British Theravada Buddhist monk (Thai Forest Tradition) Ajahn Jayasāro, Dec. 31, 2025: So it's another new year, and I would like to offer my best wishes and blessings to everyone for this new year.
Of course, needless to say, the world’s an absolute mess. But it's always been this way. When was it not like this? So yes, we do what we can do. And I would like to suggest that you have very clear goals in your life -- whether they’re career goals, worldly goals, or spiritual goals -- and having small, very modest, measurable goals throughout the year to give you that sense of confidence and uplift, not making goals too far ahead in the future. This is true both for worldly and spiritual goals.
Spiritual goals: How would that work out? My suggestion would be to take some mental defilement [of the heart], take some negative quality within you -- say, anger, jealousy, or something like that -- with the understanding that’s not who you are. It’s just a habit, just something we’ve accumulated and something that we can do something about.
Make this coming year a year when you put some consistent effort into reducing the amount of that negative quality like anger or jealousy.
And at the same time, choose a particular virtue -- whether it’s mindfulness, or kindness, generosity, patience, and so on -- and put some systematic, consistent effort into cultivating that.
This is the year of that virtue for you. And keep tabs on it. Notice if you are noticing some changes within you -- small, incremental changes, not big "wow" changes. These are realizable, practical, and will have wonderful effects on your general mental health and a sense of well-being.
And having projects for yourself and projects for others -- trying to do something good and kind for the people around you every day, something that at the end of the day you can feel proud of. And you can say, Yes, that was a good thing I did today!
We have to come to terms with the world we live in and not let our hearts/minds be carried away on a stream of anxiety and aversion and so on.
The opportunity to follow that stream is always there, but you don't have to follow it. We have a choice here. And the more that we follow the Buddha’s teachings, collectively referred to as the Dhamma, integrate them into our lives, the more capacity we have to create a better world for ourselves -- maybe not the world that you see on your screens, but your own world of you, and your family, and your friends, and community, and doing the best we can in an imperfect world.
The important thing is to come to terms with, “It's like this. Right now, it’s not any other way than this. But it’s changing.” And when we come to peace with the way things are -- right here, right now -- then we can move forward with wisdom and creativity. It’s not a passive acceptance of, “Oh, we can't do anything about this right now.”
It’s the recognition that when our minds/hearts are calm with an acceptance of how things are right now, then we can see, Yes, there is exactly something we can do something about, and here's how to do it.
So I wish you all the best, in your health, and your relationships, and your family, and your community. May you grow and prosper both in the worldly and the spiritual realms in this coming year!
Eugenics. Racism. White supremacy. Hitler. Nazism. MAGA. Trump's bigotry and ICE raids...
.
She seems like a nice girl.
What kind of Anti-Israel Nazi is this Aryan Goddess Sydney Sweeney? - Why what happened? - Have you seen her new ad campaign? - With boobs? - No, butt! She's flouting some Germanic American Eagle jeans. - Genes, you mean? - That's what I thought.
Anjelah Johnson on being pretty at the nail salon
It seems diarrhea is a genetic condition. - No, it isn't! - Yeah, it runs in your jeans. - You mean genes. - Do I?
American Eagle's sexualizing ads for Trump?
Ha ha ha. - Trump wears adult diapers because he craps himself, no bowel control due to being really old and abusing stimulants for so long. - Yeah, whistleblower Caspar outed him, butt no one seems to care that he stinks, stands like that to deal with their bulk.
We were being ironic, thinking all the hubbub was just about a single poster. But this commercial has words and is obviously playing off of Nazi (Nordic elitist) ideals and Neo-Nazi fantasies and eugenic aspirations. Even Megyn Kelly can't help but come to her defense: "This is obviously a reference to her body, not to her skin color!" Obviously, American Eagle's ad agency (or PR firm) is getting risqué with racialized double entendres, not satisfied to leverage her boobs and beauty.
First we wipe out the Indigenous then we create our Utopia.
LM; Sydney Sweeney (American Eagle, Inc.); Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks, July 30, 2025; Desi Lydic, The Daily Show; Ashley Wells, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation) (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Are Sydney Sweeney andWisdom Quarterly's numbers too big? Every time WQ reaches another million views, boobs. It's good for men's hearts, says science, but what about our lizard brains?
Her Instagram post comes after critics called her “not pretty.” [Do they say the same of Tate McRae, who is essentially her less well-endowed twin?]
Sydney Sweeney isn’t letting a little bit of controversy get her down. After headlines about her being “not pretty” and a bad actress made the rounds last week, she shrugged everything off and did what anyone would:
Cover up your man-boobs, Boobs!
