In the last 70 years, Israel Palestinian conflict has been one of the most enduring and contentious disputes in the Middle East for decades. Recent events in Gaza, marked by escalating violence and civilian casualties have once again thrust this conflict into the international spotlight.
One of the historical factor was Zionism. A few very brave Jews risked at least their livelihood if not their lives by telling the truth, warning the dangers of Zionism. These men includes Noam Chomsky, Benjamin Freedmen, Alfred Lilienthal, Israel Shabaka, and Norman Finkelstein. Chomsky was an outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals“. Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon‘s list of political opponents. In this program Why Does the U.S. Support Israel, Noam Chomsky traced back into long history of Zionism.
Chomsky said Christian Zionist, long before Jewish Zionist, were very powerful forces among British elites. The Bible said …… that is a big part of western culture, including Britain, USA, Canada and Australia etc. – these are Christian countries where biblical command were take quite literally. President Wilson was a devout Christian, so is President Truman, and one of the high official in Roosevelt administration. Also this is part of colonization, the last phrase of European colonization. These are settler colonial societies, an unusual form of imperialism. Settler Colonial societies is where settler came in, essentially eliminated the native population, also driven by religious principles. Those are the major culture factors.
Chomsky said there are also major geostrategic factors which went back to 1948, there was a split between state departments and Pentagon. The State Department want to help solve refugee problems, whereas Pentagon regard Israel as a offshoot of its military extension. In the 1967 was the time the current relation established when Israel help destroyed secular Arab nationalism. (Notes from Blogger: This is untrue, in the 1967, it was American that saved Israel from Arabs: 1967 war: Six days that changed the Middle East)
In this program of Chomsky speech:USA supported radical Islam. Chomsky said, the radical islam is Saudi Arab. (Note from the blogger: I am not clear about this, sound like Chomsky is self conflicting in his point of view. Is this program truly a speech from Chomsky or it is a fake imitation of sound program made by High Tech AI ? Talking about the danger of AI mind controlling， AI causing confusion and stirring trouble for the mankind, play Frankenstein’s advocate? With Mars square Neptune in the USA chart, and the transit Neptune is also squaring Mars, any of this kind of manifestation is not unlikely, but very unethical!!! This is a violation of the Buddhist teaching of the Precepts of No Lying. People who violate US constitution by abusing of freedom of speech!)
Chomsky said that western media basically take up the position of the government with very little question around the edge.
Another Jewish scholar, Rabbi Dovid Weiss,Talk to Al Jazeera: Zionism has created ‘rivers of blood’ explains why Zionism and Judaism are not necessarily the same thing and why he believes that Israel as a state is not legitimate.
李秉信 先生是台灣屏東人， 臨濟正宗第四十三世法嗣慧圓 ，曹洞正宗第四十九世法嗣騰覺，號圓覺老人， 畢業於台灣新竹清華大學核工-工程與系統科學材料組，清華大學核工-工程與系統科學研究所碩士，美國達特茅斯大學塔克商學院企管研究班，美國南灣中醫大學針灸及東方醫學碩士，加州五系中醫藥大學中醫及針灸博士，現任中華民國僑務委員會僑務諮詢委員，曾任中華民國僑務委員，全美台灣同鄉聯誼會第三十一屆總會會長，全美台灣同鄉聯誼會顧問會總召集人，南加州清華大學校友會會長及理事長，中國國民黨第十七屆全國代表大會黨代表，中美論壇社理事及執筆。現為江味農金剛經講堂金剛經講師，洛杉磯道家學術基金會紫微斗數命理哲學講師，子平八字命理哲學講師，易經心法講師，易經卜筮講師，易經人相學講師，台灣時報洛城藍調論壇撰稿人，國際日報週末下午茶論壇撰稿人，台灣時報及中國日報掬水聞香主編及主筆。洛杉磯華人資訊網 〔信不信由你〕嘉賓，洛杉磯華人資訊網 〔熱門話題大家談〕時事評論員，洛杉磯華人資訊網〔焦點觀察〕時事評論員，世界日報〔 U視頻〕時事評論員，AM 1300 〔尖峯時刻〕時事評論員，著作有〔心想事成〕，〔醫道易以貫之〕。 Master Li Bingxin is adept with Buddhism, Taoism and Chinese Traditional Medicine. He talked in this program about the thousand years of conflicts between Israel and Palestinians, the Biblical stories and the implication for Israel’s belief system. As God’s Chosen people, does Israel withstand to God’s test of higher consciousness or it is still wrestling with God? Like what currently the AI is doing? 李秉信先生谈神的选民的应有精神状态，耶路沙冷作为应许之地。 全世界再掀反犹风潮 以色列的宿命？《信不信由你》2023年11月9日 第215期
Adding in the factor of AI, Armageddon is a high risk with AI stirring distrust and confusions.
.
Famous host Medhi Hasan interviews this week and spoke to Netanyahu’s advisor Mark Regev. Medhi Hasan GRILLS Netanyahu’s Adviser. This episode show the key moments of the interview. Mark Regev said the Gaza health Ministry;s death toll figures shouldn’t be trusted.
Formerly the United States’ ambassador to Israel, assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs, and US special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2013-2014, Martin Indyk has been at the heart of US-Israel relations for several decades. He worked as adviser to US President Bill Clinton and was a member of his negotiating team at the Camp David talks in 2000. In this episode of Head to Head 2016, host Mehdi Hasan challenges Martin Indyk on the US-Israel relationship. Joining with them also was a panel of experts in this issue giving different perspectives. The discussion revealed a set of contexts within which the dilemma has always been a huge challenges for peace settlement.
This other program by The Thinking Muslim is working on elevate the causes of Islam and amplify the voices of Muslim. Israel has finally moved its ground operations into Gaza, and their Western backers have set down their intention to provide diplomatic cover to their settler offshoot and shield it from criticism. Western leaders have had to defend the indefensible as Israel’s punitive and indiscriminate action continues. Calls for a ceasefire have been vetoed at the UN, and the West accepts no liability for the thousands murdered in cold blood. It is truly astonishing to see how liberals on both sides of the Atlantic have confirmed what most of us have known for a long time: that their so-called rules-based international order is set up to cover their brutality. It is not that they kill civilians without any recourse to humanity. It’s that they openly declare their mass murder with knowledge of impunity. The West has given them diplomatic cover to engage in slaughter without red lines. This is truly an age of impunity.
Professor Reuven is an ordained rabbi who teach in a jewish seminary for rabbis and also in a private university in Los Angles. He has a PHD in Arabic and Islamic studies and had lived in Egypt and other parts of the Muslim world as well as in Israel for many years. He is familiar with both traditions and the languages that involved in the traditions. Is Islam Judaism? Mind Blowing Interview With Professor Reuven Fireston. This episode in August 2022 is to spell out what Islam is and how it may have developed in the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century. Arabia, Pre-islamic Arabia and Judaism and Christianity’s influence. This provide a lot of background context of what is going on in the Middle East.
Geopolitical factors also underscore the significance of energy security and the vulnerabilities faced by nations that rely largely on oil. The energy environment is changing as the world shifts to renewable energy sources, and countries need to adjust to these changes.
A few month ago, we talked about the book written by Dane Rudhyar’s 1974 book The Astrology of America’s Destiny, since then few discussion had been cover it. The recent wars and conflicts in different part of the world again challenge an old American belief: These words — “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”, which “reclaimed the beliefs of a relatively small group — of educated men who had been stirred by the ideals formulated by the Humanists and the intellectuals of the Renaissance and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”. I would like to read together with you the Chapter Two: The Roots of American nation.
Every birth has antecedents which conditions its character and define its essential purpose. It has a purpose because it satisfies a need inherent in the time and place of its occurrence. We may think of this need in terms of the desire of the parents for a child who will fill their emotional wants, prolong their existence, perpetuate their sociopolitical and religious beliefs, and contribute to the preservation of the human race. We may also refer this need to an overall planetary process of spiritual-mental development (a religiously inclined person would speak here of “God’s plan”) which requires that a particular type of person should be born in a particular environment to fill a definite place in that vast evolutionary scheme, somewhat as a particular cell fulfills a definite function in the body of a human being.
Relatively speaking, a great personage or genius uniquely fills some need of his time and society; but, any human being can be said to be born in answer to some collective human need. Whether he is actually able to fulfill this need is another matter. He may fail or only partially succeed, but the potentiality inherent in the fact of his birth was there, whether it is actualized or not. It is this “Potentiality” that a birth chart formulates in the astrological code represented by the positions and interactions of the celestial bodies in the cosmic environment of the birth. The birth chart defines the potentiality, but not the degree or the quality of the actuality — that is, of what the person will turn out to be and to achieve.
This applies equally to the birth of a collective person — a national organism. A nation is born at a certain time, in a particular place and under definite telluric, climatic and magnetic conditions in order to contribute in a more or less definite way to the evolution of mankind as a whole. What it is to contribute is essentially a certain quality of humanhood — a special way of meeting the problems involved in existence within the Earth’s biosphere and of responding to the challenges which life in an international and geophysical world constantly brings to a nation and to its leaders in all fields of human activity. We can speak of such a “quality” as the character or temperament of the people participating in the collective activities of the national whole; it is possible, for instance, to characterize the English, American, French, German, Russian, Arab or Indian temperaments.
Such a national character both produces and results from a particular culture. A typical way of life and characteristic institutions are built in order to actualize, consciously in rare cases, but mostly unconsciously and according to “the force of circumstances,” the birth-potential of the nation and to externalize the motives that brought about the formation of the national entity and its emergence from whatever surrounded it and led to its birth. A nation is often formed in a violent or somehow cathartic manner by “colonists” from an older nation who wilfully seek independence from the mother country that through them had sought to extend its field of operation and to export its economy and its culture. In other cases a nation is born when after overcoming a disintegrating society, a number of migrating tribes coalesce into their own sociopolitical organism. This is what happened in Europe during the early Middle Ages as Germanic and Slavic tribes developed into small feudal units which eventually were absorbed by a powerful governmental nucleus giving its characteristic organization to the nascent national entity.
The ideas stated above imply a purposive view of history and of human (and even planetary) evolution. They are not likely to be acceptable to most academic historians of our day. Neither is the concept of cycles of civilization popular in academia, in spite of the extensively documented work of historians like Oswald Spengler (whose major work, The Decline of the West, was written sixty years ago) and Arnold Toynbee (whose A Study of History was written after World War 1). The cyclic concept of the development of civilizations, however, is implied in the astrological approach to history, and the study of great planetary cycles and precessional Ages provides an objective and rational foundation for the belief that civilization — or “societies,” in Toynbee’s use of the term are — much like organisms which are born, develop and disintegrate — according to some kind of structural rhythm.
