A heads-up for Dharma-friends in Singapore. I'll be giving half-a-dozen lectures in Singapore, starting tonight, April 18th, at the Buddhist Lodge and then from tomorrow night at the Buddhist Union. One talk on Saturday afternoon will be for young people. Please check it out!
Chicken Contains Arsenic Says FDA. "But It's Safe to Eat" Says National Chicken Council.
("I eat plants and I'm big and strong. What's with you humans?")
So who you going to believe? The FDA says they have known that arsenic has gone into chicken feed for SIXTY YEARS. It's not there by accident, it's an additive! So if it's in the food chickens eat it becomes part of their bodies. If we eat their bodies, then we eat the arsenic. So you don't eat chicken but you eat beef? Well when the beef producers buy chicken sh*t to fill out the cattle feed (you didn't know that?) then the arsenic shat out by the chickens gets into the beef and thus into us. Oh man. I know the world loves fried chicken most of all. How are we going to stop eating chicken? Well we can simply believe the National Chicken Council, (who knew we had one?) who make their salaries by lying to the world about chicken being healthy food. What is their response to this public announcement by the official agency tasked with guarding the health of the citizens of the United States of American? "Chicken is safe to eat."
The excerpt below comes from an article on the naturalnews.com website:
"What's astonishing about all this is that the FDA tells consumers it's safe to eat cancer-causing arsenic but it'sdangerousto drink elderberryjuice! The FDA recently conducted an armed raid in an elderberryjuicemanufacturer, accusing it of the "crime" of selling "unapproved drugs." (http://www.naturalnews.com/032631_elderberry_juice_FDA_raid.html) Which drugs would those be? The elderberry juice, explains the FDA. You see, the elderberry juice magically becomes a "drug" if you tell people how it can help support good health.
The FDA has also gone after dozens of other companies for selling natural herbal products or nutritional products that enhance and support health. Plus, it's waging a war onraw milkwhich it says is dangerous. So now in America, we have a food and drug regulatory agency that saysit's okay to eat arsenic, but dangerous to drink elderberry juice or raw milk.
Eat more poison, in other words, but don't consume any healing foods. That's the FDA, killing off Americans one meal at a time while protecting the profits of the very companies that are poisoning us with their deadly ingredients."
Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/032659_arsenic_chicken.html#ixzz1qCtBjL3I
Wise Words On Transcending Fear
Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Institute was in Oakland recently and made these notes on the news in the headlines. (forwarded by Brian Stein-Webber of the Interfaith Council of Contra Costa County.)
Three recent moments of horror:
A Frenchman kills a Jewish family and several French soldiers (some of them Muslims) who had served the French government’s interests by using violence against Muslim societies.
An American soldier kills several Muslim families in Afghanistan, the second Muslim country in which he has been ordered into four tours of violence.
An armed Euro-American kills an unarmed African-American for looking suspicious inside a gated community in Florida.
Three utterly different news items? Merely, as a Secretary of Defense once euphemistically said, “Stuff happens”? Just dots, no connections?
I don’t think so. For one thing, I think all three killers were operating within a framework of what seemed like legitimate violence. Even though there was widespread condemnation of their acts, afterwards. Afterwards..
Beforehand? The Florida killer was operating under a basic American cultural “rule” (once felt by almost all white Americans, then by a majority, and still by a large proportion of them): The lives of black folk are far less valuable than the lives of white folk. The Florida killer said he felt fearful. And Fear in a white person is far more urgent to end than Life in a black person is important to save.
Why did he feel afraid? Because the domination of other human beings, the willingness to enslave one class of them, lynch them, segregate them, impoverish them, imprison them, can only be undergirded by coming to believe that this class of them are dangerous. The oppression –- which benefits the oppressor – precedes and gives rise to the Fear.
You can overcome fear by connecting, communing, with the people you fear. (But then how can you keep the benefits you get by oppressing them?) Or you can overcome fear by being willing to suffer and die for a principle. Or you can overcome fear by being willing to kill.
In France, a marginalized Frenchman put meaning in his life by enlisting in a one-man army. An army to avenge all the killings of Muslims by the French and Israeli armies. Anyone wearing a French uniform, and anyone wearing not only an Israeli uniform but the “uniform” of Orthodox Judaism, was dangerous. Even their tiny children.
He might have overcome his fear of these “dangerous” people by connecting, communing with them, trying to affirm his own humanity so that they would be more likely to affirm his. Or he might have overcome his fear by risking suffering and even death, directly and nonviolently challenging the governments he saw as dangerous and frightening. Or he could overcome his fear by killing.
And the third killer, an American soldier. He had been taught, not only in the brain but with every muscle and blood vessel in his body, that his job, and more than that his moral task, his sworn duty, is to kill Iraqis and Afghans. And certainly he fears them. They have damaged his brain, distorted his life.
He could have transcended his fear by trying to connect, to commune, with the Afghans he feared, whom he had been ordered to kill. If his officers had prevented his doing that, he could have transcended his fear by putting his freedom, maybe even his life, on the line by nonviolently challenging them. Saying the fourth tour of duty was too much. Laying down his machine-gun.. Demanding to be discharged, to be able to make love with his wife and parent his children.
Or he could transcend his fear by killing.
