And you thought Monopoly caused family violence. The Magic Gathering brings out the worst in people even more so than the family game boards. Just watch the first minute of this video:
If you search in Google for other related murders, they appear to be increasing. Also, after listening to the recent Planet Money podcast “Episode 609: The Curse Of The Black Lotus” I understand that there is a large market that is worth a lot of money for these paper cards.
These cards are like baseball cards on steroids. Magic: The Gathering cards came out right as I joined the military in 1995 and they passed my attention like Pokemon. I was too busy to even hear about these popular fads. However, these sources of entertainment are fads that have lasted for a very long time now. In fact, this habit is becoming even more ravenous and getting more popular than ever.
I love/hate Hearthstone, which is supposed to be similar to MTG. Sometimes after losing a game pretty badly, I just want to choke the winner to death. It is an awful thought and I need a little time to cool down after losing. I can see how some people get heated up about MTG as well. In fact, I remember outside the library in Rice Lake, WI, a girl went into her car and started screaming alot. I was just sitting outside in the cold playing on the internet. I wanted to know what was going on, but I had a pretty good idea that something went wrong with her game. She was probably frustrated with losing a game most likely.
That pain of losing translates into profits for the games manufacturers because nobody wants to lose and the best way to prevent losing is to have the best cards. However, this can get expensive, especially when the decks change completely over every few years. They have an amazing system that keeps people wanting more.
But is this system of trade very healthy for us? I’m not sure. I see there are a lot of overweight people who play and don’t seem to care very much for their own health. But this could be more of a causality than direct correlation.
I remember playing a little Dungeons and Dragons in the 80s. But I didn’t like it too much because it seemed too open-ended. This MTG card game really brings a much better structure to the game. It makes it more about logic than fantasy. Although, people are still free to make up stories of their conquests in the game
Seans Outpost was started because Sean was accused of stealing a card or cards and then subsequently murdered for it.
Do you think that humans accepted the practice of bloodletting among themselves in the 1700s because they were widely draining the blood of their farm animals for nutrition?
The medical bloodletting instruments could have been used on cows and horses as easily as humans.
Since no one has anything bad to say about the taste of blood, I wonder about the practice of its consumption when medical bloodletting became popular.
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Um no 07/24 06:03
I believe bloodletting was accepted because doctors so strongly believed in and recommended it. It was a way to let out extra blood and rid the body of bad humors, two things that were thought to make sickness.
I was not aware (and have been unable to find reference to) bloodletting of farm animals for nutritional purposes. Bloodletting, by definition, takes a small amount from the host while leaving it living. During slaughter, blood WAS collected and consumed (primarily in stews, sausage and puddings) because our ancestors were frugal folk and did not want to be wasteful.
So no, I don’t think there’s much correlation between animal and human bloodletting other than to provide healing practices to both. Humans, as a general rule, did not drink each others blood for nutritional value.
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No corilation, blood was captured during 07/24 07:16
slaughter and used in cooking. not exactly medicinal for the cow.
Shakespeare and other actors of the time used cattle blood on stage.
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this is absolutely correct. 07/24 08:00
There are many references to blood being more than a biological element.
Blood was considered the essence of a person. Take the phrase “blood brothers”, “blood is thicker than water” and the “king’s bloodline” which was believed to be granted by God, by some.
An illness “must” be bad blood, thus the logical conclusion was to let it out. As modern people we can see the flaw with that logic being based on the faulty premise.
To rob an animal of its “being” was not a crime but our right under Christian doctrine since God gave Adam dominion over the beasts. However robbing a person of their “being” could not be looked on favorably by the church.
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Bloodletting of cows was done by and 07/24 07:22
still is done by the Maasai in Africa. I thought of them first when I read about blood letting for nutrition. I saw a documentary a long time ago.
Anyway, I wondered if the Maasai were brought to the U.S. as slaves and brought that tradition with them. Answer is probably no as few of the Maasai were taken as slaves. They mostly protected neighboring tribes from being captured.
