Dave Bockman

I really like Dr. Breeding, he always comes across as warm and empathetic, here he has some great advice on finding a good therapist: Here is the entire poem he mentions at 2:38, 'The Invitation' by Oriah Mountain Dreamer: It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing. It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive. It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it. I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human. It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy. I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, 'Yes.' It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children. It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back. It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

When you write 'distress' what are some examples if you can recall?

Lew's always been really flexible

The action of killing someone cannot ever be universally defined as moral or immoral, since as is described in this thread exigent circumstances change how we perceive what is being done-- is a guy being killed by being stabbed in the throat, or is someone performing an emergency tracheotomy? However, that has nothing to do with morality/UPB which only validates or invalidates moral theories (not actions). 'It is moral to murder' fails that test. I also would encourage you to give a listen to this particular podcast-- I think Stef is dead on when, right at the beginning he freely admits that this is fiendishly hard to grasp: http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_872_Debating_and_UPB.mp3 "You cannot debate without UPB"

Please forgive my armchair psychologizing, but looking at your post from the outside, and noticing a couple of other things, it seems vitally important to you that you are perceived by others as not only female, but feminine, 'girly', etc. Assuming I'm correct in my comment, why do you think that is? What value is added to you by being perceived as girly or extraordinarily feminine?

free book: http://www.freedomainradio.com/FreeBooks.aspx#upb [view:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CueDiner6t0]

I think that the importance of the fact that you wet the bed, tried to set fire and burn your bed, and when you succeeded and got a new bed, and then the bed-wetting stopped, is important. The answer that comes to mind most readily would be my parents spanking me. It was humiliating and awful.

what was the worst traumatic experience you went through on that mattress?

She is using the word 'blame' in a pejorative way. She is through her sentence structure mocking the very real and righteous assignment of responsibility for inflicting trauma by inferring that if we do so, we are avoiding self-knowledge in favor of 'the easy way out' To blame someone is to correctly assign responsibility for a negative action or manifestation of an action to that person.. [edit] I also found this video by Daniel Mackler very helpful: [view:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGTWltPSedQ]

I would have ejected from the conversation when she used the word 'blame'. Bullshit weasel word.

He spelled Stef's name correctly. Lately I have been debating with many people who consider property rights to be the result of simple utilitarian reasoning. I really don't know where the truth is on this topic anymore.

If the cat is 'scaled up', larger but not a readily identifiable species (like a panther, for example, which is to my knowledge the only large member of the cat family that is black), then consider the scale between you two as perhaps important (by that I mean, a typical housecat might seem very large when you're an infant or very small child). Traditional symbolism also includes black cats as 'bad luck', also they are said to be witches in animal form. what were the repercussions in your real life as a child if a cat found his way upstairs? How would your father react, what would he say or do? Why (in the dream) was it your responsibility to go retrieve him?

When I built up my son's pc, I found several websites and forums really helpful for info like this: newegg.com newegg.com forums Windows 7 Help Forums

