Just around the corner from Sensoji, Falun Gong, aka Falun Gafa in the streets of Asakusa , were part of the “qigong boom,” a popular term for groups promoting the benefits of various exercises during the late 1980s. Falun Gong packaged theirs with some moral and spiritual teachings and a devotional leader named Li Hongzhi.Its power and structure are very decentralized and iin China where its labeled an evil cult it is illegal There are claims of mass imprisonment and organ harvesting against the Chinese government. Falun Gong is known for it “Freegate” software financed by the US government and used to avoid internet censorship in China and spread anti- China mischief.
The fact that we didn’t have the amount of resources that were necessary to carry out some of the program, and the fact that there were other features of the Wheeler Howard Act that had a tendency to put our Indian people back, set them back—well, I don’t want to use the term like they used to use it, they used to say “Put them back under the blanket,” but I don’t think it was quite that serious —but there was a tendency to stalemate the Indian right where he was at and get him to step into something that would keep him Indian forever unless he wanted to clear off the reservation.”
Clarence Foreman 76 years old TO BE AN INDIAN An Oral History
1968 Interview by Joseph Cash
War leaves behind not memory but amnesia . . . That is why the wall of names that is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is so important. It was not a project funded or organized by the state but by those who survived and insisted we not forget.
Chris Hedges War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
These were wild and miserable thoughts; but I cannot describe to you how the eternal twinkling of the stars weighed upon me, and how I listened to every blast of wind, as if it were a dull ugly sirocco on its way to consume me.
Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus Mary Shelley
“Where’d you come from?”
“Ahhhhh!” Faust waggled a free finger in a mock reprisal.”You have to learn not to ask questions like that. Its not polite, I didn’t ask nothing about you, did I? I told you my name but I didn’t ask yours.”
“I’m sorry,” He was taken back.
Dhalgren Samuel Delany
It is very strange, it is very strange!
The insentient beings speaking Dharma is inconceivable.
If you hear with your ears, you cannot understand.
If you hear with your eyes, you will understand.
Case 28 Yun Yen’s No Emotion The Mind of Chinese Chan Yi Wu
And how to bake an angel food cake in a wood stove?
“Oh now that’s an interesting thing because we didn’t have regulators on the ovens and we didn’t have any thermometer on the ovens. You had to know how to have your fire just right to make the oven the right heat, then you had to test the oven just by putting your hand in it and taking it out quick and for an angel food cake . . . you’d put the angel food cake in when the oven didn’t feel very warm , but at the same time you were adjusting your fire, putting in the wood, or even for an angel food cake alone , a bucket of cobs.
Feeding Our Families Memories of Hoosier Homemakers Eleanor Arnold, Editor 1983
I am a pilgrim, and a stranger
Travelin’ through this wearisome land;
I got a home in that yonder city , Oh lord
And it’s not made, not made by hand.
folk song
Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of men
Ripple Grateful Dead
The killers were driven by ethnic prejudice rekindled by ultranationalists and demogagues. How could adults do such things to their neighbors and former classmates? After a while, the search for explanations failed. One simply had to recognize that there was true evil in the world.
Richard Holbrook To End a War
Chofu Beer Works, Chofu, Tokyo, Japan
Alameda Creek—Just about every day I walk along Alameda Creek. I see the same things, different light, different times, different weather, and each day my own eyes are different. Where else to go? its safe from the virus along the creek.
The most important thing in the pursuit of any art is to become familiar with nature.The depth of a person’s love and understanding nature becomes iis subject matter; so for a beginning artist the most important taks is to draw from nature. In so doing the artist learns to observe nature with the greater possible care, and at the same time nature etches herself on his mind.
Rosanjin UNCOMMON CLAY The life and Pottery of Rosanjin
Sidney B. Cardozo/Masaaki Hirano
There was at the boom of a percussion grenade. The boys, most more than ten or eleven years old, scattered, running, clumsily through the heavy sand. They descended out of sight behind the dune in front of me. There were no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shot with silencers. The bullets from M-16 rifles, unseen by me, rumbled end-over-end through their slight bodies, the gaping holes in their limbs and torsos, later in the hospital.
I have seen children shot in other conflicts I have covered— death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, others with infants lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo—but I have never watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.
Chris Hedges War is a Force the Gives Us Meaning
up or the road down?? I wondered if I would do it again, not likely there will be an offer.
If you give me weed, whites and wine,
An’ you show me a sign,
I’ll be willin’
To be movin’.
Willin’ Lowell George & Little Feat
“At one moment he scatters sighs, then looks in all directions.” This painting illustrates verse sixteen of the fifth canto of the Gita Govinda and depicts Krishna’s anxiety while waiting for Radha.
Shariputra,
all dharmas are marked with emptiness;
they do not appear or disappear,
are not tainted or pure,
do not increase or decrease.
Therefore, in emptiness no form, no feelings,
perceptions, impulses, consciousness
Heart Sutra
In my tiny tiny room in Asakusa with beer, discounted-just-before -closing- sale department store sushi, and photoshop.
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