Since I had never thought about farmers using blood letting on their animals I looked into it. The posted site has pictures of blood letting tools and these paragraphs:
“The fleam is perhaps easiest-to-find bloodletting antique. These devices have one or more blades at right angles to the handle. The most common form is a brass case containing 2 or 3 steel blades, often stamped with a makers name (figure 8). The blades were usually of various sizes to offer a selection to the phlebotomist. Many of these fleams were likely used on animals but the ones with small blades no doubt were used at times on humans as well. Imagine the farming family that used their fleam for both purposes!”
“The fleams used for veterinary purposes were placed over the jugular vein of the neck most commonly and inserted with the help of a fleam stick. This was a heavy wooden club used to drive the blade in with a quick motion (so the horse didn’t know what hit him). Figure 12 shows a variety of fleam sticks. Often the bleeder would place a sheet over the animals head so they didn’t see what was coming. It’s a good thing they didn’t bleed humans this way!”
After writing the above post, I did remember a scene from an episode of Sharpe (TV Series, British, 1993-97, 2006) where a downed Calvary horse is blooded at the neck, springing to life after. I know that show did really well within their scrooge-like budget to portray costume, props and military tactics during the Napoleonic Wars as authentically as they could.
I didn’t want to sound racist or ethnocentric in my earlier post, but I did figure that other cultures outside of European and North American might have different views on blood-drinking, whether human or animal. My education, like many others, is skewed in that area. I couldn’t find anything in a quick google search (plus I was at that time on an android tablet, and HATE doing more intricate typing and searching on it!).
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Oh lordie…. ICK!!!!! 07/24 08:03
Just found a, uh, ‘interesting’ article that is close to the topic. I’m not gonna paraphrase it here…. I can barely make my way through the reading of it!
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine
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The belief is not entirely dead, i.e., 07/24 08:54
“By ingesting corpse materials, one gains the strength of the person consumed. Noble quotes Leonardo da Vinci on the matter: “We preserve our life with the death of others. In a dead thing insensate life remains which, when it is reunited with the stomachs of the living, regains sensitive and intellectual life.”
Just recently I had two older men who wanted older roosters, about 2 years of age, for eating. One man was with his son and he and I both tried to get the father to take a younger roo.
Another man, maybe 40 or so, came to get an “older” roo as he had company coming from out of town and they wanted a fresh chicken to eat.
Generally people want roos that are from 6 mos to a year old.
I was talking about this with another customer and she explained that many cultures believe that eating older animals results in the person getting the “wisdom” and other positive attributes of an old rooster.
Same idea. Glad that they limit themselves to animals.
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The worst & only exposure I had to drinking 07/24 08:18
blood was probably 40 years ago. I went to a picnic hosted by a Filipino group. I had never eaten goat and was urged by the ladies to have some. As soon as the juice–it was like a stew–hit my stomach I was at the big garbage barrel throwing up. Yuck, it was goat cooked in its own blood. Hell with “waste not, want not”.
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Common practice..for hunting 07/24 09:11
Drink the blood of your first kill.
And yet another movie. Red Dawn, (1984) ..
If nothing else you want to watch because it has a young Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Emilio Esteves
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Another movie.. 07/24 09:03
The Killing Fields. The man was starving and risked death to blood let from a cow. The livestock were protected for what one can assume that very purpose.
If the government can condition us to find joy in the Holiday Seasons, then why not also use that spirit for hunting and fishing as well? It’s not easy to train a hunter in conservation when all they want to do is stalk and kill. Holidays are positive enforcement that can help associate a day or period of time with something festive. The hunter/fisher grows up, as a child, learning to look forward to certain times of the year. They learn these days are more special than other ones.
Not every day can be special day, though. It’s just like not every day can be a hunting or fishing day for whatever you want. The special days have to coordinate effectively with the hunting or fishing season. For example: Thanksgiving is for Deer Hunting. Or, New years day marks to end of Crab Season. Also, Easter is when we can start hunting rabbits -I think.
There are consequences for not obeying the Holiday Season too. Loved ones will shame and guilt you for failing to observe the Holidays. Do you really want to isolate yourself from your own family? Most people do not. But this is the Patriotic family responding to their governments wishes to celebrate along with everyone else. Many people are happy to have National celebrations are will cheerlead the efforts, no matter what the true motive is, which in this case is for aligning with Hunting Seasons.
