Dalai Lama, only money makes me happy

(༄།ནང་ཆོས།། ☸️) Dalai Lama: Does inner happiness come from money? #Buddhism #love #fypシ

Greed is good [karma], Snidely Whiplash?

Yeah, but, hey, Dolly Lamar, I like money. I love money. My Christian friends, who all want to be rich, say "THE LOVE OF MONEY is the root of all evil" (Ecclesiastes 5:10, 1 Timothy 6:10). I don't know what "evil" they're talking about, but I'm pretty sure the historical Buddha's main donor, Anathapindika (whose name means "giver of alms," "feeder of the hungry," born Sudatta), was super rich merchant banker, a billionaire in his day and one of the "noble ones," that is, an enlightened person (stream enterer, the first stage of awakening). So it seems to me that it isn't "money" that's the problem so much as the clinging to it -- craving, grasping, longing, yearning, striving, and being greedy and rapacious for it. I'll never have enough. There is no "enough" of an intangible idea of "rich" or "wealthy" or "having enough."

(Laugh Factory) Joe Wong at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood on religion

• Dalai Lama via ༄།ནང་ཆོས།།; Joe Wong on religion in USA; Editors, Wisdom Quarterly

My trip to India, most spiritual country?

(Wise Lessons) The Mysterious Life of Anandamayi Ma

• Anandamayi Ma?

(Nahana) India sucks!!! Don't ever come to this country

(Isha Branderhorst) I stayed in an ashram in Rishikesh, and it changed my life: honest experience

• (Mystics of India) Sadhguru on wild, wild country, Osho (Swami Bhagwan Rajneesh), and spiritual "cults"
• Where is Rishikesh, yoga capital of the world?
• Is an Ashram an intentional community?

India elects Modi: world's largest democracy

I admire Aryan Hitler, it's true, but I'm nothing like Trump. I don't know why people say so.

Indian elections: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Vote for me or there will be trouble. Namaskar.

(LastWeekTonight on HBO) June 6, 2024: John Oliver discusses the elections in India, the world's largest democracy and now the world's most populous country (now even bigger than Buddhist China), what Prime Minister (racist, nationalist dictator) Narendra Modi has been doing in office, what he might do next, and the proper way to eat a mango.

UPDATE: Narendra Modi has fearmongered and bribed his way into a third consecutive term. Trump must be very happy to hear it

Top 10 worst neighborhoods in L.A. (video)

World According to Briggs, Nov. 20, 2017; Pat Macpherson, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly

I can live in LA, but it's not whi...

"Welcome to California...Now go home" the funny bumper sticker reads. How funny is it? It is the sentiment of most residents in this place. We love tourist dollars and oddball visitors.

The City of Lost Angels is not all it's cracked up to be. There is no "Hollywood," just a [insert Trumpism] where mythical Hollywood used to be.

There are rich parts of L.A. They're exclusive. That means you can't go there. Oh, sure you can -- if you want to be pulled over, ticketed, towed, or given trouble.

Then there are the gated communities, which are police states there to keep you out and the rich in. But "rich" is relative. NIMBYism is rampant. Briggs recommends the travel book Blue Highways.

Wasting our rain water in Los Angeles

Sharon McNary (scpr.org, Jan. 23, 2017); CC Liu, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly

Streets of Los Angeles flooded due to series of rainstorms after 7 years of drought (AP)

West coast mermaids need more water

Los Angeles County storm water capture systems have shunted enough water from rain-swollen rivers into percolation ponds this rain season to serve the annual water needs of about a half-million people, an official said Monday.

 

More than 22 billion gallons of storm water has been collected since mid-October  along the San Gabriel and Los Angeles rivers, said Steven Frasher, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Public Works Department.

 

However, most of the water that falls on the region is still lost to the Pacific Ocean, partly because the kinds of investments made over the years in spreading grounds along the San Gabriel River have been lagging along the Los Angeles River, said Mark Gold of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

Unsustainable

Annual fires due to lack of rain retention

"You see a storm year like this, and you see all the water that ends up going through the LA River and Ballona Creek and Dominguez Channel, and you say, "Wow, that could have been our water supply for the next year," Gold said.

 

"I think this storm here has really demonstrated where the shortcomings are in our local water system," Gold added.

