Is pot (medical-grade high-CBD-moderate THC Cannabis sativa) the greatest invention or the worst? Giggle uncontrollably with slacker friends all heshered out then become Hesher and it's slack, slack, slack. Somebody said, "Weed is spiritual." It seems about as spiritual as sipping rotten malt, which we call brews (the suras of the celestial no-suras). There has to be a better way to focus and concentrate the mind on the present, to be all zen'ed out, jhanified (absorbed in a single subject/object of attention). Pot ain't it, although it might make for a better world than alcohol gives us.
Then paradise all came crashing to an end by getting stoned too much.
COMMENTARY
This bud's for you. - Aw thank you! I smoke it?
(WQ, 3/15/24) It's bad, unskillful, not productive of good karma. Why? It doesn't have to be, but it is for the most part. Yes, but why? The real reason is because there are two opposite meanings of the English word "high." Think about it. We either mean sh*tfaced, obliterated, obtunded, stoned, and similar words to indicate senseless -- deaf, dumb, blind, mute, wasted, spaced out -- which is why they call it "sh*t" as in, "Hey, Man, that is some good sh*t" OR we mean out there, gone beyond, elevated, expanded, seeing the bigger picture, the peace that surpasseth all understanding, and so on. When it's mind-expanding, consciousness-raising, trippy, a Cybernautic journey, unity-producing, one could see how that might be good, useful, causing peace, acting as medicine, reducing anxiety, and so on.
Oh, rose bud. :( I thought you meant weed.
But either way, we foolishly call them both "getting high" when the first is clearly getting low, debased, debauched, heedless, a waste of space... Are we just suffering from the munchies, increasing craving, becoming addicted? And that's another thing. The first kind of drug (or the use of a drug in a foolish way) produces addiction, abuse, bad karma and remorse, whereas the second kind heals it. If you're freaking out, having a bad THC trip (like from too many gummies), don't butt-dial or purposely call the police on yourself thinking that you're dying. There's a better way, a faster way, a natural way to calm down: CBD, the other cannabinoid in cannabis. Iboga, ayahuasca, and natural entheogens in the proper hands, undertaken with the appropriate intention (mindset) and setting, can be used to cure addiction. One purges, sees or is shown by spirit beings how they have been, and this can set one free. People abuse alcohol, and nothing good comes from it. Much bad comes. When cannabis is treated this way, like beers at the end of a day, one is only spiraling down to future MA meetings. Contact your local Marijuana Anonymous chapter to try to make it back to life.
The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world; although the country makes up about five per cent of the global population, it has created nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
David Remnick is joined by WNYC’s Kai Wright, the host of the podcast “The United States of Anxiety,” to talk about mass incarceration and the beginning of a movement against it.
The poet and public defender Reginald Dwayne Betts, who was formerly incarcerated, reads from his book Felon. And we follow a man who returns home from prison to find a changed world.More
In 2010 Michelle Alexander’s bestselling book spelled out how mass incarceration harms communities of color and the country. Assessing its impact she looks forward and back with David Remnick.
Editors, Wisdom Quarterly (EDITORIAL); The New Yorker; Stephen Colbert
Latino Fmr. Housing Secretary Julian Castro
Watching the first Democratic debate, it was clear that there were only two humans on stage, Julian Castro and Amy Klobuchar, at ease, smiling, compassionate.
Former Housing Secretary Julian Castro did a great job. He was the breakaway winner of this silly distraction of a "horse race." Google searches for his name, it was said on NBC's coverage, shot up 24,000-fold or some similarly astronomical number.
Kind right wing Amy Klobuchar
These two debates are not about policy. They are about personality, humanity, and relate-ability. Julian Castro trounced poor, falling Beto O'Rourke, who seemed completely out of his element. He used to be such an inspiration, but not any more.
Sen. Cory Booker (NJ), smile. And calm down, calm way down. With eyes bugging and trying so hard not to screw it up, he did not make nearly as much progress in the polls as he might have. But he was center stage and tall and knowledgeable.
We do not support Amy Klobuchar in any way, with her right wing leanings and semi-Republican ways, but at least she's human, appearing soft, yielding, passionate, and humble.
(Stephen Colbert) Soldier Tulsi Gabbard knows the real price of war
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker
Honorable mention can go to the first Hindu in Congress, Rep. (HI) Tulsi Gabbard, who claims to be the only anti-war candidate. But as a soldier who loves the military, Republicans are bound to like her better than Democrats.
