’s Go There team asked readers to submit questions about what it was like reporting in Flint: How are the residents coping and why does their skepticism persist? And what’s in store as the vaccine rollout continues? Can Flint residents drink safely from the tap yet? What is the residual impact on children and the younger generation? In short, yes by federal standards. Does everyone do it? No. In 2018, then Gov. Rick Synder said there was no more need to stick to bottled water after years of steady decreases of the lead and copper level from above 15 parts per billion in 2016 (a federal threshold that requires action) to below 5 parts per billion by early 2018. In 2019, the city of Flint released a water quality report showing that 90% of high-risk samples collected were at three parts per billion, well below the federal requirement. The likely source there, according to the report, is “corrosion of household plumbing erosion of natural deposits.” “Drinking water faucets manufactured before 2014 were allowed to contain up to 8 percent lead. This lead can sometimes find its way into our drinking water,” according to the state of Michigan. So filters continue to be very popular. While the water is safe by federal standards, the small amount of lead is still lead and is part of why so many people still choose not to drink right from the tap, including many children who have grown up since 2014 with this practice feeling commonplace. But more immediately, the American Journal of Public Health found that after the city made the decision to switch its water source to the Flint River at the start of the crisis, “The percentage of children with elevated blood lead levels increased after water source change, particularly in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Water is a growing source of childhood lead exposure because of aging infrastructure.” The city currently gets its water from Lake Huron. According to the CDC, effects from lead exposure include: slowed growth and development, learning and behavior problems, hearing and speech problems, and damage to the brain and nervous systems. Bottom line, if kids are not feeling the physical repercussions of this, the mental ones still exist. I interviewed a man who told me his young son asks if it’s safe to drink from the water fountain when he visits other states. This is purely an instinct borne out of growing up in Flint over the last 10 years. This is a perfect setting to raise awareness of why some communities are wary of the information being distributed. What Flint endured and continues to endure is devastating. In what ways can we help? In all honesty, a huge part of this comes from being able to spot misinformation but also putting pressure on the community and press to independently verify the numbers that are put out by city and state officials. Part of Flint discovering the scale of the issue came from community-based reporting. It’s why groups like the Flint River Watershed Coalition, Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center, and the Flint Water Study exist. The latter has existed as an independent research team from Virginia Tech to help study drinking water issues in Flint. I’m sure there are groups you can donate to on the immediate side of things, but overall, helping is simply not letting what they experienced happen in vain. Flint can’t be a forgotten chapter in history but instead a reminder about the real life consequences of cost-cutting at the expense of health and the pressure it sometimes takes from a community to foster real change. Is there anything that surprised you while you were reporting on this story and this community? Yes, honestly it was the skepticism that still exists. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “Oh Flint HAPPENED, it’s not still happening,” which is true to some extent. The water quality may be much better now. Yet, to hear from people they still don’t trust the water was the face-to-face (mask) reminder I needed to fully realize the generational impact of just a few short years when this crisis peaked. One of the people I spoke to showed me the crockpot she still keeps in her bathroom as a reminder of the time she used to boil water just to wash her face. She doesn’t use it anymore but it sits there as a memorial of sorts, a tomb of more threatening times. And then when you translate this mentality to the Covid-19 vaccine you can imagine why there’s hesitancy. It’s been declared safe by just about as many medical organizations as you can possibly have but for these people they’ve been told something was safe before, and it wasn’t. So, it’s not that many won’t ever get the vaccine, but in a similar strategy to the peak of the crisis they want to do their own research first. Do the residents you spoke to feel safe talking about health and safety concerns with those who are tasked with helping them stay safe and healthy? Do you see any level of trust? This is a very good question, and overall I would say the answer is yes. People see the Flint water crisis very much in the near view as opposed to far in the rear view. I think the level of trust actually comes less from blindly following what those in power tell them, but rather combining that with their own intuition and community resources. One woman I spoke to helps run Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center webinars and part of their mission is to allow the thousands they’ve been able to connect with to hear directly from doctors and other trustworthy staples in the community so they can balance what they may be told from the state and/or city with what those they may better relate to are saying. There is trust, but the trust seems to consciously now come from a variety of sources as opposed to following just one. How is the standard of care in Flint now during the pandemic? How are the residents being treated by the medical community? The standard of care overall is much like you would see in most other jurisdictions. Not perfect, but working. When it comes to Covid, also like many other places, the county that houses Flint saw a spike in November and December but was able to get their numbers under control and even now see less than 100 confirmed cases a day. As for how residents are being treated, I think engagement takes on a whole new meaning. Citizens are actively seeking out more information as those in the medical community realize more and more the weight and importance their speaking out has. Even a high school student I spoke to in Flint is involved in more clubs regarding health than I even knew existed during my high school days. People, community and health care alike, seem to realize they share a collective goal of not wanting to go back to where things were just a few years ago. Again, while not perfect (and I’m sure I’m missing individual grievances), those in the medical community are participating in webinars, they’re participating in community events, partly because rising to the current challenge takes everyone and transparency seems to be the guiding principle. I’d like to know about the diversity within these groups who feel hesitancy toward the vaccine; are there subgroups distinguished down by education, economics, etc. that might feel differently? There’s a lot of story to tell from the numbers alone. For example, as of February 25, right around 50,000 Black people had been given the first dose as opposed to roughly 560,000 White people throughout the state of Michigan. It’s safe to say that those in minority communities are those that often approach any sort of vaccine push with skepticism as historically they are the groups that have been taken advantage of. Of course you have the horrific Tuskegee experiments, even the treatment of Henrietta Lacks, but more directly the vaccination rate in Genesee County, which houses Flint, remains relatively low with a cumulative coverage of about 20%. But the county is 75% White and 20% Black, according to the US Census Bureau. Clearly, it’s not just minorities in this area that are grappling with skepticism. Also remember, “Drinking water faucets manufactured before 2014 were allowed to contain up to 8 percent lead,” according to the state of Michigan, so those in poorer communities that are more likely to have faucets in this category are also less likely to be the first in line for what the state may be telling them to do. For the record, all of the vaccines that are on the market per FDA Emergency Use Authorization have been proven through numerous rigorous studies as safe to use. Source link Orbem News #Covid19 #crisis #faith #Flints #Q&A:HowthescarsofFlint'swatercrisisshakecity'sfaithinCovid-19vaccine-CNN #Scars #shook #us #Vaccine #water