To me, these are some fantastic revelations/inroads to self-knowledge and I congratulate you on your courage. I'm sure you've read Stef's book 'Real Time Relationships', but if it's been awhile I'd like to share this quote from the book, it was enormously helpful to me (perhaps even the lynchpin) in freeing up some emotional blocks and giving me a foothold for climbing up the long slog to freeing myself from childhood trauma-repetition in adulthood: (I also excerpted just the passage below from the audiobook version of RTR, that excerpt if you would like to hear Stef reading it is here) THE BOXER Why is it that we are so inevitably drawn to re-create that which we most fear? To understand that, let us look at the parable of a boxer named Simon. As a child, Simon is subjected to physical abuse. He is slapped, pushed, punched and beaten. Since he is a child, he is helpless to resist these attacks. How, then, can he survive them? Well, since clearly he cannot master his environment, or those who are abusing him, that leaves only one choice for poor Simon. Simon must master himself. He cannot master his attackers – or their attacks – he can only master his reaction to their attacks. He has no control over the external world – he can only have control over his internal world. All children take pleasure in exercising increasing levels of control over their environment. If control over their external environment is impossible, however, they have no choice but to start exercising increasing control over their internal environment: their thoughts and feelings. This is all quite logical, and something that we would all wish for, as the best way to survive an impossible situation. If we cannot get rid of the source of our pain, what we most desire is to get rid of the pain itself. THE RELIEF OF SELF-CONTROL Thus Simon grows up gaining a sense of efficacy and power by controlling his own pain, fear and hatred. The pleasure that most children get out of mastering external tasks such as tying their shoelaces, catching a ball and learning to skate, Simon gets out of “rising above” and controlling his terrifying emotions. Can we blame Simon for this? If anaesthetic is readily available, would we want to scream through an appendectomy without it? When Simon is young, his self-control remains relatively stable. As he gets older, though, his parents slowly begin to reduce the amount of physical abuse they inflict on him. This is particularly true during and after puberty, when he is becoming old enough to tell others about the abuse, and also because his increasing size makes it less and less possible to dominate him physically. How does Simon feel about these decreasing physical attacks? Two words: terrified and disoriented. Simon’s entire sense of power and efficacy – his very identity even – has been defined by his ability to master and control his own emotions in the face of terrifying abuse. In other words, in the absence of abuse, he has no sense of control, efficacy or power. In addition to being taught all the wrong things, Simon has also been taught almost none of the right things. He does not know how to negotiate, he does not know how to express his emotions, he has not been taught empathy, he has not been taught sensitivity, he has not been taught win-win interactions – the words that are missing from Simon’s social vocabulary could fill a shelf of dictionaries. Thus, in the absence of violence, not only does Simon feel powerless – since his sense of “power” arose primarily as the result of his ability to survive violence – but he is also increasingly thrust into a world of voluntarism, where sophisticated skills of self-expression and negotiation are required for success. As he enters into his teenage years, for the first time since he was very young Simon feels excruciatingly powerless – and vulnerable. Since vulnerability was the original state he was in before he began to repress and control his emotional responses to those around him, he unconsciously feels that he is in enormous danger. (This arises from the reality that he was in enormous danger when he was a child, but he is only now feeling it for the first time.) The reason that he disowned his emotions in the first place was because he felt fear and hatred in the face of physical attacks. It was the reality of his vulnerability that provoked the self-defence of dissociation and “selfmastery.” Thus for Simon, vulnerability is always followed by excruciating and self-annihilating attacks. Having spent years mastering his responses to these attacks, he has not learned how to deal with vulnerability in a positive and self-expressed manner. As he becomes an adult, however, Simon no longer needs to defend himself against attacks – thus undermining his sense of control – and he also moves faster and faster into a world of voluntary interactions for which he is utterly unprepared. Simon also unconsciously knows that learning the skills necessary to flourish in this voluntary world – if that is even possible for him anymore – will take years of excruciating labour. FLEEING THE FUTURE FOR THE PAST… Simon has access to a drug that can instantly make all of his anxiety go away. This drug can restore his sense of control, eliminate his bottomless terror of voluntary interactions, and place him right back in familiar territory where he feels efficacious, powerful and in control. That drug, of course, is violence. Simon finds that when he leaves the world of voluntary interactions and re-enters the world of violence and abuse, his anxiety vanishes. His sense of efficacy and control returns, and he feels mastery over his own world again. Like an army that does not want to be disbanded, in the absence of external enemies, Simon must create them. After realizing the relative