Catholic nuns who have been looking after dying patients for decades have sued the state of New York over gender laws which could see the carers jailed.
The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne filed a lawsuit against Governor Kathy Hochul on Tuesday opposing a bill that requires facilities to assign rooms by gender identity, not biological sex – something the nuns said clashes with their religion.
Hochul signed the bill into law in November, 2023, which states that long-term care facilities and their staff cannot discriminate against ‘any resident on the basis of a resident’s actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or HIV status.’
The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne claim that the bill forces them to choose between their mission and faith and facing fines, license loss or jail time.
The group takes patients into their care at the 42-bed Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne, New York and ‘provide comfort and nursing care for patients who are poor or suffering from incurable cancer.’
‘We are consecrated religious Sisters and have one mission,’ Mother Marie Edward OP told Fox News. ‘It is to provide comfort and skilled care to persons dying of cancer who cannot afford nursing care.’
How Chlorine Dioxide brought a doctor and young boy back to health.
“What if I told you that people have been needlessly suffering and dying from diseases like cancer, AIDS, Lyme disease and a virtually endless list of viral and bacterial infections?”
So begins The Universal Antidote, a documentary on the untapped healing potential of a substance called chlorine dioxide. Among the illnesses on that opening list, it was the word Lyme that stopped me. I wrote a book on Lyme, a disease which, when advanced, is a devious and unforgiving infection that can destroy lives.
…Dr. M was her own first chlorine dioxide patient, and she bought it like many thousands do in scores of countries worldwide—without a prescription (none is needed) and online. Following the book’s protocol, she gradually increased her dose from a single drop diluted in water to thirty-three drops daily, sipped over the course of the day. After three months, “I felt amazing,” she said. “I felt, like, as good as I’d felt in ten years.” And she still does.
…Dr. M’s own experiment, “on myself,” she said, involved slowly building up her chlorine dioxide dose to avoid unpleasant Herxheimer’s reactions, which occur when the body’s ability to eliminate killed pathogens is overwhelmed.
“I’d read enough to feel confident that a slow, measured ramp-up titrated to my symptoms would not hurt, and could potentially help,” she said. At the same time, “We’re doing things to support detoxing from all the junk that we’re stirring up. And we’re not pushing so hard that they’re just getting too much die-off, like, too much killing at once.” Among these are a binder to help eliminate toxins, Epsom salts, chlorine dioxide baths, and glutathione.
I decided to highlight Lyme disease in this article—at the risk of raising false hope—because Dr. M is not alone. Her journey aligns with testimonials of other Lymepatients, including one who was able to clear herself of an intractable tick-associated infection called bartonella after rounds of other therapies. I fully acknowledge these are anecdotes.
Pfizer toxicologist stands in the German Bundestag and says what everyone knew who didn’t want to look away.
60,000 additional deaths in temporal connection with the COVID-19 vaccination. Not estimated by fringe thinkers, but the result of a pharmaco-epidemiological analysis, presented by an expert who no longer lets himself be fobbed off with the usual “that’s complex” platitudes.
The system was simple:
Emergency authorization without long-term data. Pressure instead of enlightenment. Reports of side effects were collected, but not evaluated. The Paul-Ehrlich-Institut documented, but drew no consequences. The Robert Koch-Institut communicated excess mortality in such a way that the numbers fit. Children, young people, pregnant women – everything without sufficient data basis, without legally binding enlightenment, without those responsible ever being asked if they knew what they were doing.
The legal category is called: prohibited human experiments. Not as a comparison, but as a criminal classification. Whoever pushes a novel active substance without sufficient testing into a population and systematically circumvents the statutory duties of pharmacovigilance has crossed the line that is not crossed even in wartime.
The demand is called: Nuremberg Trials. Not as revenge fantasy, but as constitutional state. If the democratic basic order allows state authorities together with private corporations to turn people into test subjects, then this order must account for itself in court.
In the sutras, jhāna is entered when one ‘sits down cross-legged and establishes mindfulness’. According to Buddhist tradition, it may be supported by ānāpānasati, mindfulness of breathing, a core meditative practice which can be found in almost all schools of Buddhism. The Suttapiṭaka and the Agamas describe four stages of rūpa jhāna. Rūpa refers to the material realm, in a neutral stance, as different from the kāma-realm (lust, desire) and the arūpa-realm (non-material realm).[33] While interpreted in the Theravada-tradition as describing a deepening concentration and one-pointedness, originally the jhānas seem to describe a development from investigating body and mind and abandoning unwholesome states, to perfected equanimity and watchfulness,[34] an understanding which is retained in Zen and Dzogchen.[35][34] The stock description of the jhānas, with traditional and alternative interpretations, is as follows:[34][note 2]
First jhāna:Separated (vivicceva) from desire for sensual pleasures, separated (vivicca) from [other] unwholesome states (akusalehi dhammehi, unwholesome dhammas[36]), a bhikkhu enters upon and abides in the first jhana, which is [mental] pīti (“rapture,” “joy”) and [bodily] sukha (“pleasure”) “born of viveka” (traditionally, “seclusion”; alternatively, “discrimination” (of dhamma’s)[37][note 3]), accompanied by vitarka-vicara (traditionallly, initial and sustained attention to a meditative object; alternatively, initial inquiry and subsequent investigation[40][41][42] of dhammas (defilements[43] and wholesome thoughts[44][note 4]); also: “discursive thought”[note 5]).
