AUGUSTA, Maine – Tickborne illnesses are rising sharply across Maine and much of the United States, with state health officials reporting record numbers of Lyme disease, anaplasmosis and babesiosis cases as residents face increasing exposure close to home.
The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported 4,257 cases of Lyme disease in 2025, up from 3,218 cases in 2024. The increase represents a jump of more than 1,000 reported cases, or approximately 32 percent, in a single year.
Other tickborne illnesses also reached record levels in Maine last year. Reported cases of anaplasmosis rose from 1,284 in 2024 to 1,604 in 2025, an increase of nearly 25 percent. Babesiosis cases increased from 309 to 352, a rise of nearly 14 percent.
Corporate HR has metastasized into an $88 billion tapeworm — Peter St Onge
Predation Wearing the Mask of Civilization
Institutions reveal their true character in two places: in the gray zones where rules are incomplete, ambiguous, or unenforceable, and even more nakedly in broad daylight when those in authority openly violate the clearest rules without shame. In a living civilization, power is restrained by the office it occupies. In a hollowed-out order, the office becomes a license to violate. Authority exists not to uphold rules but to prove exemption from them. That is why law, bureaucracy, and policing expose the moral substrate of a society with merciless clarity.
India is the textbook case.
Even in the most civilized nations, courts decide only the tiniest sliver of human reality. The vast majority of civilization—trust, restraint, honesty, the silent agreements that make daily life possible—exists below the threshold of formal law. Verbal promises and everyday decency were never meant for judges. They rest on an internalized moral order.
In India, that moral order does not exist.
Indian bureaucracy does not administer rules. It prices access, punishes resistance, and extracts submission. Reformers claimed bureaucrats were corrupt only because their salaries were too low. This was a rationalization. When government salaries rose dramatically, the scale of bribes increased accordingly. The higher they climbed, the more entitled they became. Honesty is not a compensation problem. It is a value. A society either supplies that value to its institutions or it does not.
I cannot remember a single visit to an Indian government office that did not entail a demand for a bribe. Citizens grovel, prostrate, genuflect, and abase themselves for the most basic services. The bureaucrat does not merely want money. He wants submission. He wants to feel superior. The bribe is only part of the transaction; humiliation is the rest.
…Societies do not wake up one morning and choose virtue. They reach it—if they ever do—through centuries of accumulated wisdom and painful internalization of restraint. Or they never reach it at all.
__________
Important to understand that India is not the world’s only society like this. ABN
Julian Lage – Emily (Johnny Mandel Cover)
_________
No info on water temperatures provided. ~206 degrees into a room temp French press works well for me. ABN
The World Is A Stage: Trump Survives…Again? | Ep 343
How Greek imagery and art influenced Buddhism and Asian art
When Buddhism entered China from the Greco-Buddhist world of Gandhara, it carried Hellenistic wind-god imagery: the wild-haired airborne form associated with Boreas and the great wind bag motif linked to Aeolus.
These Greco-Buddhist forms later passed into Japan through Chinese Buddhism, where they were adapted into the wind god Fūjin. The Gods took new names, but the Hellenic image endured from Greece to Japan.
On Freudianism and the assertion of interpersonal meaning
Freudianism is an extreme example of the assertion of meaning where there is none, or very little.
It is extreme for two reasons: 1) because it is scientifically groundless and 2) because so many people believed it.
Communism, many religious beliefs and practices, fads, styles, ethnic myths, many “historical” misinterpretations, and much more are examples of false meanings that are asserted and believed by large numbers of people.
You could say that pretty much all human culture is a similar stew of strongly asserted falsehoods mixed with some facts.
Freud was an interesting writer and his ideas were and are worth considering, but they should have remained minor points in the history of psychology and never become “meanings” that influenced the entire Western world.
In this respect, Freudianism is an excellent sociological or macro example of what individuals do psychologically, on micro and meso levels with themselves and others.
Humans are extremely prone to append or assert meaning where it does not belong either because there is no “meaning” in that context or because the “meaning” being asserted is incorrect.
Freudianism shows how powerfully and massively wrong we often get meaning and how wrong our analyses of human thought, emotion, and behavior can be.
At the macro level of trends like Freudianism, we can and should have asked for evidence.
At the micro and meso levels of human psychological understanding we can and should ask for evidence or confirmation from the person or persons about whom we are asserting psychological meaning.
If you do this frequently with a trusted partner, you will begin to see that many of the “meanings” you append to that partner and to yourself are false.
False macro meanings like Freudianism can be corrected through science. At the micro or meso levels of the individual, wrong meanings can only be fully corrected through a practice like FIML.
In future we may be better able to understand micro and meso levels of interpersonal meaning through the use of brain scans, but even brain scans need interpretation and will be difficult to use during real-time, interpersonal interactions.
See Micro, meso, and macro levels of human understanding for more on what is meant by these levels.
