A Basic Buddhist Meditation Synthesis

Meta-Attention: Of all meditation skills, this is the most important. All it means is being aware of what you’re paying attention to: to what your mind is doing. If you’ve ever started walking or driving somewhere you usually don’t go and realized that you’d spent the last few minutes heading to work or home even though that wasn’t your intention, you’ve experienced what happens when you don’t know where your attention is, or what your mind (and body) are doing. Every time you drift off in thought without realizing you have for a while, you’ve lost your awareness of what your mind is doing.

May I be happy. May I be well. May I be safe. May I be peaceful and at ease.

Link here.

How politics can destroy your soul – confessions of a former Tory candidate

"MPs, ministers, civil servants, special advisers, think tanks, quangos, NGOs, industry groups, unions, MSM, charities, lobbyists, consultancies and more are all the ‘crooked timber’ of humanity.

They need to be accepted. To belong. They are greedy. Angry. Ambitious. Fearful. Vain. Vulnerable. Most of them are utterly enslaved by ego. They want what they don’t have. They don’t want what they do have. They are easily manipulated.

But how? Huge incentive levers. Emotional, financial and moral. We all want power, status, popularity and wealth to some degree. We are all vulnerable to peer pressure. Many are attracted to ideas that promise a better tomorrow. That is why the Labour Party can rely on so many youth activists. Our ability to deceive ourselves knows no bounds."

Link here.

A list of recent high-profile shootings in the United States

The attack is the country’s 22nd mass killing — in which four or more people died, not including the assailant — of 2023, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.

Link here.

Be present

When one lives vitally
In the present moment
Without being pressured
Toward the past or future,
One lives as the present itself.
One actually becomes
The present unfolding.
No other place is so vast and broad…

- Ji Aoi Isshi

Great quote from Richard Rorty

"My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."

Link here.

Conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories flourish when society cannot provide a common narrative that aligns with the everyday experience of most of its citizens.  In the absence of a shared societal narrative, other actors will step in to fill the void.  Their attraction is the promise of revealing of "truth" to those who believe.

There is no such thing as a "free market"

A "free market" presupposes:

1) Consumer choice

2) Complete and accurate information

3) Rational decision-making

Corporations are against the first two and engage in advertising to subvert the third.

Any belief system purporting to know "the truth" . . .

Is wrong and dangerous.  People espousing those belief systems impede the evolutionary potential of mankind.

The Standard Model: Beyond the Atom

Fundamental Particles and Interactions

Original size here.

Quantitative easing is MMT for the wealthy

Corporate tax cuts fund corporate profits with Federal/public debt

Mapped: Every Power Plant in the United States

Every year, the United States generates 4,000 million MWh of electricity from utility-scale sources.

While the majority comes from fossil fuels like natural gas (32.1%) and coal (29.9%), there are also many other minor sources that feed into the grid, ranging from biomass to geothermal.

Link here and here.

This Is Why It's So Hard to Sound Normal When You're Nervous

Anxiety and awkwardness create a lot of mental noise and distraction, which can drain mental resources from other processes, like finding and using the correct words. “If you experience strong emotion, fear, or any negativity-based feeling, it makes it harder to figure out these words,” Tashiro says. Part of the reason is that awkward people engage in bottom-up brain processing, Tashiro says. They tend to see situations as an accumulation of details to absorb. “In top-down processing, a person goes to a party and their first thought is that the tone of the room is positive or neutral. Most people who are bottom-up [in their brain processing] are putting together the pieces and are in a rush to put it together.

Awkward people, who are self-critical and analyze environments for potential threats to their insecurities, are doing more mental work than non-awkward people capable of “joining in the sing-song of the moment,” Tashiro says. “Especially because of speed demands, it’s amazing how many cues [awkward] people are taking in,” he adds. When a person is not able to focus on speech, non-word placeholders, like “ugh” and “um” sneak in, and “Nice to meet you” becomes “Niece to feed you.

Link here.

Britain's best long-distance walks

David Bathurst, author of a new book on Britain's big walks, picks his top 10 hiking trails, from classics like the Pennine Way to less well trodden routes

Link here.

Here's a link to company offering walking holidays.

NUKEMAP

Why was the NUKEMAP created? We live in a world where nuclear weapons issues are on the front pages of our newspapers on a regular basis, yet most people still have a very bad sense of what an exploding nuclear weapon can actually do. Some people think they destroy everything in the world all that once, some people think they are not very different from conventional bombs. The reality is somewhere in between: nuclear weapons can cause immense destruction and huge losses of life, but the effects are still comprehensible on a human scale.

The NUKEMAP is aimed at helping people visualize nuclear weapons on terms they can make sense of — helping them to get a sense of the scale of the bombs. By allowing people to use arbitrarily picked geographical locations, I hope that people will come to understand what a nuclear weapon would do to places they are familiar with, and how the different sizes of nuclear weapons change the results.

There are many different political interpretations one can legitimately take away from such results. There is not intended to be a simple political "message" of the NUKEMAP.

Link here.

Best tacos ever . . . Austin Taco Project

Humorous Charts and Graphs Show What Being an Introvert Is All About

Boy, did this resonate!

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For those of us that are extroverted, the world of introverts feels pretty foreign.  This is partially because we don’t feel the same way that they do, and partially because it is often hard to understand the difference.  Well, it just got a little easier with this great charts and graphs that – while hilarious – are very honest to help the world understand the complex but important world that introverts live in.

For those who are introverted, this is like a gift from heaven.  We can share this with friends who have never understand the “big deal” about the term introvert, so that maybe they’ll understand when you have those days that Humorous Charts and Graphs Show What Being an Introvert Is All Aboutyou don’t always want to talk or hang out.  They’ll see it as a “oh, okay, you’re introverted today” instead of a “you’re rude” thing.  It can make the difference sometimes.  Educate yourself and have a laugh at the same time.

Link here.

Happiness Runs

Happiness is wanting what you have
And not wanting what you don't have.
— Shakyamuni Buddha, 500 B.C.

The three grand essentials of happiness are: something
to do, someone to love, and something to hope for.
— Alexander Chalmers

Happiness runs in a circular motion...
happiness runs, happiness runs.
— Donovan, 1969


Link here.

In the words of former FBI Assistant Director, Thomas Fuentes . . .

“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”

Link here.