In this study of the destiny of the American nation we therefore have to deal with two basic factors: on the one hand we should survey the development of the karmic relationship between the new American nation and the nations and cultures of Europe, and particularly England as the official mother country; on the other hand, we should consider the basic reasons and the more external and temporary motives which enabled the people of the Colonies, or at least their leaders, to become I willful and effective protagonists in a vast historical process of transformation of human society which had begun many centuries before the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution set the pace for a spreading sociopolitical revolution. Such a revolution may be only the first phase of a more far-reaching, more deeply rooted, upheaval — a revolution in consciousness.
The “vast historical process of transformation of human society” to which I am referring can be identified with the development of Western civilization, a development which really began around the sixth century B.C. in Greece. It had been heralded by the great and unsuccessful reform of Egypt’s religion by Akh-en-Aton, and by the also relatively unsuccessful revelation which Moses brought to his people: the revelation of a God Who declared Himself to be the very principle of I-am-ness — thus, of individuality in its most absolute sense. The foundation of our Western civilization indeed is the concept of the individual person, along with the assertion that this individual person has an essential “worth and dignity” regardless of its condition and circumstances of birth, and of what it can produce in and for the society into which it is born.
The story of Western civilization is one of attempts to a concept of society allowing, nay encouraging, its members to regard themselves as individuals — individuals who are essentially “free and equal” and as such endowed with inalienable rights in any social conditions. These attempts have been constantly frustrated; they represented a definite challenge to the foundations upon which all societies had previously been built, foundations we can characterize as the expression of the “tribal order.” This tribal order was a manifestation of biological and psychic realities. It was rooted in the deep feeling that the unity of the social grouping — the tribe — was derived from a reality, a more or less mythical Great Ancestor or a god, that was in the past. Everything “sacred” was meant to reproduce a past event, a creative event by gods or a man-woman pair of a quasi-divine origin.
It is this concept of the tribal order — and later on, of a social order based on the different abilities of human beings to produce wares, ideas or acts of service to the expanded community, kingdom or empire — that our Western civilization has tried to supplant, or at least to polarize, The tribal and post-tribal order emphasized production and made human beings almost totally subservient to the requirements of this production. In contrast, the essential character of the democratic order is that it stresses the absolute spiritual character of the individual person. In more recent times our Western society has also stressed the nearly absolute individual rights of its collective persons — thus the concept of “national sovereignty”.
It is evident that these two rights — the right of a community to enforce patterns of productivity for the welfare of all its members, and the right of the individual to become and remain an independent person centered in his truth-of-being and essential spiritual identity — have a polar character. From the point of view of Western civilization, both have to be recognized and kept operative. The basic problem concerns the relative strength and value accorded to each by any particular society, nation or community. Because these two concepts of rights easily become the foundations of two opposite philosophies of life and of social organization — individualism versus collectivism — they constantly generate internal as well as external. conflicts: conflicts within nations, and conflicts between nations which at least theoretically, have opted for a way of life and institutions emphasizing one or the other of these principles. The basic conflict even manifests in two opposite concepts of knowledge and scientific inquiry, atomism versus holism.
Western civilization at all levels has been and is based on this polarization. We see its manifestation in the contrast between the ideals of free enterprise (or laissiee-faire capitalism) and socialism. The two-party system in the United States is a watered-down aspect of this polarization. The essential point is that our civilization is based on conflicts, and that because of this it has proven to be exceedingly dynamic; but this dynamism nevertheless tends to express itself in the form of violence, violence which has become a way of life.
Such a dialectical way of life has been accepted and even justified by our American nation, which inherited it from the European past. America inherited the religious form of violence strongly implied in Puritanism — violence against oneself and one’s biopsychic urges, and violence against dissenters and scapegoats (the burning of witches). It inherited also the conquistadors’ kind of violence, which led to the destruction of Indian tribes and the crude, even if at times heroic, conquest of a vast continent subjected to all kinds of depredation and exploitation for personal gain. America also went one step further than European serfdom by importing thousands of African slaves and allowing as many to die in transit from their native land.
The destruction of Indians, Negro slavery, and finally the wholesale pollution of the land, water and air — plus the psychological pollution accompanying the cult of violence featured by motion pictures, television and a myriad of popular books — have been a heavy price to pay for an amazing, yet chaotic, productivity and for a life of abundance which, welcome as it is, has often turned out-to be morally and biologically self-defeating because of its implications and its uneven repartition. Feverish and ruthless forms of competition, always an inch away from the boundaries between legality and crime — and often ignoring these boundaries — constitute only the shadow of the individualism and the freedom which Western civilization has been meant to uphold. By making an ever more intense productivity possible, science and technology exacerbated and intellectualized man’s instinctual drive for power; power over other human beings as much as over physical nature, power whose great symbol became the dollar.
We can lump the various movements against which the builders of Christian orthodoxy fought under the general term of Gnosticism; but there were many kinds of Gnostics, some linked with the Hermetic movement in Egypt, others with what, at a later period, was set down as the Hebrew Kabballah and no doubt was influenced by the old Chaldeans’ wisdom of Babylon. Still other Gnostic groups sought to prolong the Orphic, Eleusian, neo-Pythagorean and neo-Platonic traditions, and even the teachings of the Buddhist missionaries who, in the time of the great Indian King Asoka, had settled on the shores of the Dead Sea.
The Catholic Church was successful in condensing, appropriating and transforming much of the complex esoteric material that had been poured out by the Gnostic “sects,” center in what it was able to keep of all these highly intellectual ideas and of the great symbols of the ancient Mysteries around the personage of Jesus Christ, considered the one and only Son of God. After a series of councils in which dissident groups were anathematized, the Church triumphed and became the official religion of the disintegrating Roman Empire, then of the slowly settling down Germanic and Slavic tribes. It also absorbed the old Celtic traditions. But this success was never total. Gnostic movements sprang up here and there during the Middle Ages. The Crusades, by bringing French, English and German noblemen in contact with the still flourishing centers of Near Eastern culture and tradition — especially with the Sufi Movement, which had become the esoteric aspect of Islam(4) — spurred the spread of mystical and occult movements. This was especially the case in southern France, where the influence of the Mozarabic culture of Islamic Spain, and of kabbalistic doctrines, had been strongly felt. There the Albigenses flourished along Gnostic lines; and in northern France the Order of the Templars also gained in importance and (unfortunately for its members) in wealth.(5) This led the French monarch to savagely destroy the two movements, with the help of the Pope.
At the same time, and under the influence of similar ancient traditions, the masons who were building the magnificent Gothic cathedrals, under the leadership of architects whose names are mostly lost, incorporated in these cathedrals and their rose windows an immense amount of traditional occult and astrological symbolism. These lodges of “operative” masons were precursors of the lodges of “speculative” Masons which were formed in the early eighteenth century or a little earlier. On June, 24, 1717, a Grand Master, Anthony Sayer, was elected and for the first time given jurisdiction over several Masonic lodges, marking the effective beginning of modern speculative Freemasonry. (It is called “speculative” because it used basic philosophic concepts and symbolic rituals to bring to the intellectual classes of the Western world a free, nondogmatic, nonecclesiastic approach to man, God and the universe.)
A fast-growing network of Masonic lodges became the means whereby the rationalistic and humanistic ideals that for three centuries had been developing in Europe could effectively be propagated. Masonry had reached the American colonies during the seventeenth century, and according to the Encyclopedia of American Facts and Dates (a fascinating mine of information published by T. Y. Crowell Company), in — 1682 one John Skene became the “first Freemason to settle in Burlington, New Jersey. He belonged to the Lodge in Aberdeen, Scotland, and came to the colonies through arrangement with the Earl of Perth, chief ‘proprietor’ of New Jersey and an outstanding Freemason.” Later, in 1730, “Daniel Coxe became the first appointed Grand Master of Masons of the Provinces of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.”
In 1789, less than three months after Washington had been inaugurated, the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille. In the ensuing years Paine urged President Washington to declare America’s support for the country which had been of such great assistance during our revolutionary crisis; but Washington was both afraid to involve the United States in a conflict which might have been detrimental to our early national growth, and repelled by the radicalism of the French revolutionists — a radicalism very foreign to his nature. The President may have been right from a national point of view, but not only did his actions not avoid the War of 1812 with England, but he established an isolationist policy that lasted for a century The sharp disagreement between Paine and Washington symbolized the basic conflict between political-economic realities and the humanistic idealism which has ever been strong in American history. It is also the conflict between two concepts of social organization: one seeking to perpetuate whatever can be saved of Europe’s aristocratic past, and the other founded upon the new vision of society which had emerged from the minds of a few Greek thinkers as well as from Jesus’ teachings — a vision which never has had much chance to be fully implemented. This conflict also took form in the contest between Jefferson and Hamilton.
The practical realities and expediencies of life, especially in a newborn nation, had evidently to be considered, and the stand taken by Hamilton and Washington had value; but developments that occur in infancy do persist in later years, and once a definite quality of social and national living becomes habitual, it becomes extremely difficult to alter it, except perhaps through violent crises which often solve nothing fundamental.
The question that should be asked by anyone accepting a purposive approach to history and human evolution is: To what extent has this collective person, the United States of America, fulfilled its destiny as a new and powerful agent within the cycle of Western civilization?
The answer to this question, I believe, rests upon a grasp of what the Industrial Revolution and our more recent Electronic Revolution have meant. Undoubtedly the development by Western man of new intellectual, faculties made available a tremendous amount of power. But when power is made available, another question immediately arises: To what use will it be put?
In a very real sense the answer was already foreshadowed in the first cargo of Negro slaves that reached Virginia. It was further implied in the refusal by delegates of Southern states to accept the provision against slavery that Jefferson had included in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. It was reasserted when Benjamin Franklin’s example of friendship to the Indians was negated by nineteenth-century men intent upon the development of a big powerful nation dominated by an individualistic yearning for power and wealth and utterly conditioned by dogmatic ideas concerning the absolute value of their religion and culture. It is true that in the past the building and growth of a nation or empire have never proceeded humanely, but America was to be “the New World” and not merely a new nation. Two basic conceptions of America have always been in conflict: the great new ideal of world Americanism which Walt Whitman extolled, saying: “O America, because you work for the world, I work for you” — and that of a nationalistic United States.
Many people will say that the United States had to be and now more than ever must be a strong united nation to offset the drive for power of other nations embodying social systems opposite to what I have described as the great and so often frustrated ideal of our Western civilization. But how can we effectively fight for principles and values which we uphold in beautiful phrases while in so many ways betraying them in actions and in a general quality of living and behaving?
What we are facing today in America is not merely a political crisis, but a crisis in collective consciousness. We have to reassess the fundamental meaning of what our Western civilization has brought to mankind and what the meaning and destiny of America essentially are now. We have to try, first of all, to clearly understand, the present world, which we have been largely responsible for transforming through our industrial and managerial skills, and the example of which we eagerly export.
