Teen girl shooters in So. California (ABC30 Action News) Police say there is "indication that revenge played some role" in the alleged shooting plot against a Southern California high school by two 15-year-old girls, and that "there was a list with individuals' names on it." More
Unique experiences in our heritage have decisively influenced American culture.
As Europeans encountering Native Americans and wiping them out to make room for our settler occupier colonial project, our enslavement of Natives and Blacks, the civil war, and our ascent as the world’s first hyper-superpower. (Move over, England and Rome).
We played with guns as kids, and now we play with them for real aimed at Palestinians.
We are a Christian nation of gun lovers ready to shoot the Darkies. With Jews.
.
We can't wait to buy more guns!
However, even this militarized history is not enough to explain why Americans suffer from the worst gun violence in the industrialized world.
Other settler colonial projects have as many guns per capita (such as our neighbor to the north) with only a fraction of the gun crime.
As of 2014, for every 100 Americans there are a staggering 90 privately owned guns. It's worse now.
The mass proliferation of firearms exercises a tyrannical hold over the American imagination.
It is both a cause and an effect of the many social problems afflicting the nation.
With the country in political and ideological gridlock (and add to the mix the vested interests and lobbies with too much business to lose like the NRA or National Rifle Association), how can there be any resolution to the mass proliferation of firearms and US gun crimes?
Look, I'm just like Jewish Jesus but in a flag bikini!
While wars of self-defense and geopolitical deceit are a reality of samsara, it is basically impossible for Buddhism to defend the arms trade in any form.
Guns loom large in our national imagination.
Dealing in weapons, people, poisons, animal flesh, or alcohol are the five kinds of trade the Buddha specifically warned against, labeling them "wrong livelihood," yet this is how so much ill-gotten gain is accrued by people who could care less about accruing terrible unskillful karma.
Look, everybody, look! I'm an "American" like in the movies! Bam bam, bam bam!
My mom got me this jacket, my stepdad this Uzi.
The proliferation of weapons is antithetical to religions that promote peace. When examined from a critical historical perspective, the frontier mentality and the right's Second Amendment’s narrative of maintaining a civilian militia bearing arms turns out to be an oversimplified framing of American history.
I can't believe they give us guns and tell us to kill Natives. We're teens raised on propaganda.
We join for camaraderie and to become desensitized to the dirty desert rats' suffering.
Our settler colonial project is almost complete. Now destroy West Bank, purge Jerusalem!
To be, uh, masculine in Israel and get girls, must be killer with gun exterminating vermin.
Kids, kill for the Fatherland, a Jewish state we can steal. The Bible says they're Amalek.
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Yet it is upheld as the nation's founding myth. The capabilities and symbolism of guns, from plastic pistols (Glocks) to semi-automatic AR-style rifles to modified fully automatic military guns, continue to exert such an irresistible allure that the more deaths that occur from shootings, the higher gun sales rise. More
(Holiday History) From harvest to haunting: How Samhain (like ancient Japanese Buddhist Obon and seasonal Mexican/pan-Latin Dia de los Muertos or "Day of the Dead" celebrations) became Halloween for wandering spirits,fairies, elves, ghosts, ghouls, and goblins.
During it people return to visit ancestral family places and clean ancestors' graves because this is when the spirits of ancestors are revisiting household altars [like Mexican ofrendasprepared for the Day of the Dead].
Obon has been celebrated in Japan for more than 500 years and includes the dance Bon Odori. More
The "transfer of merit" (Sanskrit pariṇāmanā [Note 1], Pali pattidāna or pattānumodanā) [3, Note 2] is a customary part of Buddhist spiritual practice where a practitioner's merit (puñña), resulting from wholesome karma (skillful deeds), is transferred to deceased relatives, friends, deities (devas), or to all sentient beings everywhere (as when cultivating the four illimitable Divine Abidings).
