Tuesday, January 17, 2023

The Dangers of Losing the Power Grid - Will We Run Out of Time?













 



If anything might bring the people of the world and their respective nations together in common interest and effort this sure as hell should do it.

Even while the anti globalists' of the USA downplay or ignore the truth that in reality we are ALL in this thing together.


Thought for the Day...

 


“Conquer the angry one by not getting angry; conquer the wicked by goodness; conquer the stingy by generosity, and the liar by speaking the truth.

[Verse 223]”

― Siddhārtha Gautama, The Dhammapada

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

Support the International Campaign for Tibet...


 






Inspired by the vision of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the International Campaign for Tibet promotes human rights, democratic freedoms and self-determination for the Tibetan people


To learn more on how to support this worthy cause please click on the highlighted LINK and take the ferry to the ICT.

Thought for the Day...

 




Nature of Mind...

 




Whatever exists is only its own nature; and whatever ends is only its own nature: there is no movement at all in pure mind and that stillness is the body of buddha. Every word that is uttered is only its own purity; and every vibration is only its own purity: nothing is spoken or uttered in pure mind, which is the speech of buddha. Every thought and intention is intertained only as its own spaciousness, and every intuition is realised only as its own spaciousness; nothing at all is thought or intuited in pure mind, the mind of buddha past, present and future.


The true nature of the world is the true nature of the mind. It is never born and is beyond sorrow. Liberation will be attained by seeing the nature of the mind itself, the true nature of phenomena. There is no other peace to attain

---Longchenpa---

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

America... This Is How You Handle Insurrectionists...

 



How a sane intelligent country handles insurrectionists. Move fast and decisively to put down attempts to overthrow the government.

America... Take note. This is how it's done.

Only in America...

 

Maybe one of the most ridiculous cases that has ever made it to the SCOTUS. But in a land where truth has become fiction and fiction has become truth for a large share of Americans, think Trumpublicans and Q-Anon mentality's, anything is possible and nothing should surprise.


Brunson v. Alma S. Adams; et al.,
(Biden, Harris, Pence & 385 Members of Congress)


Currently, there are two lawsuits identical to each other.
The first One, filed by Loy Brunson is still held up in the Utah Federal Court.
The second one, filed by Raland J. Brunson has made it to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS),
Docket #22-380, where the brothers will file a petition for reconsideration for the 9 Justices to hear the case.


THE LAWSUIT
Both lawsuits include defendants Pres. Biden, Harris, former V.P. Pence and 385 members of congress for breaking their oath of office by voting AGAINST the proposition (that came from members of congress) to investigate the claims that there were enemies of the constitution who successfully rigged the election.

BOTH LAWSUITS ARE ABOUT THE DEFENDANTS BREAKING THEIR OATH OF OFFICE
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..."

THE QUESTION
How can you support, and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign, and domestic? Answer: You investigate. If there are claims that there is a threat, even if you don't believe there is a threat, you investigate. How else can you determine if there is a threat unless you investigate? You can't. Were there claims of a threat to the Constitution? Yes. Where did these serious claims come from? 100 members of Congress. What was the threat? That there were enemies of the Constitution who successfully rigged the 2020 election. Is this lawsuit about a rigged election? No, it's about the members of Congress who voted AGAINST the investigation thereby thwarting the investigation. Was this a clear violation of their oath? YES.

THE RELIEF THAT LOY AND RALAND ARE SEEKING
That defendants be permanantly removed from office, and not allowed to hold a public office again.

BACKGROUND
Loy, Raland, Deron and Gaynor Brunson (the brothers) witnessed the 2020 election along with claims from members of congress that the election was rigged. What got their attention was when the proposition to investigate those claims was presented to Congress and put to a vote. What came as a shock to the four brothers is when they discovered that 387 members of Congress along with VP Mike Pence actually voted against the proposed investigation, thus thwarting the investigation. Whether the election was rigged or not was no longer their main concern. What now became the concern was when those members of Congress violated their sworn oath by voting to thwart the investigation.

The brothers wanted to do something about this. Their brother Deron had quite a lot of experience in the legal field, which started out when he began suing banks in an attempt to show the corruption in that part of the financial world, so he had enough knowledge to file a lawsuit against the now current 385 members of Congress along with VP Mike Pence, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. He already had experience with the SCOTUS by bringing two petitions to them, both of which were denied, but this experience gave him enough success along the way to give him the confidence that maybe, just maybe, he might be able to do something about this thwarted investigation.