Talleyrand once said that politics is the art of the possible; but so is civilization. What is possible today? Economic or political theories are not inclusive enough to provide a truly satisfying answer. An individual of course has his intuition, or whatever is back of his consciousness as a guiding power, to show him the way. But when we deal with vast collective and global issues, the real answer lies in the universe itself and in its majestic rhythms that, no man or nation can deviate or alter. We can ask of the universe that surrounds us: What time is it for mankind according to the clock of planetary destiny? What time is it for America?
A brief study of some of the larger cycles which define this global “time” should give us a background for a more detailed analysis and interpretation
As we observe the huge social inequality, the disparages of social split in America and more and more so in China, it seems to me that any mentioning of sharing resources/wealth redistribution would triggers fear of authoritarian of socialism or communism, as the western mind hold the individual right/liberty to such lofty height of happiness and freedom, which was further over emphasized by Ann Ryan’s objectivism in the last half century, I suspect the idea of dualism had played a huge part in such mentality, causing a self-feeding of larger than life ego grandeur and selfishness.
The Eastern mind (or Eastern Traditional Philosophy) is centered on the Tao or Divinity. It is Dinvine that give that provision (生死有命，富贵在天），no matter how wealthy you are, it is Dinvine’s provision through you. If you share with others, as taught in the 《了凡四训〉，Divine will bestow you more as it use you more as a conduit, otherwise, your merit account （福报）is limited, and when it is used out, you will start to fall. So be very careful with your merit account for selfish usage, especially in those unwholesom deeds. 天命谓之性，率性谓之道，修道谓之教。 淨空法師：如何得到福報？ 佛教你三個修大福報的方法。什么都是有因果的， 福报也不例外。福報用盡，災禍必來！出現這3個徵兆，就是佛菩薩在提醒：你的福報即將耗盡【佛心福樂】 It is all about the cause(conditions) and effects in work.
Dualism is a deeply entrenched view point in the western mindset. It is closely associated with the thought of René Descartes (1641), which holds that the mind is a nonphysical—and therefore, non-spatial—substance. Descartes clearly identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the brain as the seat of intelligence. As such Descartes is often called The Father of Dualism, due to his proposing the theory of substance dualism, or Cartesian dualism. Dualism is a theory which entails the belief that the mind and the body are two completely separate substances. René Descartes is also often credited with being the “Father of Modern Philosophy.” This title is justified due both to his break with the traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy prevalent at his time and to his development and promotion of the new, mechanistic sciences.
Dualism can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, and also to the early Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy. Plato first formulated his famous Theory of Forms, distinct and immaterial substances of which the objects and other phenomena that we perceive in the world are nothing more than mere shadows.
Platonic Dualism: Splitting the Body and Soul. Plato offers the first, oldest argument that one’s physical body and soul are separate entities and that one lives on after the other has died. Dualism holds that reality or existence is divided into two parts. These two parts are often identified as the body and the soul. To dualists, the soul is a real substance that exists independent from the body. Socrates, Plato, and Augustine were all dualists who believed the soul to be immortal.
Nietzsche’s statement, “Man, in his highest, finest powers, is all nature and carries nature’s uncanny dual nature in himself” attempts to deal with the duality of humankind. His viewpoint had influence the mindset of the west for the last century: Within the natural casing of humanity lies the capability for great triumph and, in turn, great degradation.
Belief in the possibility of the soul’s existence separately from the body suffices to make one a dualist, but Aristotle rejects that belief for at least most types of soul. If Aristotle is committed to dualism, he must be committed to a weaker version of it which admits that the soul cannot exist apart from the body.
The Differences Between Plato’s And Descartes’ Views On The Concept Of God is that Descartes believes that his God is omnipotent, and Plato does not give that characteristic to any of his Deities, because he believed that Gods should not have the ability to commit bad actions as nothing that is purely good can be harmful, and ‘nothing that isn’t harmful can cause harm’.
In a more recent paper, A Defense of Dualism, John Foster hold the view that the mind and its contents are radically nonphysical, that is, that they are neither themselves physical, nor the logical product of anything physical, nor, except causally or nomologically, dependent on anything physical.
So what does Buddha teaches us about Nondualism? Read the article Nondualism in Mahayana Buddhism would give you a much clearer sense.
As it is depicted in the Movie The Matrix, we are living in a web of illusions. There are two types of reality, one is the state of ultimate truth as experiences by Buddha that described in Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra. Another type is secular truth for us standard human being, we should call a spade a spade. In a era of so much confusion, disorientation and drug abuses, speaking truthfully, frankly, and directly about a topic, even to the point of bluntness or rudeness, even if the subject is coarse, impolite or unpleasant, is the only way of keeping our sanity. Yes, John 8:32 says: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” In a similar manner Buddha taught his disciples to vividly visualize the interior of a human body, with blood, coarse intestines etc, etc as a way to counter lust, or go to the graveyard to do meditation to get into your senses of the impermanence nature of life.
Contrary to what talk show host George Noory claimed that “Monumental Myths , is a veritable buffet for so-call conspiracy theorists”, when certain themes of phenomenon keep on repeating itself, you find so-called “conspiracy theory” turned out in time to be reality, and the so-called “conspiracy theorists ” are actually conspiracy analysts, who are the courageous heroic whistleblower. These “conspiracy theorists” turned out are the ones that called out the Emperor is naked!
Monumental Myths of the Modern Medical Mafia and Mainstream Media and the Multitude of Lying Liars That Manufactured Them Paperback – November 5, 2013 mentioned above is truly a eye opener. The author Ty Bollinger, wrote at the conclusion of the book, “George Orwell couldn’t have been more accurate when he said, ‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’ It reminds me of an old proverb: ‘It’s hard to accept the truth when the lies were exactly what you wanted to hear.’
Ty Bollinger continues, ” I told my wife that this book was going to be the one that got me killed, so if you hear about me committing “suicide” by shooting myself in the head twice (like Investigative journalist Gary Webb purportedly did) or committing “suicide” by beating and torturing myself like Officer Terry Yeakey (Oklahoma City Policeman) allegedly did, or committing ‘suicide’ by shooting myself in the head and then wiping off the fingerprints after I’m dead (like deputy White House counsel during the first six months of the Clinton administration Vince Foster allegedly did) … don’t believe it. If I die in suspicious circumstances, then you can rest assured that ‘they’ got to me. Honestly, I’m not worried about it in the least. God is sovereignly controlling all things and I’m his kid, so He’s watching out for me”.
“God gives us the power of reason ‘for a reason,’ to discover truth. By definition, monumental myths are not true. They are contrary to reality. They turn truth on its head. they point fingers the wrong way. They’re pretexts for militarism, wars, mass killing and destruction, sickness, occupations, domestic repression, and other extremist national security state measures.
Hopefully, this book has helped you understand and appreciate why I said in the introduction that most monumental myths are not really as much of a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ as they are a ‘furtive foothill of foul-smelling feces wrapped in a fairytale inside a fable of fabrications and falsehoods.’ I hope that this book has inspired you to think for yourself, so that when the next false flag occurs (yes, there will be more false flags), you will not ‘blindly believe’ everything that the bimbo bobble-head bleached blonde on television tells you.”
” …. Since the invention of television, untold billions of people have been relying on a ‘television anchor’ to ‘explain the pictures.’ And even if the official explanations make no plausible sense, most folks believe them because ‘they’ told us so, and we all know that ‘they’ would never lie. As a result, scores of people, like lemmings, following one another right off the proverbial cliff. It is time to end the insanity. And this doesn’t just apply to television. it also applies to the ‘anchors’ in the ‘health’ care (which some folks refer to as ‘sickness perpetuation’) industry. ‘Well, Mr. Smith,’ the M.D. says, as he pins an X-ray to the wall. ‘See this thing?Right here? This lump? We’ll need to start chemo immediately, we’ll follow up with several rounds of radiation, and then, just in case, we might want to remove a large chunk of your brain. Then, as a preventative measure, we may need to remove an eye. If you find yourself in this position, say NO!!!!”
子曰：“非礼勿视，非礼勿听，非礼勿言，非礼勿动“。本来三界唯心，万法唯识。（指十方三世一切有漏无漏法，皆因八识心王而有而显，八识心王复依第八识及无明而现于三界，无明业种及上烦恼随眠复由各自第八识所持而藉缘变现色身及世界山河，唯依第八识心而有，依第八识心而现，以第八识为根本。 心者：总有八识，唯第八识如来藏恒常坚住不坏，自凡夫位乃至成佛，皆是此识。） 但是如果我们的修行境界还没办法到达那样的高度，那么就要 不符合礼不看，不符合礼不听，不符合礼不说，不符合礼不做； 要符合礼的看，要符合礼的听，要符合礼的说，要符合礼的做。Confucious taught his students do not watch, listen, speak or do anything that does not ahere to the ethical standard. We have to be very vigilant in adhere to the rules. This requires constant introspection and self-reflection. And be alert the sway of the mind. I have to admit this is very hard to achieve in an environment bombard with all the information explosions. The power that be intentionally want to create many disinformation to confuse people, as they are afraid to the correct information that expose their not-so-decent intentions and abusing of power.
This vow indicate to us the importance of culture and environment in influence our mind, body and spirit. That was why Amituofo had worked very hard to create a western paradise for advanced being to further cultivateboosting their practices. So Amituofo and Confucious teach us the same thing about interaction with media.《四种清净明诲》这是修出轮回的基础，是戒律中最高的“摄心为戒”。淫心、杀心、盗心、妄心，都是无量诸佛共同宣说的内容，是放之四海而皆准的恒定准则。 These practices is to help you depart from the four type of attachments. 所谓由戒生定，由定发慧，是为三无漏学。
Grown up in China Fujian Province where there was a general deep culture influence of Chan Buddhism and Confuciounism, I could not understand the widespread corruption and decline of moral standard in America, until I read the reseach paper Eclipse of Rent-Sharing: The Effects of Managers’ Business Education on Wages and the Labor Share in the US and Denmark by Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Alex Xi He (University of Maryland), and Daniel le Maire (University of Copenhagen). Fundamentally, the business degree including MBA education, which posts a huge number of college enrollment and tuition income, has plague the nation with a selfish mind and rent seeking greed, the silent destruction to the world is more violent than that of the neclear weapons.