joy and serenity that he feels after getting involved in physical fights, Simon goes down to his local gym and puts on some boxing gloves. He finds that he is very good in the ring, because where other people feel fear and caution, he, due to his years of self-mastery, feels power and control. When he is in the ring he does not feel anxious, he does not feel afraid – he does not even feel angry – he simply feels the satisfaction of being in a situation that he can control. The endorphins released in Simon’s system by violence quickly become addictive. True addiction requires both a highly positive reaction from taking a drug and a highly negative reaction from abstaining from it. For Simon, boxing not only restores his sense of control, but it also eliminates the crippling anxiety he feels in the absence of violence. Sadly, familiarity breeds content… This is the psychological story of a boxer, of course, but it can equally apply to criminals, soldiers, policemen, and others drawn to dangerous situations. Simon was utterly terrified of violence when he was a child, so how can we understand his pursuit of boxing as a career when he becomes an adult? When we become addicted to controlling our fears, we can no longer live without either control or fear. Simon became addicted to controlling his responses to abuse – thus he can no longer function in the absence of abuse. Addiction also worsens when every step down the road of repetition makes it that much harder to turn around. This applies to Simon in many, many terrible ways. Every time he uses the defences he developed in his childhood, he reinforces the value of violence in his adult life. Every time he avoids the anxiety of voluntary and positive interactions through the use of violence, he takes yet another step away from learning how to negotiate in a positive manner with kind and worthwhile people. In other words, every time he “uses” the drug of violence, he makes the next “use” of violence that much more likely – and resisting the drug that much harder. In this way, we can truly understand how a man can be drawn to endlessly repeat that which terrified him the most as a child. In hopefully less extreme ways, Simon’s story can also help us understand why we are so drawn to repeat that which we fear the most. Were you rejected as a child? Beware your desire for rejection. Were you verbally abused as a child? Watch out for verbally abusive people: they will inject you with addictive endorphins. Were you sexually abused as a child? Watch out for predators: they will tempt you with the self-medication of surviving them. THE SADIST The above analogy can help us understand how someone can end up spending his whole life attempting to “master” violence. However, at least Simon is getting into the ring with an equal. How can we understand a parent who ends up abusing his or her child? A basic fact of human nature is that it is impossible for anyone to do anything that involves a moral choice without moral justification. George Bush could not invade Iraq without claiming that it was an act of “self-defence,” or “just punishment.” When parents talk about screaming at or hitting their children, they always justify their actions by claiming that, “We have tried everything else and gotten nowhere.” Or, they claim that their exasperated responses are generated by the misbehaviour of their children: “He just doesn’t listen; he doesn’t show us the proper respect,” etc. It is impossible to imagine a parent standing in front of a mirror and saying: “I am abusing my innocent child.” Any parent capable of making such a statement would have recoiled in horror the first time that he yelled at or struck his child, and sought the necessary help. Continued abuse requires continual moral justifications. In fact, the very worst aspects of the abuse that a child receives are not so much the physical fear and pain, but rather the moral corruption of the lies that are told to justify the abuse. For a child, being beaten is terrible, but being repeatedly told that the beating is a just response to his “bad” actions is worse. So – how could this possibly come about? CHILD ABUSE For the sake of this example, let us assume that the parent was abused in her own childhood, as is so often the case. We will take the example of a mother named Wendy, who ends up verbally abusing her daughter Sally. Wendy was verbally abused when she was a child. She was told that she was bad, disrespectful, disobedient, ungrateful, selfish and so on. From Wendy’s childhood perspective, her own mother loomed like a titan in her little world. One of the amazing things about the differences in perspective between parent and child is that the parent screams and hits because the parent feels helpless. However, to the child, the parent seems virtually omnipotent. If parents knew how large they loomed in their child’s world, they would use a far, far lighter touch in their discipline. When you are around somebody whose hearing is preternaturally sensitive, you only need to whisper; yelling is both unnecessary and abusive. When Wendy was a child, her mother’s verbal abuse was utterly overwhelming. The stress of having someone five times your size, who has complete and utter power over you, yelling at you, putting you down, denigrating you, or abusing you in some other manner causes a fundamental short-circuit in a child’s neurological system. It is the equivalent of taking a man terrified of heights and constantly dangling him out the open door of an airplane. He may “acclimatize” himself to the repetitively awful stimulation, but only through extreme dissociation from his environment, which comes at a terrible personal cost. Victims of repetitive torture undergo the same “out of body” experience wherein they cease to