Such a "transfer" is a physically enacted deed with its sharing done mentally. The recipient (or another relative stuck in a purgatory such as the realm of hungry ghosts) can receive this merit when they rejoice (feel gratitude, literally becoming the "grateful dead") due to the meritorious acts being done and shared with them on their behalf.
Ah, they remember me! I'm grateful for their help!
This is necessary because in the realm (plane of existence) in which the recipient(s) have been reborn, the opportunity to generate beneficial karma by any other means is extremely limited or altogether absent.
In any case, the person offering, sharing, transferring merit produces more and more merit (wholesome karma). In Buddhism, sharing merit is seen as a far better alternative to mourning. More
According to bassist Phil Lesh, singer Garcia: "In that silvery elf-voice, he said to me, 'Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?'" [27]
The definition found in the BritannicaWorld Language Dictionary is "the soul of a dead person...showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial."
According to Director Alan Trist of Ice Nine, the Grateful Dead's music publishing company, Garcia found the name in the Funk & Wagnalls Folklore Dictionary, when his finger landed on it while playing a game of Fictionary [28].
In her Jerry Garcia biographyCaptain Trips, author Sandy Troy states that the band was smoking the entheogenic psychedelic DMT (also known as "The Spirit Molecule") at the time [29].
The motif of the "grateful dead" person appears in folktales from many cultures around the world [30]. Fittingly, the first show under the name Grateful Dead was in San Jose, near San Francisco, on Dec. 4, 1965, at one of Ken Kesey's "Acid Tests" [31, 32, 33].
Scholar Michael Kaler has written that the Dead's participation in those Acid Tests was crucial to the development of their improvisational vocabulary and to their bonding as a band, with the group having set out to foster an intra-band musical telepathy [34].
QUESTION: Does LSD ("acid") release DMT from the pineal gland (agni chakra, third eye, dibba cakhu), or how is it an entheogen (a substance that releases the divine from within) could lead to visions of reality beyond the normal human spectrum?
DMT (di-methyl-tryptamine, also known as N,N-dimethyltryptamine or N,N-DMT) is a psychoactive entheogen ("releaser of inner divinity"), psychedelic ("mind-manifesting"), serotonergic hallucinogen ("vision producer"), and investigational wonder drug of the tryptamine family that occurs naturally in many [if not most] plants and animals [2, 3, 4, 1].
One extraordinary thing about what we in the U.S. call "ayahuasca" is that not only does it have different names across cultures, it has different ingredients. DMT is in nearly everything, but it will quickly be broken down in the stomach, so additional ingredients are added to prevent that.
The parts of a tree are traditionally used in northeastern Brazil in a psychoactive decoction also called jurema or yurema.
Analogously, the traditional Western Amazonian sacrament ayahuasca is brewed from indigenous vines (with bark and leaves from other plants).
DMT is used in sacred ayahasuca (aka natema, yagé, caapi, nátema, pindê, patem, shori, mii, miiyagi, uni) ceremonies, abused as a psychedelic drug in urban settings, and prepared by various cultures for ritual shamanichealing purposes as an entheogen [14].
DMT has a rapid onset, intense psychedelic effects, and a relatively short duration of action. For those reasons, DMT was known as the "businessman's trip" during the 1960s in the USA, as a user could access the full depth of a psychedelic experience in considerably less time than with other substances such as LSD or magic (psilocybin) mushrooms [15]. More
A wealthy biochemist and Yale University graduate named Chris Cantelmo created an online DMT church or cult he called "Cantelmoism" [Can tell more-ism] in the late 2010s [241].
Mr. C had worked in the pharmaceutical industry for decades, including running multiple high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) companies [241].
He began his DMT campaign on Reddit and other social media websites after experiencing the "spirit molecule" in 2018 [241].
He rapidly spent his wealth in a fervent attempt to promote DMT and get as many people to try it as possible, forming a union in the process and becoming an online spectacle [241].