Men with a history of cannabis use had LESS cognitive decline from early adulthood to late midlife compared to men without a history of cannabis use, large Danish study reports
Abstract
Introduction: Cannabis is by far the most widely used and abused drug listed on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Schedule I, which includes drugs with a high potential for abuse. There is evidence of short-term negative effects of cannabis use on cognition, but only a limited number of studies have explored the association between cannabis use and age-related cognitive decline. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between cannabis use and age-related cognitive decline from early adulthood to late midlife.
Methods: The study population consisted of 5162 men who had participated in Danish follow-up studies on cognitive aging. These studies included scores on the military intelligence test Børge Prien’s Prøve from both the conscription assessment (mean age = 20 years; p1 and p99: 18 and 26 years) and from the follow-up (mean age = 64 years; p1 and p99: 55 and 72 years) as well as extensive data on lifestyle and health from the follow-up questionnaires. The association between cannabis use and age-related cognitive decline was investigated in linear regression models.
Results: Men with a history of cannabis use had less cognitive decline from early adulthood to late midlife compared to men without a history of cannabis use. Among cannabis users, neither age of initiation of cannabis use nor frequent use was significantly associated with a greater age-related cognitive decline.
Discussion and conclusions: In a sample of more than 5000 men followed for a mean of 44 years, we found no significant harmful effects of cannabis use on age-related cognitive decline.
Cannabis Use and Age-Related Changes in Cognitive Function From Early Adulthood to Late Midlife in 5162 Danish Men
Trump’s secret NATO ultimatum sparks panic as US ‘pulls jets, bombers and EVERY submarine from Europe’
Donald Trump is set to slash the arsenal of US fighter jets, warships and submarines reserved for NATO allies should a military crisis erupt in Europe.
A military envoy sent by Pete Hegseth blindsided senior NATO officials in a classified Brussels briefing late last week, revealing US firepower committed to defending Europe will significantly decline, Der Spiegel and Reuters reported.
The US fighter jet commitment to NATO is to be slashed by a third, while the Navy will withdraw destroyers from the alliance’s pool.
The cuts will gut the so-called ‘NATO Force Model,’ the alliance framework for defending Europe drawn up in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As the US prepares to eliminate its supply of submarines to NATO, it leaves open a massive military risk for the continent if its not able to fill the gap left behind by Trump.
US submarines are among NATO’s most critical assets in Europe because they are capable of monitoring Russia’s nuclear-armed underwater vessels.
Critical infrastructure for the west, such as undersea cables and oil pipelines, are safeguarded by the submarines.
__________
This appears to be part of a major geopolitical reorganization. This sends a strong signal to Russia that USA is not going to continue NATO’s never-ending encroachment on Russia’s borders. And that means Russia and USA can now form real-world economic ties, beneficial to both nations. ABN
CFR WAVES WHITE FLAG: Trump Just Killed Britain’s 100-Year American Project
POV: You Try Watching ERIKA KIRK News But Candace Owens Keeps Noticing TPUSA
__________
Dark parody and dark humor. Crude and callous and 100% appropriate for our time. Viewer discretion not advised. ABN
Divine powers and demonic entities are the same
Tragedy as man, 75, dies after being sucker-punched by DoorDash driver he asked to drive more slowly through his leafy neighborhood
…What happened was captured on a neighbor’s security camera.
Shaw said her father stepped from his porch in an attempt to get the vehicle’s license plate number when Turner suddenly stopped his car and got out.
The two men exchanged words for several moments before the driver is alleged to have suddenly attacked.
‘Then out of nowhere, the guy punches my father on the side of the head,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t even try to defend himself. I don’t think he saw it coming.’
Poole crashed to the pavement after being hit, suffering a devastating head injury.
‘He fell, and the guy got back in his car and drove away,’ Shaw said. ‘He just left him lying in the road.’
Police later said Turner admitted to striking Poole and leaving the scene.
__________
Not long ago, a sucker-punch was the sign of a coward and a knave, a worthless POS. A 40 year-old man sucker punching a 74 year-old man (he died aged 75), by standards some of us still hold, is a savage crime, as bad as it gets. That’s murder with a deadly weapon. Seems the interwebs have accustomed people to seeing sucker punches, and hearing some fool go oooh, oooh in approval off camera. There may be no way to go back to the old days when men valued honor, but that single punch given without warning and killing the victim is the fundamental reason sucker-punches have traditionally always been anathema among civilized men. Same goes for men hitting women. I saw a vid just last night of some woman slapping and punching her husband in the head many times. At some point, he belted her hard several times in the head, knocking her senseless to the ground. Guys, it’s a rare woman who can throw a punch that even hurts, and this woman was not that type. She was angry, she was being stupid, but all she did was land a flurry of very weak blows on her much stronger husband. A strong man can kill a woman, or an elderly man, with one punch. That’s why men hitting women—or old men without warning—has also always been looked down on in Western societies. Yes, there are times when a woman can and should be hit by a man, but they are rare and almost never warrant a deadly punch, full-force to her head. The dude in the video landed several hard punches to her head before she crashed into the pavement. Most of the comments on his behavior were approving, a sad sign of our times. ABN
American Buddhist Net 