I'm no Budh, but the old guy had a point when he said that life was full of suffering and that suffering is caused by attachment and desire. As the Gnostic Jesus said, "If you knew how to suffer, you wouldn't suffer."
Comfort food sometimes comes in surprising forms: Pad Ma Kuer: Thai dish of sauteed spiced Japanese eggplant. Homemade huevos rancheros: tomato sauce, fresh ground cumin, chipotle pepper hot sauce, eggs cooked long and slow inside. Klondike bars. Bologna and potato salad.
What is it with people's obsession with equality? It's neither the first nor only political virtue. Even less, tolerance.
"One of the ideas that has proved to be almost impervious to evidence is the idea that wise and far-sighted people need to take control and plan economic and social policies so that there will be a rational and just order, rather than chaos resulting from things being allowed to take their own course. It sounds so logical and plausible that demanding hard evidence would seem almost like nit-picking. In one form or another, this idea goes back at least as far as the French Revolution in the 18th century. As J.A. Schumpeter later wrote of that era, "general well-being ought to have been the consequence," but "instead we find misery, shame and, at the end of it all, a stream of blood." Thomas Sowell
In Hawthorne, Jada Pinkett Smith --plastic surgeried to within an inch of her life-- is yet one more angry ball-busting black woman. Zzzzz. No wonder black men won't marry them.
If both Buddhism and Islam are "religions", then Libertarian and National Socialist are "political parties."
Still lookin for a car. Isuzu Rodeo 98 or later. Black or silver, maybe red (again) even white. I also want a new TV and a smart phone.
Yet another commercial where cool and wise black people watch slow and clumsy and not too bright white people flounder or worse. So typical. Or the Progressive insurance ads where, if there's an idiot or someone to be condescended to, it's always a white male. And where the ads, of any company, are all composed of whites, it will be the male who is the idiot. Racial and gender progress. Yeah.
In the recent season of CSI and in the series Bones, the cast is multiracial and it's not a focus, mostly not even an issue. That'd be progress.
At this point in my life, my attachments are real, but none passionate. It's sort of like getting off the moving sidewalk at the airport: suddenly everything is heavier and slower and you realize what an earthling you are.
The kindness of friends is a grace. I hope I am a good friend in return, selfish though I be.
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