The elites’ ethic debasement ranges from political arena to business, diplomatic circle to military group, from CEOs to school education, the decay from toxics of the mind is beyond words to describe. The research paper (Eclipse of Rent-Sharing mentioned above) provides evidence from the US and Denmark that managers with a business degree (“business managers”) reduce their employees’wages. Within five years of the appointment of a business manager, wages decline by 6% and the labor share by 5 percentage points in the US, and by 3% and 3 percentage points in Denmark. Firms appointing business managers are not on differential trends and do not enjoy higher output, investment, or employment growth thereafter. Using manager retirements and deaths and an IV strategy based on the diffusion of the practice of appointing business managers within industry, region and size quartile cells, we provide additional evidence that these are causal effects. We establish that the proximate cause of these (relative) wage effects are changes in rent-sharing practices following the appointment of business managers. Exploiting exogenous export demand shocks, we show that non-business managers share profits with their workers, whereas business managers do not. But consistent with our first set of results, these business managers show no greater ability to increase sales or profits in response to exporting opportunities. Finally, we use the influence of role models on college major choice to instrument for the decision to enroll in a business degree in Denmark and show that our estimates correspond to causal effects of practices and values acquired in business education – rather than the differential selection into business education of individuals unlikely to share rents with workers.
Confuciounism is the totall opposition of the Mercantilism. 子曰：“无欲速，无见小利。欲速，则不达；见小利，则大事不成”。为什么不要只关注利益？孟子跟梁惠王讲了一个故事，深有启发。不与民争利；欲望是无止境的，民众得到再多的利益，也是永远不会满足。 只有让大家不要关心利益，而是关心仁义才能得到长治久安。 这里的仁义就是利己和利他。 如果整个国家的人都是自私自利，只有每一个人都能关心他人，整个国家才能得到蓬勃发展。 孟子的思想就是集体主义精神.
於是有讀者和我分享了一篇論文（參見《Eclipse of rent-sharing: The effects of managers business education》），針對美國和丹麥商業主管接受MBA教育後的實際表現做了詳細統計分析，發現他們不但不增加產品銷量，連對利潤都沒有絲毫貢獻，唯一可以測量到的差異，在於他們大幅改變了薪資結構：削減底層而圖利高層。論文作者進一步確定，支付這些薪資的資金來自公司舊有的生意傳承，和他們的“管理”毫無關係。總結來説，資本主義體制是圖利大資本的設計，而商學院教育在其中所扮演的角色，在於通過誘惑鼓勵經理階級參與分贓，來為掠奪勞工生產價值做普及和掩飾；這些MBA別説對國家社會，就是對公司和商場也是毫無正面價值的毒藥，有興趣深究的讀者可以參考聯想的案例。
The Chinese has a proverb, 天有好生之德，meaning Divine has the virtue of provision. Human’s responsiblity lies in living in harmoney with Heaven and Earth and have a congruency in coexistance everything else in nature, abiding by the great Tao (道）of Divine Principle, as all are the reflection of the diversity of cosmic love.
Like the rivers eventually returning to the ocean, individually we may be on differnt stage of development, different cycle of spiritual evolution, differnt path, but ultimately we are all on the same journey returning back to universal consciousness. In that sense we are one and the same.
As such we all have right to have access to basic necessity and human diginity: like clean air, unpolluted water, basic living condition like healthy food, a roof over your head to stay, and free education from K-12 and basic medical care provision. This is my understanding of the “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”. It is injustice for America to control the world’s food supply (more on that by Professor Michael Hudson later of this blog). It is unjustice for a handful of elites to have 90% of the resources of the society while so many live in the street and plagued by drug abused untreated without clean water and food. Because every mental disorder, every drug addicted posts a further debasement/environmental cost of the whole society.
Of course, the popullation growing put a high pressure on the resources. So how to consolidate ways and means to live within budget is the challenge. GDP as a measure of national productivity which is often accompanied by tremendous waste, resources misallocation and huge disparity in distribution, is not a proper index to cover the basics for all. In this aspect we have a lot to learn from Indegenious people for living in community and sharing resources. We may need to have part of society to revive agriculture for organic food, vegetables and medical herbs in paralle to the industrialized plants and office employment. Organic plants grow without chemicals and non genetically modified organis food takes up more labor and produce less quantities. But the food will reduce many modern disease and help boost immunue system for the society, and thus reduce medical cost.
Government has a responsiblity to enforce and implement norms, customers and proper order for a functional society. Government also has the responsiblity to organize and help provide the public good mentioned above. Our time is prevalent with corruption. Different branches of the govenment spend a lot of time fighting on small details rather than work coherently towards a mission to serve the people. Not to mention abusing of the power and blantly violence. We should be ashame of our sin, but we should not ashame of our repenance. While God has patience with us, the Noah’s Ark is building, the flood will come. From the Dust we come, and to the Dust we shall return. There is judgement days awaiting. Day by day what we think, what we do, and what we talk forms files/records for the final judgement when we depart this world.
The government official has accountability not only towards their constituents, but also towards Divine’s order, Tao’s way, or whatever you name it in that sense. Structurelly, U.S government do not have systematic way to select officials who are both decent and competent for the job. Chinese has a idiom, 人贵有自知之明，which is similar to Know Thyself, know the strength and weakness of your ability and capacity to take up a certain position to serve. The lack of a human resoures function in the govenrment open the door to unfair treatment and unjustified favorism. Another function structurely lacking is the system of Independent Commission Against Corruption to monitor government officals’ conduct and finance， which should be different from the current FBI or CIA.
Professor Michael Hudson had degree in Germanic pilology and History and Linguistics. Most of his studies, apart from that, were at Roosevelt University and Depaul in Music. At early days, It never occurred to him to even tread an economics book. It was just like another world. He was into history of culture, art, music and literature. That explains a lot about his later use of economic history in terms of understanding economic theories. The use of deficit payment in terms of being an imperial state was the one of the three pillars that are very central to his thesis.
Michael Hudson explained Why the US has a unique place in the history of imperialism? Prof. Hudson speaks on the nature of US financial dominance, the role of World Bank in developing countries, USA’s ability to run a huge balance of payment deficit, changes in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, the problems of US economy with post-industrialization, and the role of neoclassical economics in all this.
Question: Contrary to the understanding of most people that world Bank as a very benevolent institution committed to developing the third world, ………….Actually the World Bank was directly complicit in restructuring the new imperial world order and particularly its effect on the deveoping world was terrible. It suppressed any radical restructuring of the agraian order.
Hudson: the World Bank was always been an arm of the U.S military and very often its president has been the former Defense Department head or a military head. The World Bank, upon its founding, had one basic purpose to make sure that other countries did not produce their own food. The idea was to hav eother countries produce goods, food, and services that United States didn’t produce, such as tropical climate crops or planation crops….. the state department fought any reform….. on the ground tat anywhere that there was a land reform, there was an anti-American policy.
The one heaviest element of America’s balance of payments was its food exports. It realized that here was a way to strangle the global south, Latin America, Africa, and what was called the Third world, by being able to cut off its food supply and starve it if it would decide to pursue any policy that the United States did not approve of. It wanted to use food like it’s using oil today against Europe by blocking access to Russian oil and by invading the Near East to seize the oil of Iraq, seize the oil of Syria, control the pipeliness in Afghanistan, and destroy the oil production in Libya. Agriulture was what the fight was all about in the 1950s and 60s and early 70s. I (Hudson) wrote my master’s dissertation on the World Bank missions to countries. All of the missions said you have to promote domestic agriculture, domestic family farming and food production. The World Bank wrote into its articles of agreement that it couldn’t do this. The World Bank only made foreign currency loans, maily in dollars for projects that would earn foreign exchange.
Well, if a country like India or Pakistan feeds itself, this doesn’t earn foreign exchange. Feeding yourself did not even qualify for loans from the World Bank. Only if you make exporet crops or produce things that America wants to import, low-wage manufacturers will do it. I (Hudson) published an article along those lines in a periodical, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Catholic Church became one of my major supporters in the years leading up to the publication of Super Imperialism in 1972 because their liberation theorlogy came out in favor of land reform. The United States said if there’s land reform, then the American corporations can’t control the bananas in Guatemala and Ecuador.
One of the first regime changes right after iran was the coup d’etat that the CIA overthrew the government in Guatemala, where people wanted to feed themselves. And the United Fruit Company said if they feed themselves, then where are we going to grow our bananas? The World Bank from the beginning was even more destructive of the Global South and Third World countries than the IMF because it just blocked any attempt to be self-sufficient. And it loaded down these countries with debt. The projects that the World Bnak funded with U.S. dollars and U.S. engineering companies was raods to the export facilities, ports. The World Bank funded electricity that would serve the American companies there, lower the cost of producing exports for firms that Americans bought control of. So if the American company would buy into a country, the World Bank wold suppoly all of the external costs so that the American company would not have to build roads, would not have to build port facilities. None of this actually helped the Third World countries develop at that time. But they did help the American investment and it was always looked at that. The idea was to make American investment in foreign countries more profitable, prevent other countries from becoming independent in food. In the 1950s, America tried to starve China by blocking all grain exports to China. Canada broke the blockade and enabled China, fortunately, to obtain its grain elsewhere. but the United States wanted to use that tyhreat against countries.
That’s now coming to be very beneficial for the American military today. The Charles Schwab and the World Economic Foundation says the world population ahs to drop by 20%, wha tthey mean is not the white population, they mean the global south population. The United States is trying to prevent Russian grain, as you’ve seen in Ukraine, from getting to the global south countries. only letting Russian grain be exported to help Europe and the united States, not to anyone outside of NATO. you have the result of warped one-sided development of the World Bank is funded, resulting in today’s crisis throughout the global south countries. While these countries are running a balance of trade deficit for their food and energy, they also are still paying the World Bank and foreign bondholders in dollars, where the dollar is going way up against their own currency. You’re seeing a massive kind of default that the United States is trying to use as a godsend to force countries into dependence on another military agency, the Internatiuonal Monetary Fund, whic will only mkae them loans to be able to import the food and the energy they need, if they agree U.S to control their infrastructure and complete the privatization takeovers that have been taking place for the last 30 years. The world Bank is run essentially with a neoliberal economic philosophy, strongly by the pentagon, by the military and the state Deartment interests, as a tool of American economic neo-colonialism….. the World Bank was structurally in favor of unbanizing projects and that led to a massive unstable immigration to the cities.
Origins of debt: Michael Hudson reveals how financial oligarchies in Greece & Rome shaped our world. Many people think debt and the payment of interest, the fact that all debtors have to pay their debts. It is assumed that the rules of Finance are Universal, they’ve always been this way, and there is no alternative. The political message of modern economic history is there is no alternative, and there has never been one. Therefore there isn’t any alternative in the future, all debt have to be paid.
The common theme that made Western Civilization different from everything that went before was the fact that they didn’t cancel the debts. In the ancient time, the near Eastern counties had a common practice, which was a Jewish religion called the Jubilee or the cancellations of debts in 50th year, that was put at the very center of Mosaic law in Leviticus Chapter 25. Jewish laws were taken word for word from the Babylonian practice. You cancel a personal debts (not the commercial debts) that were due, liberate the bond servants that were pledged and you restore lands to people who lost them. That way you prevented an oligarchy from developing and taking over all of te land. what happend was a very bad climate from 1200 BC -800 BC. Population couldn’t make it on the land that they lived on.
