Links
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 Lundoxia Presents (1 of 10): A video about stoicism A 5-minute video about the ancient Greek philosophy of stoicism, which also bears similarities with ancient Chinese taoism. |
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Lundoxia Presents (2 of 10) : Facial recognition and the future of nanotechnology A fascinating 6,5-minute report by The Economist about facial recognition. Eventually, nanotechnology will become so advanced, combined with x-ray camera technology and powerful telescopes in outer space, literally each and every single living person on the planet (even humans living deep in caves) will be identified, on one single database, all 7 billion or more people. People are obsessed with privacy. You can draw a diametrical analogy with the Dutch Calvinist psyche centuries ago that if one had curtains in the window then he or she was obviously trying to hide something. Recently I tried explaining this to some young English women in their 20s. They responded saying: "that sounds suspicious". In their mindsets, you would only NOT have curtains if you were an exhibitionist. But what if the ones looking are Peeping Toms? Aren't the lookers the ones causing someone to be called an exhibitionist? Eventually it is nanotechnology that will erase terrorism. The technology will become so advanced that it will detect such people long before they can commit their misdeeds, similar to the Hollywood film MINORITY REPORT (2002) starring Tom Cruise. But they won't even need psychics, massive amounts of data and x-ray pictures, right down to the nanometer of any object on Earth (including caves and the bottom of an ocean floor) captured from as far away as a telescope in space, will be sufficient evidence. And the state? Even centuries before today's technology, this was a subject of continued debate. Yes it can be a slippery slope to an Orwellian totalitarian nightmare, or a benign one foretold by H.G. Wells in his prophetic satire THE TIME MACHINE (1895) in which humans in future societies are profoundly apathetic, have no opinions nor intellect as everything is done for them by super-advanced technology. Eventually technology will become molecular and indifferentiable from organic life so this prediction is a possible future reality. As the Dutch axiom goes: "wij zijn niet zo ver vandaan" (we are halfway there already.) |
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Lundoxia Presents (3 of 10): Engineering optimum humans: is Iceland the most cutting-edge nation state on Earth? An excellent 6-minute report by The Economist about gender equality in Iceland, where business ownership is 50% male and 50% female and generally ranks first in the world in gender equality. But looking deeper into the socioeconomic ramifications, the real issue is engineering humans to optimum level. Much has been written about the ideal nation state, from Socrates in Ancient Greece (who was given a choice by the authorities in Athens to either be exiled, stay in Athens but stop spreading his radical ideas or commit suicide; he chose the latter) to Thomas More's UTOPIA in which men and women met each other naked as an efficient way to select their partners (More was hanged and as he was, famously stated most symbolically: See me safe up: for in my coming down, I can shift for myself; the ultimate Stoic) and LEVIATHAN by Thomas Hobbes (1651), and heaps more. In the end, a nation state is only as good as its worst-off. There is a huge difference between a Nanny state (or paternalistic state) and a state-of-the-art state, or a progressive state. A Nanny state encourages laziness, cowardice and extreme cynicism (what is cynicism except intellectual laziness, a refusal to dig deeper and understand complexity?) A cutting edge state encourages alternative thinking, backed up by pith, grit and sound reasoning. This piece resonates. |
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Lundoxia Presents (4 of 10): Politicized pornography and the normalization of body culture: Stormy Daniels interviewed on BBC (a porno star as US president) BBC interview with porno star Stormy Daniels. This is a great dimensional interview as it emboldens the modern idea of body culture, the normalization of nudity and sex, exposing body-shaming for what it is: the movement of the stupid people who want you to feel shame. Stormy Daniels is the opposite of the latter and explains her position crystal clear. There is no need for body-shaming. There is no need to be a victim and make a career out of it. On the contrary, Stormy Daniels is happy to be a porno star. Will this take down Trump's presidency? No, if anything it will increase his popularity and virility factor which is an unspoken core value of the republican party. And anyway, there are millions of men who are envious: just look at any Stormy Daniels porno film, she is super-sexual, a rare quality many men yearn for. Sex is an ancient mating ritual and pornography or erotica as an art form is also the oldest. Without sex, there is nothing. Sex is how you were born, nude. No need to twist it into anything negative. This is a great interview for body/sex-positivity or neutrality. I'd love to see a porno star like Stormy Daniels run for the US presidency, this would be the ultimate coup for liberty, democracy and new thinking. Link: 8-minute interview on BBC Newsnight, YouTube |