She wore a slogan T-shirt that showed everyone that she’s staying above the fray.
Deep in a carousel of images shared over the weekend, Sweeney showed a snapshot of herself in an oversized gray sweatshirt that reads, “Sorry for having great t*ts.”
.
“Good times and tan lines,” she captioned the post.
Last week, producer Carol Baum, who worked on Father of the Bride and its sequel, said at an event that Sweeney is “not pretty” and “can’t act” — and that her hit rom-com Anyone But You was “unwatchable.”
Even with those comments, the film has earned $219 million at the box office worldwide.
According to the Daily Mail, Baum made her comments during a panel in Pleasantville, New York.
(Amy Sussman/GA/The Holly-
wood Reporter/Getty/InStyle)
“There’s an actress who everybody loves now: Sydney Sweeney. I don’t get Sydney Sweeney.
“I was watching on the plane Sydney Sweeney’s movie [Anyone But You] because I wanted to watch it,” she said.
“I wanted to know who she is and why everybody’s talking about her. I watched this unwatchable movie — sorry to people who love this…romantic comedy where they hate each other.”
It's a "man's world," right? I'm just making the most of it. "Sex sells," but who's buying?
Cover your beauty, Syd! It's distracting our eyes!
“I said to my class, ‘Explain this girl to me. She’s not pretty. She can’t act. Why is she so hot?’ Nobody had an answer. But then the question was asked, ‘Well if you could get your movie made because she was in it, would you do it?’” Baum continued.
“That’s a very hard question to answer because we all want to get the movie made and who walks away from a green light? Nobody I know. Your job is to get the movie made.”
Sweeney clapped back, saying in a statement shared by Variety: “How sad that a woman in the position to share her expertise and experience chooses instead to attack another woman.
If that’s what she’s learned in her decades in the industry and feels is appropriate to teach to her students, that’s shameful. To unjustly disparage a fellow female producer speaks volumes about Ms. Baum’s character.”
After Baum’s statement was shared, TMZ reported that she is “already expressing regret over the whole thing” and “wishes she never would’ve made her original comments.”
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COMMENTARY
It's very interesting. Fran and I were on retreat with an enlightened Buddhist nun.
(Yes, such people exist even if no one realizes it or can bring themselves to accept that such a thing could be possible in this decadent age, the Kali Yuga. But it was decadent and overcome with lust when the Buddha awakened and attempted to teach humans and devas the way to the end of all suffering. He assumed it would be hopeless because living beings in those days were so obsessed with sex and sensuality. This is, after all, the Sensual Sphere or Kama Loka we're living in).
There was calm and bliss (piti).
She asked a very straightforward question during a Dharma talk after a long day of meditating: "Where does clinging [lust] come from, outside or inside?"
"Like rain, does it (lusting for or clinging to the delights of the senses)," I asked myself, "creep in the poorly thatched roof of the physical senses and mind (the sixth sense)? Or does it arise from within (from some innate badness) like bubbling, oozing, staining crude oil?"
We were all stumped. We had all seen beautiful things. We had all, for having seen them, experienced lust, distraction, craving, preoccupation, obsession, thirst (tanha), desire, yearning, pining, and languishing, sick when we didn't get what we wanted, thrilled-then-disappointed when we did get it.
We were all hesitant. We all wanted to be good students, wanted to be right. We did not want to disappoint her as Americans. So we were waiting for her to drop a hint. Finally, someone dared to say that clinging (like lust) had to be coming from the outside.
Why? We were all peaceful and fine until someone dared to walk around provocatively dressed, thereby ruining our calm (samatha), stillness (samadhi), onepointedness (ekagatta), mindfulness (sati), and renunciation (nekkhamma).
Is this explained anywhere? (Abhidhamma)
Just as we were starting to let go and be free of the outside world's pull on us, some clinging or lust (for food, sex, a massage, a blissful experience) got the better of us and ruined the meditation. Clinging held us like six bondage straps, making us involuntary servants to this coarse, crass, and crappy body.
We were here for the bliss and rapture of meditative absorption, the calm and cool of mindful awareness, the insight and liberating-wisdom of spiritual knowing-and-seeing. The body and all its wants stood in our way, we thought.
Seeing a lovely, hot, shiny body, a little too much skin, one button too many undone, whew, it could be days before the mind simmered down again.
Clinging (repeated craving and grasping) had to be coming from the outside! We were fine until the outside world -- the boobs of a beauty or glistening muscles of a rugged and handsome person -- ruined us. It wasn't our fault! We were mere babes in Toyland!
The skull is like a thatched roof. And we are safe inside our guarded skull, until that darn rain seeps in from the evil (lusty, sexy, and provocative) world outside.