Western Civilization let an oligarchy take over, and instead of the basic rule that debts have to be written down to the ability to pay, Rome introduced a pro-creditor law. All the debts have to be paid no matter what the social consequences are. No matter how much Society is injured by families losing their land, and the land being concentrated, the money being concentrated, wealth being concentrated, political power being concentrated in the hands of a creditor oligarchy. Debt is a debt and it has to be paid. Roman law is still the philosophy of modern law, the whole modern legal system is still based on that of Greece and Roman.
Debt in Discussion with Michael Hudson. Professor Hudson said people are trying to compliment him by saying he is an economist, but he said he has not spoken with economists for the last 50 years. Since 1972, he decided call himself a futurist or historian. Professor Hudson said he is NOT an economist who have to get rich by making other people poor, and get richer off them, basically that is why they give Nobel prizes for. We need a name for a new discipline, Professor Hudson said he does not know what to call it, he was at Harvard University’s anthropology department for 25 years doing the five colloqui on ancient economics and det cancellation. Professor Hudson said he could say he is an anthropologist, but then he remember the joke in the 1960 that when governmet suspicious of somebody as a government agent, the jobk is: is he FBI or is he an anthropologist, meaning CIA? that is why Professor Hudson said we need an other terms for Economist.
Professor Hudson worked outside of mainstream, David Graeber was drawn to Michael Hudson’s work, because of its brilliance, and the kind of brilliance that often has to come from outside of mainstream. Hudson was not appease any aprticular trend or try to game the Tanger track game, instead were researching trends that he had been studying for decades. And so he had conviction of the soundness of his arguments. People in the mainstream are unable to see just how complicit they are in the problems that they are supposed to be solving, but are in fact creating through means of capital accumulation.
Based on his decades of work in the area, Professor Hudson take the view that the debts can’t be paid. He argues for debt cancellation. Especially now because of the sanctions against Russia on World War III. Obviously rising energy and food prices forces Global South countries to make a choice, either they pay the U.S dollar debts and impose austerity or they don’t pay the debts and put their own growth first. That is the big political fight, Professor Hudson is working with several European economists to write a book on debt cancellation, and how this can be done from the members of the Shanghai cooperation organizaiton, how the rest of the world can become independent from the dollarized debt.
Professor Hudson had been teaching history of economic thought, and he was using Marx’s theories of surplus value, and that infuriated the marxists, they say you are not a member of any marxist group, only their member can teach Marx……. Hudson’s main concept is focusing on economic rent is unearned income. and extend the concept of economic grant to interest Financial charges to the rentier economy and almost all the work he had been publishing in the last two years have been were not in industrial capitalism, were in a retrogression of Finance capitalism, in a way is rolling back all of the historical tasks of industrial capitalism to free economies from the legacy of fedalism – to free it from Land Run Monoploy rent and privatized banking to go back to the same kind of rentier economy that you ad under the landlors except now rent is for paying interest and landlords paying in the 19th century has been taken over by bankers and the financial sector. Professor Hudson want to integrate his analysis of finance and debt with the concept of economic rent which is basically what the banks in the financial sector Finance. They finance real estate and capital gains, actual asset price gains for Real Estate housing, they finance the oil and gas natural resource mining industries and finance technology monopolies. Hudson wanted to revive classical economics. Hudson said he can say he is a n economist as long as he say he is a classical economist.
Basically that is Adam Smith in the whole 19th century emphasis on Price and Value Theory where price is the excess of market price of economic rent, in excess of the cost value….That was what people like Henry George had no concept of. Paul Krugman was a reader for a book yale University press wanted Hudson to publish. Krugman thought Hudson is a follower of Henry George. Well, Henry Georgedidn’t have a Price and Value Theory. He was against the big government without realizing that the only way you’re ever going to be a le to tax the renties, the only way you’re going to make money and credit a public utility instead of a priate monoply is to have a government strong enough to check the oligarchy and that’s what the classic antiquity is about.That’s really the prolem of western civilizations.
So what David was doing in his book and where he and Hudson both were at the time he was riting it, and afterwards, was to say, well, if you look at anthropology, look at all the damage that does, look through ages how societies cope with debt, either of us made the logical jump to say this is the path that western civiliztion went that become a unique totally new detour around the 8th century BC and ever since we’re still living in the aftermath of Rome’s oligarchy, and the creditor-oriented law that developed.
So Hudson really developed his own ideas quite further when he began to write the book on Antiquity and just to a higher level of abstraction, and then when he began to look at the Crusades and find how awful they were, he forgotten what evil the Vatican had been in the early centuries – the second, third, fourth, fifth all the way down to last week. He forgot the utter evil of the popes and trying to be emperors, and it was a Crusades that brought in the Inquisiition. When Hudson looked at the Wikipedia, people think Crusades were to free holy land Jerusalem from Muslim, that wasn’t it! …. The crusade were against Christians!
The Crusades was to kill the French catheters who said that the rich people are evil. No, that is our constituency to fight the German kings. He said we want to be independent of the Popes. And we don’t want the churches to send all their money to Rome to fund the wars against people that don’t want Roman leadership. The Crusades were to destroy Constantinople and destroy Eastern Orthodox, the real Christianity that had survived. The Crusades were to introduce them, we dont know what call it, but it was not Christianity. That was why the Pope has not invited Hudson to help him write a new encyclical on this topic. But that really is what is needed. Hudson realized that it was The Crusades that led to the Pope saying, well, we’ve got to finance the wars so that we can fight Germany, France, Spain, Sicily,… that doesn’t accept our dictatorship. In order to fund these wars we need Bank to support, so let’s get rid of all the church’s anti-usery law, let’s say credit is good, not bad. Like the animal farm with Orwell.
All of a sudden a total inversion of everything that Christianity western Christianity was about. You get the key to this inversion as Hudson at the end of the Collapse of Antiquity with the Lord’s Praye saying: “Forget our sin, in other word, Lord. Don’t screw around sexually, instead of forgive us our debts they’ve done.” ….. It is just a travesty of mistranslation that Western Christianity suffered for the last thousand years, all that comes from the Crusades.
It hadn’t occurred to Hudson until he actually began to study Saint Augustine and as Peter Brown, the biographer of St. Augustine at 5th century pointed out: it was really Augustine that founded the spirit of the Inquisition, although it didn’t really come through until the Dominicans. The Dominicans realize the genius of the Pope was you can’t have Christianity unless you’re willing to kill everybody who can read the Bible. You have to prevent it from being translated so people can read it, because if people read the Bible, they are going to realize that we (Dominicans) are the opposite of everythg that Jesus was fighting for.
Yet, Hudson was supported by all of the various Christian groups. They were publishing, sending him across the country at a lecture. So there was a kind of thinking in the late 1960s and early 70s that somehow there was some hope for Christianity. But again that was befor ethe Pope from Hell, the Polish Pope came in, and the German Pope from hell that followed him, before the Catholic church was captured by the Spanish fascists. Hudson hope he haven’t offened anybody.
You can’t not have reindustralization with the labor under pay. you can not reindustralize without reversing this whole philosophy of past industrial society as a class war against labor.
In the last chapter of Hudson’s book, he showed the battle isn’t about Democracy and anti-democracy. The battle is really oligarchy and autocracy. In light of post-1970 world, one of the point Graber makes in the last chapter is that now that we’ve gone off the gold standard, and we’re decoupling ourselves from bullion, and are gong to a more virtual credit oriented kind of economy, in Graber’s mind, it allows for the opportunity of volume, so it doesn’t necessarily guarantee it, but if these historical patterns are accurate, it will at least open up a possibility. Graber said there are two conditions to Democracy. One that you’ve got to have people want to act democratically – basically an assumption that Pluralism is better than one person rule. But he also argues that you’ve got to have a strong government in order to bring about the kind of changes that Democratic change implies. Hudson think the concept of democracy and autocracy today has gone way beyond what it was even five years ago. …….. the value of study classical antiquity is that you realize that Aristotle was very clear that democracy evolves into oligarchy.
What the oligarchy wants to do is prevent any kind of central power strong enough to challenge its control of society. They called in Greece that any reformer wanting to have a strong enough ruler to cancel the debts and redistribute the land was called a tyrant. Because that’s what the tyrants did in 7th and 6th century BC. Well, the tyrants were who introduced democracy to Greece. They were the people who got rid of the mafiosi type leaders and cancelled the debts and redistribute the land. Now all of a sudden Tyant became a bad word, sort of like communist. In Rome, anyone wanting to cancel the debts and redistribute the land like Julius Caesar or Catalan were called seeking kingship. The Roman Kings, according to the Roman historians, cancelled the debts and supported access to the land by the people in the Bible. The Jewish rabbinical class, the Pharisees wanted Rome to Crucify Jesus, they said, well Jesus wants to be king. He want to be the king, the king of the Jews. they knew that for Rome saying somebody wanted to be king, is to do what Jesus said, his mission in life was to do to bring about the debt cacellation of the Jubilee year, and to restore the laws of leviticus against the rabbinical school wanting people to sign the prose pool of Rabbi Hillel where you waived all of the rights under the Jubilee.
The internal econonic dynamics is such that democracy leads to oligarchy, and so democracy is essentially ends up leading to what you have in the United States today. It’s led to finance capitalism overpowering the progressive tendencies of industrial capitalism. So when you have community party led China trying to support policies to raise producivity raise living standards provide a health care, education, transportation, alll the basic public utilities, that is called autocracy. American will say, well, under democracy you have to have a free market, meaning you have to let the American oligarchs buy control of transportation, you have to make America Banks create your money at interest, you can’t have public banking, you can’t have a central bank creating money. You need that to be aprivate monoply. That is democracy. That is what the whole term means today.
The power that being like to put great actors, communicators and media personalities on the public arena to play the role of fake guru. Ronald Reagan played a tricky role in the “Making American Great” trickle down economics. In the 1980s, as the United States struggled financially, Ronald Reagan was ushered in. From trickle down Reagonomics, cut social spending, upped the military budget, and reduced the taxes on the wealthy, union busting to decimating the middle class, infiltration of Christian fundamentalism into American government and more, Ronald Reagan is responsible for many of the shifts that occurred at the end of the 20th century that caused the major inequalities we see in America today. We’ve basically been living under four decades of Reaganism, under both parties. The way Clinton expanded it doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. Watch How Reagan Ruined Everything.
It is also interesting that Dr. Helen Caldicott met with Reagan briefly and later said that Reagan was “diagnosable,” i.e. he was already suffering from Alzheimer’s disease long before he left office. What was the real impact of Reganomics? Here are some of the quotes from audience to the youtube program Miserable and Broke in the US? Blame Reagan.
