Shirley deserves great credit for his video and David deserves great credit for his years of research which made that video possible. Both of them are exhibiting admirable bravery. ABN
Dozens of federal agents working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security probed multiple locations in Lewiston on Tuesday that have been associated with Somali fraud allegations and gun theft charges.
Those locations included sites linked to Gateway Community Services CEO Abdullahi Ali and his former deputies State Rep. Deqa Dhalac (D-South Portland) and Rep. Yusuf Yusuf (D-Portland), as well as a 210 Blake St. property owned by Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services (MEIRS) founder Rilwan Osman.
A spokesperson from HSI in Portland declined to elaborate on why the agency had selected those addresses for aggressive audit visits.
Gateway Community Services CEO Abdullahi Ali and Office of New Americans Policy Analyst Eklhas Ahmed appear with Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D)
HSI is actively conducting audits of businesses in Maine to protect America from fraud & ensure businesses only employ legal workers. Hiring unauthorized workers risks severe penalties & undermines national security.
The best way to protect your business is by following the law.
Either way, not fit for public office or any position of trust.
As this sort of news keeps rolling in, remember Washington, DC is many orders of magnitude worse and so non-transparent it is a blackhole at the center of our nation.
The other way to look at this news is the public is now widely aware and angry.
Over 100 million watched Nick Shirley’s video and even the FBI responded.
Nick’s video may have been encouraged or promoted by White Hats in government or it may have simply come at the right time. I hope it will not be used as a distraction to keep us from catching much bigger fish.
What we want is for all of the corruption to be exposed and destroyed and, so far, this is a good beginning. ABN
A study conducted at the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä showed that a genetic predisposition for higher muscle strength predicts a longer lifespan and a lower risk for developing common diseases. This is the most comprehensive international study to date on hereditary muscle strength and its relationship to morbidity. The genome and health data of more than 340,000 Finns was used in the research.
This essay by Daniel Chandler is good introduction to semiotics and a good way to help readers better understand how we are using the term on this site. I highly recommend the essay for anyone interested in thought, culture, language, or psychology. But it will be especially useful for Buddhists because having some idea of what semiotics is all about can be a great help in understanding many of the teachings of the Buddha. The deep significance of fundamental Buddhist concepts like emptiness and dependent origination may become clearer and more useful when viewed from a semiotic point of view.
Buddhists might also take note that semiotics is difficult to define and/or get a grasp of and in this resembles some of the more abstract or philosophical teachings of the Buddhist tradition, particularly the work of Nagarjuna. Semiotics is the study of meaning, how we communicate it and what it is. Buddhism, one might say, is the study of how meaning pertains to the self, or the illusion of the self, and how our perceptions of the world around us are built out of a welter of ever-changing codependent meanings–semiotics.
We use the term semiotics on this site because it greatly facilitates our discussions of FIML practice. Terms like semiotics, emptiness, dependent origination, and so on were not created to make subjects obscure but rather to clarify them.
Can you look at someone’s face and know what they’re feeling? Does everyone experience happiness, sadness and anxiety the same way? What are emotions anyway? For the past 25 years, psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett has mapped facial expressions, scanned brains and analyzed hundreds of physiology studies to understand what emotions really are. She shares the results of her exhaustive research — and explains how we may have more control over our emotions than we think.
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This talk is a very good background for FIML practice, which is based on acknowledging that interpersonal emotions and interpretations are fundamentally ambiguous and must be investigated often to achieve good communication. ABN
In just two days, Americans may start noticing a change to the labels on their meat and egg products as a new rule takes effect.
In March 2024, Tom Vilsack, USDA secretary at the time, announced the finalization of a rule that will require that ‘Product of USA’ food labels only be used on products derived from animals that were born, raised and slaughtered within the US.
The new rule is set to take effect January 1, 2026 and will apply to meat, poultry and egg products.
The IRS has now confirmed Gavin Newsom is running what looks like a straight-up criminal operation.
Spencer Pratt sat down with IRS criminal investigators after discovering that $800 MILLION raised through “Fire Aid” for Pacific Palisades and Los Angeles fire victims never reached a single victim. Not one dollar.
Besides Minnesota and Ohio, the same thing has been happening in Maine, ruining the state in just a few years. Importing fake refugees costs states targeted by this strategy a fortune while completely undermining the political will of their citizens. The invasion of Maine may appear small to outsiders, but the population of Maine is a mere 1.3 million, so per capita it is as bad or worse than Minnesota. ABN
Starmer’s government has set the most dangerous of precedents: it can now outlaw any political group it chooses as a terrorist organisation – and thereby make it impossible to defend it
The moment the British government began proscribing political movements as terrorist organisations, rather than just militant groups, it was inevitable that saying factual things, making truthful statements, would become a crime.
And lo behold, here we are.
The Terrorism Act 2000 has a series of provisions that make it difficult to voice or show any kind of support for an organisation proscribed under the legislation, whether it is writing an article or wearing a T-shirt.
Recent attention has focused on Section 13, which is being used to hound thousands of mostly elderly people who have held signs saying: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” They now face a terrorism conviction and up to six months in jail.
But an amendment introduced in 2019 to Section 12 of the Act has been largely overlooked, even though it is even more repressive. It makes it a terrorism offence for a person to express “an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation” and in doing so be “reckless” about whether anyone else might be “encouraged to support” the organisation.
It is hard to believe this clause was not inserted specifically to target the watchdog professions: journalists, human rights groups and lawyers. They now face up to 14 years in jail for contravening this provision.
American Buddhist Net 