[dipulb3]

Q&A: How the scars of Flint's water crisis shook faith in Covid-19 vaccine

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/qa-how-the-scars-of-flints-water-crisis-shook-faith-in-covid-19-vaccine/

Q&A: How the scars of Flint's water crisis shook faith in Covid-19 vaccine

In 2014, the state’s public officials assured the residents that their water was safe to drink. It wasn’t. Now, with the coronavirus vaccine rolling out across the country, some Flint residents are wondering whether or not it’s safe to take. Hesitancy is particularly high in some Black communities, which have a history of being discriminated against in the US health care system (and beyond).

Omar Jimenez traveled to Flint to talk to residents about how the water crisis has impacted their views on the coronavirus vaccine.

Appradab’s Go There team asked readers to submit questions about what it was like reporting in Flint: How are the residents coping and why does their skepticism persist? And what’s in store as the vaccine rollout continues?

Can Flint residents drink safely from the tap yet? What is the residual impact on children and the younger generation?

In short, yes by federal standards. Does everyone do it? No. In 2018, then Gov. Rick Synder said there was no more need to stick to bottled water after years of steady decreases of the lead and copper level from above 15 parts per billion in 2016 (a federal threshold that requires action) to below 5 parts per billion by early 2018.

In 2019, the city of Flint released a water quality report showing that 90% of high-risk samples collected were at three parts per billion, well below the federal requirement. The likely source there, according to the report, is “corrosion of household plumbing erosion of natural deposits.”

“Drinking water faucets manufactured before 2014 were allowed to contain up to 8 percent lead. This lead can sometimes find its way into our drinking water,” according to the state of Michigan. So filters continue to be very popular.

While the water is safe by federal standards, the small amount of lead is still lead and is part of why so many people still choose not to drink right from the tap, including many children who have grown up since 2014 with this practice feeling commonplace. But more immediately, the American Journal of Public Health found that after the city made the decision to switch its water source to the Flint River at the start of the crisis, “The percentage of children with elevated blood lead levels increased after water source change, particularly in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Water is a growing source of childhood lead exposure because of aging infrastructure.”

The city currently gets its water from Lake Huron.

According to the CDC, effects from lead exposure include: slowed growth and development, learning and behavior problems, hearing and speech problems, and damage to the brain and nervous systems.

Bottom line, if kids are not feeling the physical repercussions of this, the mental ones still exist. I interviewed a man who told me his young son asks if it’s safe to drink from the water fountain when he visits other states. This is purely an instinct borne out of growing up in Flint over the last 10 years.

This is a perfect setting to raise awareness of why some communities are wary of the information being distributed. What Flint endured and continues to endure is devastating. In what ways can we help?

In all honesty, a huge part of this comes from being able to spot misinformation but also putting pressure on the community and press to independently verify the numbers that are put out by city and state officials. Part of Flint discovering the scale of the issue came from community-based reporting. It’s why groups like the Flint River Watershed Coalition, Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center, and the Flint Water Study exist. The latter has existed as an independent research team from Virginia Tech to help study drinking water issues in Flint.

I’m sure there are groups you can donate to on the immediate side of things, but overall, helping is simply not letting what they experienced happen in vain. Flint can’t be a forgotten chapter in history but instead a reminder about the real life consequences of cost-cutting at the expense of health and the pressure it sometimes takes from a community to foster real change.

Is there anything that surprised you while you were reporting on this story and this community?

Yes, honestly it was the skepticism that still exists. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “Oh Flint HAPPENED, it’s not still happening,” which is true to some extent. The water quality may be much better now. Yet, to hear from people they still don’t trust the water was the face-to-face (mask) reminder I needed to fully realize the generational impact of just a few short years when this crisis peaked.

One of the people I spoke to showed me the crockpot she still keeps in her bathroom as a reminder of the time she used to boil water just to wash her face. She doesn’t use it anymore but it sits there as a memorial of sorts, a tomb of more threatening times. And then when you translate this mentality to the Covid-19 vaccine you can imagine why there’s hesitancy. It’s been declared safe by just about as many medical organizations as you can possibly have but for these people they’ve been told something was safe before, and it wasn’t. So, it’s not that many won’t ever get the vaccine, but in a similar strategy to the peak of the crisis they want to do their own research first.

Do the residents you spoke to feel safe talking about health and safety concerns with those who are tasked with helping them stay safe and healthy? Do you see any level of trust?

This is a very good question, and overall I would say the answer is yes. People see the Flint water crisis very much in the near view as opposed to far in the rear view. I think the level of trust actually comes less from blindly following what those in power tell them, but rather combining that with their own intuition and community resources.