Politically-aware comedian Jimmy Dore had good things to say about her for being vocal against war, military interventions, and the US being the world's police. Yet, she sounds like she would fully support the military-industrial complex itself.
I'm a young soldier first: Major Tulsi Gabbard
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA), yikes! Strident, pushy, aggressive, fighting mad, blathering, Bernie-esque, harsh, and did we mention strident? Who would vote for Hillary II? Why does the media keep promoting her and derailing other candidates?
Waorani women celebrate their court victory (Dolores Ochoa/AP via The New Yorker).
An Uncommon Victory for an Indigenous Tribe in the Amazon
Nemonte Nenquimo (Rodrigo
Buendia/AFP)
On April 26, 2019, a parade of hundreds of Waorani, an indigenous nation in a remote part of the Ecuadorian Amazon jungle, marched triumphantly through the streets of Puyo, the regional capital of the eastern province of Pastaza.
PHOTO: Nemonte Nenquimo and other Waorani
representatives marched in Puyo on the day they won a lawsuit against
the government (Rodrigo
Buendia/AFP/Getty).
Many had come from villages in parts of the rain forest that have no roads -- journeying by canoe and small plane. They were celebrating a new court ruling, which held that the Ecuadorian government could not, as it had planned, auction off their land for oil exploration without their consent.
Nemonte Nenquimo (pictured), a Waorani leader, told me that they had come to Puyo to reclaim their right to self-governance and that the verdict had made them feel safer.
“The court recognized that the government violated our right to live free and make our own decisions about our territory and self determination,” she said, over WhatsApp. “Our territory is our decision, and now, since we are owners, we are not going to let oil enter and destroy our natural surroundings and kill our culture.”
In February, the Waorani, together with Ecuador’s Ombudsman, a parliament-appointed official who serves as a public advocate, had filed a lawsuit against the Ecuadorian government for not properly consulting with them before opening up their territory to potential oil exploration.
In recent years, Ecuador has divided much of its portion of the Amazon jungle into blocks to lease the mineral rights in an international auction. One of the blocks included Waorani land.
Waorani Native American village in disregarded rural Ecuador (Kate Fisher/wiki)
The path to the verdict had not been certain. In March, a group of Waorani womenshut down a hearing with song, protesting the conditions under which the case was being tried; they objected to it being held in Puyo, far from the Waorani villages, and to the absence of a court-certified translator.
Many of the Waorani representatives wore traditional dress in court and had red bars painted across their cheekbones and brows. Singing a song about their traditional role as protectors of the forest, they drowned out the judge and lawyers until the judge finally suspended the hearing, which was rescheduled for April.
Nemonte Nenquimo and other representatives of the Waorani people marched in Puyo, Ecuador, on the day they won a lawsuit against the government, over plans to lease oil rights on their land. More
Make America GRATE Again -- so it's not so cheesy. Campaign taken to billboards.
The New York Times best-selling author and comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998 is taking his satirical news column on the road to The Dolby Theatre on Wednesday, April 24, 7:30 PM.
Join Andy Borowitz for an evening of conversation and storytelling as he gets down to addressing what the @#$ is going on! Limited number of VIP seats available with a post-show photo opp.
.
Borowitz has been called a “Swiftian satirist” (The Wall Street Journal), “America’s satire king” (The Daily Beast), “the funniest human on Twitter” (The Times), and “one of the funniest people in America” (CBS News’ “Sunday Morning”).
In 2001, he created the Borowitz Report, a satirical news column that has millions of readers around the world, for which he won the first-ever National Press Club award for humor.
The Borowitz Report was acquired by The New Yorker in 2012. He has published two recent best-selling books: The 50 Funniest American Writers, which became the first title in the history of the Library of America to make the Times best-seller list... More
The Dolby Theatre, L.A. (323) 308-6300 for more info
Not
long ago I was accused of something I hadn’t realized was a bad thing:
clarity.
Adam Gopnik, reviewing my book Why Buddhism is True, in The
New Yorker in August (2017), wrote:
“He makes Buddhist ideas and their history
clear. Perhaps he makes the ideas too clear.”
Underlying
this allegation (which I vigorously deny!) is a common view: that
Buddhist ideas defy clear articulation — and that in a sense the point of
Buddhist ideas is to defy clear articulation. After all, aren’t those
Zen koans — “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” and so on —
supposed to suggest that language, and the linear thought it embodies,
can’t capture the truth about reality?
