Consumers

I hear we live in a consumer economy. The term is used in media constantly. It is a given. By defining human beings as consumers, some human beings exploit human greed and materialism for great profit. This is not new.

Stepping away from the addictive process of consuming every new thing is part of an awakening. The brainwashers of advertising use peer pressure and fear of isolation to peddle electronic devices, cars, clothing, alcohol and soft drinks. They used to peddle cigarettes in the same way, before the product was revealed to be more toxic than being the odd man out.

Watching television with commercials has always felt like manipulation to me. I could not enjoy the content of a drama or comedy without the nagging feeling that my brain was being programmed to do things against my better interests. I stopped watching commercial TV about twenty-five years ago.

I come back to the Japanese Buddhist mantra , "Person environment one." If you are submerged visually in commercial advertising all day, your mind and your environment are no longer your own. You are inhaling messages, overt and covert, which shape your ideals and your interests. The goal of the originators of these messages is simple. They wish to own you.

You are what you eat. In a similar way, you are what you watch and consume. Taking time away from the messages of media and the process of consuming or planning to consume is essential to finding your center. Meditation is a useful tool for this. Yoga is another. Other forms of focused activity, geared to releasing the mind from cluttered thought, are useful tools to break the pattern of wanting and buying and wanting more.

As I have said before, wanting more when you are full is a symptom of disease. The lords of the consumer economy never want you to stop wanting. This is a struggle for your health and mental well being in a world driven by money and profit. The choices are difficult and require great balance and persistence.

Betrayal

I like Trader Joe's markets. Their attitude toward customer service is very humanistic, in my opinion. They strive to produce a positive shopping environment and offer affordable food. Good things. So, you might understand my current sense of being betrayed.

I have to read package labels in markets. I have several food allergies and sensitivities, developed after taking multiple chemotherapies for a variety of problems. This complicates my daily life in a fundamental way.

I drink cocoa in the evening. It is one pleasure that has not become toxic...yet. However, I cannot tolerate high fructose corn syrup or additives made from corn. So, I always attempt to buy pure cocoa powder, a simple, whole food.

This week, I wanted to replenish my cocoa supply at Trader Joe's, where I have bought an ethically traded cocoa powder from Colombia in the past. A very good cocoa, actually. The T.J.'s where I shop regularly did not have the familiar brown container. So, I settled for a blue can which says, "Conacado Organic Fair Trade Cocoa". 'No biggie,' I thought, until I got home and remembered to read the label before putting this new product in my cupboard:

"Ingredients: Organic evaporated sugar cane juice (natural milled cane sugar), organic nonfat dry milk powder, organic cocoa powder, organic guar gum, sea salt, organic carob bean gum, organic vanilla bean powder (organic vanilla extract, organic maltodextrin [corn], organic gum arabic)."

In other words, I had been duped. I had not bought just organic fair trade cocoa. I had bought a hot chocolate mix, similar to all the junky ones I could have found on any major grocery chain's shelf. And, it cost me about twice as much as it would have if it had been Swiss Miss. This was a true miss for me. I forgot to read the label...the entire label in Trader Joe's.

I feel betrayed by Trader Joe. I also feel that this product's label is a misrepresentation, a lie, a fraud. It is just one more example of the loss of ethics in business. Had I consumed this product, I would have been ill, probably for days. I doubt Trader Joe or any of his ilk would care.

Libertarians scream about free markets and abolishing all government regulation of business. Well, for their sakes, I hope they fail on their mission. If they should encounter life changes like those I live with every day, they might well be done in by a mislabeled can of cocoa mix. I would not wish this on anyone.

Moore

I consider Michael Moore my soul brother. Last evening, I watched his film, "Capitalism: A Love Story". If you haven't seen the film, I recommend it. If you don't agree with the politics of the film, you will still get a few laughs.

The laughs endear Michael Moore to me. He is the daring fool, the courageous bumbler, on the surface. Inside his down-home, just-another-guy exterior, Michael is truly awake to the truths of the human condition. He is wise, as well as being a wise guy.

For me, Michael's greatest service to humanity in this film is his exposure of the Ronald Reagan presidency as a coup d'etat by Wall Street. Everything political since Reagan's ascendancy in 1980 has been guided by the financiers in New York. This casts a clear light on the motivation behind the attack of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent bristling of the American government into war and internal-spying mode for the last 7 years. The paranoic response of a shadow government to the light of exposure.

The major Hollywood backing for Michael Moore's "Capitalism" confirmed my suspicion that the corruption and control of the government by Wall Street has offended even the most calloused sensibilities in America. Yet, the majority of citizens seem dulled, narcotized. Is it the high obesity rate? Is it the high substance abuse rate? Is it a societal depression? Perhaps it is all of them.

Moving

Those who awaken

Never rest in one place.

Like swans, they rise
And leave the lake.

On the air they rise
And fly an invisible course,

Gathering nothing, storing nothing.

Their food is knowledge.

They live upon emptiness.

They have seen how to break free.

---The Dhammapada, Canto VII, The Master,

Shambhala Pocket Classics Edition, 1976

My propensity for moving house frequently is a matter of endless amusement among my friends and family. I have moved about 30 times in the past 40 years. As a single man in an urban setting with a job which paid a moderate salary for most of my career, I often moved out of economic necessity. Rent increases motivated me to look for more affordable digs. Sometimes I moved for environmental reasons: Noise, rough neighbors, homophobia, bad plumbing, sparking electrical systems. These various factors threatened my serenity and/or my person. Since I value both, I moved.

After certain events prompted my early retirement from nursing, I utilized my moving skills and my real estate skills to secure better housing and some financial security simultaneously. Not an avid capitalist, I was not a flipper for the thrill. I turned over property in which I lived to achieve peace with myself as well as some financial independence.

I am now moving again. Having placed my house under agreement, I have taken an apartment in a location that suits my current aspirations and relationships. I have been fortunate that my pursuits have placed me in the hands of a responsible and personable property owner. And, I feel this move has advanced my inner journey to be at one with myself so I may continue to try to become the human being I would like to be through my humanist practice.

A substantial part of the beauty for me of this move lies in the realization that the people who are purchasing my house are experiencing an advancement in their life journeys as well, from what I have been told. To achieve a sense of harmony between commerce and humanism in my life is important to me. While I have always held to a personal code of ethics in business, I have not always felt harmonious in the process of buying and selling. So many who buy and sell are obsessed with winning. And, where there is a winner, there is a loser. I have been in both roles, and I have not found much sustainable happiness in either.

I find now that I am able to see the role of consumer and the role of vendor as potentially cooperative, as opposed to competitive. This is rather antithetic to modern capitalism in the U.S.. I don't care. I relish being an odd ball in most things.

So, I intend to keep moving. My grandfather often said, "Stay where you are; keep moving." I believe he meant internal movement was more important than changing the external or circumstantial. He lived in the same apartment for decades. I am learning to cherish moving in itself, internally and circumstantially. It just seems to agree with me.

Exploitation

It occurred to me recently that the great harm of the Catholic Church, exposed in the recent cases of sexual abuse, is its prolonged history of exploitation of the poor and rich alike. Religion, as we know it, is basically a form of exploitation. There is no measurable, concrete product offered by religion that is not available in many other places in society. In fact, the products and services offered by religions are generally inferior to those offered professionally in other segments of society. However, the political Right resents subsidizing quality services for those who cannot afford them.

The big push by capitalist exploiters on The Right in the last decade for faith-based initiatives seems a profitable way to direct the poor to these inferior services to free up public funds from providing higher quality social security services. Why pay a highly qualified, licensed child psychologist to counsel poor urban youths when an under-qualified urban reverend will gladly take a small Federal grant in exchange for setting up an ineffectual grass-roots after-school basketball team? Why provide tax-funded shelters with qualified social workers and medical personnel when a church will provide a soup kitchen and blankets?

Religion presents itself as philanthropic, as well as paternalistic. The leaders set themselves up as qualified to dispense wisdom, ethical advice and counseling. Their provenance comes from "The Lord", whichever deity they represent for their purposes. The wisdom they dispense fits the script of their own purposes. Frequently, those purposes are their own celebrity, income and bourgeoise lifestyle. Challengers to their authority are painted as disturbed and uninformed. Conformity within their followers is used as a weapon to isolate and victimize dissenters.

As we see in the Roman Catholic Church, these methods have worked very well for centuries. The recent wave of fundamentalist entrepreneurs in the U.S. have followed that well-worm model. It is perhaps the oldest form of pyramid scheme in the world.

The problem for these demagogues is simple. There is something inherent in the human intelligence that eventually resists domination and exploitation. Once educated or freed from unhealthy dependence, the human psyche rebels and reveals injustice. The truth will out.

The rage of the exploited is intense and infectious, as we have seen in the Roman Church. I would speculate that some of the rage tapped by the Tea Party movement is the rage of disenchanted born-agains. Once manipulated by The Right under the misconception that the "successful" were benignly pointing them in the correct or moral path through their religious leaders, former Moral Majority members now rally to Tea Party banner, also funded by the same Right Wing manipulatiors. Now, as we see, they are much more difficult to herd, because they are wary of being duped again. Their rage at government is pehaps displaced rage at their pastors, who taxed them and delvered nothing of value in return.

My advice to anyone who wishes to found a morality-based movement or religion is simple. Focus on the giving, not the taking. That is perhaps the only way to stay on course for the greater good. Encourage your followers to pay taxes and get involved with government. And, when presented with problems and issues outside the realm of the well-meaning do-gooder, refer your members to professional services.

Adoption

The current flap over the returned Russian adopted boy from Tennessee illustrates a basic disconnect in the human psyche when it comes to reproduction and population policy. Few in the U.S. may be aware that Russia is panicking over decreasing birthrate to the extent of offering government subsidies for pregnancies. Meanwhile, Russia has a booming adoption industry, similar to China's. There are between 600,000 and 750,000 orphans now in Russia, according to a variety of sources. Does that sound like a shortage of births in Russia?

I have a couple of thoughts. First, the concept of declining national or ethnic birthrates, applied to wealthy economies, with millions of starving children all over the planet seems absurdly anachronistic. Xenophobia, racism and poor government stand in the way of ethically and efficiently redistributing many more children from poverty to security via adoption worldwide. It would serve the capitalist interests of wealthy nations to facilitate and promote adoptions for their interested citizens in cooperation with informed and supported parents in underdeveloped countries.

Instead, wealthy countries cling to capitalist nationalism. Intentional reproduction is still practiced as narcissistic self-replication by all too many educated and financially motivated people. The ancient concept of legacy abounds and trumps the concept of the universal quality and value of human life. This process of producing heirs to satisfy a personal legacy is seen as a reproductive right. Meanwhile, illegal immigration is seen as a boon to those aggressive and desperate enough to attempt it. This is the current methodology of compensating for declining birthrates in wealthy nations. Immigrants crowded into substandard housing in the worst parts of wealthy cities raise their deprived children to be the low-wage servants of rich native populations.

I think those who adopt with a simple motivation to improve the lot of poor children from underdeveloped nations are benefactors of the human species. I see them as highly evolved human beings with great compassion. And, I see anyone who would abuse these adoptive parents or the process of ethical adoption as representative of the worst of humankind. I wonder how long it will take for the human species to progress to an understanding that the quality of life of the entire species is dependent on the individual lives of its children, all of its children worldwide.

Insurance

Insurance, as a product, has no ethical basis. It is a scheme, not a service. Its premise is simple. Money is collected from a broad range of individuals, persons or business entities, who statistically have a calculatable risk of adversity, accident, mortality or other misadventure. Based on the mathematically calculated risk, based on historic data, a premium/cost is set for the policy or share, which has a predetrmined monetary value, collectable by the holder when adversity strikes.

When most people were illiterate and innumerate, the era when insurance was really a great racket, the issuers of insurance, the insurance companies, were like great casinos, which knew the odds and profited accordingly from customers who were generally clueless about the math, loopholes and cleverly worded exemptions, which allowed the insurance companies to avoid paying out and thereby get richer.

As I often say to anyone who lauds insurance companies to me, "They didn't build all those high rise monuments to themselves by paying out claims liberally and evenly."

The insurance industry in industrialized nations is under duress. Public education, computers, savvy judges and savvier lawyers all pose great challenges to the bottom line. Premiums are rising to breathtaking heights. In the U.S., libertarian-minded, healthy people feel persecuted by a government demand that they insure themselves for health care. Unfortunately, they don't understand that government is not the problem. It is the potential solution.

Religiuous adherence to capitalism ideology when it comes to insurance companies is not in the public interest. For one thing, health is not a commodity. It is a predictably degradable process with age in every human being. We all get sick. We all die.

As insurance companies are required more and more to live up to their contracts and pay out, premiums for insurance will continue to rise and rise. Sadly, the public will end up paying much more in insurance premiums for less compensation and security. If comparatively less money could be paid in taxes to a well run nationalized health care system which would eliminate the need for private health insurance companies altogether, we would all be much better off.

Community

I live in a densely settled neighborhood near a large metropolis. I was born into this type of living. I grew up in a densely populated small city next to Boston. My first memories are set in an apartment in an old, three-unit tenement building. My first playground was the street.

One of the side effects of the increasingly mobile American culture is the loss of bedrock populations in neighborhoods. In my own city, the transition in every neighborhood is visible and palpable. I walk quite a bit around the city and witness the constant changes. My city is mostly populated by people of low-to-middle incomes. The ripples of immigration are touching many neighborhoods as well. This was true of my native city in my childhood. I am familiar with it.

Despite all the benefits of diversity and mobility, the losses are also considerable. Change is never all good or all bad. It simply is.

My particular neighborhood has a scattered, diminishing long-term population, bound to it by socioeconomics largely. The poorer sons and daughters of original homeowners have stayed in their humble family homes, attached English-style townhomes in four-or-five-house rows. Because the houses are at the low end of price for my city, new immigrants have often bought or rented when houses come on the market.

The older residents all know each other. They have had their bonds and their feuds over the decades. There are cliches of old women who know each other for various reasons, such as shared church or club. The general attitude of these older residents towards new ones is cool, reserved observation. It takes some effort to get them to say "hello".

The newer residents, mostly foreign-born, stay to themselves. A few have developed curbside relationships based on shared nationality or ethnicity. Those of us who are American-born and new to the neighborhood manage to connect randomly with a neighbor here or there, but the reserve of old to new never quite melts.

Some may say this is a Bostonian or New England phenomenon. Bostonians have a repuation of being reserved. New Englanders have a reputation of being parochial. However, I feel this is more than that. I think this is genuine culture shock. And, I think this in part accounts for the current extremes of anger at the political process in the United States. After all, who is screaming loudest? Those who are screaming loudest are those who live in cities like mine, which voted overwhelmingly for Tea-Party-sponsored Scott Brown for the U.S. Senate after decades of being centrist Democrat.

The price of change is often discomfort and anxiety. Without a concerted effort, led by government in many cases, building community from isolated populations can take decades. And, how can the government build community when there is an absolute phobia in the U.S. about 'socialism'? This is a symptom of the absolute failure of the government to take control of immigration policy, and its failure to compensate American cities for its effects on public education, infrastructure and civic planning.

The key issue of immigration, in my opinion, is not legality or illegality. The key issue is community. If community is valued and fostered by government policy on local and national levels, the negative side effects of immigration can be minimized.

However, in the current exploitive political climate, dominated by corporate profit motives and tax avoidance, this is impossible. The wealthy interests in this country are obviously willing to sacrifice the community fiber, the social fiber, of the country to maintain their greedy accumulation of wealth. Wealth accumulation is the actual religion of our time. And, the gated community, the refuge of the wealthy, is the proof of it.

Fascism

Fascism, pronounced /ˈfæʃɪzəm/, is a political ideology that seeks to combine radical and authoritarian nationalism[1][2][3][4] with a corporatist economic system,[5] and which is usually considered to be on the far right of the traditional left-right political spectrum.

The United States Supreme Court opened the door wider to fascism yesterday. In a five-to-four ruling, it has allowed for corporations to directly fund advertising in election campaigns without limitations. In other words, corporations are now citizens. Yes, citizens with billions of dollars at their disposal to indoctrinate and propagandize the electorate. This, combined with the unlimited corporate monopoly of public media, rings a death knell for electoral democracy in the U.S..

It is also interesting to note that today's news reports that Senator-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts owes his election in part to support from the national Tea Party organization which mobilized its members to volunteer on the Brown campaign. This item, combined with a report that Mr. Brown stated his interested in sitting on the Senate Armed Service Committee, Homeland Security Committee and/or Appropriations Committee points to his deep roots in the Far Right, which mouths 'small government' but supports militarism, nationalism and religious fundamentalism.

I am afraid the American public is asleep. They seem generally blind to the obvious forces of corporate oppression which have already diminished their standard of living, made it harder for them to find work and continue to chop away at the social security structure of their government. They continue to buy new gadgets as fast as they appear. They subscribe to media which support their enslavement.

Now, as much as ever in human history, personal daily practice for health and mindfulness is one method to avoid being lulled into supporting the loss of human rights and human dignity. The practice of study, truth-seeking and truth-speaking is one way to avoid becoming a victim of fascism. It is a choice between making history and simply repeating history.

Opportunism

Since I didn't go to Oxford or Harvard, I'll begin by quoting Wikipedia:

Opportunism is a term used in politics and political science. It forms an important rationale as well for transaction cost economics. It is interpreted n different ways, but usually refers to one or more of the following:

....a political style of aiming to increase one's political influence at almost any price, or a political style which involves seizing every and any opportunity to extend one's political influence, whenever such opportunities arise.

....the practice of abandoning in reality some important political principles that were previously held, in the process of trying to increase one's political power and influence.

....a trend of thought, or a political tendency, seeking to make political capital out of situations with the main aim being that of gaining more influence or support, instead of truly winning people over to a principled position or improving their political understanding.

Most politicians are "opportunists" to some extent at least (they aim to utilize political opportunities to their advantage), but the controversies surrounding the concept concern the exact relationship between "seizing a political opportunity" and the political principles being espoused

Milton Friedman, the Father of Contemporary Narcissistic Greed, in my opinion, is quoted as saying, "One man's opportunism is another man's statesmanship."

The problem is this: Media and politics have merged in our electronic age. Media has made politics a spectator sport. This is, of course, intentional. The powers who hold the media wish to hold the world's vision and shape it to their liking. The Fourth Estate, a free and somewhat anarchic press (newspapers), has disintegrated under electronic capitalism. The anarchy exists on the Web, but it is only anarchy within the boundaries of commercial capitalism. It is bourgeois anarchy. One must have a computer and a certain amount of capital, as well as technical education, to get one's message actually seen on the Web. In order to influence society in any way in the world of virtual information, one must subscribe to Google Ads or other mechanisms of capitalism. And this trend is becoming more and more entrenched.

So, as media and politics do their dance, politics effect media as well. And, as media is effected, or infected, with political opportunism, the whole public discourse becomes opportunistic. As the whole public discourse becomes opportunistic (think: bipartisan, extremist, materialistic, etc.), people themselves become opportunistic. Human beings tend to mimic their leaders. Now, more than ever, human beings study their leaders by being bombarded with constant information about them. Perhaps this explains why Sarah Palin has become a perfect storm of a relatively ignorant beauty queen, elevated to national political figure.

I wish I could say the leaders have taken this to heart and put their houses in order under the weight of their responsibility to the public they represent and influence. They have not.

The Oprah-ization of the population is one result. To have the light of the Oprah spotlight shine on your life is salvation in the modern culture in the US and, increasingly, in the rest of the world, as it becomes infected by American media. The Oprah spotlight now comes in many forms: American Idol, Survivor and dozens of other reality TV shows. The book-publishing industry has been particularly infected with Oprah-ism, since it was soon discovered that her magic wand can make or break an author's sales record. An author's sales record is what determines the quality of what is published more than ever in increasingly attention-deficient times.

So, what happens when a world becomes overpopulated by one predatory species, infected by opportunism? I think we are beginning to see exactly what happens in our environment and social structures. Sharp divisions between the wealthy and vast majority of struggling-to-be-wealthy. With these divisions, environmental fall-out is inevitable. China and India, among the latter class, refuse to consider curbing their carbon emissions, for one example.

As for 'American culture', what else could evolve in a country which tries to idealistically apply the illogically mutated principles of slave-owners from two centuries ago to a present world that has absolutely no scientific relationship to that past? If America turned to its present with hard and discerning eyes, it would walk away from its self-righteous meddling in the affairs of other nations with shame and embarrassment. Perhaps it would then tend to its own health and survival.

Reproduction

At the core of all the problems facing the human species is its inability to examine and effectively deal with human reproduction. Reproduction is considered a human right, but dealing rationally with reproduction has not been treated effectively by most societies as a human responsibility.

The result is the ever-growing problem of overpopulation, which lies at the root of all the planetary problems of our age. Do you doubt this? If so, I would suggest that you are either ill informed or naive.

Industrialization, based in petroleum, has developed as a means to support population, as well as a means for the most aggressive and wily of our species to ensure their own progeny's survival and dominance . This petroleum based industrialization is the cause of global warming. It is the basis of corporate agriculture, which is stamping out biodiversity and producing food which can maintain an overpopulated planet at a huge cost in nutritional and cultural value. The processing of human waste in industrialized, urban population centers produces a sludge, which is used as fertilizer on millions of acres of land. The heavy metals in that sludge have already rendered thousands upon thousands of acres permanently useless for food production, due to the heavy metals from pipes and pollutants in it.

Educated people in industrialized countries look to the underdeveloped world and shake their heads at the lack of family planning there. Well motivated couples adopt children from those countries, as opposed to having children of their own. These people are perhaps the most rational and courageous planetary stewards in our times. However, corporate capitalism preaches the values of overpopulation, which is considered 'growth'. More cookie-cutter developments, more widgets for more factories to produce more useless junk to fill more landfills. Insanity.

An examination of the Chinese experience with The One-Child Policy illustrates the inability of human beings to address, understand and control their own reproduction for the common good of the species. And, even in a China which is now reaping the benefits of that policy, it is spoken of with condemnation by 'human rights' advocates in China and abroad. How about the human right to have enough space to grow food and enough clean air to breathe?

I hold the opinion that being a truly mindful and compassionate Humanist entails a commitment to fostering and practicing socially responsible reproduction of the human species. It is key. Wars, disease and famine have been the only modifiers of human population to date. With advances in medicine, a growing abhorrence of war, and a growing movement to feed the poor of the world, overpopulation will become a more and more obvious issue. Whether human beings will be able to chose quality of human existence for all people over their selfish choices, based on sexual and instinctual urges, may well determine the survival and continued evolution of our species.

Ethics

Peter Galbraith, son of a prominent American political family, has demonstrated the etiquette and importance of ethics in true democratic culture. He has been castigated for it by corrupted men in international seats of power.



The corrupt shrug at the practicality of corruption in others. This is the way of politics and the world of materialistic men without ethics and higher vision. Keeping their secrets overrides keeping their standards of ethical behavior. When exposed, the corrupt encircle each other defensively, like a pack of attacked wolves. The truthsayer is isolated, punished, expelled.

This behavior has infected all layers of civic culture and business culture in the U.S. and in the developed world. It is symptomatic of governmental and corporate reactions to overpopulation, stressed environments and stretched natural resources. Greed is a symptom of the awareness of the wealthy classes, usually well educated, to the impending environmental disasters on this planet.

Is this behavior conscious? I doubt it is as conscious as it is pervasive and infectious. Capitalism has no consciousness. Corporations have no definable consciousness. Accumulation of wealth drives capitalist corporations in the same way hunger drives a pack of wolves. However, the hunger of corporations is unmitigated. Corporations never have full bellies. They never sleep.

The practice of truthfulness in all things is a bad business model in a capitalist world. This is a crucial conflict for any person who wishes to practice mindfulness, truthfulness and compassion in his/her daily life. It is a moment-by-moment choice. Making the right choice and taking the right action in each moment over time builds practice. In my experience, living in this practice, while never easy or monetarily enriching, builds the strength and skills which also ensure living well within the realities of the world.

New

I recently downloaded Windows Live Writer, so I am trying to post this first entry from that application. I find that technological learning curves help me evolve as a human being. Therefore, I appreciate the great minds who devise these toys for the mind and its expression.

I do not like the greed which eventually captures these devices for its purposes of accumulating more and more monetary wealth. This is a flaw of capitalism. In capitalism, as we know it in the US, greed often motivates innovation.

Innovation motivated by greed inevitably falls short of the mark as a boon to mankind. Exploitation, just as inevitable, follows this form of innovation. The wonderfully ingenious and mad Edison mastered artificial light and developed the groundwork for the electric utilities of today, which have left a wide swath of destruction of the environment and a stifling of true innovation in their wake.

In Buddhist thought, the practitioner is encouraged through mindfulness to look at all aspects of human actions, whether beneficial, destructive or ineffectual.

This new application, while it delights me in the present, may also lead to the easier composition of the most vile propaganda in the wrong hands. Or it may lead to the most inane dribble about Barbie doll collections or celebrities. Or it may lead to the publication of words about Buddhism that succeed to reach one open mind.

Cloning

Science, while disciplined in its methodology, lacks ethical discipline and moderation. This is due to the influence of antisocial capitalism. The pharmaceutical companies of the capitalist world are representatives of the unethical mining of science for absurdly high profits.

Now the food production conglomerates are pushing cloned foods for the same reason. Biodiversity is scientifically proven to be essential for a healthy planet. Yet, so-called scientists are working for these greedy corporations to maximize profits at the expensive of planetary and human health.

Practice often includes resistance to the assaults on the personal and global environment. This takes time, self-education through research, and expense. These expenditures are worthwhile. They serve as a non-violent resistance to the evil of capitalist greed and attempt at control over the human community.

Holidays

In the early days of human development, people lived in small tribal groups. Life was hard. Nature was a mysterious enemy or friend, depending on the season and the weather. Periodic rites (precursors of holidays) were devised to bring tribes together for common purpose to benefit the tribe's survival and possible prosperity.

We no longer live in tribal groups. We no longer live in villages or other cohesive community groups based on simple proximity. Holidays, as they are today, have been taken over by the capitalist machine to sell things. That's all they are: Sales opportunities. People in capitalist countries are brainwashed by commercial media to buy airline tickets, buy gas, buy presents, buy unusual foods in huge amounts, buy alcoholic beverages, etc.. If you doubt this, go to a store on the day before a major holiday or just turn on a television.

Every day is actually the same. Every day is an opportunity for personal growth. Wasting time, energy and money fulfilling your indoctrinated role to make some fat cat richer is rather pathetic. It is a waste of your human potential. It is hollow ritual.

Perhaps your holiday could be spent in meditation, in fasting, in serving someone else who is disabled or impoverished or simply alone in the world. Perhaps you could spend your holiday writing letters/emails to all the government officials who wrongly support war, bigotry, exploitation of the poor and preferential treatment to the wealthy. Think what would happen if even a small percentage of the population did that on every holiday.

Fools

The purpose of mindfulness in practice is focus. Without the practice of mindfulness, distractions rule the human experience. Distractions bleed concentration away. Goals are not achieved. Evolution is sabotaged.

The purpose of materialism and capitalism is the distraction of the consumer's mind at all times. Fools give themselves over to this distraction without resistance. And fools and their money are soon parted by those distractions. Without a stable income and resources, one cannot pursue personal evolution effectively. Fools become slaves of the corporations which distract them into buying their unnecessary goods and services.

At the top of the financial pyramid of capitalism, wealthy shareholders live off the distraction of those who occupy the wide base of the pyramid. The poor buy the baseball tickets, cars, clothes, vacations, toys, prepared meals which fund the lives at the top of the pyramid. Those in the high financial brackets lavish themselves with luxury to no purpose or benefit other than comfort. The rare wealthy person uses his wealth to seek personal evolution.

Being a fool or being a person of self-evolving practice is an ongoing choice in the capitalist world. This is a key choice point each moment of each day.

Fire

The media interest in the recent wildfires in California has been focused on the rich and their losses. Multimillion-dollar homes destroyed near the beach. The obsession (attachment) of the society with money and things is reflected in these stories.

Fire, like flood, is a predictable force in the environment. It is man's dysfunction in Nature which worsens the effects of fire. Nature is not the enemy. That attitude is responsible for the deterioration of our planetary environment.