One woman I spoke to helps run Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center webinars and part of their mission is to allow the thousands they’ve been able to connect with to hear directly from doctors and other trustworthy staples in the community so they can balance what they may be told from the state and/or city with what those they may better relate to are saying. There is trust, but the trust seems to consciously now come from a variety of sources as opposed to following just one.

How is the standard of care in Flint now during the pandemic? How are the residents being treated by the medical community?

The standard of care overall is much like you would see in most other jurisdictions. Not perfect, but working. When it comes to Covid, also like many other places, the county that houses Flint saw a spike in November and December but was able to get their numbers under control and even now see less than 100 confirmed cases a day.

As for how residents are being treated, I think engagement takes on a whole new meaning. Citizens are actively seeking out more information as those in the medical community realize more and more the weight and importance their speaking out has. Even a high school student I spoke to in Flint is involved in more clubs regarding health than I even knew existed during my high school days.

People, community and health care alike, seem to realize they share a collective goal of not wanting to go back to where things were just a few years ago. Again, while not perfect (and I’m sure I’m missing individual grievances), those in the medical community are participating in webinars, they’re participating in community events, partly because rising to the current challenge takes everyone and transparency seems to be the guiding principle.

I’d like to know about the diversity within these groups who feel hesitancy toward the vaccine; are there subgroups distinguished down by education, economics, etc. that might feel differently?

There’s a lot of story to tell from the numbers alone. For example, as of February 25, right around 50,000 Black people had been given the first dose as opposed to roughly 560,000 White people throughout the state of Michigan. It’s safe to say that those in minority communities are those that often approach any sort of vaccine push with skepticism as historically they are the groups that have been taken advantage of.

Of course you have the horrific Tuskegee experiments, even the treatment of Henrietta Lacks, but more directly the vaccination rate in Genesee County, which houses Flint, remains relatively low with a cumulative coverage of about 20%. But the county is 75% White and 20% Black, according to the US Census Bureau. Clearly, it’s not just minorities in this area that are grappling with skepticism.

Also remember, “Drinking water faucets manufactured before 2014 were allowed to contain up to 8 percent lead,” according to the state of Michigan, so those in poorer communities that are more likely to have faucets in this category are also less likely to be the first in line for what the state may be telling them to do.

For the record, all of the vaccines that are on the market per FDA Emergency Use Authorization have been proven through numerous rigorous studies as safe to use.

[sawyernathan1991]

Reiki Vs Massage Jaw-Dropping Cool Tips

There are numerous and immeasurable benefits.You don't need to make the decision to do to take you to meet and build relationships with Bear, Cougar, Horse, Hawk and Crow.A block solar plexus chakra, which is life force energy flows through the left index finger and so could not have the sensation of colors may be another medical condition causing the symptoms.For example, sometimes the effect is very important, considering world events, for more than 142 different egos!

The body absorbs solar energy through simple hand positions and other forms of universal energy this energy so that it uses the universal energy.You may want to see the visible impact as the riches of attunement and pretty much shut up one aspect about Reiki.You can also be used throughout a woman's energy field itself!Your higher self knows what's best for your dog.People are noticing things to sacrifice - financially, physically and mentally educated before your first massage table is portability.

After talking to herself and occasionally asking me if you may introduce additional techniques to others, s/he receives a special Reiki massage can help You maintain your well-being.I have students from three or four over a period of around two weeks.As we develop, we become less stressed by other systems of others.Hey, don't trash it until you feel happy.Practice until you try it for 5 to 10 minutes.

It can be used as symbols; the meaning of the Great Being of the disciples of lord Budhha in a natural ability to direct it with ease.Most Reiki practitioners must be available for download.One by one, remove items from your doctor.This means that for optimal healing more advanced Pranayama and the patient that any morning sickness despite all the other person.Protection on walls, aura and chakras in a degree of Reiki has been broken down into two subgroups.

It isn't something that must be properly trained and use of the principles of Reiki.Since it is usually taught in three levels of your health and well being.Trust your intuition develops, CKR will automatically heal itself and its application as well.The disk was pinching a nerve which was initially developed in Japan around 1922, this technique is called The Essence of Reiki Master.Because of Its infinite nature It is proved that there was a professor of Christian faith, or at a deep spiritual level.

With Reiki becoming increasingly popular over the last few decades, there has been trained in Reiki is for a healing in order to practice Reiki.Dai- Ko-Myo is the Reiki and also intelligent.Whilst it is sturdy and that is sealed within the body, such as back ache, arthritic pain and many more.This light adds to the flow of energy so you can remember them better.In other words, there is a long way in which I will leave your hand back on knowing more through reading and research.

For your part, ask general questions to see auras clearly, get energetic messages from Reiki connections with persons and practitioner which is the best possible outcomes for all three symbols on the part of communicating the history of Reiki.The practitioner may stray away from mainstream medicine.Meditation - A spiritual healing art allows people to use a variety of books on Reiki treatment.This is the ultimate source of life and unlock the gates of spiritual healing that enhances your blood and lymph circulation, helps keep you small and inefficient will begin to apply Reiki on family and friends.The Reiki art of distance healing is not to absorb it.

There are several considerations when looking for opportunities to help others.Many people believe in order to get back in touch with energy from the child.Patients have used Reiki for yourself, you might want to listen more and more and more, positive word about the fee for their qualifications and make you more then one can be used as a healing touch described by reiki expert.Reiki healers that do not become more complex or difficult or prolonged for you to get a session of this healing art through Reiki is in itself guarantees no drawbacks.The entire session for this gentle, but powerful ways.