Their brother Gaynor was heavily occupied with his audio/video television business (Rock Canyon Studios) so Deron got together with his other two brothers to plan out the strategy. They decided to have their oldest brother Loy to be the name on the lawsuit, which is called a "Complaint" and because he would be on the Complaint, the Court would refer to him as the Plaintiff. The 388 people being sued will now be called Defendants. Loy filed the complaint, which eventually got stuck in the Federal Court, so they got together and decided to have their brother Raland file the identical lawsuit with his name on it, in the Utah 2nd District Court. While Loy's lawsuit continued to be held hostage in the Federal Court, Raland's lawsuit eventually made it to the SCOTUS. Here are the events of both lawsuits:

SOURCE

Thought for the Day...

 


“Let us look at wealth and poverty. The affluent society and the deprived society inter-are. The wealth of one society is made of the poverty of the other. "This is like this, because that is like that." Wealth is made of non-wealth elements, and poverty is made by non-poverty elements. [...] so we must be careful not to imprison ourselves in concepts. The truth is that everything contains everything else. We cannot just be, we can only inter-be. We are responsible for everything that happens around us.”


― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Monday, January 9, 2023

Interbeing...

 


The following is from Thich Nhat Hanh's book, PEACE IS EVERY STEP.

A book with profound insight it has the power to facilitate transformational change. One person, one family, one community, one nation at a time.

Truth, understanding, compassion, love, and mindfulness lead the way to a happier and more joyful life.

As you read this, imagine you are holding the book, or the sheet of paper.

All the best to all.

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So, we can say the cloud and the paper inter-are. "Interbeing" is a word that that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix "inter-" with the verb "to be," we have a new verb, inter-be.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. Without sunshine the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in the sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in the sheet of paper. The logger's mother and father are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

Looking even more deeply, we can see ourselves in this sheet of paper too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, it becomes part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. We cannot point out one thing that is not here- time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. "To be" is to inter-be. We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.

Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is this sheet of paper is made up only of "non-paper" elements. And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without non-paper elements, like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.

In much the same way we are all interconnected, thus we are all interbeings.

Saturday, January 7, 2023

Happy New Year!

 



Wishing Buddhists Around the World a Safe, Mindful, Prosperous, and Happy New Year




Friday, January 6, 2023

If We Believe...

 


If we believe that mind is continuous, our love for others becomes continuous. If we recognize this continuity, we don’t trust temporary, tangible circumstances, or take them too seriously. Since it is tiring to switch between changing uncertainties which are inherently impermanent and unimportant, we become less easily influenced by any circumstance. This creates the habit of stability so that our minds are less erratic, our lives are less chaotic, and our feelings for others are less changeable.

If we believe in the continuity of mind, then love inconspicuously connects us to the ones we love with continuous positive energy, so that even tangible separation between people who love each other do not reduce the intangible power of love. This love is automatically enduring since it is not easily affected by circumstances.

If we can keep from grasping at others with the selfish fear of losing them or in the hope of possessing them through the unawareness of our ordinary dualistic mind, then the energy of love increases and its quality of giving energy to others opens and expands.


—Thinley Norbu Rinpoche

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

Conservatism's Wrecking Ball...

 


On the heels of today's earlier repost of a 2015 article excerpt about conservatism we follow with more TRUTH about conservatism  and its philosophical agenda.

Resisting change in general and social advancement (think social security and social safety nets) almost exclusively conservatism is a political philosophy whose time and usefulness has long since expired.

America must move forward. Not backwards. Greater liberty, not less is what is needed. More compassion and love, not otherism and hate is what is needed.

America is better than its conservative agenda. An agenda that quite frankly can be summarized simply and accurately as one of ignorance and greed. 

 

What is a conservative? We've seen a lot of them in 2020, refusing to respect the needs of society.

The Heritage Foundation says: "Foremost among [conservatism's] transcendent values is the individual's use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force." Stanford University adds: "For conservatives, individuals and local communities are better assessors of their own needs and problems than distant bureaucrats." A 2003 study for the American Psychological Association stated: "The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality." There are many other forms and definitions of conservatism as political, economic, and social philosophies. The usage here may best be understood as the evolvingmarriage of individualism and neoliberalism (privatization, deregulation, low taxes, austerity) since the 1970s.

Conservatism has made 'social' a dirty word. Here are some of the details of fifty years of damage inflicted on America.

The Disastrous Effect of Placing Individuals Over Society

The anti-government, "all about freedom" individuality of conservatives has failed terribly in a time of national emergency. How did the misdirected mindset get its start? With Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who are commonly referenced with connection to neoliberalism. Friedman is the author of some remarkable quotes: "The free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people." And, according to The Guardian: "There is evidence that a democratic society, once established, destroys a free economy."

Then came Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The former UK Prime Minister said about society: "There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families."Reagan, whose campaign slogan was, familiarly, "Let's make America great again," famously stated that "Government is not the solution to our problem; government IS the problem."