I can't help it if people stare at me.
"Is a fully enlightened person still overcome by lust [greed, craving, grasping], aversion [anger, fear, hate], and delusion [wrong views, distortions, ignorance about ultimate matters]?" she asked in answer to our suggestion that clinging had to originate outside ourselves.
"Well, no," we answered. If such liberated folks were still obsessed with greed, hatred, or confusion just because they saw sights, heard sounds, smelled scents, tasted savors, and felt sensations (to say nothing of mental past memories and future projections of these), what hope would there be for any of us in our practice?
Turning away, averting one's gaze, restraining the senses is just the first step. It might be difficult, but that's not all there is. Buddhism is NOT about severe austerities, penance, pious acts of self-mortification. It is about withdrawing into mental seclusion, calming the mind, exercising mindfulness, then cultivating insight that breaks through the illusion.
One develops the ability to see through the unreal, the superficial, the misleading. If this body were beautiful, why then we should celebrate it. If this body were the way to happiness, why then we should all become hedonists and have at it. If licentiousness and easy virtue were the way to liberation, why then we should condemn anyone who stood in our way and was being a stick in the mud at the party!
It is exactly because beautiful things in the world are constituent in nature not compact, ephemeral not permanent, disappointing not satisfying that they are not at all what they seem.
They are superficial illusions, they are disappointing, they are painful and struggling to get them is painful, and not getting them when one craves them is painful, and finally getting them is ultimately disappointing and not fulfilling. And we have been treading this hamster wheel for aeons beyond measures, past lives beyond comprehension, and most of us can see no end in sight.
So if there were a way to see things as they truly are, what would happen? We would become dispassionate, disillusioned, and detached. The mind that clings would let go.
Clinging and reacting to things in the world with lust, annoyance, or confusion comes not from them but from us. And when a person becomes enlightened, one has seen through the charade. One has seen things as they really are. For example, let's get gross.
I thought you liked my poop. You bag it.
Let's say we had a naked inflatable doll, beautiful, exquisite, the perfection of proportion, complexion, and symmetry, comely, alluring, and more real than real. But inside it was full of poop and worms and a stench so foul as to make us heave involuntarily. If a little leaked, or we opened its mouth or other openings and experienced the ugly inside behind the beautiful superficial outside, how might we feel?
We might feel tricked, deceived, upset to have been taken in by a shiny exterior. Or imagine a pretty pink bag, smooth and reflective, potentially useful to carry things like our lunch or precious possessions, only to find out that bag contained dog feces. Yikes! Suddenly we turn away, clutch our stomachs, berate ourselves for almost touching it.
What's inside this body? Or that pretty body covering Sydney Sweeney? (Well, I'd rather not think about that! Of course not. That would ruin all the fun of the illusion. Flowers are pretty and alluring, but they're steeped in fertilizer, worms, fungus, dead bodies, microbes, pathogens, pale threads taking in nutrients. Most of us instinctively avoid the muck or are stained, tainted, and stink.
Conclusion
People can be free. Practice.
If beautiful objects had the intrinsic ability to grab, take hold of us, make us obsessed, we would have little to no hope of escape.
But because lust (craving) and clinging arise not due to beauty, but due to the interaction of beautiful stimuli impinging on the senses (contacting consciousness) and our response to it, which is rooted in delusion, we can escape.
That delusion, very broadly stated, is a failure to see pretty phenomena as transient (radically impermanent), incapable of satisfying or fulfilling us, and it not being real (not a self, not what it seems.
When we see things, even the most beautiful things, as they really are (impermanent, disappointing, and impersonal), then the heart/mind lets go. There is no effort to reject beautiful things, only to see them as they really are. The effort is to see clearly (vipassana).
Whether things are ugly or dull, the same is true of stimuli that provoke aversion (fear or anger) or delusion (wrong view or ignorance). "Boring" things (that provoke inattention because they neither give rise to lust or anger) are neutral and peaceful, but craving makes them dull and something to get away from as we go in search of delight.
So by calm-and-insight we can be free here and now, even if beautiful creatures parade in front of us with next to nothing on and even if Hollywood feeds us airbrushed images and AI beauty pageant winners.
Heavy rain on New Year's Eve in Los Angeles; Rose Parade should remain dry
(KTLA 5, Dec. 31, 2022) Headed out to celebrate New Year's Eve? Better bring an umbrella.
Heavy rainfall is expected to hit the Southland in the hours leading up to midnight and into early Sunday morning. Strong gusty winds and slick roads will present extra dangers to those traveling for New Year's Eve celebrations.
KTLA's Kaj Goldberg reports on Dec. 31, 2022.
Details: ktla.com/news...
Get Los Angeles breaking news, crime, entertainment, weather, traffic, and sports from L.A.'s very own KTLA 5 News. Keeping Southern Californians informed since 1947.
Online: ktla.com.
(Global News) Meanwhile, the rest of the world celebrates the new year with massive fireworks displays:
Climbers having sex on Mt. Agung angers the volcano which will lead to an eruption.
What have the bule done to our land?
Foreigners have disrespected the mountain which has angered Agung, "the Beast," and this is why it is about to erupt, residents living near to Mt. Agung insist.
The Indonesian volcano looks set to blow as up to 400 earthquakes have hit the region over the last few days, causing 75,000 people to flee the danger zone.
Bali volcano update: Climbers having SEX on Agung are to blame, say locals.
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While the imminent eruption is a natural phenomenon, a priest of a nearby village, Muntig, a Balinese village inside the volcano evacuation zone, says that the mountain is angry because the “bule” -- white people [actually any “foreigner”] -- have been having sex and menstruating on it, according to Australia’s Fairfax Media.
Jaya, the priest of the village, said: "The climbers did that.”
No-one can predict when Agung will erupt, say the villagers but the biggest warning sign will be when the animals start fleeing.
Another
local, Ketut, said: "The old people advised us the heat from the
mountain will make them flee. All kinds of animals -- deer, snakes, wild
cows, anything.” More
Jaya's priest said Mount Agung -- the largest and most sacred mountain
in Bali -- is wrathful because the "bule" (white people) had sex and
menstruated on the mountain. "The climbers did that," Jaya said. Mt. Agung looked deceptively calm on Wednesday, with a puff of white cloud hovering above the peak. More
Indonesia on the other hand, that’s a place that doesn’t really
come up much in everyday American life.
China, Russia, India, sure, I
know those places. I read about them. Sometimes stuff that happens there
shows up on my Facebook feed. I can even show you where they are on a
map.
Indonesia, however, I’ve seen it on some t-shirt tags, and that’s
about it. Indonesia is the fourth
most populous country in the world, but to a lot of us, that’s just that place
that had that tsunami. Or at least, that’s what it was to me when I
agreed to go live there. See, Americans... More
"Buddhism" is neither a religion nor a philosophy; it is a path of practice summed up in four ennobling truths. Meditation is development to superheroic heights (naturalnews.com).
Buddhism tells us that everything in the world arises due to causes and conditions and is subject to change. Nothing is permanent. However, it is in this process of change that we can cultivate profitable conditions (merit) that lead us to a better future. Buddhism points out the causes of suffering and, moreover, how we can bring suffering to a final end.
Buddhists look upon the Buddha as a teacher. He is an ideal teacher who has realized the truth of life and phenomena in the universe. He has freed himself from greed, hatred, and ignorance -- and he assures us that we can do the same. He was pure in conduct and perfect in wisdom and compassion.
He shared his experiences and taught us methods of practice to evolve. It is by making our own effort, putting into practice these teachings, that we can gradually develop a calm, rational, and compassionate mind, purifying our conduct and ending our suffering.
We, too, can attain perfect wisdom, compassion, and other virtues just like the Buddha, who pointed out that:
By ourselves is wrong done; By ourselves we pain endure. By ourselves we cease from harm; By ourselves become we pure.
No one saves us but ourselves; No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path, Buddhas only point the way. (Wisdom Quarterly translation, Dhammapada 165)
Four Truths that Ennoble Practitioners Dharmachari Seven, Wisdom Quarterly The first truth one realizes long before coming to Buddhism is that life is beset by unpleasant and unsatisfactory experiences.
There is disappointment. This message is forever useful and fresh because it leads to the second realization: There is a cause.
There are reasons why this is happening. Our distress does not pop out of nothing. What are the causes and supporting conditions for it? More importantly, what are the causes and conditions for happiness, peace, and freedom?
That happiness, peace, and freedom from all that is disappointing is the third truth, the truth of nirvana (the end of suffering). But so what if there is unhappiness, so what if it has a cause, so what if there is a solution, what does any of that matter if it were not for the fourth truth: the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering?
So the Four Noble Truths are all about ending suffering. They lead to enlightenment and nirvana, the ultimate. Nowadays we would be less put off if Buddhism were not phrased negatively focusing on suffering: There is an illness. There is a cause. There is a cure. Here is the cure.
The Dharma in a nutshell could just as easily be phrased positively: There is a cure. There is a cause of getting better. Of course, it goes without saying that there is an illness. Here is the cure!
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