Gregg R Thomas

Enco, Jake…. I’ve spent thirty minutes deciding how to choose a small window into profundity. I’ve landed on a Māori experience.

Each tribe has its own “marae” which is their sacred community building where they attain a sense of ‘belonging’. It is prohibited for non-tribe members.  I was adopted as sister, and embraced into the shared flow of…[Read more]

Have a great week!

@Enco the tribes I lived with were NZ Māori, Fijian Pacific Islanders and a little with the Aborigines in Australia. Not part of any group or organisation – I went by myself, and bearing in mind the potential risks, I probably ought to be dead several times over, by now.

Stories about all of them, that changed my perceptions of almost…[Read more]

@Enco

”We Homo Sapiens just surround our wars with ideology and religion” is quite a profound statement.

This fits in with the behaviours of some of the far flung tribal groups I’ve lived with. For them, religion is a comfort, not a cause. They still have aggression, but the dividers between ‘them’ and ‘us’ are more commonly tribal root orientat…[Read more]

According to my studies, one of the big differences between chimps (and the other great apes) and humans, is that we are “domesticated” (compared with them, our society is not structured around male-male dominance relations).  That means that we are able to cooperate and share.  Chimps can’t share, and therefore there’s no point cooperating.

We t…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Why humans are not clever chimps. (interesting site)

Theophilus Painter was not a very rigorous thinker, he kept making mistakes, of assuming things when he didn’t know, sometimes rooted in racial bias it is probably true.

New data from the National Institutes of Health show the human genome varies from the chimp…

[Read more]

But it has to be facilitated to some extent – someone has to be there to interpret and read out loud what someone is pointing to.

If they are doing it themselves it is not FC.

If somebody’s pushing somebody’s elbow as they type at a keyboard, or point to letters, then obviously that’s a pointless exercise.  But if they’re doing it themselves, it opens up communication to an otherwise non-verbal person.

Facilitated Communication sits at the intersection of hope, identity, and perceived injustice, which makes it unusually resistant to evidence. When you watch FC in action, it can be convincing. The person appears to be communicating fluently, even sometimes at a level far beyond what anyone expected. The problem is that this impression is exactly…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
World of Woo: Facilitated communication.

Facilitated communication may possibly be woo sometimes, but it’s not always, and it provides a communication lifeline for people who can’t talk but can use their fingers.

I have a nephew who is severely autistic and non-verbal, and he now communicates on an i-pad.  He has…[Read more]

Thank you, Reg!!!