feel, and in many ways cease to live, at least emotionally. When a child is abused, she experiences her life as a series of fundamentally impossible situations. The capacity to abuse arises out of a lack of bonding, a lack of empathy, an absence of sensitivity towards the feelings of the child. A child’s only security is her bond with her parent. Abuse is a deliberate severing of that bond – a “strangling with the umbilical.” Abusing a child requires that you eliminate your capacity to empathize with her. If a child perceives that she cannot rely on her bond with her mother – which is to say that her mother’s capacity to empathize with her comes and goes at best – then the child feels fundamentally insecure, because positive and empathetic treatment cannot be relied on. When you are under the total power of someone who can treat you badly whenever she feels like it, you are placed into an impossible situation because that person will inevitably command you to show “respect” and “love” towards her. If your abusive mother detects that you fear her, for instance, she will generally react with aggression. If at a dinner party your mother raises her hand and you cower in fear and beg her not to hit you, she will get very angry. Thus you must pretend on the outside the opposite of what you feel on the inside. You must show “love” and/or “respect” despite feeling fear and hatred. Thus, when Wendy’s mother verbally abused her, Wendy could not react with fear or hatred, because that would only increase her mother’s attacks. (“I’ll give you something to cry about!”) Thus Wendy had to disown and repress her own authentic emotional responses and mimic their exact opposite. All her fear and pain had to be “magically” transformed into “love” and “respect.” This form of the “Stockholm Syndrome” has disastrous effects on a child’s long-term emotional development and integrity. Instead of learning how to interact in a rational manner with reality, the child ends up forced into a situation of eternal hyper-vigilance wherein she constantly scans the behaviour of those around her, endlessly alert for any signs of an impending attack. If you are driving a car and suddenly notice a number of wasps in the car with you, it will become very hard to concentrate on the road. In addition, imagine that you had to keep driving under increasingly difficult conditions, while the number of buzzing wasps in your car kept multiplying – all the while knowing that you were allergic to wasp venom – this is the endless livid terror of all too many childhoods. This kind of terrible “split focus” (“I must keep driving / I must not get stung”) empties out the spontaneity and richness of the child’s inner life. Just as we cannot daydream while being pushed out of a plane, we cannot develop an internal discourse with ourselves if we are in a constant state of hyper-vigilance with regards to our surroundings. If a child in an abusive environment stops scanning for danger, the pain of being attacked is then combined with the shock of surprise, and the inevitable self-flagellation for lowering one’s guard. Daydreaming, or self-conversation, thus becomes a form of “self abuse,” insofar as it increases the risk and agony of being attacked – it becomes as dangerous as a tightrope-walker losing his concentration and risking falling to his death. This terrible equation – “relaxation = danger” – keeps the child in a constant state of high alert, of hyper-vigilance, and effectively prevents her from ever coming to a true understanding of her situation. In a nation, a state of war creates the panic, haste and hysteria that prevents people from effectively questioning their government. Just so does hyper-vigilance in childhood prevent children from rationally evaluating their parents’ behaviour. Thus, with all this in place, when Wendy becomes an adult and gives birth to Sally, an awful series of events is set into motion. THE CHILD UNAFRAID… To understand how parental cruelty comes into being, the first and most important fact to remember is that children enter this world in an unabused state. They are not afraid, they are not hyper-vigilant, they are not twisted, they have not become enemies to themselves or others – they are curious, perceptive, engaged and benevolent. Remember – as a child, Wendy learned that relaxation was danger. Thus when Sally is born, Sally is fundamentally relaxed in a way that Wendy has no conscious memory of. Since for Wendy relaxation is followed by attack, Sally’s relaxation creates great anxiety for her mother, because she associates it with an impending attack. In the same way, if Sally were crawling towards a set of steep stairs, Wendy would feel great anxiety and a compulsion to snatch Sally away from the impending danger – very aggressively if need be. For Wendy, then, when Sally in all innocence engages in actions that in Wendy’s world would have triggered a terrible attack, it reawakens all of the repressed pain, fear and hatred in Wendy’s heart. When this occurs again and again, Wendy genuinely feels that Sally is creating or causing terrible attacks of pain, fear and hatred in her. Now, the last time that someone else created pain and fear in Wendy, it was her own mother attacking her when she was a child. For Wendy, then, any sudden eruption of pain and fear is associated with a direct attack. Thus for Wendy, Sally’s innocent anxiety-provoking behaviour is the direct emotional equivalent of her parents’ abusive attacks. Furthermore, the only way that Wendy could create any sense of security and control as a child was to brutally repress her own emotional responses. In other words, “that which causes anxiety must be brutally repressed” is the law of her emotional land. Now, when Wendy was a child she could not brutally repress her