Second jhāna:Again, with the stilling of vitarka-vicara, a bhikkhu enters upon and abides in the second jhana, which is [mental] pīti and [bodily] sukha “born of samadhi” (samadhi-ji; trad. born of “concentration”; altern. “knowing but non-discursive […] awareness,”[6] “bringing the buried latencies or samskaras into full view”[52][note 6]), and has sampasadana (“stillness,”[53] “inner tranquility”[50][note 7]) and ekaggata (unification of mind,[53] awareness) without vitarka-vicara;
Third jhāna:With the fading away of pīti, a bhikkhu abides in upekkhā (equanimity,” “affective detachment”[50][note 8]), sato (mindful) and [with] sampajañña (“fully knowing,”[54] “discerning awareness”[55]). [Still] experiencing sukha with the body, he enters upon and abides in the third jhana, on account of which the noble ones announce, “abiding in [bodily] pleasure, one is equanimous and mindful”.
Fourth jhāna:With the abandoning of [the desire for] sukha (“pleasure”) and [aversion to] dukkha (“pain”[56][55]) and with the previous disappearance of [the inner movement between] somanassa (“gladness,”[57]) and domanassa (“discontent”[57]), a bhikkhu enters upon and abides in the fourth jhana, which is adukkham asukham (“neither-painful-nor-pleasurable,”[56] “freedom from pleasure and pain”[58]) and has upekkhāsatipārisuddhi (complete purity of equanimity and mindfulness).[note 9]
This excerpt comes from the Wikipedia entry on samadhi, which is really very good and worth reading in full. This entry and the description just above are detailed descriptions of meditative states which lead to full enlightenment in Buddhist and other traditions that revere samadhi states. This deep capacity of the human mind to realize enlightenment through directed concentration is all but nonexistent in modern Western thought, a momentous omission. In the Nagara Sutta, the Buddha refers to the Noble Eightfold Path, the last element of which is samadhi, as ancient, showing that Buddhism and other samadhi traditions date back millennia before the time of the Buddha, roughly 500 BC. Buddhism is a deep Indo-Aryan tradition and as such has roots shared by ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome as well as India and most of Asia. I believe it is helpful to recognize the antiquity of samadhi and jhāna practices as well as the civilizations associated with these practices which still exist today. In this respect, Buddhism is an extremely old and pristine core tradition belonging directly to most of the world’s peoples via tradition and indirectly to all of them via efficacy and reasonableness. ABN
Humans are retarded because throughout our long history of being able to speak and listen, not a single one has discovered FIML or taught it.
How can humans be any more retarded than that? We all talk, but no one has ever figured out how to talk correctly, let alone taught us how to talk correctly.
This fact alone makes me seriously doubt all religions everywhere. What god, God, Saint, or sage would not teach humans how to talk, thus saving us from many millennia of mental illness, sadness and pointless violence.
(I love chess), but consider what a waste of time it is; how many years so many people spend studying it. Yet not one human anywhere has ever spent a tiny fraction of that much time figuring out how talking and listening actually works, or how to talk and listen as well as a grandmaster plays chess.
Becoming good at FIML is probably 1,000-10,000 times easier than becoming a chess grandmaster, or a capable engineer, or a PhD in linguistics, history or psychology.
What subject is more obvious than people suck at talking and listening?
Think about it: What constitutes what most people think is talented talking and listening?
For talking, it’s fluency, vocabulary, charm, persuasiveness, explanatory ability, etc. But never accuracy in dynamic real-time, real-world situations. Virtually all so-called talented speakers, whether public or private, are performers. They perform dazzling speech acts like acrobats, but rarely tell the truth and never know how to properly analyze even their own words.
As for listening, it’s the flipside of performative talking. All people everywhere have been and are still raised to talk and listen in these ways, a sure sign of species-wide mental retardation.
The other way people are raised is to stifle speech and listening, which is an even more direct way to make them retarded
All you have to do to escape human linguistic retardation is learn FIML and do it with someone close to you, someone smart enough to understand why it is necessary. ABN
Simply stated, semiotic codes are the conventions used to communicate meaning.
Codes can be compared to puppet masters that control the words and semiotic bundles that people use when speaking and listening. For many people, semiotic codes are largely unconscious, functioning mainly as limits to communication or as givens.
Some examples of codes might be the ready-made formulas of politics or the ordinary assumptions of any culture anywhere.
Codes work well in most cases when we do ordinary or formal things, but they inhibit thought and communication when we want to go beyond ordinary or formal interactions and behaviors.
Unconscious, unexamined, or strongly-held codes can be a disaster in interpersonal relations if one or both (or all) parties are rigid in their definitions and understanding of the codes being used. These are the sorts of conditions that lead to absurd exchanges at the dinner table and are one of the main reason most of us learn never to talk about politics or religion at most gatherings.