The penalties are much more severe for failing to follow Hunting Seasons. People have been put into prison for killing the wrong animals. It’s considered murder off-season, but perfectly legal in season. You can make it comparable to it being in the military where it’s legal to kill another human, but outside of the military, it is illegal to kill people.
After reading about how there have been botched executions that occur for both drugs and electricity, I believe that they both can fall short at times. This makes me question why we should rely on only one method of executing a prisoner. Why not use both electric chair and drug execution at the same time?
In. acupuncture, for healing and not killing, herbal therapy and needle therapy are very complementary to each other. They aren’t necessarily exclusive from each other. The discipline inter depends both electrical and chemical therapies together. That’s what makes treatment so effective for most people.
Have you ever heard of the drug-free operations? They can exist with using electrical Acupuncture. They successfully performed a heart surgery without using drugs to incapacitate the patient. The simply used needles strategically placed that were hooked up to a car battery. The patient was better off not getting overloaded with toxic drugs.
Although, what would work slightly better than electric needles are a light dose of drugs as well. Just because a patient may be interested in electrical Acupuncture, doesn’t mean they need to exclude all pain killing and mind numbing drugs. In fact, drugs and electricity work great together with the right strategy.
I was needled almost twenty times for a digestive disorder. The Acupuncturist also followed up my needling with herbal therapies as well. I liked the treatment a lot, it made me feel better. But I was suffering and the pains still returned anyway. I finally figured out the best strategy for my disease, but it took a long time and cost a lot of money.
As you can see, the drugs and electrical charges can help aid us in our the direction we need to go with our life course. If we need to recover from an illness, a strategy can be developed to improve our condition. If we need emergency surgery, there is a different strategy. And lastly, if we need to be executed for our murderous past, there is the ultimate strategy of overloading our bodies with drugs and electricity.
If I were to strategize a moment for combining the 2 disciplines into executions, I would think that you want to use an extract that depresses the heart significantly enough so that a strong electrical current can finish off the rest of the prisoners life. But I’m just pontificating.
It’s too bad that there are people out there who are so evil, that it comes to choosing the Desth Penalty.
You just can’t make up for the scents and smells that you find in real traveling. There are many different factors that come into play with changing essence as you pass through neighborhoods or landscapes.
The problem with virtual sandboxes is that we smell the same scents no matter where we are. If you in a cave, it smells like your room. If you are in a large body of water, you still smell your room. Even if you pass through some kind of desert or jungle landscape, you still smell your room.
You can’t imagine what the scent will be like either. There is no standard odor for a particular scene. Every part of the area is different and unique. Also, throughout the year even, bouquet will change too. So, you really do smell something different in real like all the time.
How warped do our brains get when we travel in the virtual worlds all day and smell the same thing the whole time. If we are going to battle monsters, we should smell the fear and anguish of our enemies. The video game players are very detached from these small details and it lends itself to psychological disorders.
Instead of the parent saying, “go outside and play” they should say, “go outside and smell something different”. Perhaps the lack of scent variety could be contributing to weight gain as well, who knows? Either way, forcing yourself to smell the same thing while consuming different content will cause people to enter into a trance that can be damaging to their health.
What if the house is sick? By coupling yourself inside your sick house to play virtual world games, you risk breathing problems. Do you know where the cleanest places to breathe air is? It’s generally near oceans, waterfalls, or after a lightning storm. There are small molecules in the air called negative charged ions that are good to breathe in. They make you healthier and feel better. They get charged through electrical actions on the earth. They do not generate inside a stuffy house.
Did you know that a baby emits a particular scent from the top of its head? Scientists discovered this is a way to get people to want to hold the babies and care for them. Here is a video that contains the baby reference, plus other facts:
So, consider the importance of real travel to areas. Remember that the countrysides tend to be a lot healthier to breathe in, especially if you don’t have access to the ocean.
Here is a video I made where I complained about Port Hadlock, WA:
Here is another video with me in Rice Lake, WI talking about the scents:
I hope you can see the difference in scents. Our nose may not be as strong as a dogs or any other kind of animal, but surely we can tell the difference between what is pleasurable and what is not.