Comment from audience: this should be a multi-part series covering Ronald Reagan’s Legacy, because this is just covering Reaganomics and doesn’t touch the AIDS crisis or other events tied to his administration. In short we need a part 2 and probably a part 3.
Comment from audience: Don’t forget that Reagan also stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act resulting in almost immediate mergers, acquisitions, leveraged and hostile buy-outs of corporations. Now we have fewer but stronger corporations interfering in our politics, elections and in our lives.
Comment from audience: I remembered what Reagan did to unions and how it impacted American families even to this day. When I was a kid in the 70s, every mother in my neighborhood was able to stay home and take care of their children. One income could support a family of seven in a blue-collar neighborhood. Today, everyone on my street has to go to work. Families are smaller, and while all of us are highly skilled, we struggle to make ends meet. We have been screwed for so long, most of us don’t even realize that we are being screwed. There should never be such a large wealth gap as there is today.
Comment from audience: Most companies in the 80s that got tax cuts didn’t respond by giving their workers more money, They responded by taking their jobs and businesses overseas.
Comment from audience: He said the homeless camped all around D.C. were there because they “preferred” to live outside. NO! They were there because he had axed the budgets of all the mental health hospitals and VA treatment for mentally ill service people. He said that “community-based programs” would care for these folks…only, those programs didn’t exist. And let us never forget that his and Nancy’s answer to the exploding drug addiction problem was “Just Say No.”
Comment from audience: When Reagan refused to take AIDS seriously because it was the “Gay Virus” almost 90% of severe Hemophiliacs also contracted AIDS, such as my self, during this time due to lax testing protocols. We were essentially given $100,000 and told to fuck off forever. Fast Forward to today, I’m 42 years old, still an AIDS survivor and incapable of working due to my health conditions. My ‘relief fund’ is entirely exhausted as they never expected any of us to survive this long. I was 2 years old when I was infected with HIV, and when I was 5 I also contracted Hepatitis C due to the same lack of real testing protocols. The Reagan administration completely destroyed my life and I’ll never be able to forgive the Republican party for these crimes against humanity.
With a mindset of social darwinism, America has misused its power in its way for dominance. Just the 20th century alone, U.S.A has been through World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror (which encompasses the War in Afghanistan and Iraq War). Isbel Hickety (1903-1980) is a New Age Sages. She taught meditation and was Director of Boston School of Astrology. Her guidance, classes, retreats and books lifted countless souls. In her book Astrology: a Cosmic Science , she had discussed the atomic bomb to Japan in 1945, and she said something to the effect that United States will suffer from the karmic retribution for that brutal act. Isabel Hickey had some very famous quotes.
Karmic retribution is a powerful force that can’t be ignored. It’s a reminder that our actions have consequences and that we should always strive to do the right thing. Whether it’s in the form of instant retribution or delayed retribution, it’s important to remember that our actions have consequences. This article gave some very powerful examples. Used metaphor of water, How Does Karmic Retribution Exact Itself? describe the complexity of kamic retribution. And if we do not change our behavior of injustice, we will suffer much more.
The Book by Professor Michael Hudson The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point describes how the dynamics of interest-bearing debt led to the rise of rentier oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome, causing economic polarization, widespread austerity, revolts, wars and ultimately the collapse of Rome into serfdom and feudalism. That collapse bequeathed to subsequent Western civilization a pro-creditor legal philosophy that has led to today’s creditor oligarchies. In telling this story, The Collapse of Antiquity reveals the eerie parallels between the collapsing Roman world and today’s debt-burdened Western economies. In the program Origins of debt: Michael Hudson reveals how financial oligarchies in Greece & Rome shaped our world, Professor gave you more detail account of his thoughts.
In ...and forgive them their debts, renowned economist Michael Hudson – one of the few who could see the 2008 financial crisis coming – takes us on an epic journey through the economies of ancient civilizations and reveals their relevance for us today. For the past 40 years, in conjunction with Harvard’s Peabody Museum, he and his colleagues have documented how interest-bearing debt was invented in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, and then disseminated to the ancient world. What the Bronze Age rulers understood was that avoiding economic instability required regular royal debt cancellations. Professor Hudson documents dozens of these these royal edicts and traces the archeological record and history of debt, and how societies have dealt with (or failed to deal with) the proliferation of debts that cannot be paid – and their consequences. In the pages of …and forgive them their debts, readers will discover how debt played a central role in shaping ancient societies, and how it continues to shape our world – often destructively.
The Big Question: What happens when debts cannot be paid? Will there be a writedown in favor of debtors (as is routinely done for large corporations), or will creditors be allowed to foreclose (as is done to personal debtors and mortgagees), leading to the creditors’ political takeover of the economy’s assets – and ultimately the government itself? Historically, the remedy of record was the royal Clean Slate proclamation, or biblical Jubilee Year of debt forgiveness.
The Real Message of Jesus: Jesus’s first sermon announced that he had come to proclaim a Clean Slate debt cancellation (the Jubilee Year), as was first described in the Bible (Leviticus 25), and had been used in Babylonia since Hammurabi’s dynasty. This message – more than any other religious claim – is what threatened his enemies, and is why he was put to death. This interpretation has been all but expunged from our contemporary understanding of the phrase, “…and forgive them their debts,” in The Lord’s Prayer. It has been changed to “…and forgive them their trespasses (or sins),” depending on the particular Christian tradition that influenced the translation from the Greek opheilēma/opheiletēs (debts/debtors).
Contrary to the message of Jesus, also found in the Old Testament of the Bible and in other ancient texts, debt repayment has become sanctified and mystified as a way of moralizing claims on borrowers, allowing creditor elites and oligarchs the leverage to take over societies and privatize personal and public assets – especially in hard times. Historically, no monarchy or government has survived takeover by creditor elites and oligarchs (viz: Rome). Perhaps most striking is that – according to a nearly complete consensus of Assyriologists and biblical scholars – the Bible is preoccupied with debt forgiveness more than with sin.
In a time of increasing economic and political polarization, and a global economy deeper in debt than at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, …and forgive them their debts documents what individuals, governments and societies can learn from the ancient past for restoring economic and social stability today.
The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism Paperback – May 2, 2022, explains why the U.S. and other Western economies have lost their former momentum: A narrow rentier class has gained control and become the new central planner, using its power to drain income from increasingly indebted and high-cost labor and industry. The American disease of de-industrialization has resulted from the costs of industrial production being inflated by the economic rents extracted by this class under the system of financialized monopoly capitalism that now prevails throughout the West.
The book explains why the U.S.-China conflict cannot simply be regarded as market competition between two industrial rivals. It is a broader conflict between different political economic systems – not only between capitalism and socialism as such, but between the logic of an industrial economy and that of a financialized rentier economy increasingly dependent on foreign subsidy and exploitation as its own domestic economy shrivels. Professor Hudson endeavors to revive classical political economy in order to reverse the neoclassical counter-revolution.
Buried in the metaphysical study, I have not been watch any movies for the last several years. However a recent commend about Movie Oppenhenimer from Palki Sharma of Vantage Media in India caught my attention. Sex scenes from the film Oppenheimer have triggered a backlash in India for using the Bhagavad Gita as a prop. The government has reportedly pulled up the censor board for approving the controversial scene. The India Informaion and Broadcasting Minister has good reason to feel upset about certain scene of the Movie. Why did the makers use the Hindu Holy Scripture in a scene involving nudity? Certain scene fits the PG-13 description. Palki Sharma is the Managing Editor and First post of Vantage Media. By breaking stereotypes, Vantage Media aims to challenge conventional wisdom and present an alternative view on global affairs, defying the norm and opening the door to new perspectives. This bring up the question that why would American glammorize profanity and put the nuikty in limelight and thus toxicate the minds of millions of people all over the world? Why would Hollywood insult ancient wisdom of holly scripture to condemn ourself? What does this speak of level of sanity on the mind of Hollywood and American culture as a whole?
Buddhism teaches that arrogance is inherent in our tendency to perceive our own value based on comparisons with others. It is a reflection of a very shallow and limited view of oneself. Impermanence is looking at reality from the point of view of time. No self is looking at reality from the point of view of space. They are two sides of reality. No self is a manifestation of impermanence and impermanence is a manifestation of no self. If things are impermanent they are without a separate self. If things are without a separate self, it means that they are impermanent. Impermanence means being transformed at every moment. This is reality. And since there is nothing unchanging, how can there be a permanent self, a separate self? When we say “self” we mean something that is always itself, unchanging day after day. But nothing is like that. Our body is impermanent, our emotions are impermanent, and our perceptions are impermanent. Our anger, our sadness, our love, our hatred and our consciousness are also impermanent.
Nothing can exist by itself alone. It has to depend on every other thing. That is called inter-being. We think of our body as our self or belonging to our self. We think of our body as me or mine. But if you look deeply, you see that your body is also the body of your ancestors, of your parents, of your children, and of their children. So it is not a “me”; it is not a “mine.” Your body is full of everything else—limitless non-body elements—except one thing: a separate existence. Looking Deeply With the Three Dharma Seals: Impermanence, No-self, and Nirvana. The three seals are the marks to check against for any doctrines if they are in line with fundamental Buddhism teaching. In the Buddhist cosmology, the earth is not the only world, and human are not the only living beings. The 31 realms of existence are divided into three ‘worlds’ (loka); and existence in every realm is temporary. Rebirths take place in any realms according to one’s karma, wholesome and unwholesome actions. To free oneself from the cycle of birth and death, the Buddha recommends the Noble Eightfold Path. Another very intuitive diagrammatic representationof the Buddhist Universe JPG file can be download from here.
Again American’s exceptionalism tend to blindfold ourselves in cloudy head. In our current culture, talk about Jesus calls for courage. And it also calls for love and grace. The arrogrance of Christianity with its limit certainly deluded America in numerous religion/idilogious wars. The most offending thing in Christianity is the idea that Jesus is the only way to heaven. Unfortunately, American can easily come across as arrogant about the truth of Jesus, such as Evangelicals ask themselves “what would Jesus do?” and then do the opposite. According to Leeja Miller, a lawyer and researcher, How The Religious Right Ruined Everything breaked down all the ways the Religious Right and how white Christian nationalism poses an existential threat to our democracy. The religious right, the moral majority, evangelicals, and white Christian nationalists have, throughout the history of the United States, used religion to further personal greed, absolve themselves of guilt for heinous crimes, and force their morals and world view on an entire population, despite being neither particularly moral, nor the majority.
But we can squelch that impression if we listen to the other person’s views. Not arguing, just listening. We earn the right to be heard, and when our turn comes to share our views, we can couch the gospel in a lot of love and grace.