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Lundoxia Presents (5 of 10): NaaktopStraat.nl pamflet video Het 5e Element De nieuwste video voor mijn petitie (naakt in het openbaar) gericht naar de tweede kamer.2 minuten. Ga na www.NaaktopStraat.nl en teken de petitie als u mee eens bent dat andere mensen mogen zelf bepalen of ze gekleed of ongekleed op straat gaan! |
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Lundoxia Presents (6 of 10): Deutsche Welle (DW) report on YouTube about nude sauna culture in Germany Another excellent, super-rare report about nude sauna practice in Germany, by a British woman, for Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany's public international broadcaster. This item is a gem for lovers of all things esoteric and eclectic. When I was a travel writer publishing pieces in mainstream magazines, if my submitted piece contained a passage about the super-exceptional unisex nudity of German, Austrian or Dutch public saunas then the editor would delete it before publishing; either the editor thought I was inventing this plain true fact, or automatically linked up the non-sexual nudity with lewdness, worried about potential complaints from the readership. Hence this "nude fact" remains one of the best-kept secrets on Earth. And yet wearing a swimsuit inside a sauna is severely unhealthy (inhaling its bacteria in the extreme heat of the sauna potentially causing legionnaire's disease), not to mention the foul odor of the wet swimsuit in the sauna. 30 years ago my father filed reports as television journalist for Deutsche Welle (DW), which had a large studio in Cologne (some reports still exist on YouTube as recent uploads*; search under " Neil Lundy / European Journal".) We initially lived in an apartment by the Rhine, a section of Cologne called Rodenkirchen. Nearby there was a local sauna I frequented. I could not believe the diametrical juxtaposition of being in the company and conversation of young nude Germany women as a then 16-year old in 1988, compared to the previous two years at an all-boys school in Toronto wearing a uniform with shirt and tie on a property where girls were forbidden. Night and day. Hallelujah to the German Freikörperkultur, the sign of an enlightened civil society. It was 30 years ago that I drove up to Amsterdam from Cologne in a vintage 1972 silver Mercedes Benz, assisting on reports about the homeless, soft drugs, prostitution, same-sex marriage and euthanasia, the latter three issues not then yet legalized (2000, 2001 and 2002 respectively); what a journey for any lad! *Probably the most popular of which is the 1987 report on Poteen, Irish Moonshine; a segment of which will be aired on Irish television as part of a sitcom in 2019 (!) |
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Lundoxia Presents (7 of 10): Last manned mission to the moon: Apollo 17 (1972) An awesome, beautiful documentary, high-octane and gravitas-charged, on the last manned mission to the moon (7 December 1972); 75 hours on the lunar surface: Apollo 17 THE LAST STEPS with a kick-ass score by Matt Morton; Inside NASA's Last manned moon mission (on YouTube; duration: 20 minutes.) Of the three men who went on this last manned mission to the moon, only Harrison Schmitt lives on to this day, he is 83. Ronald Evans (1933-1990) did not descend onto the moon, he orbited the moon in the Command Module (CM, called AMERICA) while Gene Cernan (1934-2017) and Schmitt set down on the moon using the Apollo Lunar Module (LM, called The Challenger.) |
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Lundoxia Presents (8 of 10): The emergence of electric cars in 2018 A 6-minute video about the emergence of electric cars in 2018, with some cities such as Paris, Athens, Madrid and Mexico partially only allowing electric cars into their city centers by the year 2025 (The Economist.) The end of fossil fuel cars by the year 2040? |
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Lundoxia Presents (9 of 10): An illustrated instructional video to proper sauna ethos (do it nude!) At long last, a 3,5-minute illustrated instructional video to proper sauna ethos (namely, use the sauna nude, not with a swim suit!) This video is by ARTE (French and German language cultural television based in Strasbourg) and this link is on YouTube; the video's audio is in German but has an auto-text translation: left-click on the settings icon (round nut icon beside the CC icon, lower right side INSIDE the video screen), then click on "subtitles", then "auto-translate" and select the language you desire to read from the drop-down menu, even though it will be a word-by-word literal translation from the originating German. Note: this text-translation feature may only appear when logged into YouTube. Question: how many countries in the world sport sauna culture and practice correct sauna ethos in abundant unisex public facilities: namely, fully nude? There is the "black and white" A list and the "wishy washy/unclear" B list. All are located in Europe sadly. The A list is only 3 countries: Germany, The Netherlands and Austria. Are the Dutch losing their sauna ethos? Now Spa Zuiver in Amsterdam has "badkleding dagen" (swimsuit days) on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a gross violation of sauna ethos, like pouring a vat of hot chocolate on Italian pasta. Also, there used to be more small-scale saunas in Amsterdam such as Oibibio, Sauna Fenomeen (frequented by Brad