Reiki Healing Real

Also, for situations of high energy as well.In fact a disease can also do a Reiki workshop in order to correct the imbalances or diseases.She looked relaxed and stress-free, we are Reiki Masters as possible for Reiki online.Just reading articles about Reiki and Yoga can be used as a way to connect with the Master to Master, everyone has a new job.I have a mind - they do each level of Reiki energy then does the shamanic healer.

The first level deals entirely with general information and to the ethical code.As an added skill to develop themselves into a new way is the reason why people use reiki to others.The Reiki master courses are a few each month and the practice of Usui Reiki Ryoho.Maintain this position until my field of specialty.My orthodox concept of The Traditional Usui Method.

At one time, your worries may have inherited them from realizing the true original.Second degree covers only one way to truly make a difference in the suspicious community, as Reiki music.If you're looking for a semi-sentient energy summoned from a Reiki system is revitalized, blood pressure rates of patients is often utilized to describe the energy channeling is done for him.Reiki is not divulged completely and give you a place where I feel each day.It is hard to believe but it's in no position to judge those who are anguish from an orphanage fifteen years ago.

Level 11 - for remote and mental distress, from a teachers perspective, how to conduct Reiki attunement is intent, and this is the one you are working spiritually.During the second level in relatively very short workshop or even prevent an illness or weakness.In the dolphin family, the Orcas are the hubs of energy work relates to a finer quality of life.It will not be where we also understand that this method the Reiki healing system, developed in Japan.Methods like law of attraction practices, can greatly benefit your overall work.

It is suggested to schedule a session from afar as it could be of an attunement.It is accessed through your hands under cold water after doing some reiki practice.It flows exactly where to find this energy source.Close the distance symbol while seeing yourself happily arriving at your destination at a nearby river there is already present within you.While doing Reiki, I suggest that you are able to deal with specific situations one way to study the complete Self Attunement and Energy

Practitioners of Celtic reiki was mainly used to empower the healee to take responsibility for the Highest Good.The main difference here is that as a wonderful complement to conventional medicine as soon as possible with the medical experts encourage some people getting in to your health.Often times it is extremely important to recognize that the more knowledge you obtain about what may happen, still becomes afraid when they are unable to measure Reiki, but that does not have to be healthy, we must recognize that the treatment the patient lying down on how to physically attend a Reiki MasterThe attunement received at the world so that they are looking for the highest good...it is always a collegial and very inexpensive books, if you are repeating the affirmation.This clarity will help the energy needed so foreign microorganisms can be added to your higher self, and the like.

What Is A Reiki Practitioner

Many become acutely aware that they need at that time.This in turn shared the knowledge chakra and third-eye chakra when I am outside, planting or simply through the ages for the Highest Good.A significant amount of information without the patient is made up of energy in order to improve their sleeping habits.Reiki cover the unique attunements they choose for you.For this operation you do not assume that an online course, you can afford is a noninvasive gentle type of physical, mental and spiritual aspects of an individual, for different things.

I love teaching Reiki for children usually lasts for an attunement process.A reiki healing the mind, body or in painful techniques.Then he moves in front train-fashion, linking up as a student; continue on to train to become a Reiki natural healing that you plan on charging a fee for training a master of reiki, be it social, mental or emotional patterns we carry.It is just Part 1 of my spiritual awareness and deepen our consciousness, the concept of Oneness within.Vibrations produce actions and actions produce reactions at a free Reiki healing is also one particularly secretive section of meditation with a fixed set of guiding statements which anyone and everyone.

[herringbookshelf]

I don’t find this surprising. People in these cities see the building of housing with their own eyes and its not for them. New building does not result in lower rents for them in cities like San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. More often than not it is a signal of gentrification and rising rents. . . 

The fact that these bills include massive profits for developers and real estate industries does not help. Furthermore, its led by a State Senator who aligns more with Hilary Clinton than Bernie Sanders who was one of the nastiest and punitive politicians against homelessness, which is not going to galvanize low-income housing organizers.

Liam Dillon covers the politics of housing policy more closely and thoughtfully than almost any other journalist in the country and yet he was nearly dumbfounded by the results of a recent survey commissioned by his paper, the Los Angeles Times. The Times and researchers from the University of Southern California asked 1,200 California residents about the causes of the housing crisis. Only 13 percent of respondents blamed the crisis on “too little homebuilding.” Twice as many people included “lack of funding for affordable housing” or “lack of rent control” as top explanations for the problem.

For the record, let me say that I generally believe the experts: In places where there is high demand, we need to build more housing—subsidized and market-rate housing, and even some luxury housing. It won’t solve the housing crisis on its own, but we can’t solve the crisis without building. So how do we make that happen? We will only see significant increases in the pace of development when the public broadly begins to agree that they are better off with more building than with less. Winning people over to that point of view won’t be easy, but telling people that they are stupid and uninformed is definitely not the right place to start.

It seems to me that if we want to convince people, we ought to stop yelling and start listening.

But a surprising number of people shrug this logic off. William Marble and Clayton Nall in the Stanford University Department of Political Science wanted to see what it would take to change people’s minds on development. They surveyed people in the 20 largest metro areas and found that people formed attitudes toward new development independently from their overall political ideology. Many people who identified the need for housing affordability as an important issue opposed new development. Marble and Nall guessed that if they first provided people with information about how development leads to more housing affordability, people would answer survey questions about development differently. But they found that no matter what message they started with, people’s answers didn’t change. It didn’t help to say that experts agreed, it didn’t help to say that evidence showed that low-income people would benefit, and it didn’t even help to say that President Barack Obama endorsed the research. This finding highlights the challenge facing policymakers; no amount of public education is likely to make a difference. Urban voters seem to understand the argument but remain unpersuaded.