Gopnik
seems to think that this drift of Buddhist thought — its apparent
emphasis on the inscrutability of things — largely insulates it from
scrutiny. Buddhist discourse that acknowledges, even embraces, paradox
may “hold profound existential truths,” Gopnik says, but by the same
token it has, as a kind of built-in property, an “all-purpose evasion of
analysis.”
So apparently people like me, who would like to evaluate
Buddhist ideas in the light of modern science and philosophy, should
save our breath.
The question Gopnik
is raising isn’t just an academic one. Every day, millions of people
practice mindfulness meditation — they sit down, focus on their breath,
and calm their minds. But the point of mindfulness meditation isn’t just
to calm you down.
Light Morning Meditation in Floyd, Virginia 2017 (Lori Marsh/Light Morning Community)
.
Rather, the idea — as explained in ancient Buddhist
texts — is that a calm, contemplative mind can help you see the world as
it really is.
It would be nice to critically examine this powerful
claim, but if we can’t say clearly what Buddhists mean by “the world as
it really is,” then how can we examine it? How can we figure out — or
even argue about — whether meditation is indeed drawing people closer to
the truth about reality?
The
cultural critic Edward Said famously used the term “Orientalism” to
refer to a patronizing way Westerners sometimes think of Eastern
cultures and ideas — as charmingly exotic, perhaps, but as deficient in
various Western virtues, including rationality and rigor.
Said was
talking mainly about Middle Eastern cultures, but much the same could be
said of Buddhism: Western thinkers may cherish its art and its cryptic
aphorisms, and may see meditation as therapeutically useful.
But many of
them don’t imagine Buddhist thought playing in the same league as
Western thought; they don’t imagine a Buddhist philosophy that involves
coherent conceptual structures that can be exposed to evidence and logic
and then stand or fall on their merits.
This
condescension is unfounded. Not only have Buddhist thinkers for
millenniums been making very much the kinds of claims that Western
philosophers and psychologists make — many of these claims are looking
good in light of modern Western thought.
In fact, in some cases Buddhist
thought anticipated Western thought, grasping things about the human
mind, and its habitual misperception of reality, that modern psychology
is only now coming to appreciate.
Consider a quote that Gopnik employs in suggesting that appraising
Buddhist philosophy may be a fool’s errand. It is from a Zen Buddhist
who, in analyzing a famous text called the Heart Sutra, wrote this:
“Things exist but they are not real.” More
Woolsey fire, near LA, seen from West Hills. California
is currently ablaze, after a record hot summer and a dry fall set the
stage for the most destructive fires in the state’s history (Kevin Cooley/The New Yorker).
.
Thirty
years ago, The New Yorker published “The End of Nature,” a long article
about what it then called the greenhouse effect.
I was in my 20s
when I wrote it and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was
still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness.
We were spewing so much [natural and vital] carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no
longer a force beyond our influence -- and humanity, with its capacity for
industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic meter of the
planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water.
Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began
referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the "world made by Man."
I
was frightened by my reporting, but at the time it seemed likely that
we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening.
In 1988,
George H. W. Bush, running for president, promised that he would fight
“the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”
He did not, nor did
his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world,
and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has
become a fierce daily reality.
As this essay goes to press, California
is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu,
and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills [Northern California], has become the
most destructive in California’s history.
After a summer of
unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than
half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city
called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten
thousand buildings and killing at least 63 people; more than 600 others are missing.
The authorities brought in cadaver dogs,
a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and
anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on
how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments. More
"This town's not big enough for both these haircuts!"(New Yorker)
I'm so sick of that dotard that I may stop bluffing and do something. People are behind me.
The only guy worse than Li'l Rocket Man is Republican Senator Bob Corker!
Republican senator says Trump risks starting "World War III"
Tennessee US Senator Bob Corker warned the president's behavior was in danger of putting the US "on the path to World War III." The head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said the White House was turning into "an adult day care center" and later explained he was genuinely troubled that administration staff appeared to spend each day "trying to contain" Trump.
In her new book that tells reader who and what to blame, Whuh Happened???, Hurricane Hillary Clinton is by turns angry, accusatory, and apologetic about the 2016 election and her utter failure at its outcome. Trump did not win; he was appointed. But she did lose.
She promotes the view that it was infiltration by Russia as a “clear and present danger” to the US electoral process, which Republicans should take as seriously as Democrats.