Pitt when he spent some months in Amsterdam during his breakthrough moment, Thelma & Louise, 1991) and Sauna de Keizer; they have all closed down. The closing down of a small-scale sauna is a profound tragedy as it indicates an erosion of sauna practice. Correct sauna practice cleanses and refreshes the human body and mind; Mens sana in corpore sano. Finns are dead against the large commercialization of large sauna establishments. To be sure, the authentic Finnish savusauna (smoke sauna, that is, heat generated by fire, not electricity) by a lake in Finland is still by far the best sauna experience. Rustic, simple yet magnificent, finished off with some Finnish Vodka or cold beers afterwards, and remember the aromatic birch tree branches, whipped against your body and dunked in a copper vat of water. Most other saunas are electric and can make you sick; heat is not just heat, there are many different forms of heat and the savusauna form is the most organic and thus soul-soothing. The B list is "hit or miss" and includes, but is not limited to the following European countries (Finland, Estonia and Russia - especially Karelia which was formerly Finland prior to World War II - sport sauna cultures but most have access to their own free private saunas so there is little need for paid public facilities, which are gender-segregated there anyway, tragic as up to World War II in Finland there used to be public unisex nude sauna bath houses on every block; these vanished as the per capita income increased and more people built or bought their own private saunas): The other Germanic states or regions of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Belgium, Luxembourg and some countries of the former Yugoslavia such as Slovenia (a sort of Slavic version of Austria if you will) have some too but it truly is unclear and in no way abundant nor universal as there is not a strong sauna culture base. I have also found and been to decent saunas in Ukraine, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia but again it is like finding a needle in a haystack. Once I was about to go into a sauna in Kiev with a woman, and the male owner calmly asked me in Russian: "are you going to fuck her in the sauna?" so we went away. In Copenhagen in Denmark the saunas are gender-segregated with the exception of Christiania but its use is excluded to Christiania residents only; having said that a naturist group reserves a public spa for unisex nude hours once weekly but then this counts as a club membership activity. People are stunned that there is no real sauna culture in the nordic states except Finland; you have to go to naturist resorts to find them such as the lakeside savusauna (smoke sauna) located in Nora in the middle of Sweden, a place called Gustavsberg. Again, club membership-based or private ownership-based sauna practice is esoteric (secretive, or exclusively known to few), so not exoteric; this is to say universal, unisex nude, instant-access abundant sauna facilities. Yet esoteric can be equally blissful if the participants are sauna-savvy; in Vancouver a group of us rented out an old bath house periodically; in Toronto a professor held sauna parties to a closed group. Similar esoteric groups also exist in New York, San Francisco, Budapest and many other places but you need to be "in the know". Very, very few countries of the world sport authentic Finnish sauna ethos. I have a guidebook from the Finnish sauna society which outlines the basic tenets. One of these tenets is, one is supposed to be respectful and quiet and mentally clean* (and physically clean, meaning all orifices) in the sauna, similar to the behavior in a church. People who try to make the nudity sexual or kinky spoil the ethos; you separate the sex from the nudity, otherwise you are not mentally clean. Boxes don't touch. Seeing without looking, knowing without thinking (Taoism.) It may sound preachy but try to engineer such sauna ethos in other countries where there is no sauna ethos; it is next to impossible. You can't engineer the core of a collective psyche: I know, I banged my head against a brick wall for a decade trying. Either a given society is geared up for it or it is not. Perhaps most of humanity will never manage to accept its own body, which is ironical because the moment no issue is made of it, there is no more issue. It is just mental. "Maak geen punt van" as the Dutch axiom goes. *I term this "The Art of non-Judgment", a hard stoic and Taoist art to master. A simple technique to try is, as you sense your mind about to form a judgment or even comment on someone or anything, pause and abstain from judging or commenting. Then notice the blissful sensation of non-judgment. Humans are fixated on judgment. Kant wrote about the deep mental physics of human judgment in his 1790 book Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft), a book you could spend the rest of your life reading. |
