Dimensionally Barrett

  It’s Christmas Day and though I doubt Christianity, much less Christians, would consider associating me with their holiday, I find it one of those perfect days for reflection. This particular day comes in one of the most catastrophic years in humanity’s recent history. That much of the world has ably managed the coronavirus pandemic is cause for gratitude. Some would ask to whom should we be grateful, but that misses the point. Gratitude, like love, is not found in persons. Being grateful does not, should not, connote debt to another, but merely an unselfed sense of joy or at least, well-being as being-for-itself/in-itself. Still, some will feel a desire to be grateful to some sense of a singular being and this I begrudge no one. If you posit a God or gods, or an Absolute or Universal Being, then you should no doubt feel joy in that and a warmth of that feeling that can find expression in sharing with others your wish for their happiness and well-being. That’s what today’s ...

  Let me be clear that I am as relieved as most of the country who turned out to vote Donald Trump out of office, and while I am not a dyed-in-the-wool fanboy of Joe Biden, he does have my utmost respect and I certainly wish him and Kamala Harris the very best. This comes with all the feet to the fire that our elected leaders need to be held by. That there will be a lot of work to be done (and I have a wish list to that I will get to), we can celebrate that not only is the most toxic president this nation has seen been voted out by the people and the Electoral College, we will also lose his attorney general who was surely hopeful that Donald Trump would be his guinea pig to try out the ‘unitary executive’ theory that many on the right believe is foreordained. To be sure, the theory is not a monolithic structure; there is a spectrum along which the powers of the executive office are weak or strong. The support for the theory largely springs from Article II of the Constitution. ...

  Recently, I attended a four-day online retreat (more technically, a drubchen/ sgrub-chen / གྲུབ་ཆེན། / ”great accomplishment”, but bear in mind that drubchens as I’ve come to know them, last considerably longer; ten days or more) dedicated to the goddess/bodhisattva Tārā/Drolma ( sgrol-ma / སྒྲོལ་མ། ), a deity close to my heart for a variety of reasons that are not necessarily reasonable (for instance, why or how does such a figure arise anyway and why or how would one come to hold such a figure “closely”?) but will become clear shortly. The drubchen was carried out under the auspices of Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche and his Nalandabodhi organization in Seattle, but in coordination with Nalandabodhi International, the Karmapa Center and associated groups. While in general, the focus on Tara is to reflect on her being as representative as the vanquisher of “the eight great fears” as the embodiment of the Buddha’s enlightened activity, the impetus behind accomplishing such practices ...

As I mentioned in a Facebook post, a whistleblower supplied a report of forced hysterectomies at an ICE detention center in Georgia. This points to greater systemic and systematic abuse throughout the agency.  If you are unfamiliar with the story, here are some articles to get started:  "“The allegations Ms. Wooten made in her whistleblower complaint are shocking, but unfortunately not surprising, given everything that we know about healthcare in ICE detention facilities specifically at Irwin, and nationwide,” says Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, who wrote about Irwin in 2016 report for the Southern Poverty Law Center, and investigated other LaSalle facilities for an ACLU report this year. " https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/hysterectomies-ice-allegations-whistleblower-georgia-1062429/ Historical resonances beyond WWII (the U.S. has its own history of forced sterilization): https://www.macon.com/news/state/georgia/article245747515.html F...

 I've touted Heather Cox Richardson frequently and today, I'm touting her again. This is not one of her commentaries/analsyes on how a current move by the administration developed out of historical antecedent, nor is it a look at the evolution of Movement Conservatism into the Republican Party as we know it today. Before reading my post any further, read hers : https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-15-2020-saturday It is a warning, though. It reads as hypothetical, but I detect a tone of agitation that  is typically foreign to the writer's voice. As I read it and reread it, I am struck by its starkness and how it supports a worst-case scenario, one that I've wondered about in my more apocalyptic moments. I wish I could say that there's little to support her post today. However, that's not the case. We have seen the systematic "deconstruction" as Steve Bannon put it, of the functionality of the Federal Government over the past almost four y...

“Man is a mad animal.” – Orson Welles On the eve of the 75 th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, it’s time for a reassessment of the mental state of the human race. Have we learned anything from the wiping out of hundreds of thousands civilians? On August 6, 1945, the United States became an imperial force. Some have argued it was better to have the U.S.A. than the U.S.S.R. in control and there may be merit in that statement. However, at the end of the day, is the adage about the corrupting aspect of power comes to mind. The decision to employ nuclear weapons against Japan was a signal, not to the Japanese – who were beaten and ready to surrender – but to Russia and yes, yes, to the Japanese in terms of decimating them and punishing them for their imperial hubris(1). An act of supreme barbarism was used as a flexing of devastating leverage to bring the communist state to heel, to put them on guard and be made aware of how mighty we were. It was an act worthy of the most barb...