Overpopulation, greed, selfishness, materialism...these are the enemies of the planet, which will adjust to their onslaught with pure, unprejudiced physical and chemical reactions. It is not a moral, or even human, struggle. We are one species, a species which has intentionally abused the planet and many other species.

Effective practice for personal evolution demands confronting these realities daily in your own life. Practice includes taking responsibility for your own relationship to the planet. Without contact with Nature and education about it, there is no understanding of your own place in it.

Refuge

There is a lot of attention being paid to the subject of immigration in the so-called developed world. Economic refugees, or migrant workers, are claiming a right to cross borders illegally to earn money to support a life based on ignorance and poverty in their home countries. Political refugees in the U.S. are just as likely to be aligned with fascist regimes as with opposition groups seeking social justice. All lines are blurred. Overpopulation makes it impossible for governments to justly consider each case with the compassion it deserves. Borders are porous due to air travel and the sheer numbers of people willing to break immigration laws.

The refuge these people seek is elusive. The lawfulness they subvert by illegally entering a more civilized society is key to maintaining the civility of that society. So, these refugees subvert the quality of the idealized society to which they flee. Rarely do these refugees return to their home countries for the purpose of effecting real social and political change. More often, they attempt to create a microcosm of their root culture within the society which grants them refuge. This too subverts the cultural integrity of the very place which they seek as refuge. After all is said and done, their root culture is what drove them to seek refuge in the first place. The propaganda of corporations which rely on these people for cheap labor would have you believe that this behavior is culturally enhancing by adding to the hyped diversity factor. In reality, alienated, undereducated and impoverished people have very little to give to their environment. They are more focused on getting than giving. They have to be to survive.

The only real refuge from poverty, cruelty and ignorance is education. If developed countries estimated and spent the expense which refugees incur on building and staffing schools in underdeveloped regions of underdeveloped countries, potential refugees could be given the tools to turn their native lands into decent places to live over time. Accepting and enabling refugees to remain ignorant for the purpose of enslaving them for financial gain is not commendable.

For those in developed countries who are in need of refuge, the solution is the same. Education, combined with hard work. I myself was born in a developed country to relatively uneducated and intolerant people. I found refuge in my schooling, though it was extremely difficult for me to overcome learning and cultural disabilities, to which I was born. Running away to become an uneducated and underpaid worker (slave) or a dependent on someone else never occurred to me. I suppose I owe it to my upbringing that I never felt that escape on that level was an option. I stayed in my community, endured violence and derision, worked like a dog, and managed to learn a great deal about life and people, as well as science and literature. But now, at an age when I often need refuge from pain, disease and social discomfort, I can and do rely on my ability to learn, to immerse myself in study and research with a goal of improving my life, despite adversity. That refuge is part of my daily practice.

Baseball

Hitting a ball with a stick. This will not stop global warming. It will not deal with overpopulation. It will not lead to human evolution. Charging large sums of money for overweight fools to watch men hitting balls with sticks is a game older than the Roman Coliseum. Wake up. The time of a single life is short. There is so much to do.

Accidents

All of life is accidental. This is not a statement of equivocation. This is an alarm. Wake up.

If you are pretty, healthy, well built, a racial majority where you live, born to a wealthy family by world standards, all of this has come to you by accident. You have not earned any of it. Therefore, you are not any more special than someone who wins the lottery. Society will reward you for these favorable accidents, as long as you conform to what society wants from you. And, because these favorable accidents may have spoiled you in many ways, you may well do everything you can to remain privileged and to feel superior.

Turning the mind away from the conformist view of favorable accidents is very hard for those blessed by them. This is at the very root of a celebrity culture, pumped up by capitalist advertising. It is also at the root of social stagnation. The pretty and rich often call the shots. They are elected to public office. They determine the fashions. They portray the heroes in cinema.

Compassion requires turning away from one's reliance on one's own happy accidents of birth. This, after all, is the story of the historic Buddha. When a person truly abandons the trappings of his accidents of birth in favor of becoming a person of change and intent for the benefit of all beings, it is indeed inspirational. Part of my practice is acknowledging the accidental nature of life and death for all beings.