‘End the chronic disease epidemic in this country’ — RFK Jr and Trump agree on this
That right there is a strong card and they will have more of them. ABN
Proactive moral behavior is required of all of us
Trump warns Zuckerberg: ‘If he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison’
President Donald Trump railed against Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his upcoming book, accusing the tech tycoon of undermining him in the last election and warning of possible jail time.
Trump, 78, recounted meeting with Zuckerberg, 40, and seethed over the 2020 election in his upcoming book “Save America,” set to hit bookshelves on Sept. 3.
“We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election,” Trump wrote in the book, per a preview obtained by Politico.
The 45th president has lashed out at the Meta chief executive repeatedly in the past. Earlier this year he bucked his own party and expressed support for TikTok, warning, “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business.”
Bangor Newspaper Smears Aroostook Group with Latest Journalistic Malpractice
The Bangor Daily News, the media arm of marketing firm Bangor Publishing Company, on Tuesday published its latest report into the boogeyman of anti-government extremism in Maine.
From Christopher Polhaus, the Biden-backing pro-Ukraine war Wyoming man whose business partner raised $100,000 for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, to Tom Kawczynski, a former town manager who posted ridiculous things on social media, the Bangor newspaper has developed a fetish for identifying, publicizing, and “exposing” anyone in Maine who can be vaguely connected with a person or group the Southern Poverty Law Center claims is bad.
It’s a strategy that’ll generate clicks from terrified liberals, but it’s not very useful for directing public attention toward real problems in the state.
Iceland
The Astral Plane
The astral plane, also called the astral realm or the astral world, is a plane of existence postulated by classical, medieval, oriental, esoteric, and new age philosophies and mystery religions.[1] It is the world of the celestial spheres, crossed by the soul in its astral body on the way to being born and after death, and is generally believed to be populated by angels, spirits or other immaterial beings.[2] In the late 19th and early 20th century the term was popularised by Theosophy and neo-Rosicrucianism.
Another view holds that the astral plane or world, rather than being some kind of boundary area crossed by the soul, is the entirety of spirit existence or spirit worlds to which those who die on Earth go, and where they live out their non-physical lives. It is understood that all consciousness resides in the astral plane.[3] Some writers conflate this realm with heaven or paradise or union with God itself, and others do not. Paramahansa Yogananda wrote in Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), “The astral universe … is hundreds of times larger than the material universe … [with] many astral planets, teeming with astral beings.”
My sense is the term astral plane has fallen a bit out of favor. In some cases it is replaced by ethereal plane. In Buddhism, it is traditionally referred to as ultimate reality or vaguely as nirvana, or what comes after nirvana. More recently among scientists and philosophers, we are seeing the concept of a conscious universe or a thinking universe, a universe in which consciousness is a primary force, feature or dimension. However we refer to it, we need a term that evokes dimensions or planes of awareness beyond earthly or mundane awareness or ‘relative reality’, as it is put in Buddhism.
The concept of an astral plane dates back to Plato if not before. The Buddha was referring to something like that without using any term when he spoke about nirvana. The Buddha was a Scythian who argued against the strong Scythian belief in an absolute distinction between right and wrong and a single, great God (Ahura Mazda) who created the world and could be known only through doing good.
It’s a good development that scientists and philosophers today are increasingly seeing what the Buddha and many others have seen throughout the ages. I believe deep meditative states and a moral life afford us frequent opportunities to commune with or glimpse dimensions or realms beyond our normal default cultural behavioral realms.
Buddhism is a profoundly ethical teaching but it also rejects absolutes. We humans are characterized by emptiness, impermanence, and the suffering wrought by clinging to any concept, belief or idea, and yet are capable of freeing ourselves from ‘relative reality’ through ethical practice and experiential samadhi states.
The Buddha remained silent on matters related to anything like the astral plane because he knew that focusing on ethereal aims (especially in his day?) tends to reify them, which then leads to ossification, doctrine, worship without reason. I wonder if in our day, the Buddha would reason differently as many reasonable thinkers now accept that consciousness may be inexplicable by rank materialism or particle physics or biology based on those; and thus may/must be a primary aspect of all that we know of.
My current understanding of Buddhism and ancient history has been recently influenced by Christopher Beckwith’s The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China, which I highly recommend to Buddhists and everyone else. ABN
Latvia’s defense minister wants to conscript women by 2028
Latvia should make conscription mandatory for women, the Baltic country’s defense minister said Tuesday.
“Moving toward comprehensive national defense, I support the mandatory conscription of women into the national defense service. 2028 could be the optimal time to start it,” Andris Sprūds posted on X, reiterating his comments in an interview with local media earlier Tuesday.
Latvia, which shares a border with Russia, reintroduced conscription only last year, after abolishing it in 2006. The country, which has a population of less than 2 million, selects conscripts at random and aims to have 4,000 soldiers by 2028.
The Baltic nation was one of the last countries near Russia to bring back conscription, as Sweden and Lithuania decided to do so shortly after Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014.
The Baltics should have declared neutrality after achieving independence and worked to be a bridge between Europe and Russia. Foreign policies based on hatred and fear from their Soviet pasts have been a mistake for all three Baltic mini-states. Money from the EU has been cool but teach a man a skill and he will be happier his whole life than accepting handouts. As a bridge, the Baltics would have benefitted economically but more importantly, they would have benefitted intellectually and spiritually. The bold move of putting their Soviet years behind them and creating the future they wanted to live in would have stimulated them to abandon the habit of being someone else’s bitch. Latvia wants to raise a military of 4,000, surely yet another one of the hidden costs of those ‘free’ EU handouts. It’s not too late to change course. I hope at least one of the Baltics or even Finland will break with the war-mongers and train 4,000 diplomats, economists, and statesmen instead of soldiers. Ukraine has lost 500,000 of its military, dead, for zero benefit except to the oligarchs who now own all of their destroyed nation. ABN
Raymond Ibrahim on Islam in Europe
Yoga falls
Telegram founder Pavel Durov transferred from police custody to court after arrest in France
Paris CNN — Telegram founder Pavel Durov was released from police custody in France on Wednesday and transferred to court for questioning ahead of a possible indictment, prosecutors told CNN, days after his dramatic arrest at a Paris airport.