Gathering for dinner itself is a code. On Thanksgiving we are expected to break bread without breaking the code of silence on politics or whatever else your family can’t or won’t talk about. There is not much the individual can do to change this because the harder you try—no matter how good your intentions—the more it will seem that you are breaking the code, being aggressive, or threatening the (probably fairly weak) bonds that hold your dining unit together.
Many years ago, Charles Berger and Richard Calabrese proposed a theory about communication known as the Uncertainty Reduction Theory. This theory deals with how people initially get to know each other. It proposes:
…that, when interacting, people need information about the other party in order to reduce their uncertainty. In gaining this information people are able to predict the other’s behavior and resulting actions, all of which according to the theory is crucial in the development of any relationship. (source)
The basic idea is that we humans need to reduce uncertainty in order to understand each other well-enough to get along. If we succeed at reducing uncertainty sufficiently, it then becomes possible to continue to develop relations.
The theory works pretty well in my view, but the problem I see with it is reducing initial uncertainty is much the same as feeling out semiotic codes, discovering which ones both (or all) parties subscribe to. As mentioned, this works well-enough for ordinary and formal relations, but what happens next? For the most part, most people then become trapped in the codes they seem to share.
What happens next can even be seen as sort of comical as people over the weeks or months continue to reduce uncertainty while confining themselves even more. Very often, if you try to go a bit deeper, you will be seen as breaking the code, disrupting convention, even threatening the group.
This is the region in which intimate relationships can be destroyed. Destruction happens because the parties involved are trapped in their codes and do not have the means to stand outside them and analyze them. Obviously, this leads to either reduced or turbulent speech.
I think the Uncertainty Reduction Theory might be extended and amended to include a stage two theory of uncertainty reduction. FIML practice would constitute a very reasonable stage two as FIML is designed to remove uncertainty and ambiguity between close partners.
Notice that FIML itself is not a semiotic code. It is a tool, a method, a procedure that allows partners to communicate without using any code at all save ones they consciously choose or create for themselves.
It seems clear to me that all established interpersonal codes are ultimately limiting and that people must find a way to analyze whatever codes they hold or have been inculcated with if they want to have truthful or authentic communication with their closest partners.
Most codes are public in the sense that they are roughly known by many people. But all of us have idiosyncratic ways of understanding these public codes and all of us also have private codes, idiosyncratic codes that are known only to us.
Sometimes our understanding of our idiosyncratic codes and/or idiosyncratic interpretations of public codes is not all that clear to us. One reason is we do not have good ways to access them. Another reason is a good many idiosyncrasies are sort of born in the dark. We muddle into them privately, inside our own minds with little or no opportunity to share them with others. Indeed, as seen above, to try to share them all too often leads to disruption of the shallow “certainty” that adherence to the shared code has provided.
What a mess. We need codes to learn, grow, and communicate with strangers. But we have to go beyond them if we want to learn, grow, and communicate with the people who are most important to us.
FIML is a sort of stage two Uncertainty Reduction Practicethat allows partners to observe and analyze all of their codes—both public and private—in real-time.
Why is real-time analysis important? It is important because codes can only be richly and accurately analyzed when we see clearly how they are functioning in the moment. The “psychological morphemes” that appear only during brief moments of communication must be seen and analyzed if deep understanding is to be accomplished.
Among the many reasons Trump appears to be losing touch with reality, targeted energy weapons, even subtle poisons, could be as much to blame as blackmail or threats against him and his family. I doubt he is the victim of only his own hubris. The stakes are very high and the forces controlling him will stop at nothing. His smartest move might be to go into some form of hiding; a place from which he can communicate and also be left alone long enough to clear his mind and body of whatever thoughts or weaponry is harming him. Saving himself may save USA but not his family, who will remain vulnerable; that’s how fraught the situation is for him. Trump is wrangling with KOBK forces; Kill-Or-Be-Killed. What is happening to him can happen to any leader, but most of all to the most powerful leader in the world, President of USA. When people suddenly go crazy and piss everyone off, including those who had been closest to them, it is always important to consider the kinds of mind-warping weaponry that might be being used against them. Anyone with street smarts knows how common roofies, poison, knives and violent crime is. It’s no different at the top of global power. Up there, the stakes are higher and the weapons better, but the hearts of those people are no different from violent criminals on any city street. ABN
Asia is collectively rejecting the Israeli-American War against Iran and preparing for the post-American era in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Japanese crude oil tankers are heading east toward the Strait of Hormuz. These vessels are assembling with others at the entrance to the waterway during the ceasefire between the United States and Iran.
Meanwhile, Republic of Korea (ROK) Foreign Minister Cho Hyun is sending a special envoy to Iran to discuss bilateral concerns between the ROK and Iran, and to clarify navigation problems in the Strait of Hormuz.
Spain is reopening its Embassy in Tehran. Madrid is walking away from Washington and toward Tehran. Soon Spain’s walk will become a European sprint.
These developments make it difficult but not impossible for Washington to restart the war for Israel. But if Washington resumes the offensive they risk blowing up the world economy in what the international community will view as Washington’s sabotage of Iran’s “Istanbul moment.”
American Buddhist Net 