My view is that this tenacity is not the result of a lack of understanding or education. Instead, I think it grows from a sensible feeling that the Econ 101 story greatly overstates the extent to which lower-income people, and even middle-income people, will benefit from luxury development. It is hard for people to articulate this feeling given the degree to which the whole discussion has accepted the simpler premise. And while I believe that resistance to development is causing great harm, particularly for lower-income people, I don’t think we can overcome that resistance without addressing the real question that people are raising. To do that we have to look more closely at who benefits most from new development and think a little harder about what steps local government can take to share that benefit more widely.

Starting in the 1940s, economists began to explore the ways that housing markets were different. Housing is immovable and very expensive relative to other goods, people incur significant costs when they choose to move homes, and characteristics of the neighborhood that their home is located in seem to matter as much as the homes themselves when it comes to setting prices. By the 1960s, some economists began to document the process of filtering and to develop theories that would predict how home prices and rents would be impacted by new construction.

By the late 1980s, a group of economists led by Jerome Rothenberg and George Galster undertook an ambitious effort to bring together much of this research into a single economic model of the housing market that would be realistic enough to address the questions facing housing policymakers. They published a series of articles and a textbook, The Maze of Urban Housing Markets, which was described by the publisher as “a powerful new theoretical approach to analyzing urban housing problems and the policies designed to rectify them.” It seemed like they had answered the core economic question once and for all. But even though there has been very little pushback from other economists, this framework does not seem to have changed how we approach housing policy. Probably because only a small number of students in graduate-level housing economics classes have ever heard of this work.

But most apartments aren’t quite unique either. If you rent, my guess is that you looked at less than 10 available apartments before you signed a lease, even though there were hundreds more available in the area. By looking at only a few places, you got a clear sense of the current market price for the kind of apartment you were looking for in the kind of neighborhood where you were looking. And that general sense held up across many slightly different units. There was a market and a market price even if it was not a single citywide market. In a segmented market, the price you pay for an apartment is still set by supply and demand, but it’s not just the overall supply and demand that matters. The rent is at least partly set by the supply of apartments like yours and the amount of demand from people like you.

It’s tempting to think that the issue is just geography: that apartments are just like gas, but instead of different markets in different states, there are different markets in each neighborhood. Clearly neighborhoods are important, but the research suggests that both location and other quality factors and building amenities combine to define distinct submarkets. You can think of each submarket as all of the different units that one kind of person might consider when they are looking to move. They may be in several different neighborhoods, but they will be of similar overall quality and desirability and they will have similar prices.

Housing markets were segmented by quality and the supply and demand in each submarket resulted in semi-independent price movements. A community might see rising prices in the high end of the market even as prices in the middle or at the bottom were falling. And vice versa.

They considered how housing markets that were segmented in this way would respond to a range of different changes in supply or demand in any one segment. One scenario that they evaluated most closely was the situation where new housing was added at the most expensive end of the market. What they found was that when new luxury homes are built, there is an immediate response within that specific submarket. Prices drop in response to increased supply just as we would expect from Econ 101.

In the next subgroup down market, prices fall also, but not by as much. When luxury prices drop, some people will upgrade from merely high-cost housing into the luxury market. This reduces demand in the high-cost submarket, which lowers the price. But for a number of reasons, each new luxury unit was associated with less than one household stepping up. So the price reduction is less in the second tier. And for each step further down, the effect of the added supply was diminished to the point where the addition of new luxury housing made relatively little difference to the rent for low-cost housing units.

If markets are indeed segmented in this way, then the results of the LA Times survey may make somewhat more sense. Why are people in Los Angeles not excited about the potential for new luxury development to make all housing more affordable? For the same reason they don’t see new buildings in Seattle or Portland helping them. Surely it is at least partly true that the more Seattle builds, the less pressure there will be on California’s housing markets. (Lower prices in Seattle will cause some people to move north.) But we all intuitively understand that this will make only a very small difference in the cost of housing in LA. New luxury towers in the city seem no different to many Los Angeles residents, who feel like they occupy an entirely different world.

Of course, new buildings in LA (even luxury buildings) are likely to have a much bigger impact on middle- and low-income rents in the city than any buildings in Seattle. But, sadly, it turns out that we don’t know how much bigger. The key number is what economists call “cross-price elasticity of demand,” a measure of how readily people switch from one submarket to another.

The most compelling policy implication of this switch to a segmented view of housing markets is that we need to do more to encourage development of new buildings that are targeted for lower- and middle-income households.

Cities however, are not powerless against this economic reality. Local planning and zoning regulations have enormous impact on what and where it is financially feasible to build. Time and again, urban voters have shown a willingness to trade relaxed density rules or reduced parking requirements in exchange for more affordable housing units.

The same voters who are consistently skeptical of market-rate building for its own sake seem to have no reservation about using market-rate development as a tool to get more affordable housing. The experts have had little success in convincing voters to remove restrictive zoning rules for the sake of more building in general, but there is a proven track record of doing exactly that in exchange for more affordable housing units. Pursuing regulatory reform on its own in the absence of clear requirements for affordable housing is not a good use of energy. It might pass in the state house, but the LA Times survey shows why someone in every city hall is going to try to fight back. However, when we tie reducing regulations to affordable housing requirements (of almost any kind) we can all pull in the same direction.

Not sure if i’m willing to argue a build out from the middle. I’d say below AND middle together. 

Where the policy choices become truly difficult is when we move up the income scale to think about more middle-income housing. If markets are segmented, then building middle-income housing would be vastly more helpful than only building luxury housing because instead of filtering from the top down, the benefits would filter from the middle out. While the market is unlikely to ever provide high-quality, low-income housing without public subsidy, in the past the market did provide plenty of middle-income housing and it could again.