So now, at a time when we need to work together as a society rather than as a crowd of individuals, we've been betrayed by conservatism. As historian Neil J. Young puts it, "Now, 40 years later amid a global pandemic, that unbridled individualism has shown its deadly dimensions in Trump and the Republicans' lack of response to COVID-19...it's evident in the millions of Americans who—in refusing to wear masks, practice social distance, and momentarily deny their self-gratification—have selfishly exploited the language of 'individual responsibility' as license for their own recklessness."

Just as frightening is the recent conservative Supreme Court church-gathering decision that "placed religious freedom before pandemic precautions."

Deregulation and Subsidies: Corporations Running Rampant


The euphemistically-named Citizens United(CU) is an example of the deceptive measures used by conservatives. CU refers to an initiative that "seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security." But it helps corporations, not citizens, by allowing unlimited funding for corporate-friendly candidates.

Conservatives argue for less government intervention—except when it comes to subsidies. Leading the pack of favor-seeking lobbyist groups is the pharmaceutical industry. Few companies have benefited more than Pfizer, whose former CEO Ian Read once complained that U.S. taxes had his company fighting "with one hand tied behind our back." In 2019 Pfizer made nearly half of its $17.7 billion in profits in the U.S., yet the company claimed $1.8 billion in federal and state tax refunds. And it takes from America in another way. In recent years Pfizer has increased the prices of dozens of prescription drugs at over ten times the rate of inflation.

Now Pfizer is basking in the glow of media coverage for the so-called "Pfizer Vaccine." The company deserves credit for its all-out efforts to distribute the medication to millions of people. But the vaccine was created by the Turkish/German founders of BioNTech, Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, who guided the development of the messenger RNA process that triggers an immune reaction against Covid. The groundwork for the relatively rapid production of the vaccine was laid in place at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Pennsylvania by research on the prior SARS and MERS outbreaks. More expertise came from the taxpayer-funded Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC). According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, "The speed is a reflection of years of work that went before." Indeed, a successful vaccine is the product of long-term social cooperation, not individualism.

Inequality: Going Viral

Thanks to the insidious conservative-minded 50-year-old "trickle-down" philosophy—which astoundingly continues to be preached by many of the super-rich—inequality has stretched our nation nearly to the breaking point.

At one end, the 25 million adults who make up the richest 10% of America increased their wealth in this pandemic year by an average of $200,000 each.

At the other end: it is estimated by Moody's Analytics that nearly 12 million American renters will owe an average of $5,850 in back rent and utilities by the beginning of 2021. Little of America's surging income and wealth since the 1970s has gone to the poorest 50%.

Continue reading BELOW the FOLD.

Modern Conservatism In a Nutshell (a repost)...

 

The following is an excerpt from an article ran in AlterNet and posted on this weblog on November 6, 2015. Seeing the dysfunctionality currently affecting the so called conservative republican party, and its affect on the new congress as it attempts to determine a new Speaker of the House is why it is being reprinted today. It has been just over seven years since the initial running and still it remains as relevant and true today as it was in 2015. Perhaps even more so.

Conservativism today is in great need of revamping itself. Specifically so as to remain relevant in the 21st century. Change is the only constant. Yet conservatives struggle and fight mightily to remain reified in the 19th and 20th centuries. A sure fire way to insure a historic social uprising in the future.

After decades of "compassionate conservatism," "a thousand points of light," and "Morning in America," dark talk of class warfare on the right can seem like a strange throwback. So accustomed are we to the sunny Reagan and the populist Tea Party that we've forgotten a basic truth about conservatism: It is a reaction to democratic movements from below, movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up, redistributing power and resources from those who have much to those who have not so much. With the roar against the ruling classes growing ever louder, the right seems to be reverting to type. It thus behooves us to take a second look at the conservative tradition, not just its current incarnation but also across time, for that tradition provides us with an understanding of why the conservative responds to Occupy Wall Street as he does.


Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors. They have gathered under different banners—the labor movement, feminism, abolition, socialism—and shouted different slogans: freedom, equality, democracy, revolution. In virtually every instance, their superiors have resisted them. That march and démarche of democracy is one of the main stories of modern politics. And it is the second half of that story, the démarche, that drives the development of ideas we call conservative. For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.

If one has taken the time to analyze the political, economic, social, and military trends over the past 35 plus years they cannot escape the reality and truth of the above statements.

A nation founded on liberal political philosophies and enlightened views has, in the modern era, become the battleground of conservative and reactionary politicians and wealthy special interests who desire nothing less than to "take America back". Given their way the USA wil become a modern day feudalist society.


Following this LINK will ferry you to the original posting with some interesting perspectives in the comment section.