own parents, because that created further attacks – thus she had to brutally repress her own anxieties. The difference with her own child, however, is that she now has the power to repress Sally, which she did not have with her own parents when she was a child. It is in this way that she makes the transformation from victim to abuser. Since she experiences Sally’s actions as attacks upon herself, Wendy feels justified in controlling Sally’s behaviour so that these attacks do not occur. If our child continually kicks us in the shins, we consider it good parenting to prevent this child from acting in such an abusive manner. We must do whatever it takes, we say to ourselves, to prevent our child from hurting others. What will happen, we think, if we allow our child to act in such a horrible manner? A life of brutality, loneliness and rejection seems inevitable, and we could scarcely call ourselves good parents if we allowed that to happen. Many parents start off with relatively calm and patient lectures, but the absolute of “thou shalt not” remains determinedly hovering, in the not too- distant background. “It upsets Mommy when you act like that,” we may say gently – however, like the initially polite letters from the IRS, a not too subtle threat is always visible between the lines. We talk about “politeness,” “niceness” and “consideration for the feelings of others,” and so on, but what we are really saying is: “It makes me angry when you make me anxious, so you’d better stop!” Children, due to their amazingly perceptive natures, find it hard to take these lectures seriously, because they sense the contradiction and narcissism at the root of such speeches. Thus they generally tend to continue to do what comes naturally to them, despite the anxiety that their actions cause other people. Since the children remain in an un-brutalized state, they do not themselves directly feel the anxiety that their actions provoke in their brutalized parents. In the same way, if I do not have a migraine, playing loud music will bring me pleasure. If I do have a migraine, obviously it will not. Since children continue to do what comes naturally to them, and since their actions continue to provoke anxiety, pain and rage in their parents, their parents feel a growing sense of helplessness and frustration and an increasing loss of control over their own emotions. The basic lesson that Wendy learned in her own terrible childhood was that when someone does something that makes you feel bad, the solution is to stop the other person from doing that thing. Thus, when Sally’s actions provoke awful feelings in Wendy, Wendy’s inevitable reaction is to prevent Sally from performing those actions, so that Wendy does not have to feel those terrible emotions. To be a “good” daughter, Sally must stop doing whatever causes Wendy anxiety. If Sally continues to act in a way that causes her mother anxiety, Wendy will be inevitably driven to the “conclusion” that Sally wants to cause her pain – or, at best, is utterly indifferent to the pain that her actions cause. In this way, Wendy can frame a perception of her daughter that includes the pejoratives “cruel” and “selfish.” Now, the battle lines are truly becoming drawn. If we say to our child: “Stop doing ‘X,’ because it makes me feel bad,” surely the solution is simply for the child to stop doing ‘X,’ right? Sadly, no. THE ESCALATION… The true nature of Sally’s “offense” towards Wendy is that Sally is unafraid. Remember that in Wendy’s childhood, being unafraid always invited attack – or made the inevitable attack even worse. Thus Sally’s state of calm or self-possession creates an overwhelming sense of “impending doom” for Wendy. When Wendy was a child, spontaneous self-expression invited attack. Now that she is a mother, when Sally sits and sings to herself, this causes increasing anxiety in Wendy, and at some point she will express disapproval to Sally. At this point, perhaps Sally stops singing. However, five minutes later, Sally states that she wants to go for a walk. In Wendy’s world, expressing an open desire always invited attack – thus when Sally says that she wants to go for a walk, Wendy also feels anxiety, and once more snaps at Sally. As we can imagine, this process can go on and on virtually ad infinitum. There is no end to the escalation of “little rules” that end up snaking around Sally, like an infinity of tiny spider webs that eventually leave her bound and immobile. However, even if Sally were to obey every single one of her mother’s “rules,” she would still not be safe. As Sally becomes more and more inhibited and more and more fearful, Wendy begins to feel guiltier and guiltier. Sadly, Wendy also interprets this as some sort of “manipulative aggression” on Sally’s part and so is inevitably drawn to accuse Sally of “playing the victim” in order to make Wendy feel bad. In this way, there is no possibility whatsoever that Sally can ever satisfy her mother. If Sally acts in a natural, independent manner, she provokes an attack. If she acts in an unnatural, obedient manner, she provokes an attack. Since she can neither be spontaneous nor obedient, neither act nor refrain from acting, there is nothing that she can do to avoid being attacked or criticized in some manner. THE EVIL AT THE CORE… The central problem is that Wendy is attempting to manage her own anxiety by controlling Sally. However, since Sally is not the actual source of Wendy’s anxiety, controlling Sally’s behaviour will only temporarily alleviate Wendy’s anxiety – while making it worse deep down, since she is acting unjustly and blaming Sally for her own feelings. Real-Time Relationships, the Logic of Love by Stefan Molyneux, pgs. 80- 91. Download the full copy at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/free/