Some people will override their reaction to bad smells and feel a sense of pleasure from them. For example, if a garbage man makes good money working with filth and decay, he may think positive thoughts with all the bad smells. He seeks out those nasty odors, because that is what gives him money.
So, it can be hard for some addicts to leave particular damaging areas because they got too comfortable with the smell. Perhaps if you wanted to change someone’s perspective on things, changing the smell can help. I believe a popular trick that Real Estate agents use is to place a drop of vanilla or cinnamon in a house that’s for sale. Perhaps they focus it in the kitchen to help people associate cooking in the kitchen.
In turn, you could put lavender in the bedroom, which always smells nice.
of what actually goes on. The majority of people usually get away with their plans in a lot of crimes. I would think that contract murders don’t deviate much from the statistics of other crimes.
There are plenty of unsolvable crimes in the Nation, such as Jimmy Hoffa. He’s been missing for years with no leads that bring us to his body. His was a well-executed contract murder committed on a high profile celebrity with no leads.
Imagine, lesser known people who have a contract murder placed on them. They can easily disappear, without anyone noticing, for weeks. By that time, the evidence starts to depreciate in value. If the murderer is a professional, they know how to avoid leaving evidence at all.
A lot of times, the murderer gets caught years later by bragging about their crimes to an informant. It actually takes someone to have a slip of their tongue to lead to their arrest for murder. It is so weird how the legal system is left up to solve murders. A little evidence gets the case nowhere.
When it comes to murder charges, you have to prove it was committed beyond a reasonable doubt. This puts a lot of burden on the Prosecution from the start. If any piece of information breaks the link between a suspect and the murder, they could walk free. We found that simple link in the OJ trial, where the glove didn’t fit. The simple glove test left people in doubt that OJ could even wear the glove left at the murder. He walked free as a result.
What if this lady in the video said that she was role-playing in a satirical way? Maybe she didn’t really want her husband killed. She wanted to talk about the event, but when it came to payment, she didn’t pay. We didn’t see any video of her paying anyone, she only talked about the situation.
Why would the news withhold the moment that could secure her time in jail? Money transfer is usually a guarantee that she is fully committed to support her husbands murder.
The lady who paid for her husbands murder in 2009 is only on house arrest today. The Cops through with the role-play to cause her to believe her husband really died. Even going fully through on the series of events doesn’t get the person put in prison for a long time.
Without serious punishments for contract killing, this kind of negotiation can still go on. The legal system seems to protect the acts of violence
The notorious Chris Dorner has become more than a man who shot a few people. There has been a lot of content surrounding the whole scenario that has turned it into an added political game as well. People are watching and responding to the events on several different media events from youtube to twitter.
I have been reading a lot of 4chan to get information about the case. It seemed so bizarre at the beginning. The explanations sounded so random it was hard to link all that was going on to the same guy. People kept asking questions over and over again, and others kept answering them repeatedly. Because of the back and forth exchanges and for as long as this fight has been going on, most people seem to be on the same thought process.
There are groups of people who support Dorner and his actions and call him a hero. There are people who are conflicted about the situation since innocent people died. No one has really spoken out against Dorner actions, except for the professionals and racists.
People have made jokes on Twitter about his rampage, the latest being that he has Goldilocks and the 3 bears as hostages in a cabin in the woods. There have been prank calls.
Someone called a pizza delivery to the alleged house he is barricaded in:
I’m sure the delivery guy is aware there is a shoot out happening in that area now.
Dorner has become a world wide news story. One guy from Poland asked if he was a wizard? The foreigners don’t normally pay attention to what is happening in the US, but this is unique news that has really been drawn out.
LA is usually a fake city. The people are fake and the type of work is all about acting and getting famous. A lot of people say that the city is in decline. I listen to Adam Corrolas podcast and he complains about his dissappointments with the city. Now, we hear about how LA cops are so corrupt. This news story is a great way to give LA some entertaining attention in such a way that people probably won’t fear for their lives since Dorner was more focused on exacting revenge instead of random killings.
Carefully Choosing Words 