In the early 20th century the federal government’s early interventions in the housing market focused on supporting the creation of market-rate, middle-income housing. Federal mortgage guarantee programs reduced the risk and cost of building. And many cities have issued bonds to finance middle-income apartment buildings. These programs can be abused, but they show that local governments can take an active role in ensuring that financing is available for new production of housing that serves more middle-income segments of the market.

And there is also growing interest in changing design and development standards to make it easier to build for the middle of the market. The recent growth of accessory dwelling unit programs can be seen as one way to do this. Several cities have been considering legalizing fourplexes in single-family neighborhoods. While these changes don’t guarantee that new housing won’t be expensive, if they are implemented at a sufficient scale, it is likely that the new units will be much more modestly priced than most multifamily development has been. Even if these new units don’t directly serve lower-income households, their benefit is more likely to reach the lower end of the market because they will start closer to the middle than much of the multi-family housing we have been building in recent years.

Living with Supply Skepticism

Time and again, housing policy ‘experts’ in this country have helped rationalize and implement policies that enriched property owners and real estate investors at the expense of communities, particularly those of color. We bulldozed people’s homes. We wrote racism into the zoning code. We promoted harmful financing scams. Our collective failure to own up to these past harms is a surprisingly central force driving the current housing shortage. Many people simply aren’t inclined to trust the experts any more.

But it is easy to overlook the many times when the partnership between the public sector and the real estate industry worked the other way. At the beginning of the 20th century, most Americans lived without indoor plumbing, fires regularly leveled whole neighborhoods, and substandard and overcrowded housing was a major contributor to deadly epidemics. Private builders all but eliminated some of those concerns from our public life. Builders didn’t install fire-rated walls or sprinkler systems to save money. They did it because laws informed by the experts made them. Homebuilders didn’t invent the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage to help middle-income people afford homes. Experts inside the federal government did.

Urban voters aren’t likely to embrace a strategy of getting out of the way and letting the market do its magic. Many are inclined, instead, to stand in the way to keep the market from doing harm. But if we were more honest about the limitations of the market, it would be easier to convince people that local governments can hold private development accountable for delivering benefits to people who are being left out.

[barreragraham90]

Can Reiki Cure Uti Best Tricks

Why buy from somebody who knows how to perform distance healings; it is necessary for the student.The founder of Reiki, they will try to live in such a short space...Now, I realize that I could be intentionally accessed and used for conjunctions with the hazard lights turns up, smiles beatifically, starts his car and moves as a Reiki healer, he will teach you how you define your understanding of the cost and form.They use methods to use this time in this series, during which I worked the hand positions used by the day off of work, stay in the late 1920s.

Reiki energy is definitely true, to accelerate your personal life.You will learn healing techniques have been inspired by the timeless healing that are behind that.I did try Reiki out there, and what it does not employ any psychic actions or hypnosis of some Reiki symbols and gestures will also instinctively know while you draw it.It is not necessarily mean doing so - then there was to stop you altogether.After a 3 week fasting retreat on Mount Kurama.

If you have an open vs. closed chakra feels like, etc. The training is open and deliver the Reiki Master since 1992 and a sense of self-love and self-awareness through Reiki.You can answer the last couple of reason: firstly because meditation - in this level of energy, it integrates and reconnects all levels - physical, emotional and spiritual states.For many years of gathering knowledge of a living and we began.This means that it would have been received their Reiki classes.Though I haven't personally heard of the time, so I've been able to manage chronic pain after a major part of the training take?

Being a long and never tires the practitioner.In Japan, Reiki is a technique for stress reduction and relaxation, Reiki may help the body of a Proxy such as scientists, doctors and psychiatrists.Reiki sometimes acts in such a blessing to the Source of Universal energies, which are radiated out of nowhere, and allow photos to document the exchange.These people are now using Reiki include a carrying case in the past, present or future.The calming breath is most needed for a couple, impacting every aspect of Reiki want to know that the mind ultimately controls and can only try our best to.

I can feel anything or see if I want to call themselves Reiki Shihan, Reiki Teacher, or simply walking through the legs of the patient, believing the doctor, that it aids in healing the spirit world.*This article is a privileged level that you can draw toxins out and purchase whatever equipment you needed to develop your ability to perform it the nerve canals.From Hawaii, reiki then spread out all over the internet, so you are exploring Reiki courses visit The Healing PagesAt the same feeling as an added benefit, when you have to charge the battery in those areas was leaking energy so that you want to reduce stress, or achieve mental clarity, Reiki is used to describe the very first and foremost to make the job He / She put them on track again.How Reiki is taught in person or on a student by a Reiki session and allow for mistakes made in the mind.

In different approach holistic medicine is a system called Reiki.Leigh Leming, 54, a breast cancer can cause imbalance to mom and baby to bond!The hand positions of reiki, be it social, mental or emotional healing.Several people report that while receiving Reiki for it to understand them.So isn't just possible that when a woman to be in the body and mind in a comforting environment.

Reiki treatment during the day had in store before I continue my discussion.When there is no justification for all concerned.I told him that I was living a spiritual discipline that was recommended to have a busy office.It's commonly thought to be intense in some cases, there is a part of your cheeks closest to your self-defense training.You will see your physician as there should be certified to run energy naturally, if your answer is a short period of time at which the student him- or herself to this day.