It was harrowing and brutal to read this post, I am so sorry you endured so much as a child. I have to skip to the end and say quite frankly, after reading only one small part of your childhood expriences, I have no idea why you love your mother, I really don't. I'm not putting that up there as a challaenge for you to defend why you love her, I'm just saying I personally could never possibly love someone who was so sadistic towards children.

In his defense... The Stage Door Deli is REALLY good []

It's all here, for free: Universally Preferable Behavior: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics and some videos Stef has done on UPB: [view:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsS8vpLaVS4] [view:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CueDiner6t0] [view:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8nB2FjS8AQ]

while cheeky, the above response is dead on. UPB is not any type of argument, it is a framework for establishing the validity of potential ethical theories.

I appreciate your feedback, I had a very similar reaction. Wow Dave, that's quite a quote... Thanks, it really gives me something to reflect on for mother's day. To be more honest, it taps into a deep well of emptiness and pain

Specific actions cannot be defined as either moral or immoral, we can never say definitively that someone stealing a piece of bread or a fire extinguisher or a private boat while adrift in the Atlantic is moral or immoral-- for the very reasons you're citing-- exigent circumstances. Circumstances change the act of stabbing someone in the throat from attempted murder to an emergency tracheotomy. Moral & immoral can only be applied to ethical theories. Logically, 'It is moral to steal' fails before even leaving the starting gate.

A friend of mine on Facebook rather bravely posted this yesterday (Mother's Day), it's by Dr. Alice Miller: "So it hardly happens that somebody takes the heart to say clearly and honestly: "I never have received love from my mother and therefore I do not feel love for her. In truth she is an alien for me. She is lonely and may be in need of a loving son, but I do not want to lie in order to give her this illusion. I owe her and myself the truth that I cannot feel genuine love for her as an adult, because I suffered so much from her blindness as a child." Someone who dares to reflect that way will not be dangerous to his children anymore and will hardly have to anticipate severe, incomprehensible illnesses, because he is able to realise his body's signals before it is too late." from the article Body and Ethics by Alice Miller

