Re:  Climate change, and Human response to it.

It's like my Dad. Doctors, friends, and even total strangers told him, "stop smoking, or it will kill you." He didn't. He said it was too hard to quit.  Finally, after a massive heart attack and triple bypass surgery, lying in a hospital bed, the surgeon standing over him said, "If you smoke any more, this will happen to you again, and I won't be able to save you." My Dad stopped smoking.   Evidently, it wasn't too hard to quit, after all. 

 I'm afraid it's going to be like that all the way. We know what we need to do. But, none of us really want to. Corporations think of the expense, individuals think of the inconvenience. We have the ability, but probably won't get serious about it until irreversible damage is done, and Nature smacks us down hard.  

Pseudoscience and antiscience are ways of ignoring the obvious.  I'm sure my Dad told himself that people were overreacting to bad press about the dangers of smoking.  He probably told himself that he was an exception, and would be fine.  Probably, with each pack of cigarettes, he thought, "I'll quit soon, before anything bad happens, but right now, I really need this."  He would got through the motions of quitting, without really quitting, and tell himself that at least he tried.

Humans.  For such an intelligent species, we can be awfully dumb.

I swear the Smith's I shop at is on the edge of another dimension or something. 

For instance,  I can always find a parking place near the door and a cart corral, even when they're busy.  They always have one or two marked down jars of gefilte fish on the clearance shelves, although I have never seen a new jar anywhere on the regular shelves.  Little things like that.

Today this happened.

I heard people talking in the next aisle.  Voice 1 sounded like an older woman.  Voice 2 sounded like a teen or twenty something guy.  Voice 3 sounded like a middle aged woman.

Voice1:  Oh, hello there!
Voice 2: Umh... hi...
Voice 3: Who was that?
Voice1: He's one of my pupils.
Voice3: *laughs* Is that where the scar came from?
Voice 1:  Yes, it is.

I decided I really wanted to see these people, and maybe talk to them.  By the time I got to the end of the aisle, there was nobody there but a man stocking cans of corned beef hash.  He looked too old to be Voice2, but who knows?  So, I asked him where the Gefilte fish is.  He told me they don't carry it.

He wasn't Voice 2. 

I had a very good counselor who told me this about memories that aren't confirmed by other family members:
__________________
If we could wind back your memory like a film, we might not find a scene that exactly looks like what you remember. That's how it is for everyone's memory about everything. BUT, we would find that your memory is consistent in emotional content. Your memory of the location or the date or other small details may be inaccurate, but casting will be correct. Who the abuser was, and what sort of abuse it was will be accurate.
 
Our memories are how we move through life, and we get the gist of people right, because it can be important to our survival. Whether it happened in the back yard or on your Grandmother's sofa is not relevant. 
 
False memories do happen, but they take a lot of work to create. The cases you may have heard of are made with hypnosis, heavy medication, and a bad shrink trying to force their patient to dig up supposedly repressed memories that may not even be there. They don't jive with other memories, and usually can't be made to fit into any reasonable time or space. 
 
Memories that you recover yourself, you can trust. They're not so much repressed, as you just don't think about them. When you are emotionally ready to deal with them, they surface on their own. Or, they don't. It's okay either way.
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At least, this is what I remember her saying...

Here is why it is important to pay for certain types of personal interactions. Sex*, psychic readings, counseling, and other non-material exchanges.

We never do these things for free, really. When we do these things with friends, it is part of our ongoing exchanges of friendship. It's not tit-for-tat like a commercial exchange, but the recognition of value given and received is there.

When we do these things with strangers, the recognition of value given and received is represented by an exchange of money or other material goods. This closes the interaction, so that nothing else is owed. The provider and the client can go on their separate ways. They may never meet again, and that's okay.

You can probably guess what brings this up for me today. Someone tried to get a free reading, using the argument that, "It's a gift you should share with the world."

No.

If I was a magical healer, then, yes, I would go around doing it "for free", because it would be making the world around me a better place to be in. But, giving that individual a free reading is not going to improve the world around me. Especially since they don't seem to appreciate the value of it, so will probably not heed the advice given anyway. It would be like healing someone's cirrhotic liver so they could keep drinking.

On top of that, I was not at all interested in being their friend.


*meaning one person doing sex for another person. Not a "one night stand" situation where someone does sex in exchange for sex.