Chase Hughes marked for telling truth
Among other claims, Mr. C asserts that DMT cured his mind cancer and that it could cure other diseases [241]. He later explained that he had mind, not brain, cancer and that what it had really cured was his "severe" atheism, which he likened to a mental cancer [241].
Mr. C, they say, had mental health issues, so he had to be put out of his misery by alleged "suicide" (taken out before others could start following him). He was put under pressure, losing his home in November 2019 [241],
Why? He dared to promote a natural cure outside the for-profit Big Pharma model. Since Big Pharma had not yet found a way to legally profit from. Anyone who tells the world about the wonders of DMT risks the same fate. So talk to Chase Hughes if this is too hard to believe.
Black market availability
Vape pens or electronic cigarette cartridges filled with liquid DMT were being sold on the black market by 2018 [39, 38, 40] due to there being no licit market. Akasha Song previously manufactured and sold DMT on the Dark Web and is said to have been the largest DMT producer and seller in history [242].
DMT's legal status
International law
Internationally, DMT is illegal to possess without authorization, exemption, or license. However, natural ayahuasca and other DMT brews (natema, yage, etc.) and plant preparations are lawful. More
It's that spooky time of year, and that can only mean one thing. The Simpsons will air another installment of the Treehouse of Horror Halloween special. Like The Great Gazoo of yesteryear (The Flintstones), our favorite extraterrestrial space aliens Kang and Kodos may make an appearance. But Apu is back.
Treehouse of Horror is a series of annual Halloween-themed anthology episodes of the animated sitcom The Simpsons. Also known as "The Simpsons Halloween Specials," each episode typically consists of three separate, self-contained segments. Each segment involves the Simpson family in some comical horror, science fiction, or supernatural setting. More
What is Griffith Park? - It is a giant wilderness area with free roaming lions like P-22's cubs.
Danza Azteca, Indigenous Los Angeles
Sacred Path at The Autry Museum. The big Los Angeles Pow Wow 2026 is scheduled for Saturday, November 7th, 10:00 am to 8:00 pm. (Grand Entry begins at 1:00 pm).
The Autry Museum is in Griffith Park, Los Angeles (between Hollywood and Glendale). It is appropriate for ages 13+, families, seniors, and admission is FREE and open to the public. More info
ABOUT: Join The Autry (next to the LA Zoo by the Shakespeare Festival) for a full-day celebration of Indigenous/Native culture with traditional
powwow dancing, food, and vendors.
The event features:
Shaman medicine man healers?
Traditional dancing and songs led by Northern- and Southern-style drummers and singers
SACRED PATH:
The Autry is pleased to announce a new partnership with Sacred Path Indigenous Wellness Center. Sacred Path is a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving urban Native communities, offering a variety of programs and services designed to promote cultural connection, community engagement, and overall well-being. For more info, please visit sacredpath.org.
What is a powwow?
What must the extraterrestrial visitors the tribes remember have looked like? (wiki)
A powwow is a Native American gathering that brings together Indigenous communities to celebrate their culture, heritage, and spirituality. It includes traditional regalia, intertribal dancing, singing, and Indigenous foods and crafts.
The Autry Museum acknowledges the Tongva/Gabrielino (Kizh) peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar (the Los Angeles Basin and Southern Channel Islands). We recognize that the Autry Museum and its campuses are located on the traditional lands of Tongva/Gabrielino peoples and we pay our respects to the Honuukvetam ("Ancestors"), ‘Ahiihirom ("Elders"), and ‘Eyoohiinkem ("our relatives/relations") past, present, and emerging.
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The mass proliferation of firearms exercises a tyrannical hold over the American imagination.
Yet it is upheld as the nation's founding myth. The capabilities and symbolism of guns, from plastic pistols (Glocks) to semi-automatic AR-style rifles to modified fully automatic military guns, continue to exert such an irresistible allure that the more deaths that occur from shootings, the higher gun sales rise. More
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