"Considered in total, this study provides important early archaeological evidence for meat eating, hunting and scavenging behaviors -cornerstone adaptations that likely facilitated brain expansion in human evolution, movement of hominins out of Africa and into Eurasia, as well as important shifts in our social behavior, anatomy and physiology," Ferraro said. whole article here

"They'll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner..." The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Who is on the lease at the moment? Were you the original renter? What does the landlord think? A concern would be the new power paradigm, it would no longer be 50-50, they would be a united block moving forward. I don't think it matters where she sleeps, she is still a renter. If the boyfriend wishes to kick in for her third that's fine too.

Human ancestors living in East Africa 2 million years ago weren’t a steak-and-potatoes crowd. But they had a serious hankering for gazelle meat and antelope brains, fossils discovered in Kenya indicate. Three sets of butchered animal bones unearthed at Kenya’s Kanjera South site provide the earliest evidence of both long-term hunting and targeted scavenging by a member of the human evolutionary family, anthropologist Joseph Ferraro of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and his colleagues conclude. An early member of the Homo genus, perhaps Homo erectus, hunted small animals and scavenged predators’ leftovers of larger creatures, researchers report April 25 in PLOS ONE. Along with hunting relatively small game such as gazelles, these hominids scavenged the heads of antelope and wildebeests, apparently to add a side of fatty, nutrient-rich brain tissue to their diets, the scientists say. Those dietary pursuits could have provided the extra energy Homo erectus needed to support large bodies, expanded brains and extensive travel across the landscape, Ferraro says. A few East African sites dating to as early as 3.4 million years ago had previously produced small numbers of animal bones bearing butchery marks made by stone tools. Scientists think those bones indicate occasional meat eating (SN: 9/11/10, p. 8). Now Kanjera South has yielded several thousand complete and partial animal bones, representing at least 81 individual animals. A known reversal of Earth’s magnetic field preserved in an excavated soil layer allowed Ferraro’s team to determine the age of the finds, which accumulated over a few thousand years at most. Hominids hunted gazelles and other relatively small animals and hauled their take back to Kanjera South, the researchers say, as evidenced by the presence of bones from the animals’ entire bodies. Stone tool marks indicate that prey were cut into parts before hunters stripped flesh from the meatiest bones. The site contains no remnants of burned wood or other signs of cooking. Few tooth marks of lions or other predators appear on these fossils, another clue that hominids must have killed the small game. “Hunting small animals may have been a regular behavior of 2-million-year-old human ancestors,” comments anthropologist Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo of Complutense University of Madrid. Researchers also found disproportionately large numbers of skulls and lower jaws in the excavated remains of antelope and other comparably sized animals with considerably more heft than gazelles. The preponderance of skulls best fits a scenario in which hominids retrieved heads left untouched by big cats that had fed on meaty parts of carcasses. Several brain cases and jaws display dents and fractures created by hammering with stones to reach tissue inside, Ferraro says. Predators tend to devour small prey quickly, so early Homo at Kanjera South plausibly acquired gazelles via hunting, remarks anthropologist Henry Bunn of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Further work needs to examine whether the prey animals were mainly in the prime of their lives, which would be another clue that hunting was practiced, Bunn says. In 2010, Bunn and a colleague found mainly prime-age antelope and other prey among 1.8-million-year-old butchered bones at Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge. Hominids with wooden spears climbed into trees and ambushed prey walking by, a tactic that the Kanjera South crowd may have employed even earlier, Bunn proposes. Distinguishing between hunting and scavenging can be difficult based on fossils, he adds. Early Homo, for instance, could have occasionally driven predators away from fresh kills and carried away bodies of prime-age gazelles. Likewise, says Domínguez-Rodrigo, the overrepresentation of skulls could be due to selective disposal of antelope parts after a hunt — as practiced by some hunter-gatherers today — rather than intentional scavenging of heads.