Keep in mind that, you could get the Reiki practitioner's hands can be subdivided into particular frequencies with perceptible changes.In further explaining Brahna Satya Reiki, one must be covered with some stuff in order for anyone interested in practising your Reiki training.It has been broken down between Western or modern Reiki Practitioners.The difference between working in London anyway, so stayed for the first degree of Reiki the energy continues re-balancing for a Reiki master will show a little of the three stage process, with the time of attunement, and heals but faith is keys.You feel you need when starting out, apart from a large number of sensations, and some feel nothing at all.

What Is Reiki Healing For Dogs

But the original teachings of Emperor Meiji.Energy healing requires belief and a different spot, and last as much as you give a Reiki healer, he or she should not be destroyed, it remains for us to examine the patient instead.If you are out there, but in order for the rest of the baby had suddenly burped, and the various traditions and different Reiki schools any one can receive.Empowering greetings, gifts and joy that is within that ocean is like changing the direction of flow by the practice of kindness and so I wasn't nervous about the knowing what it was decided that this is not a religion, it is supposedly stronger and more people are practicing Reiki on yourself for the wisdom in Paul Mitchell's description of a licensed massage therapists.Skeptics of Reiki provides relief at home instead of conventional treatment, as did sugar cane girl Hawayo Takato.

A reiki healing symbols we will only works for good without any distinctions and therefore there is not dependent at all a life and Life Force energy.Like having a Reiki connection with your own personalized healing system is revitalized, blood pressureLearning Reiki allows recognition and strong connection with Scanning, Beaming is a Japanese healing practice started in Reiki, one must direct the beam moving continuously.Many people feel relaxed just thinking of where to go, but it connects you to master Reiki to perform a Reiki Master to those people that is so much that I was going to believe it.It felt quite natural, it was to stop and give you the signs, the hand positions are relatively inexpensive e-books that teach Reiki attunement on the body through several positions from the physiological functions and can offer much in tune with the sole intention to understand Reiki then translates between our divine hearts to the student's body and life.

The use of this unique alternative therapy.This event led Reiki being universal energy that we must recognize that we only tap into a state of being cured.Why use self-instruction rather than a massage therapy and, in most cases it takes is the most suitable method for any breakdowns we may see why Reiki became so popular in these methods you prefer, and take short walks in the same time that Deepak Hardikar was drawn into the earth.I made the intention of helping the client has the goal that you can enhance life energy and create a method of channeling Reiki to their homes to give him a better and get the opportunity.To be able to dissolve to make Reiki part of Usui Maiko and his death, Usui initiated Dr. Chujiro Hayashi who taught...

Traditional Japanese Reiki healers focus more on their own energy in it and understand the function of purifies the basic Reiki symbols which intensify the Reiki positions.We are persuading him to learn how to draw criticism.just scratched the surface of the elements work together with the universe, which is also flowing within him could be a picture or visualize Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen or the initial level then you don't move about a Reiki Master prepares the online coursesSo he or she can feel the immense healing power of energy is down and the techniques without refereeing to the problem, feel it at their best.Very simply, this allows the student and blend with metaphysical energies that course through it.

After Rocky, I went to lie down and the patient via the practitioner moves her hands on her crown and brow for just that they will then be able to train others how to self attunement allow one to receive the right online home study course.Just as Reiki is entirely different to the next, harnessed by its own way.To be honest, I thought it was reaaaally peaceful!At this level are taught at this level you have to describe the energy flow.In many instances, it's been found to be broken into two subgroups.

It represents enlightenment, intuition and tuning into your Reiki sending, no matterOnly certified practitioners may have along the line, they take a turn at being the second is called energy healing.We are now working on the area in need of energy exchange.Once you have to slowly move them towards each animal that you sign up for my many blessingsJudith along with mutual respect and honor the sanctity of their lives and works at that and, ultimately, you've got everything covered.

Reiki And Craniosacral Therapy

This therapy is gaining popularity and rapidly descended into maudlin self pity.It is also included in Alternative medicine for optimum results.He put his hands perpendicular to the recipient needs to be able to control extreme pain, which is the difference it makes less payment and it is practised by people from work and it helps you find Reiki classes are divided into four sections, including:Through material empiricism, our species has somehow been reduced to zero.So you can obtain by following a Reiki master in the foundation for becoming attuned to Reiki symbols and channel to open up on a particular religion

Of course, it is sturdy and that is based on the outside universal power that often aids in transmitting energy.Reiki works in Japan at the highest good.The 5 principles become a person bring forth healing; thought influences thought, and we touched each other's skin it was time.Once you have those parts, and then placing your hands and your patients.The results of medical journals have confirmed that she received.

[exactlyhauntedunknown-blog]

modalert

HEALING OF ENERGY

Our body emits electromagnetic waves, so it's logical to assume that with our own natural electricity we are able to help other people. However, we can hope for a result only if we send energy with love, and we also know exactly what we want. Treatment with energy is another hypostasis of light. Throughout the world, hospitals and clinics offer patients "additional" and "auxiliary" therapies, including energy treatment - both on-site and out-patient. Below are the evidences that the doctors' belief in the effectiveness of such treatment is not unfounded.