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Lundoxia Presents (10 of 10): Public Nudity Festival in Zurich Switzerland and Naakt op Straat petition a year later Body and Freedom Festival takes place at the end of August each year in Zurich, Switzerland's largest city, featuring dozens of nude artists performing fully naked on the downtown city streets of Zurich in broad daylight. For those public passers-by who enjoy the nude performance, they stop and watch. Each performance lasts 20 minutes or less and are repeated throughout the day. For others who are uninterested, they simply walk onward. Again, more proof that my NaaktopStraat.nl decriminalization of public nudity - which already happens in a variety of contexts in The Netherlands - could easily be realized without any problems. In fact, it is a total non-issue. I gave countless varied examples where public nudity is tolerated, which you could call "variants". After so many variants, it is safe to say "water is wet". This is a fascinating topic sociologically; if realized, it could radically change society and elevate human interaction to a more sophisticated level. When you walk around naked at a nudist resort it has a calming effect on the soul, enhancing a peaceful and harmonious collective mindset and mode of being. Yet many who heard about this petition immediately ridiculed it without reading the wording nor even attempting to understand it (the knee-jerk negative thinking mode.) I even met representatives of the NFN, the Dutch nudist federation and they told me I was 10 or 20 years ahead of my time. I was only trying to shift a non-official pre-existing de facto reality into an official new reality. When people know they have official permission it transforms and enhances the pre-existing reality into a new norm. Norms are made by people, they do not appear by magic. Public Nudity is in fact an equal variant of soft drugs at coffee shops. These were once illegal but were decriminalized. You see a coffee shop, you pass by a coffee shop but you need not go inside the coffee shop. You can purchase a marijuana joint from the coffee shop but you don't need a context to smoke it in public. You don't need to look at a coffee shop nor at marijuana smokers. You need not look at a thing or person you dislike, clothed or unclothed. Linked: Bodyfreedom.com Naaktopstraat.nl has an infinite shelf-life and could stay online open for digital signature until it attains the required 10K in order to upgrade it to a citizen's initiative (Burgerinitiatief), even if this petition's goal outlives me its initiator! |
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Lundoxia Presents (addendum/elf): Naakt in het openbaar petitite NaaktopStraat.nl nieuwe video 1,5 minuut Nieuwe toelichting video in het Nederlands (English subtitles, click "CC" bottom right inside black screen) met muziek van van Halen (Eruption, 1978.) Teken de petitie NaaktopStraat.nl Dit is een experiment om democratie te toetsen. Deze petitie is al een jaar oud. De meeste mensen die over deze petitie horen lezen het niet en hebben verkeerde ideeën erover; dit is een apathisch, cynisch en lui reflex. De democratie zit in een zwakke staat! Laten we zo snel mogelijk alles verbieden: prostitutie, coffeeshops, homohuwelijk, euthanasie...een fascistisch systeem is het resultaat van moderne apathie. Een democratisch denker ondersteund ook een idee juist omdat hij of zij niet per se mee eens is. Dit is de organisch alchimie van democratie. |
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Lundoxia Presents (The Dirty Dozen): Lundy vs Amsterdam Trilogy, and, The End of Rickshaws in Amsterdam in 2020? A summary of the case called Lundy vs Amsterdam (2016-2018) concerning my revoked rickshaw licence for Solar Rickshaw, in 3 parts, looped into a playlist thread on YouTube. The last court ruling ("uitspraak" in Dutch) of 21 February 2018 at The Hague's Raad van State (Council of State, one of four national supreme courts in The Netherlands, each specializing in a specific type of law) was also featured in Europa Decentraal, the legal journal about European law, on 5 March 2018 (article: "FIETSTAXI’S ZIJN GEEN RONDVAARTBOTEN".) New: in April 2018 the city of Amsterdam publicized its decision to terminate all rickshaw (pedicab or Trike taxi in US/Canada, or Fietstaxi in Dutch, VeloTaxi in French and German) licences effective 1 April 2019. Recently this termination was postponed to 1 April 2020 but appeals were filed to overturn this planned termination. Sometimes you hear stupid people say: "they (the bike taxi drivers) should just accept it and do something else" (as if this were North Korea), but using this cowardly and idiotic attitude we would all just lie down and die and let ourselves be wiped out. It is anyone's legal right to appeal a decision in her or his disfavor in a free democratic state. The fietstaxi vergunning or rickshaw licence gives the driver the right to wait in a public place offering paid rides to passengers. Without this licence, a driver may still offer his or her rickshaw services but on a reservation basis, which generates much less business compared to paid rides spontaneously obtained in public. The vergunning is no joke, it is an important document and difficult to get; if one fails to furnish it upon demand by a cop, one will be fined, his or her vehicle confiscated and the driver put in jail in case the hefty fine is unpaid by the due date. Appeals were filed in April 2019 yet their outcomes are always uncertain. A singular collective hearing has been pinpointed for 11 July 2019 at the municipal appeals commission at Jodenbreestraat 25, and it happens to be mine as well as the appeals of other rickshaw riders. As Jim Morrison of The Doors sang, is this "The End", or, will it be "Break On Through (To The Other Side)??? "Riders on the Storm"; how eloquently apt. More news here as it develops. |
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