Leo Gura

@LostSoul I'm tired of such debates. Decide for yourself. It's wisest for me not to comment about others consciousness.

I knew a pickup guy in Austin TX who made a good living playing chess tournaments and teaching chess. I don't know his rating but we was making up towards $100k. Not sure how he managed it but apparently it's possible.

If you set your intention to be truthful and unbiased then racism solves itself. Notice that this whole Palestine-Israel issue revolves around bias. People are too biased in one way or another to see things clearly or to strike compromises. Peace requires seeing other perspectives besides your own. War requires seeing only your perspective.

The stronger Ukraine fights the better deal they can probably get. So it's not just a binary thing. They will have to negitiate with Russia over how much land they will lose. It really depends on what kind of deal Putin is willing to settle for. Putin's demands may be too unreasonable. I don't know. Military aid is starting to fail to work as Ukraine runs out of manpower. They can't hold out forever, but Russia can.

No way, Ukriane does not have the manpower or resources to hold out much longer. Russia will likely win this war within a year and Ukriane will be forced to capitulate to Russian demands.

Namaste

It's not really a question of best but having a wide diversity of sources. I look at: CNN MSNBC Vox Mother Jones The Gaurdian The Atlantic NYT New Yorker Washington Post AP News Google News The Verge Ars Technica Politico And a bunch of Youtube channels like Breaking Points

I wasn't making a moral judgment. I was pointing out why chess is a bad way to fund a lifestyle. Chess is way more niche than any other sport. And all professional atheletes are on a ticking clock. They all need some career beyond their sport because it only lasts a decade or two at best.

You need to develop some line of work besides chess. That doesn't mean you have to quit chess. But chess just does not make a solid enough career unless you are worldclass. The problem with chess is that it doesn't add that much value to peoples' lives, so it's difficult to live off that. Also, limiting your whole creative output only to chess is just very limited. There are so many other areas of life where you could contribute besides that. Unless you are a worldclass grand master, keep chess as a hobby/side-gig. Not your main career. You might find that this is a win-win because you may enjoy chess more if your whole livilihood doesn't hinge on it. Doing professional chess can suck the joy out of what should be a fun hobby. If you think about it on a fundamental level, chess is a game. It was never meant to be a profession. Trying to turn it into a profession is not a good idea, even if you could do it. If you really thino about it, this notion of chess as a career is a preverted recent invention. Chess was never supposed to be about that. So you are ramming a square peg into a round hole in trying to do that. Even someone like Gary Kasparov, he has moved on to writing books about politics, etc. Because chess is just too narrow a thing to devote your whole life to. Chess's proper place in life is as a hobby, not a career. Those who turn it into a career are threading a very fine needle. And it's not at all clear that this is even good for them. There's way more to life than chess. Why artificially limit yourself so much? The whole point of chess is to enjoy it, not grind it out for years. It's the same problem as turning sex into a career. Sex is not supposed to be a career.

Agreed. There's just no clean solution. Either way it will be dirty and nasty. This is peak politics: where you must choose between only shitty options.

Here is Eternity.

First one is great! Good taste.

No idea

Of course the US is allied with Israel so there's going to be a double-standard there. Israel does not threaten US global interests like Russia. The situation is also very different in that Israel is not trying to annex Gaza the way Russia is doing with Ukraine. Putin started a war of conquest. Israel is responding to terrorist attacks. If that's true then I'd say it's fair game. But I saw footage of Russians bombing hospitals, schools, etc. I don't give Russia the benefit of the doubt. They do tons of war crimes. The deeper issue is that it's nearly impossible to conduct a war without war crimes. That's just what war entails. There are no sweet wars that run strictly by the book. War is chaos and madness. Which is why all effort should be made to avoid it. Once that dam bursts there's no holding back the carnage.

@Twentyfirst You will never move Israel anywhere. This idea it totally ridiculous. Israel is not going anywhere.

Should be fine. It might make you nauseous. I find it good to eat a bit before 5-MeO otherwise I can get too nauseous. This will be a personal preference.

The Roman era was full of vicious extermination of entire city-states. All the men would be killed, all the children and women were raped and sold into slavery. This was standard operating proceedure during those times. The Romans completely exterminated Carthage. The Mongols were also extremely vicious if you opposed them. But they could be lenient if you joined them. Most pre-modern war was utterly barbaric across the board.

70 years ago, there def was.

Everything in human history is understandable.

The issue is that Palestine was never a proper "nation". It was a loose collection of villages and towns. You can't retroactively create "a nation". You have to build that nation first and defend it. People just take for granted the existence of a Palestinian nation. As if nations are like mountains, which exist by themselves. Plenty of people are calling Israelis war criminals and losing their shit. Russia also was fighting a more conventional war, not Jihadists in tunnels under dense civilian areas. The Ukraine army does not fire rockets from hospitals. So there is no military need to bomb a Ukraine hospital other than to demoralize the population, which is a war crime.

I take 150mg, 4-6 times per day. ALA has a half-life of 3-4hrs.

@SpectrumDT The claim is that you can become conscious that God exists and what God is. Whether this is practical or not for you is besides the point. It's like I'm making the claim that bigfoot lives in the forest and you can find him. And your reply is, "But is there any practical benefit for me to find this bigfoot?" Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. But the fact remains that bigfoot can be found in the forest, if you want. If you don't want, then don't look for him. Explaining the practical implications of God to an unawakened person is very difficult, and frankly, an insulting thing to ask for. If you were too reduce God to its practical implications then you would miss best parts of God. God is such a profound thing that it transcends the practical domain.

No political leader is perfect. Of course people die. The question is how best to prevent further deaths. Simplistically blaming leaders for Hamas attacks is childish. Regardless of the Israeli leadership, Hamas will continue to do its terrorist attacks. The IDF themselves have basically admitted to bombing an entire refugee center to kill a single Hamas battalion commander. I'm not saying that ratio is the typical ratio. But the IDF seems fine with such a ratio, which is the issue. I've seen the civilian death rate estimated to be 93% in Gaza. I am not going to trust those numbers. We need receipts if such numbers are going to be claimed. Yes, Palestinians have been kicked out of their homes. But that's what happens when you don't have a proper solid state. Anyone can come along and kick you out. That's why a state is needed with a military. Yes, the British controlled that area through military power and they gave it over to Israeli's. That's how geopolitics works after a war. The victors of the war get to decide who gets how much land. If you don't agree with it you can go to war with the British and after you defeat them, you can set your terms and divide the land however you feel like. War has stakes. Those who win wars get land and those who lose wars lose lands. Again, this isn't kindergarten. If Palestinians wanted to keep their land they should have gone to war with the British and blocked them from giving it over to Israel. But that time has long passed. There's no mystery about it. If Israel did a ground invasion without all this massive bombing, they would incur 10000s of casualties as Hamas ambushes them in the urban jungle. This bombing is softening Hamas up so they are unable to do massive damage to the IDF once the land invasion begins. Yes, destroying infrastructure in Gaza significantly cripples Hamas, even if it does not kill them directly. After a few months of bombing Hamas will be on its last legs from lack of supplies. This is like a medieval siege. In a medieval siege the enemy was surrounded and starved out over a period of 6-12 months. After months of bombing Hamas fighters will be so famished, resource-starved, and fatigued that they will not be able to fire a rifle accurately. That is the strategy here. Israel's goal now is to avoid losing 10,000 IDF soldiers in Gaza to ambush attacks.

Because eliminating Hamas is more important than getting back the hostages. As a political leader you cannot let the death of 250 people influence the big picture of your defense policy. If Israel does not properly defend itself 1000s more civilians will be killed by Hamas in the future. So that is the higher priority. It didn't start out as Palestinian land. It was land without a solid state of any kind, being part of various Middle Eastern powers and empires over the centuries. Land cannot be "yours" unless you have built up a solid state to claim and defend it. "Palestine" was never a properly defined state. And it still isn't today. Because it was never powerful enough to define itself. If you want to be able to have a state, you must be able to win a war. If you can't win a war then you don't get a state. That's the way things work. This is not kindergarten.

It gives me mental energy and makes my visual field sharper. It even raises my baseline consciousness a bit.