The downside of meditation

Sri Lanka, the country that I grew up in, is made up of about 90% of Buddhists and Hindus, religious traditions that have meditation as a part of their tradition and yet, growing up there, I did not know anyone who was a real devotee of the practice. I do recall dropping in with a friend out of curiosity to a place that was supposed to be a meditation center and listened to the leader of the program tell us of the need to ‘open our third eye’, which my friend and I found pretty funny, conjuring up as it did the sudden appearance of an eye in the middle of our foreheads like Cyclops, and tried to suppress our laughter. We never returned.
[Read more…]

Film review: The Day Shall Come (2019) and FBI entrapment

Back in 2019, I wrote about a comedy film that had just been released that I wanted to see. Unfortunately, because of the Balkanization of offerings that streaming has created, a problem that I wrote about recently, I could not because it was being streamed on Hulu for which I had no subscription. But my daughter visited me recently (we are both vaccinated) and she subscribes to that service so we watched it.
[Read more…]

An in-depth look at the trans experience

The radio program On the Media devoted this week’s entire 52 minute episode, titled Trans* Formations, to talking with trans academics, doctors, activists, historians, and artists, starting with a discussion on the many anti-trans laws that are being passed in state legislatures around the country based on various misconceptions and outright distortions. While the earlier efforts to pass bathroom bills seem to have run out of steam, the recent efforts to keep trans women from taking part in sports and athletics seem to be more widespread and successful.
[Read more…]

New documentary on opioid drug profiteering

Alex Gibney has a new documentary The Crime of the Century that looks at the opioid drug crisis and the shameless role played by the big pharmaceutical companies like Purdue and the Sackler family who profited greatly from the deaths of many people and the destruction of families and communities, topics that I have covered many times before. They were aided and abetted in their crimes by government officials and lawmakers who cut deals with the Sacklers and top Purdue executives to allow them to escape the consequences of their actions and retain their ill-gotten billions.

Here is a detailed review by Saloni Gajjar.
[Read more…]

Signs that the fossil fuel industry is getting increasingly desperate

As the cost of renewable energy keeps going down and the technology used to generate and store it improve, the fossil fuel industry, especially coal, is feeling the pinch as energy companies move away from using fossil fuels. Despite Trump’s electioneering promise to coal miners that he would revive the industry and bring back the mining jobs that were disappearing, he did not really do anything other than eliminate some clean air regulations.

The latest effort by Wyoming, one of the nation’s biggest coal mining states, is a measure of how desperate the situation is for the industry. It is telling other states, “Buy our coal or else!”
[Read more…]

Slumlord Kushner’s companies get reprimanded by judge

ProPublica’s investigative reporter Alec McGillis has been following the predatory practices of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner that have earned him the label of being a slumlord. Kushner’s real-estate company would engage in deceptive practices, provide shoddy apartments, fail to make urgent repairs, and harass tenants with debt collection and eviction lawsuits even during the pandemic. ( I wrote about this last year. )

McGillis has a new report out that a judge has ruled that the Kushner companies violated multiple laws with their practices. The Maryland attorney general brought the lawsuit as a result of increased awareness created by ProPublica’s reporting.
[Read more…]

How James Bond got his name

I was recently watching the TV series Marple (2013) based on the stories of Agatha Christie and one episode A Caribbean Mystery had her on holiday on an island in that region. One evening she is seated for a lecture on tropical birds next to a dapper visitor from Jamaica who introduces himself to her as Ian Fleming. When she asks him what he does, he says that he is working on a novel but is stuck on finding a good name for his lead character. At that point, the ornithologist speaker begins his lecture by saying “Good evening, my name is Bond, James Bond.” Fleming quickly takes out his notebook and jots something down.

The Fleming character disappeared after that so it is clear that the writers inserted him into the show purely for that one joke but I was curious whether there was some truth to it and it turns out that there is.

The name James Bond came from that of the American ornithologist James Bond, a Caribbean bird expert and author of the definitive field guide Birds of the West Indies. Fleming, a keen birdwatcher himself, had a copy of Bond’s guide and he later explained to the ornithologist’s wife that “It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born”.
…

On another occasion, Fleming said: “I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find, ‘James Bond’ was much better than something more interesting, like ‘Peregrine Carruthers’. Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure—an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department.”

That plain name, and the way it is said, has become iconic.