She also blames Putin who could, she points out, just as easily turn on Trump now. Why did he have to turn on her? She would have made secret deals with him, too, if he had asked, but he's sexist!
Hillary's message is clear: Don't BLAME ME! (theguardian.com)
Buy this book or you're a misogynist! So what if I charge people to attend book signings?
Clinton tells old time news man Remnick, who sat next to her at a White House dinner 25 years ago, that the media failed voters by focusing coverage on scandals rather than on her words and policies, never mind her actions or her past.
She also blames sexism and how it affected voters as they judged a woman who sought the highest office in the land, forgetting that it was her. She's special.
Lock her up! Lock her up! Hillary for prison!
Voters were too dumb to see that it was her, not a woman. Just ask war criminal and former Sec'y of State Henry Kissinger, Hillary's personal friend and mentor.
Hillary also blames Pres. Obama and wishes that he had broken the rules and campaigned for her and against Don John Trump. He could have at least done it on what was known about Russian involvement.
494 pages, $59.00 + tax
She also blames Kim Jun Un and lays out a plan for diplomatic efforts to address the North Korea nuclear crisis, which she could solve in a moment if given the chance to rule the world.
A resolution is possible, Clinton believes, but she worries that “nobody’s home at the State Department. That's why she's needed to go in there and tell everybody what to do and how to do it. Her reputation for being a Dragon Lady precedes her.
Hmm, maybe she is lying.
There isn’t anybody to really guide a strategic approach to North Korea without former Sec'y of State Hillary Clinton, as opposed to tweeting and speechifying.”
How could I lose if this was rigged for me?! It just doesn't make sense. Was it Pizza-Gate?
Hi, I'm Terry Gross.
Ten months after her surprising loss in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton is back with a new memoir.
In What Happened, Clinton [blames everyone as she] reflects on the tumultuous campaign and her devastating defeat, as well as her experiences as the first woman running for president as a part of a major political party [other than much better candidates like Dr. Jill Stein, MD].
What follows is the transcript of the conversation between Clinton and Fresh Air's Terry Gross, which was recorded at WHYY's studio in Philadelphia.
Hillary is a CAT 5 blowing a lot of hot air.
Gross: Hillary Clinton, welcome to Fresh Air, and thank you for being here in our studio. It is a pleasure to have you here.
Clinton: Thank you so much, Terry, I am delighted to be [pitching my new $59 book. Have you bought one?]
So I want to pick up where we left off [during Clinton's 2014 Fresh Air interview] — and this isn't going in the direction that you think it is, so bear with me. More + AUDIO
Humor
lifts us up, but it also underscores what’s already great.
It connects
us with others and also brings us home to ourselves.
And like everything
meaningful, it’s complex and nuanced: It can be fortifying or
damaging, depending on how we wield it.
But as a tool for survival,
humor is elemental.
On Being explores this idea with a rabbi who started out in
drag, comedians, an NPR host, writers of sci-fi/fantasy, social
commentary, and the TV show Veep.
What is humor? Truth in real life? (French comic artist Emma/theguardian.com)
Host Krista Tippett: If there’s one thing we can
perhaps all agree on in our struggles and in the everyday mundane, it’s
our need for the release and balm of laughter.
Humor lifts us up...This was
the animating idea On Being’s Lily Percy had for a shorter-form
podcast we’ve just launched [called COOL, "Creating Our Own Lives"].
This is a glorious taste of the voices
she captured this hour, ranging from a rabbi who started out in drag,
comedians, an NPR host, writers of sci-fi/fantasy, social commentary,
and even the TV show Veep.
Lily Percy: The idea of humor as a tool for survival
is so personal to me, I wanted to start by talking to someone that I
knew and admired, reporter and former NPR Politics Podcast
co-host Sam Sanders.
Sam has a very dry sense of humor. If you follow
him on Twitter, you know that already. But what makes his voice unique is the thoughtfulness and warmth that go hand in hand with his
jokes.
"We cats didn't invent the Internet to share it with this." (P. Byrnes/The New Yorker)
Ms. Percy: You grew up in Texas, and you know what
it’s like to be surrounded by difference. I mean politically,
religiously, socially, culturally -- every kind of difference. And you
also grew up in the church. And I wonder how much those things have
really influenced the way you cover right now and the way you see
things.
Sam Sanders: Yeah, I mean I think that there were
things that I kind of feel affected my worldview. One, I was raised in
the San Antonio, Texas area. San Antonio is a city that is majority
Latino.
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