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Britain's First Jedi Member of Parliament
earthlingpink writes "In his maiden speech to the House of Commons, the Hon. Member for Copeland, Jamie Reed MP, announced that he is a Jedi: "as the first Jedi Member of this place, I look forward to the protection under the law that will be provided to me by the Bill" (the quotation is a fair way down the page; search for 'Jedi,' not surprisingly). How long before we have a Congressional equivalent?" Update: 06/29 23:15 GMT by T : Reader JE_Hoover adds a correction: "Although the previous MP for Copeland was the Hon. Member for Copeland, the current MP for Copeland is not a member of the privy council. Debretts make it all clear."
Here is Jamie Reed's MP page on My Society's excellent TheyWorkForYou project.
And here is the screen scraped debate, that you can comment on like a blog.
You cant make anything foolproof, they'll only invent better fools.
A certain famous one claims to have produced fish out of thin air, and also cured paralysis and blindness amongst other unprovable, highly dubious things.
By the way, I can't help noticing that verified religious crooks of recent centuries past have claimed to be able to perform those very things, only they were exposed as fraud.
So for me, claiming to believe in a Jedi creed is no more ludicrous than being a Christian. Also, watch this post be modded down promptly as a troll, which should tell you something of the power of long entrenched religions.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I hope you will next time. We need people like this to stand up against any trend towards religiousity becoming part of government (as distinct from part of state) in the UK. For the many people who consider religion to be no more than fiction or, at best, mythology, those who will mock its place in parliament are to be encouraged and voted for. A
Time is life: speed saves it. LJK Setright
There are several physiological theories about the meridians and points of acupressure. Nervous reflexes are one; there are others involving the electrical properties of fascia, and another involving a network of less-differentiated cells throughout the body. It's possible that different points work by different mechanisms. The explanation is far from complete.
Most pracitioners of Chinese Medicine don't care much about trying to find a Western Medicine explanation for why acupuncture, Asian bodywork therapy, and Chinese herbs, are effective; any more than most musicians are deeply interested in the physics of sound, or the physiology of hearing.
As for "believing" in qi, qi is not something one has to "believe" in. Qi is something that is experienced. If you get up in the morning as say "I feel full of energy today!" - you just made an observation about qi.
"O genki desu ka?" - "How is your ki (qi)?"- is the Japanese version of "How are you?" (Specifically, "genki" is what the Chinese call "yuan" or "original" qi, a specific type.) It doesn't require a voltmeter or any objective observation to answer. :-)
It's unfortunate that many practitioners of CM and of Asian martial arts have latched on to the idea that qi is some sort of electromagnetic like energy field. This is a misinterpretation, attempting to fit Taoist concepts of the Universe into a Platonic/Aristotelian grid.
Like other aspects of Chinese Medicine's model of the human being, qi is best understood not by what it is but by what is does. The CM model is very much a functional, not a structural, one.
I recommend Tad Kaptchuk's The Web That Has No Weaver to those interested in learning more.
The two are no more incompatible than the description of a certain sound in terms of a time-varying frequency spectrum, versus "that's an A chord played on a steel-string guitar". The former description may tell you why, when you play it through your amp, it makes your speaker buzz because of some resonance; the latter tells you how it works in the music. They're both correct.
(Tom Swiss, NCCAOM Diplomate in Asian Body Therapy; Sandan, World Seido Karate Organization)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood