On Saturday, it was announced that women’s basketball sensation Caitlin Clark would not be included on the US Women’s Basketball team in the 2024 Olympics.
The greatest collegiate player in history, who broke nearly every men’s and women’s basketball scoring and assist records while at the University of Iowa, will not be on the team.
Brittney Griner, who has only played in one game and scored 11 points this year, will be on the team!
A reclusive tribe in the Amazon finally got hooked up to the internet, thanks to Elon Musk — only to be torn apart by social media and pornography addiction, elders complain.
Brazil’s 2,000-member Marubo tribe has been left bitterly divided by the arrival of the Tesla founder’s Starlink service nine months ago, which connected the remote rainforest community along the Ituí River to the web for the first time.
The Marubo are a chaste tribe, who even frown upon kissing in public — but Alfredo Marubo (all Marubo use the same last name) said he is anxious that the arrival of the service, which delivers super-fast internet to far-flung corners of the planet and has been billed as a game-changer by Musk, could upend standards of decorum.
Alfredo said many young Marubo men have been sharing porn videos in group chats and he has already observed more “aggressive sexual behavior” in some of them.
A high-profile Japanese government official has issued a public apology to his people over the mass deaths and vaccine injuries caused by Covid mRNA shots.
The apology was made by Kazuhiro Haraguchi, a former Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications in Japan who currently serves as a member of the House of Representatives.
Haraguchi made a heartfelt statement during a speech at a major protest against the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday.
“I apologize to all of you,” Haraguchi told the massive crowd.
Maine House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross (D-Portland) recently appointed a new commissioner to the state racial equity commission, the Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial & Tribal Populations (PCRITP), from an organization that administered a $175,000 taxpayer-funded grant to her “domestic partner.”
The new PCRITP Commissioner, Amy Winston, whose appointment was announced at the Commission’s Wednesday meeting, is the Senior Director of State Policy at Coastal Enterprises Inc. (CEI), a progressive thinktank focused on climate change and racial equity initiatives.
‘I’ve seen so many soldiers thinking they’re mentally ill and I tell them, “No you were injured.”’
Sergeant Nicholas Ranstad was twenty minutes into a nap when his spotter woke him up.
Four Taliban fighters were 1.28 miles away from the hut where the Army specialist sniper was living in Kunar Province in northeastern Afghanistan.
If the insurgents had looked more carefully, they would have seen white marks on boulders beside them. Randstad, a 28-year-old Florida native, had been using them for target practice for weeks.
Now, however, his AK-47-wielding target could shoot back while they were surveilling the U.S. traffic checkpoint.
Nick Ranstad set up on top of a Afghanistan Border Patrol (ABP) hut and got into the prone position.
He peered down his scope, and got the precise distance from his spotter Alex Simpson: the enemy was 6,778ft away – 22 football fields. It was an immense distance for any marksman.
He tried to reduce his heartbeat by taking slow, deep breaths, then pulled the trigger, unleashing a round traveling at almost 3,000ft per second.
Buddhism is very much a system of ethics. Buddhist practice is founded on the Five Precepts of refraining from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and the irresponsible use of alcohol.
In most Buddhist traditions, these precepts are taught as if they are fundamental to the workings of the universe. But how can morality be fundamental to the workings of the universe? How does it really even matter to human beings?
If we think of a human being as a signaling system, we may be able to show that ethical thoughts and behavior are of fundamental importance to the system itself.
Human signaling systems signal internally, within themselves, and externally, toward other people. Our most important signaling system is the one we share with that person who is most important to us, our mate or best friend. Let’s confine our discussion to this sort of primary signaling system.
If I lie to my partner or cheat her, I may gain something outside of our shared signaling system, but that signaling system will suffer. And when that shared system suffers, my own internal signaling system will also suffer because it will contain errors. It will no longer be in its optimal state. Similarly, if she lies to me or cheats me, our mutual signaling system will become less than optimal as will both of our individual, or internal, signaling systems.
My own signaling system cannot grow or become optimal without my partner treating me with the best ethical behavior she can muster. And the same is true for her with respect to me. And we both know this.
We would be good to each other anyway, but it is helpful to see that our being good to each other has a very practical foundation—it assures us optimal performance of our mutual and internal signaling systems.
FIML practice is designed to provide partners with a clear and reasonably objective means to communicate honestly with each other. FIML practice will gradually optimize communication between partners by making it much clearer and more honest. In doing this, it will also optimize the operations of their mutual and individual signaling systems.
To my knowledge, there is nothing like FIML in any Buddhist tradition. But if I try to read FIML into the tradition, I may be able to find something similar in the way monks traveled together in pairs for much of the year. I don’t know what instructions the Buddha may have given them or how they spoke to each other, but it may be that they did a practice with each other similar to FIML practice.
In any case, if we view human being as a signaling system, we may be able to claim that clear signaling—that is, ethical signaling—is fundamental to the optimization of that system.
Representative Harriet Hageman used the opportunity of the House Weaponization Committee hearing, on the Lawfare trial of Donald Trump in New York, to outline Rep. Dan Goldman’s (D-NY) conflict of interest.
Goldman has hired Judge Merchan’s daughter – a clear conflict of interest. Additionally, Goldman has admitted to coaching Trump witness Michael Cohen prior to his testimony. Harriet Hageman outlined the details of the issue, while Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) claimed an immediate point of order in order to hide the information. WATCH:
During the same committee hearing, Hageman also outlined the larger Lawfare attack as constructed by Judge Merchan to assist the Lawfare goals.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it: the concept of the energy transition is essentially a Western conceit. The U.S. and Western European countries are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on programs like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Energiewende to fund buildouts of solar, wind, batteries, and tutti-fruity-colored hydrogen, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world will do the same. There is no evidence that China and India are going through an energy transition. Instead, the numbers show those two countries are building staggering amounts of new coal-fired capacity. That capacity is far greater than the amount of nuclear capacity they are building. This chart, which I first published last December, uses updated figures from the International Energy Agency and Global Energy Monitor.
Trump phoned into Hannity's show last night to declare "we have to stop the anti-Semitism that's just pervading our country right now." He says the US needs to get the "courage" to support Israel even more unreservedly. "I think Biden is not on the side of Israel," Trump posits pic.twitter.com/nlh7GBJkzv
Impossible to do here because corruption in USA is rife at all top levels of government, including executive branch. Decades of nefarious infiltration have left no one uncorrupted in control of anything important. ABN
Whether you like her or not, from a Buddhist point of view this is a good apology. She takes full responsibility, briefly explains why she thinks she did what she did but does not turn that into an excuse. She disciplines herself and in essence vows never to do it again (an important part of a Buddhist apology). She deserves forgiveness from the public for this incident and, while she should reflect on it fully for a year or so, she should also gradually put it out of her mind and move on after that. I do not know anything else about Doorley and am just commenting on her apology. ABN
American Buddhist Net 