(Alex Meyers) May 2026: Off Campus is my kind of trash! Yeah, Off Campus, that's right. So I made an animated commentary analysis of it. Here's a full breakdown of this Prime Video TV show, a romcom that is so basic, it's kind of not the worst thing out there.
Nothing Higher to Live For: A Buddhist View of Romantic Love
(Leo Price) ...If life means nothing, then only pleasure is worthwhile. Or if life has meaning and we cannot get at it, then still only enjoyment matters.
This is the view of not only brutes but some sophisticated philosophers.
It slips into our unconscious by default when we hold no other. However, we are reluctant to entertain it.
Oh, Ro-Ro! - Oh, Jewels!!
We would rather, if we question ourselves about it at all, take as our "purpose" the
support of family,
search for truth or beauty,
improvement of society,
fame,
self-expression,
development of talent...
It might be fair to say that apart from these or beneath these, for many of us our fundamental purpose is the search for love, particularly romantic love.
The love of one person for another is often the floor onto which we fall after the collapse of other dreams.
It is thought of as solid when nothing else is, and although it frequently gives way and dumps us into a basement of despair, it still enjoys a reputation of dependability. No matter that such a reputation is illogical—it still flourishes and will continue to flourish regardless of what anyone says.
Love, or the MYTH of love, is the first, last, and sometimes the only refuge of uncomprehending human beings. What else makes our hearts pound? What else makes us swoon with tingly feelings? What else renders us so intensely alive, aching, pining, yearning, wishing, hoping, craving?
The SEARCH for love—the sublime, the nebulous, the all consuming—remains sacred in a world that increasingly despises the sacred.
When the heroic and transcendental are only memories, when religious institutions fill up with bureaucrats and social scientists, when nobody believes there is a sky beyond the ceiling, then there seems no other escape from the prison of self than throwing ourselves abandon into love.
With a grey age of spiritual deadness upon us, we love. We beg for love or grieve for love. We have nothing higher to live for.
Indeed, many take it on faith that romantic love is the highest thing to live for. Movies, popular literature, art, and music all relentlessly celebrate it as the one "truth" accessible to all.
This kind of love obliterates reason, as poets have long sweetly lamented, and this is part of its charm and power. Why? We want to be swept up and spirited out of our calculating selves. "Want" is the key word because in the spiritual void of modern life, the wanting of love becomes increasingly indistinguishable from love itself.
So powerful, so insistent is it that we seldom notice that the gratification it tempts us with is rare, yet the craving is relentless. Love addiction? Love is mostly in anticipation; it is an agony of anticipation; it is an ache for a completion not found in the dreary round of mundane routine. That we never seem to possess it in its imagined fullness does not deter us. It hurts so bad that it must be good. Nothing Higher to Live For: A Buddhist View of Romantic Love
More than 60,000 people have signed a petition calling for Stanford
University to at least apologize publicly to the female student who was raped on campus
last year by a Stanford swimmer.
Judge Persky. [But he's white, and I'm white.]
The case made national news
this month when Stanford alum Santa Clara County Judge Aaron Persky ordered Stanford student rapist Brock Allen Turner, 20 (from Ohio), who was convicted of three serious felonies, to only six months in county jail, of which he will only serve three months.
The prosecution recommended he serve years in prison of the maximum 14 years sentence he faced, just three months in spite of that fact that he was caught by two graduate students who were eyewitnesses of Turner's sexual assault of the
unconscious female victim, also a Stanford student, behind a dumpster.
A Stanford law professor has
launched an effort to RECALLJudge Aaron Persky (sign it at change.org), who quietly began a new
six-year term this week when he ran unopposed and the election was called off.
Judge Persky. [White privilege partially derives from an implicit bias that favors whites.]
Right before sentencing Stanford rapist Brock Allen Turner to six
months in jail, Judge Aaron Persky presided over a domestic
violence case, where the abuser was also dealt a light sentence.
Stanford law professor Michele Landis Dauber watched as the victim in
that case made a powerful statement to the court and showed photos of
her abuse. "She had been beaten so badly that she was completely
unrecognizable....the photos were almost impossible to look at,"
recalls Dauber, who is leading an effort to recall Persky. "[Her abuser]
got like a weekend or two in jail." Even then, Dauber says, Judge
Persky was concerned the man might not be able to make it to work on
Monday after his jail term. "We all had to sit there while they tried to
communicate with the county jail to make sure that he wouldn’t be
super-inconvenienced by having to go to jail for having basically almost
beaten this woman to death," Dauber says.
Separately, more than 800,000 people have
signed a petition to remove the judge. The victim’s powerful letter to
her attacker has been viewed more than 13 million times online (buzzfeed.com) and read aloud on CNN:
He's my boy, it was only 20 minutes worth of action, we're from Ohio. I think the judge did the right thing not throwing the book at him. He'll be in the neighborhood jail 3 months.
.
"You
took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my intimacy, my
confidence, my own voice, until today," she wrote in the letter,
addressing her rapist directly.
"You bought me a ticket to a planet
where I live by myself," she added. Stanford Univ. is also facing criticism for its outrageous handling of sexual abuse and rapes on campus, which they conceal to save the university money and its reputation.
The "S" is for Sexy jocks at frat parties
A new report by The Daily Beast
found that the university reported 26 rapes on campus in 2012, 2013, and
2014. While that's certainly a gross under count of the real number, it's still one sexual assault every two weeks for three years.
Democracy Now! talks
about the Stanford case and how the problem extends far beyond Stanford
with Amy Ziering, filmmaker of "The Hunting Ground," a documentary
about sexual assault on college campuses, and Harvard's Kamilah Willingham, one of
the film’s subjects.
Turner in yearbook
Willingham says she was sexually assaulted while
unconscious by a fellow Harvard Law School student in 2011. More
(AP) In his daily press briefing today, Robert Gibbs distanced the president from comedian Wanda Sykes’s joke comparing Rush Limbaugh to a "9/11 hijacker" at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
At the dinner, where Obama was the guest of honor, comedienne Sykes blasted Limbaugh for saying he hoped Obama’s administration would fail, joking: “I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker, but he was just so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight.”
Obama appeared to smile at the remark.
PHOTOS: 1. President Barack Obama reacts with laughter to comic/actress Wanda Sykes who entertained the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. on May 9, 2009 (AP/J. Scott Applewhite). 2. Rush Limbaugh and the destruction of the republican party; 3. Comic actress Wanda Sykes speaking at the White House President Obama, far left, as the guest of honor, Jennifer Loven, the White House correspondent for the AP, is at center (AP/J. Scott Applewhite).
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