GenQueue

Sumerian star map from Ninive

When I was in India living close to Tibetan monks and lamas, I was often surprised at the apparently easy-going, laid-back way in which many of them seemed to live their practice. They often responded to my intensity and fervor with the expression kale kalepe TOnang (literally “please go slowly”). Essentially, what they were saying was take it easy, go slowly, and you get there. They seemed highly amused by the attitude I had towards my practice, as though they could not understand why I was so driven. They did not have the underlying emotional disposition in their psyches that said they were not good enough. This does not mean they did not practice and work hard. It meant that they let things be and did not have the neurotic intensity of striving many of us suffer from in the West.

Rob Preece.

The human virus is attacking the lungs, it wont be long now. Vote Jill Stein to at least try to save the earth.

September 12, 2001

Fifteen years have passed since the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001. And while most of us remember with unsettling clarity where we were when we heard that hijacked planes had crashed into the World Trade Center (and later, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field), killing nearly 3,000 people, it might be the next day — September 12, 2001 — that actually marked the beginning of a new era, one in which full-body scans at the airport, color-coded threat levels, slow-burn wars that never really end, and an undercurrent of fear running beneath the mundanity of life became the norm.

Hundreds of Native American protesters temporarily stopped construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Nearly 400 protesters gathered to halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a $3.8-billion system that, if completed, would stretch across North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois — rivaling the length of the rejected Keystone XL Pipeline. So far, 16 members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe have been arrested, including the tribe’s leader, David Archambault II.

On Wednesday, Archambault contacted the White House and met with North Dakota senators to try to get construction halted on the 1,172-mile behemoth. While the pipeline doesn’t cut through any federally reserved indigenous land, it will hurt the tribes in numerous ways.

See, if the War On Drugs was actually about reducing drug crime, the capitalist state could win it in a matter of months. Decriminalise most drugs, legalise and tax the least dangerous drugs, plough the massive policing budgetary savings and tax revenues into treating drug addiction as a disease, and you’d completely undercut the demand which fuels black-market capitalist drug enterprises virtually overnight - and you’d still have a huge slice left over for all the fancy medals to award to ‘reforming’ police chiefs you could wish for.