A similar case was the scandla over Netflix Cleopatra show. Egyptians are very upset about the Cleopatra documentary for black washing Cleopatra, falsifying Egyptian history and incorrectly representing Egyptians. The entire country of Egypt was pissed off. An Egyptian lawyer is even suing Netflix over this. They’re just trying to rewrite history. What is problematic is trying to meddle facts or editing real life history. This Egyptian young lady communicate well why they feel so offended. And since she went online to speak about Egyptian culture appropriation, she was heavily attacked by mutiple insults and offense of racism and religious dogmatism. In support of her righteousness, the audience offered three quotes:
Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Be able to defend your arguments in a rational way. Otherwise, all you have is an opinion. — Marilyn vos Savant
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. — Gustave Flaubert
According to Candace owens youtube program Netflix Blackwashed Cleopatra, and Egypt Is Mad, black wash is happening a lot now. Used to be white washing is takes something the belons to black people, or it is about back people and you give it to white for treat. Now black washing is essential the same thing where you are blackifying everything. The Disney movie of Little Mermaid is another case in point.
Candace owen also mentioned the book The Rules, which put feminism into proper perspective, helpping women to have healthy relationship in the dating age. The five books series was published first in 1995, and now 2023 got an update with supplement. One of the author Sherrie Schneider was interviewed, she said, ” If you want to be happy in marriage, think about your husband’s needs like what does he want, meet with his mother more often. Too many women this days are all about themselves, they are me, me, me. ” Men are biologically programmed to like extreme sports like bunge jumping, courting was one of those games they don’t want to be deprived of the exicitment. Candace was also very fiery outspoken about Black Life Matter Movement. People this day are deluded and lied to by big medias.
Similarly, Hollywood has a very narrow view of Arabs. Why Hollywood misrepresents Muslim communities. The U.S. Department of Defense has a lot of influence over Hollywood — and that’s led to some damaging portrayals of Arab and Muslim communities. The audience feedback with the folk story “Frogs in the well” , where the elder frogs tells to the younger how cruel the outside world is while they enjoys the outside world… Another audience who was an malaysian said he agree on the point of view. “Pakistan been touted as terrorist country and that is what the media been telling all this while. One day, I got an opportunity to visit Pakistan due to work trip (it was an easy process because I’m a malaysian) . It’s an heaven on earth. Pakistan is surely an heaven on earth. The people all kind and angels. They treat me well. I went to islamabad and Karachi. Omg, surely I will visit again. Humanity exist in Islam and I observed it Pakistan. If anyone got chance to visit Pakistan, without hesitate, please visit Pakistan. Waiting for covid to end.” Accoring to this clip, another movie the Dictator is an insult to the Islam. Take the Netflix show Elite as an example, the way they portrayed a hijabi, Nadia, is disgusting and causes Islamophobia to spread even more. So the stereotyping is a reflection of our narrowness. Americans have much to learn about our Arab sisters and brothers.
All over the world, cultures reflect different dimension of human history and experience. Together the multi-culture combined into totality of human realm. There are many Near Death Experience research and reports PROOF OF THE AFTERLIFE. The Incredible REINCARNATION STORY of Sunny Ray | The Indian Rebirth Story that shocked the World | just a couple of the Reincarnation reveallations.
Buddhism told us that we have been rebirth millions and millions of times since eons. According to Buddhist teaching, all beings cycle continually through one lifetime after another before developing to the point where they can reach enlightenment. The Buddha was no different, although the stories of his past lives, known as the According to Buddhist teaching, all beings cycle continually through one lifetime after another before developing to the point where they can reach enlightenment. The Buddha was no different, although the stories of his past lives, known as the Jataka tales, indicate a pretty remarkable being. In the 547 story-poems about his past lives that are collected in the Pali canon, which includes some of the earliest Buddhist scriptures we know, the Buddha takes birth as various kinds of humans (ranging from murderers to sages to a princess), myriad animals (elephants, deer, monkeys, birds—you name it), and numerous deities and metaphysical beings (a tree sprite and the lord of gods, for starters). The tales are chock-full of wily criminals, evil seducers, and magnanimous kings.
The Jataka tales go back to the 3rd century B.C. Because of the limited literacy of the times, travelling storytellers known as Jataka bhanakas were selected and given the task of reaching the stories to every corner of the land and beyond. The Jataka Tales carried strong and inspiring messages of kindness, compassion, generosity, non-violence, self-sacrifice, charity and the need to abjure greed. The Jataka stories explain the concepts of karma and rebirth, and teach moral values. Though the Jataka Tales are more than two thousand years old, they carry a message for us even today. This is the reason for their popularity, especially as stories for children. Their interesting stories and moral teachings are a positive source of inspiration for the young people of today JATAKA TALES OF BUDDHA –1, JATAKA TALES 2A, JATAKA TALES 2B.
As U.S.A is having its Pluto is returning, and the transit Saturn is retrograde and trine U.S.A Juipter and Venus – The Law of Responsibility is remind us to rethink about our value system and turning inward for self introspetion on our social political and economic structure that are dyfunctional. Any downfall start first from spiritual decay. Now when I rethink about the The Five Precepts of Buddhism and relate to some of the governmental issues, I want to bring it to public attention.
Christian regards stealing not just as a crime, but it’s a sin. Here’s what the Bible says about stealing: “Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with hishands what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need” (Ephesians 4:28 NKJV).
Buddhism is also not about intellectual pursuit, it is actual about putting the wisdom into our speach, action, behavior and ethic code of everyday life. The second precept, Asteya,in practice implies to “not steal”, “not cheat”, nor unethically manipulate other’s property or others for one’s own gain. Asteya as virtue demands not only that one “not steal”, but that one should not encourage cheating through speech or writing, or want to cheat even in one’s thinking.
Now when we take the guideline and relates it to U.S. dollar, there is questions about American’s consience. Backed by the U.S government sovereity power, Federal Reserve print money out of thin air to lend it to U.S Treasury to spend on government budget and issue bonds. Just as former Federal Reserve Chairman of near twenty years, Greenspan said, “No Chance of Default, US Can Print Money“. U.S maybe able to temporary avoid nominal default because of our military dominance, but U.S.A can not avoid spiritual decay. Some have compared the spiritual life to walking upstream; if you are not fighting to move forward, then you are, by default, going backwards. There is a continual inertia drawing us and others towards spiritual decay. Law of Karma says, whatever thoughts or energy you put out, you get back — good or bad. In order to get what you want, you have to embody and be worthy of those things. It’s the concept of what you reap, you sow. Here are the 12 laws of Karma everyone should know about.
Almost half of U.S debt will mature within the next two years. Considering the interest rate is much higher than last 10 years, as government borrow new debt to pay off the old debt, their interest expense is going to go through the roof.
As a reserve currency, when Federal Reserve print money, it dilute the purchasing power of the dollars in circulation in rest of the world. By complicit to the Federal Reserve operation, U.S government is in default of its morality. The U.S government does not obtain the proval of the governments in the rest of the world, and it is stealing, by definition above. Such operation has caused U.S.A intense crashes with the rest of the world. In addition, we lose any moral high ground to be the leader of the world, and if we do not make correction to the wrong doing, U.S.A will inevitable crumble under our own weight – how prone we are to fall back into sin and compromise. Maybe we should work with the global community to come up with a commonly accept currency to be more fair to everyone.
American has always been adament about loyalty to its Constitution. The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides that “[n]o person shall be … deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” With all the connectivity of the era of Globalization, shouldn’t this rule apply in our national conduct?
Publicize tax-efficient contributions to good causes, such contributions may be a relatively small price to pay compared with changing fundamental operational practices. Leeja Miller reported from Take back your financial freedom today.
When responsibility for public goods and services rests not with our democratic institutions but with wealthy private individuals. it is a system know as “philanthrocapitalism” which relies on charity of billionaires to support public projects, instead of just regulating and taxing those billionaires to begin with. According to a recent article in The guardian, Philanthropy serves to legitimize capitalism, as well as to extend it further and further into all domains of social cultural and political activity.” The piece goes on to say, “Exploitative labor practices or corporate malpractice are swept under the carpet as companies publicize tax-efficient contributions to good causes. Billionaires and multi-millionaires love to pat themselves on the back for their charitable giving. But what if we just taxed the rich and regulated their business practices instead of letting them get away with theft and atrocity while still getting to pad their reputation by giving away the millions of dollars they stole from their laborers? Even more irony is lawyers and law school are heavily invovled in these philanthropy scheme that is ruining America. The rapidly growing empirical literature on international tax avoidance by multinational corporations is even caught the attention of IMF
A 2021 document Addressing Tax System Failings That Favor Billionaires and Corporations. It revealed bombshell reports from ProPublica have confirmed what tax experts have long known and what many Americans have long suspected: Many of the country’s wealthiest people pay little or no tax because the U.S. system preferences income from wealth and offers the wealthy and corporations avenues to avoid tax that are not available to working people.1 These fundamental flaws in the tax code existed many years before the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) took things from bad to worse by giving massive new tax cuts to the highest-income Americans and largest corporations.2 These flaws have helped fuel the dramatic increase in inequality, leading to a less dynamic and less just economy.
A massive trove of tax information obtained by ProPublica, covering thousands of America’s wealthiest individuals, reveals what’s inside the billionaires’ bag of tricks for minimizing their personal tax bills — sometimes to nothing. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. In June 2021, The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax These IRS Files hold the secrets Inside the Tax Records of the .001% and the absurdity of U.S government. A Novermber 2021 story from IRS records reveal how Gov. Jim Justice, Gov. Jared Polis, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and other wealthy political figures slashed their taxes using strategies unavailable to most of their constituents.
In the book The Hidden Wealth of Nations, Zucman offers an inventive and sophisticated approach to quantifying how big the problem is, how tax havens work and are organized, and how we can begin to approach a solution. His research reveals that tax havens are a quickly growing danger to the world economy. In the past five years, the amount of wealth in tax havens has increased over 25%—there has never been as much money held offshore as there is today. This hidden wealth accounts for at least $7.6 trillion, equivalent to 8% of the global financial assets of households. Fighting the notion that any attempts to vanquish tax havens are futile, since some countries will always offer more advantageous tax rates than others, as well the counter-argument that since the financial crisis tax havens have disappeared, Zucman shows how both sides are actually very wrong. In The Hidden Wealth of Nations he offers an ambitious agenda for reform, focused on ways in which countries can change the incentives of tax havens. Only by first understanding the enormity of the secret wealth can we begin to estimate the kind of actions that would force tax havens to give up their practices.