No wonder the Army that had taught him to kill brought him home after he killed, lest he be tried by the Afghans whose community he had shattered. After all, that same Army has time after time killed civilians, murdered wedding parties, broken the brains and bones of children -- claiming all the while these dead were merely “collateral damage.” That same Army has taught such fear and hatred of Islam that its soldiers could piss on the bodies of dead human beings because they were Muslim, they could casually burn the book that to Muslims is the very Word of God.
So one soldier went beyond the Army’s expectations. If they were honest, they might give him a medal. Not the Medal of Honor, not the Medal of Courage, but the Medal of Fear Transcended.
In every one of our traditions, religious and secular, there are streaks of blood. In the Torah, proclaiming genocide against the Midianites. In the Gospels, pouring contempt upon the Jews. In the Quran, calling not only for the inner jihad, the struggle against arrogance and idolatry, but on occasion for jihads of blood against some communities. In the Declaration of Independence, with its denunciation of “the merciless lndian savages'” who were the indigenous peoples of this land.
Let us not turn our rage, our fear, and then our violence against those “others” who have such bloody streaks amidst their wisdom, while pretending there are no such streaks amidst our own.
Let us instead remember that these streaks are only streaks in the many fabrics woven of connection and community, woven of a “decent respect to the opinions of Humankind.” A fabric woven by all human cultures and by all the life-forms of our planet. A fabric of fringes, where every thing we call our “own” as if we own it came into being only through the Interbreathing of all life.
Watch Mark Bittman of the NY TImes Discuss Real Fake Chicken
Mark Bittman of the NY Times presents his video report so skllfully you have to consider for yourself whether flavor, the last barrier to being vegetarian, is worth taking the lives of eight billion chicken. What's more, says the creator of the as yet unnamed mock chicken, it will cost less than real chicken. Watch it yourself below.
Dharma-talks in Singapore April 18-22nd
I will be speaking about Guanshiyin Bodhisattva at the Buddhist Union and the Buddhist Lodge in Singapore for five days in April. The first lecture, at the Buddhist Lodge will be in Chinese, the other four at the Buddhist Union in English. The topic is Guan Yin Bodhisattva and the sutra that describes her compassionate vows, the "Universal Door Chapter" of the Lotus Sutra. The talks are free but space is limited. It's also a good idea to carpool or use public transportation. For inquiries, call the Buddhist Union at 6241-9419. The Buddhist Lodge is located at 17-19 Kim Yam Road, Singapore 239392. The Buddhist Union Dharma Centre is located at 43 Lowland Road Singapore 547444. Please tell your friends - - the event will include original Guan Shi Yin Bodhisattva songs in English.
It Doesn't Do A Body Good: Pasteurized Industrial Milk Can Cause Three Kinds of Cancers
Back in 2006 a Public Health researcher from Harvard, Dr, Ganmaa Davaasambuu, (Mongolia) who is both a medical doctor and a PhD and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute For Advanced Study (and probably a Buddhist) interviewed in the Harvard Gazette, reported in a lunch talk to Harvard Fellows on the suspected role of cow's milk, cheese, and other dairy products in hormone-dependent cancers. (Those include cancers of the testes, prostate, and breast.)
"The milk we drink today is quite unlike the milk our ancestors were drinking" without apparent harm for 2,000 years, Dr. Davaasambuu said. "The milk we drink today may not be nature's perfect food."
Read the report from the Natural News online service here. Then consider becoming a vegan.
Remembering Great Teachers in Six Word Essays
"I remember her fifty years later." The Students First organization sponsored a six-word essay contest to remember great teachers and point out that thousands are being laid off, using seniority as the criteria. The best teachers are the oldest, in many cases. In the practice of Buddhism when we recall the kindness bestowed upon our lives, when we think to thank the people from whom we have received the biggest gifts, the Buddha comes first, for gving birth to our wisdom, then parents who gave birth to our bodies, then teachers and elders who give birth to our knowledge and our humanity.
The essay contest had 106,000 + voters and they selected Cullen A. of Indiana's essay, "I remember her fifty years later" as the winner. I like the runners-up equally well. They are:
"They doubted, you believed, I succeeded." -- Phillip J., Wisconsin
"Selflessly dedicated to someone else's success.' -- Amanda W., Nevada
"Teachers hold the ladders students climb." -- Rebecca H., Pennsylvania
"All thirty students raised their hand." -- William S., Washington
"Spark interest. Ignite curiosity. Fuel dreams." -- Jackie K., Texas
And Mother Nature Says, "Get Real!"
Sitting on my porch in Mudgeeraba, Queensland with my new birdseed feeder set up and open for business two days now, only no birds. Not one. A big ol' kookaburra pipes up from the tree behind me. I sand up, walk closer and stare at him. He looks back; cocks his head. He's ten feet away, big as a feathered football. I say, "Okay, King of the Bush, give the word to all the other birds in your 'hood, okay? Tell them the seed is here. Lots of sunflower seeds, and little yummy seeds in colors, just what you birds all like. If you tell them, they will come, right? Let them know it's ready. If you come eat they will all follow, follow?" He says nothing, just gives me that beady eyes over the beak stare.
I walk back to my chair and continue typing. A minute later he flaps up to a tree on the other side of the building directly in front of me. I reach for my binoculars to see if he'll come down to the feeder. Only in the glasses I notice his head is moving back and forth. As the glasses focus I see he has a wriggling tan snake in his beak, fully as long as his body, which he chokes down in four gulps. I imagine the snake inside the bird, trying to figure out what to do in a kookaburra's belly.
"Bird seed? I don't eat yer ruddy birdseed, mate."