The Russian-born billionaire exited the anti-fraud office outside Paris in what appeared to be a police vehicle on Wednesday afternoon, according to a CNN producer there.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said he would now face “initial questioning and possible indictment” at a court in the French capital.
Durov, 39, was detained at Paris’s Bourget Airport on Saturday on a warrant related to Telegram’s lack of moderation. He was being investigated on charges relating to a host of crimes, including allegations that his platform was complicit in aiding fraudsters, drug traffickers and people spreading child pornography.
“You cannot make it safe against criminals and open for governments,” Durov told CNN in 2016. “It’s either secure or not secure.”
The issue comes down to the highlighted quote from Durov above. At first glance, it may seem reasonable for government, even an ideally good government, to control how criminals communicate electronically. Upon more thought, one wonders why should even an ideally good government presuppose this right of search, seizure, judgement and censorship against electronic communication? Isn’t it enough for even an ideally good government to pursue criminals as they have always been charged to do? That is, without summary search, seizure, judgement and censorship? Compounding factors are no one in their right mind trusts any real-world government with those over-the-top powers, and yet we all know they do it anyway, despite the law. So, should they alone have privacy in their communications, which they abuse against all of us, or should all of us have privacy in our communications which only some of us will abuse? ABN
‘The End of Days’ — Abrahamic fanaticism in Israel and USA
….believing-without-thinking is well inside the Netanyahu regime by virtue of Bibi’s dependence on extremist Zionists such as Ben–Givr, Smotrich, and Strook for his political survival. There are implications to think about here. And we should then take care to connect some dots: Christian Zionists in America are less influential on the Israel question than these shockingly deluded extremists, but not by much, and America’s Christian Zionists are just as extreme in their version of “the end of days.”
We cannot look upon Israel’s Zionists with any kind of detachment or critique from some conjured place of elevated superiority. Americans have long told themselves similarly grand, delusional stories to justify their history of injustices and cruelties: Bush II’s Gog and Magog bit is merely an over-the-top telling, a variant on the theme. U.S. policy, certainly since the 11 September disasters, has been based ever less on rational calculation—to say nothing of concern for the global commonweal—than on what I think of as desperately held beliefs in the face of twenty-first century realities.
It is the same with the Israelis as the killing proceeds daily in Gaza and, increasingly, in the West Bank. Israeli policy—and this is true of American policy, too, at bottom—is conceived and executed by people who do not act rationally. They answer to their gods, whether this means Yahweh or divine Providence—“the Great Œconomist,” as some of the eighteen-century historians used to put it.
There are grave implications here. Chief among them, there is no talking to these people, for they live and act behind the thick, protective wall of messianic belief. They may pretend to listen to others, but they do not hear. Nothing others may say can change them. This is a highly consequential circumstance, given the power people who act irrationally hold.
Between the U.S. and Israel, our world is defined by those who view it in radically simplistic binaries. To them there is no place for complexity in our increasingly complex global environment. One could argue this is a good definition of incompetence. This is our dreadful predicament—dreadful because the way forward, beyond these people, cannot be but long and arduous. And here we come to a final conclusion of sorts.
Only failure holds any promise of forcing either Israel or the U.S. to change course. I unshyly applaud all the very costly foreign policy failures of both for this reason, although I must quickly add that failure very often disappoints because the policy cliques in Washington and Tel Aviv seem committed to going from one failure to the next without changing anything.
If anything, Zionist Israel appears yet more dedicated than the U.S. to its course of righteous murder and destruction in the name of its apocalyptic destiny. This seems to me the grimmest reality of our time. If the assault Israel prosecutes in Gaza and the West Bank—and now possibly in Lebanon and Iran—is an end-days battle against Gog and Magog, how can the righteous desist, or make peace, or negotiate an enduring settlement? How can it end short of the Israelis’ destruction?
This essay is worth reading and its points are well-taken but, to my eye, it is merely a slice of the big picture. Yes, the Abrahamic fanaticism of US and Israeli policy is real on its own but it is also a tool used by cabal globalists who stand above both populations and direct them both openly and subtly. Other tools used by cabal are Ukraine War, DEI, open borders, election fraud, attempted assassination of Trump, arrest of Durov, etc. Cabal is fueled by the ‘religious’ fanaticism of KOBK as much or more than that of Abraham. ABN
UAE freezes $10 billion contract with FRANCE for 80 fighter jets due to Durov arrest
United Arab Emirates calls on France to provide ‘all consular services for Durov’
Telegram in a statement defended its operations, saying it abides by European Union laws and its content moderation is “within industry standards and constantly improving”.
Durov, the company added, had “nothing to hide and travels frequently in Europe”.
French media reports that Durov was detained on an arrest warrant alleging his messaging platform had been used for money laundering, drug trafficking and other offences.
A French investigative judge extended Durov’s detention order on Sunday night, French media reported, but he had not been charged and few details were available on the investigation.
A statement from the Paris prosecutor’s office said Durov’s police custody order was extended on Monday evening for up to 48 hours.
Under French law, Durov can remain in custody for questioning for up to four days. After that, judges must decide to either charge or release him.