U.S had got used to use economic sanction to any government in the rest of the world that does not cooperate with its idiology. But we have to ask ourself where does that power come from? Is it mere force of bully? If we are violate the universal principle, we lose the divine precondition specified in the George Washington’s Thanks Giving Proclamation : “the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor.” Besides, how can American take so granted that our idiology is better than rest of the world? What gives us the right to enforce rules on others without setting an example ourself? Is not that double standard? Pope Francis laments when ‘ideology replaces faith’ in segment of U.S. Catholics.
Even if we have valid reason to require other countries to cooperate with our rule, weaponize U.S dollar should not be the means to the end. And are should be many other avenues to deploy rather than using economic mean which is a new form of colonization. For example the sanction of nuclear weapon, US government documents admit that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on the verge of surrendering. The nuclear attack was the first strike in Washington’s Cold War on the Soviet Union. Ben Norton reviews the historical record. One of the audience commented: “My Dad served in the Far East during WWII. He didn’t come home until May 1946. He was adamant that the US used the Atom Bomb because they were terrified of Russia overrunning Japan. The Red Army crossed Manchuria in 24 hours reaching the coast from which they could launch an invasion. All his friends and my uncles all agreed with my Dad.”
According to the article from Bible.org, What are signs of spiritual decay in our lives or others and how should we confront it?Misuse of Finances Is a Sign of Spiritual Decay. We must develop a righteous anger that leads us to confront sin.A Decrease in Time Given to Worship Is a Sign of Spiritual Decay. We must be people who truly desire to please God. Certainly, we see this decay in our churches and Christian communities. Why are so many of our churches in disarray? Statistics say that around 75% of youth fall away from the faith in college and never return.4 Seventeen hundred pastors leave the ministry every month in America.5 We have churches making all kinds of moral compromises as they disregard Scripture. We are seeing a very rapid spiritual decay happening in the church. When we compromise with the world, not only does it affect us, but it affects those close to us, like our children. They will grow up speaking and thinking like the world, instead of speaking and thinking like God.
We must be tenacious in seeking to practice a holy life and also fighting for holiness in our national standard as well as that of churches. Maybe behind the government/federal reserve’s compromise, we need to start with raising the conscience from the kindergarden and all the way of schools as well as that of the church community.
For reference, here is a article research on Christian, Buddhism and Muslim, the three religious are all against Usury. 星云大师：佛教对经济的看法 谈到佛教不但重视一时的财富，更重视永久的财富；不但重视现世的财富，更重视来生的财富。非法所得的财富，例如：窃取他物、违法贪污、抵赖债物、吞没寄存、欺罔共财、因便侵占、藉势茍得、经营非法、诈骗投机、赌博淫业、放高利贷等，则为佛教所不许。 … 佛教不但重视狭义的金钱财富，尤其重视广义之财，例如：佛法、信仰、 … 星云法师著述《当代问题座谈纪实》讨论“放高利贷”是否合乎“正业”？佛教过去办有类似今日的“当铺”，只向百姓收取非常微薄的利息，甚至完全不取分厘，以帮助贫苦人士经济上的周转运用，譬如北魏的僧祇粟、南北朝的寺库、唐朝三阶教的无尽藏院，都是佛教为了便民利国的金融事业。只是佛教创典当制度，不同于今日一般当铺的高利放贷，佛教是本着来之于十方，用之于十方的精神，把社会的净财做一个集中，然后再一次发挥其整体的力量，回馈于社会，属于服务大众的慈善事业，而且具有繁荣经济的功能。譬如前面提到的开酒家、赌场、卖钓鱼器具、卖打猎的猎枪，或者是算命、卜卦、看相等都是邪命的经济生活。佛教不提倡看风水、择日期，《佛遗教经》曾指示佛教徒不应去仰观星宿、推算命运，因为这些都不是合乎因缘法则正命的经济生活，都是佛法所不允许的。
Couple months ago, two of the most influential economic thought leaders of our time came together for a fireside chat: Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, and Raghuram Rajan, the Chicago economic professor. They explored key themes from Wolf’s latest book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2023). They also reflected on some of today’s most pressing issues—including the rise of inequality, economic turmoil, and political instability—and examined the role of capitalism, democracy, markets, and civil society in shaping a more secure and prosperous future for all.
Richard Wolff on how Europe DESTROYED itself in America’s War on China. He said, for the last 25-30 years, major American Multinational Corporation had a wonderful profitable time trading with and investing in China. China was the capitalist dream, it offered capitalists low wage, disciplined, educated labor and the fastest growing market in the world. Corporations went head over heels making enormous amount of profits. All the major coporations in America want peace, deal and mutual finances between U.S and China. They don’t give a flying what about Taiwan or anything else. They don’t talk about Uyghurs or HongKong. The Chinese policies when provoked by the neocons pretened it didn’t happen. Becuase the Chinese government want what the American business community wants which is the profitable commerce. On the other hand, there is the political ideological sometimes captured neocons or neoconservatives who are out there being the Vanguard to try to stop what is happening which is the decline of USA relative to the rise of China. So they want the tariffs, they want the trade Wars. They got it half way with Trump, and a quarter of the way with Obama, and they got another halfway with Biden. But ti is always a quarter and a half becuase this conflict. Now the militar industrial complex has a particular position, they don’t want war, but they want perpetual trouble so that they can get the funding for defense. Put all these today, the rest of the world acutely aware of U.S.A’s decline and contraditory policy. Chinese state capitalism has sent western capitalist world in shock.
Ullambana Festival (盂兰盆节） is August 30 this year. Ullambana, or the Ghost Festival, is the most popular celebrated Buddhist festival in various countries. The Ullambana Festival, observed in the 7th month of the Lunar calendar, holds deep significance in various East Asian cultures as an important occasion. It aims to bring liberation to all sentient beings, including our ancestors and departed loved ones. Throughout this period, we actively partake in acts of merit by making extensive offerings to the Triple Gem and engaging in mass prayer recitations. At the heart of Ullambana lies the mission of spreading the universal compassion of Buddha and amassing merit for the betterment of both the living and the departed, drawing strength from the power of the Triple Gems.
On this day, it is believed that the “Gates of the Hell” are opened and the dead souls visit their loved ones. During this festival, offerings are made to the spirits of the dead and to the hungry ghosts in order to bring good fortune and luck. The word ‘Ullambana’ is a transliteration of the Sanskrit word meaning ‘deliverance from suffering’, and specifically refers to the salvation that is granted to tormented souls in hell. On this day, Buddhists offer prayers both to their departed forefathers and to their living parents and elders. It is the day for helping those beings who are suffering so that they can obtain liberation.
The Ullambana Festival is also known as the “Buddha’s Joyful Day”; on this day, monks finish their practices and emerge from their retreats. In ancient times, the emperor and his people would make offerings and donations to the great monks and congratulate them on their enlightenment. It is also on this day that the underworld king visits the human world to pay respect to the Buddha and celebrate the enlightenment of the great monks, and sentient beings in hell are allowed to travel to the living world to celebrate the joyous occasion.
Grandmaster JinBodhi once said, “Only when we accumulate merits on this auspicious Buddha’s Joyful Day and think of our parents and ancestors who gave birth to us, wishing for them to receive the blessings and guidance of the Buddha and bodhisattvas can we find peace of mind. If our loved ones are suffering, not to mention in hell or prison, can our hearts be at ease? For example, if your child is living abroad and not doing well, you will not be calm, and you may feel your heart beating irregularly. Why is that? When your child is experiencing afflictions, anger, fear, or being bullied, your heart aches. This is why some people often experience rapid heartbeats. Here, we’re only talking about our loved ones who are still alive; if our parents who gave birth to us are suffering in hell, how much impact would it have on us?”
According to the Story of the Ullambana Sutra, the most important practice on this day is actually to make offerings to the Sangha (ordained monks and nuns), as taught by Shakyamuni Buddha in ‘Ullambana Sutra’. The Venerable Mahamaudgalyayana, one of the great disciples of the Buddha, was foremost in spiritual powers. When he obtained the six spiritual penetrations, he searched for his departed mother. He discovered that she had fallen into the hells. Although the Venerable Maudgalyayana had great spiritual powers, he could not save his mother. Thereupon he knelt before his teacher, the Buddha, and beseeched the World Honored One to help.
The Buddha explained that his mother was suffering in the hells because of her deep offenses and so the Venerable Maudgalyayana must rely on the united strength of the Sangha of the ten directions in order to save his mother. The Buddha said, “On the fifteenth day of the seventh month you should make an offering of the finest vegetarian foods and drinks and offer it to the Buddha and the Sangha. By making this offering, the Way-virtue of the high Sanghans of the ten directions will then be able to save your mother.”
The Venerable Mahamaudgalyayana did as the Buddha had instructed. Due to the strength of the greatly virtuous ones of the ten directions, his mother was reborn in the heavens. Since then, the Ullambana festival has become an annual Buddhist celebration and a day upon which anyone can rescue his or her parents of seven lives past.
There are many ways to celebrate Ullambana Festival. City of Ten Thousand Buddhas Live 萬佛聖城直播 has an online events you can follow. For people who do not have access to temple resources, another popular ways is to Recite Kstigarbha Sutra. The Boddhisattva who is most famous for his filial piety and his great vow- “If the Hell is not empty, I shall not attain Buddhahood”.
In the context of Mahayana Buddhism, Kstigarbha Sutra is the most fundamental sutra when it comes to classical teaching of Mahayana. In all sects of Buddhism, we start learning Buddhism by learning the original teaching of the Buddha Shakyamuni, the 4 Noble Truths, follow by the 8-fold path. From the 8th fold path, it developed into the 37 meritorious avenues. All those are the fundamentals of Shakyamuni’s teaching. After having studied those subjects mentioned, Mahayana Buddhism takes a step further. It progresses further with a higher form of ideology. Generally speaking, the Theravada ancestors are known as the Vibhajyavadin and their ideology is analytical reductionism. As opposed to that ideology is the new school called the Sarvastivadin and their ideology is anabolic holism. A better term for analytical reductionism is reductive analysis. A better term for anabolic holism is holistic synthesis. Curriculum at www.AWE-edu.com has offered in-depth Buddhism program, here is a seminar on Ksitigarbha Sutra Commentary Part 1, Part 2.
Regarding the Earth Store Bodhisattva, you can follow the reciting online from this youtube program: Sutra of the Past Vows of Earth Store Bodhisattva. I also had wrote about a whole series of Learning Ksitigarbha Sutra from Buddhist Mastersa while ago.
When all Buddhas throughout time and space achieve enlightenment, their names have the power of all their past cultivation and prayers. That is why reciting their names have so much power to purify our defilements and eons of negative karma. This is also reiterated in The Kstigarbha Sutra Chapter 9. 鬼月最易積陰德！地藏聖誕散功德，這樣做才能接得住！地藏經讀誦2小時18分版本包括回向文，由台湾地藏学会编制非常好。或者拜地藏忏，or practice repentance with Kstigarbha Boddhasattva。