"We've barely scratched the surface on what we can do in the eastern San Fernando Valley in trying to capture more of that precious rainfall from the sky and have it actually infiltrate into the ground and get into our groundwater supply." 

Why do we lose so much rain water?

The flood control system was initially built to speed water to the ocean to avoid damage to communities along the rivers during heavy rain storms. So it took decades for the region to adapt to the idea of capturing that water for later use. More

• VIDEO: Paradox: California has the highest poverty rate in the USA
• Third Southern California storm brings flooding, rockslides 
• Rainstorm prompts freeway flooding, rescues across LA
• LA Women's March causes Metro trains to reach capacity
• California's poorest may finally be feeling rising economy
• Study says Californians missing out on health care subsidies
• Surprising charts on smoking, unemployment, cell phones
• Trump signs 3 executive orders, withdraws from TPP

Earth 2025: Population Explosion? (video)

Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Hans Rosling (gapminder.org), Ed Doc

(Education Documentary) Hans Rosling (Gap Minder) on the Earth's population and what it really means to life on this planet beyond the hype and spin of the mainstream media.

Truth about ALIENS: How THEY LIVE AMONG US!

• How to Destroy the Planet Earth: Possible Way
• Next Future Terrifying Technology Will Blow Minds
• This is How World will End: What does the Bible say?
• ALIEN CONTACT FROM SPACE
• Secrets About Mars: The Red Planet
• Asteroid That Might Hit Earth in Future
• AfterMath: Earth Under Water in Next 20 Years
• Timeline of Scientific Experiments

7 Billionth Person Born

Text by ​Runnin Scared (VillageVoice.com), Wisdom Quarterly

A century ago, there were only 2,000,000,000 people. Welcome to the human plane, 7 billionth! You are among more than 7 trillion "Earthlings" like ants, fish, bugs, and unseen beings.

The UN Population Division estimates the world's 7 billionth person will be born tomorrow. How do they know this? The UN says the number is "derived from the annual series of world population estimates obtained by interpolating the results of the 2010 Revision of World Population Prospects by assuming exponential growth within each year."

Standing shoulder to shoulder, 7 billion of us would only fill Los Angeles.

Translation: Tracking chips implanted in all our brains by shampooists working hand-in-hand with the Illuminati. Due to birth rates, the 7 billionth person will most likely be born in India or China. Who cares about them? Where do you fit into to this number? The BBC has a program that calculates what number person you were on Earth when you were born. More

• VIDEO: Just how big is seven billion?
• 7 billion by the end of 2011 (Nat'l Geo)

World population clocks (prettejohn.net)

Psychedelic Tea Brews Unease

Stephanie Simon (WSJ.com)

Leaf swirl green (Jenny Yee/hackerinformatico.blogspot).

SANTA FE, New Mexico -- A secretive religious group that fought a long legal battle for the right to drink hallucinogenic tea in pursuit of spiritual growth now plans to build a temple and greenhouse in a wealthy community here -- to the dismay of local residents.

A woman in Brazil picks one of the two plants used to make the potent hallucinogenic tea (Magali Girardin/pixsil.com).

The church was founded in Brazil in 1961 and remains most popular there. But about 150 people in the U.S., including about 60 in Santa Fe, practice the faith, which goes by the Portuguese name Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal, or UDV. Members say the church is based on Christian theology but also borrows from other faiths and finds spirituality in nature.

Since the U.S. branch of the religion emerged in the late 1980s, practitioners have imported from Brazil their sacramental tea, known as [ayahuasca or] hoasca, which is brewed from two Amazonian plants. It contains the psychedelic compound dimethyltryptamine, or DMT.

The U.S. government classifies DMT as a Schedule I controlled substance, the same designation given to heroin and marijuana. But in a unanimous ruling in 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the UDV had the right to use hoasca in its ceremonies.

Now the Santa Fe branch has drawn up plans to build a greenhouse for growing their own sacred plants, a ceremonial kitchen for brewing the tea and a 7,100-square-foot temple, complete with a children's nursery and foot-thick walls to ensure privacy. More>>

The man who defused the "Population Bomb"

The "Green" Revolution, which provided unsustainable bumper crop yields, was the work of frankenfood founder Norman Borlaug ("the greatest American of the 20th century"). He died late Saturday at 95. He either saved a billion from starvation in the 1970s or caused the current population explosion and the health problems that stem from genetic manipulation of plants and intensive use poison chemicals in agriculture.