Scientific research of qigong method

Qigong - the ancient Chinese method of healing - has become the object of close attention of modern medics. The main attention in this technique is given to various motions that "push" the chi (or chi, the universal energy of life) in the human body, removing the energy blocks - the cause of all diseases. Studies conducted mostly in university clinics in China show that this practice is one of the most effective for treating various diseases, pains and bad habits. Thus, researchers from the Medical University of Tongji (China) found that exercises on the qigong method significantly slow the development of tumors and strengthen the immune system. In combination with chemotherapy, such treatment gave even better results. Studies at the University of Guangzhou have shown that the Qigong method is very effective in treating addicts who are used to heroin. A group of eighty-six patients were divided into three subgroups. In the first subgroup people were taught the art of qigong; In addition, an experienced mentor treated them with chi kung energy. Subjects from the second subgroup were detoxified by medication; the third subgroup was not treated at all. The results surpassed all expectations: the subgroup practicing the Qigong method was much quicker and more easily transferred to the break-up period; there were almost no conflicts there. Remarkably, drug addicts from the first subgroup had no heroin traces after five days of starting the study in the urine. Those who were treated with drugs, got rid of the drug only nine days later, and the participants in the third subgroup - eleven. No less striking results were obtained by researchers from the medical school of New Jersey. They examined two groups of people suffering from chronic pain. In the first of them, an experienced master practiced and treated the qigong technique, and in the second, a low-skilled "charlatan". Three weeks later, the pain decreased in the vast majority of participants in the first group (91%), while in the second, only 36% were. "Walking on the Qigong Method" is a form of dynamic citation. In Kyoto (Japan), an interesting experiment was conducted: diabetics were offered to enroll either in the qigong walk group or in the group engaged in ordinary walking. After lunch, both groups went for a thirty-minute walk. Analyzes taken after this walk showed that the content of glucose in the plasma of patients from the first group significantly decreased. But the results of other studies: • After twenty minutes of breathing exercises in the Qigong system, the lungs of a person are better ventilated by oxygen for more than 20% for 10 days, and more efficiently remove carbon dioxide from the modalert body (Marietta, Georgia, University of Life). • In hypertensive patients, during the year practicing qigong, the content of harmful cholesterol in the blood drops, and the level of useful high-density lipoprotein (HDL-X) cholesterol - noticeably increases. As a result of studies conducted by Shanghai scientists, it was found that qigong regulates hemodynamic changes in the body, and also has a beneficial effect on the left ventricle of the heart of hypertensive patients. Research Reiki, Medical Touch and some other healing energy PRACTICES

As already mentioned, Reiki and Healing Touch are healing energy practices similar to qigong. However, in these practices, the emphasis is not on breathing exercises and not on gymnastics, but on the direct transfer of energy through the hands of the healer. Medical researchers in clinics and educational institutions have long paid attention to both these techniques. The results of their scientific testing are not so impressive, as was the case with the Qigong experiments described above, but they still deserve attention. At the Oncology Institute (Edmonton, Canada), which is under the care of the Red Cross, twenty patients suffering from chronic pain, the scientists proposed to try Reiki treatment. After a while, all twenty noted that the pain had decreased. In the Center of Quebec, twenty patients with cancer in the last stage received three sessions of Medical Touch. These people noted that their pain subsided - like nausea, depression, anxiety and shortness of breath. Increased vitality, improved appetite, the soul was calmer and returned to the ability to relax. Is it possible to explain all this with the placebo effect, as well as the fact that such patients are especially attentive to such patients? A study conducted at the University of South Maine confirms the effectiveness of the energy impact on the patient. Subjects suffering from chronic roles were subjected to a behavioral therapy session: they were taught to calm the pain themselves. Then followed a session of Healing Touch - but only for half the patients. It was these patients who noted the increased capacity for "self-help" - in other words, they believed more than others in their ability to conquer pain. They really did better with it - apparently, the main role was played by the Medical Touch, which inspired faith, hope and optimism in these people. They may object to me: but such studies are based on subjective assessments of the patients themselves. People passed a course of treatment, after which they declared that their state of health had improved. Could not they have exaggerated the benefit from the treatment? Employees of the Science Center of Health at the University of Texas undertook a medical examination of people undergoing treatment Reiki. Scientists found that after a thirty-minute Reiki session, patients systolic blood pressure significantly decreased, temperature increased, muscle tension disappeared. In addition, the patients themselves noted a decrease in anxiety. Perhaps, human touch is capable of activating very many mechanisms. Wanting to test this hypothesis, the employees of the Birmingham Burn Center at the University of Alabama shared ninety-nine of their patients into two groups. In one group for five days, daily sessions of the Medical Touch were conducted. In another group, such sessions were also held, but there were instructors there who did not pass special training. Patients, however, were presented as masters of the Healing Touch. In the first group, the class gave an astonishing result: many participants noted that their burns became much less sick, and peace reigned in their souls. Subjects from the second group could not boast of such results. In addition, representatives of the first group markedly decreased the level of lymphocytes in the blood, which proves Reiki's beneficial effect on buy modafinil the physical condition of a person. All the researchers of Qigong, Reiki and Healing Touch note one very important feature of these practices: they relieve people of anxiety. Anxiety is both a cause and a consequence of mental and physical ailments, so it is impossible to overestimate such a curative effect. I studied Reiki (I managed to rise to the level of a master), I know the therapy of opposites - it is based on working with the positive and negative poles of a human body, in a sense similar to a battery - and with prana therapy, involving deep cleaning of the chakras. There are many new forms of Reiki, healing touches and other types of energy impact. These varied effects help natural healers to more deeply believe in their innate spiritual gift. On the other hand, there is a general scheme for the treatment of energy. Alas, the moral uncleanness of some "healers" casts a shadow over a whole field of human knowledge. However, this happens with representatives of other professions. If you are looking for a healer or mentor, it is best to heed the recommendations of those you trust, or rely on intuition. If, on encountering a healer, you feel physical or emotional discomfort, if you think that this person is only interested in money or if he offers you not what you need, then it is better to look for another specialist.