I have been a daily meditator for nearly 60 years, and looking back over that time I will tell you that I think developing the daily practice of meditation is the greatest gift you will ever give yourself. My wife and I meditate together every evening before she goes to bed and I go back to work for my night session. I think meditating with your partner, if you have one, is also a great gift to each of you. There are many ways to meditate, find one that suits you. After much research I created a non-religious meditation technique based entirely on science: Meditation for Modern Minds. Many religious meditation techniques were developed centuries ago in a very different world, one that had none of the electronic stimulation that so dominates our world today. Meditation for Modern Minds recognizes that. If you are interested you can go to my personal website and download it. It will guide you through a technique of mediation that will allow you to reprogram and restructure your life to become the person you seek to be.
Meditation has taken two divergent paths through the Western mind. For many, it’s a few quick, calming breaths, perhaps timed with a smartphone app, in search of a stress tonic that can soften anxiety’s edges. Along a less-traveled route, meditation remains what it long was: a deeply transformative pursuit, a devoted metamorphosis of the mind toward increasingly enlightened states.
But this bifurcated view of meditation as a relaxing practice for the masses and a life-changing practice for the committed few is deeply misleading. A spectrum runs between them, harboring experiences that are far more interesting and powerful than what the growing mindfulness industry advertises, and more accessible to average people than what tropes of arcane states like enlightenment suggest.
Given that wealthy countries like the US aren’t exactly riding trend lines toward new peaks of mental health (depression rates in American adults are at an all-time high, while young people appear in the grips of a mental health crisis), scalable ways of not just mindfully soothing, but completely re-creating psychological experiences for the better should set off sirens of general, scientific, and funding intrigue.
Floridians are increasingly facing an insurance crisis that is proving devastating for them. So what is their governor, Ron DeSantis, doing to help them? Nothing. Instead, as this article describes, the insurance companies gave DeSantis millions of dollars in an act of blatant corruption, and he arranged to make it almost impossible for an ordinary Floridian to sue their insurance company. It is all part of the trend of Republican corruption that has become so explicit it has become a hallmark of the Republican Party. I wonder if any Floridians are questioning why they voted for DeSantis.
Last fall, Jonathan Stettin decided he and his longtime partner Jeanie would stay put in their Cape Coral, Florida, home, rather than evacuate for Hurricane Ian. Meteorologists had warned that the storm was destined to make landfall around Tampa, which is 130 miles north of Stettin’s one-story modern stucco home near Fort Myers.
But the meteorologists were wrong. On September 28, 2022, the Category 4 storm’s 150-mile-per-hour gales whipped the canal in Stettin’s backyard into rapids. Stettin says the hurricane partially lifted his roof from its beams. Meanwhile, he and Jeanie huddled nervously in their bedroom’s walk-in closet.
“We actually feared for our lives at one point,” he says.
Their concern was surviving. He wasn’t worried about how they would fix their home.
“’Thank God we’re insured. It will be okay,’” Stettin, 61, remembers thinking. “That turned out to be the biggest miscalculation that I ever made in my life.”
Stettin says it took roughly three months for his insurance company, Heritage, to get back to him with a payout: approximately […]
The corruption of the Republican Party, including the Supreme Court christofascist cabal, in my view ought to be one of the major issues in the upcoming election. But, of course, it won’t be. The Democrats just don’t seem to be able to figure out how to make it an issue. Perhaps because they have members of their party like Sinema and Manchin who are just as corrupt. But even given that, we need to make corruption a major issue because we have become a kind of banana republic.
Credit: Brandon Mowinkel / Unsplash
So now, as expected after decades of taking big bucks for her right-wing work on behalf of America’s oligarchs, we learn that the wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginny Thomas, was in Trump’s January 6th “rally” up to her eyeballs.
Let’s just say it right out loud: the US Supreme Court is corrupt. And Americans know it.
No other federal court in the nation would allow a defendant in a case before them to fly a judge on a private Gulfstream luxury jet to a luxury hunting retreat in Louisiana and then, a week later, watch as that judge rules in that defendant’s favor.
But Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did exactly that when Dick Cheney was sued for allegedly lying about his secret “energy group” that was planning the seizure and sale of Iraq’s oil fields as he and Bush lied us into the war that opened those oil fields up to exploitation.
No other federal court would allow a judge to give a speech before a […]
Kathleen McLaughlin, Reporter - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
Several months ago I did a story on what had happened in Idaho after the Dobbs decision was followed up by the Republican controlled state legislature passing an extreme anti-abortion law. In that story I reported how the city of Sandpoint, Idaho had only one hospital, and the hospital decided to close its OB/GYN clinic leaving the women of Sandpoint without a hospital in which to deliver a baby, or get gynecological medical care. Well, as bad as that story was, it has gotten far worse. Since that first story, every OB/GYN specialist physician in the city has packed up and left, leaving the women of Sandpoint without even the most basic OB/GYN care. This is an extreme example of what is happening in Republican controlled Red states, but this is the trend across the Red states. How a woman votes Republican, I confess, I cannot understand.
Ob/Gyn specialist Dr. Amelia Huntsberger stands in her garage filled with moving boxes as she prepares to leave her home and practice in Sandpoint, Idaho. Credit: Natalie Behring / The Guardian
It’s a scene out of an American dream: a stretch of city beach buzzes with young families playing and laughing under the hot afternoon summer sun, moms chasing after children, splashing in the shallow ripples of Lake Pend Oreille. We are on the outskirts of Sandpoint, Idaho, a quiet, charming lakeside town in the mountain west. From the idyllic scenery and bustling beach, you wouldn’t know this is a place recently overwhelmed with anxiety, grief and fear born of state politics.
Lauren Sanders relaxes among the beachgoers in a sea-green bikini that reveals her pregnant belly, keeping an eye under her sun hat on her young daughter, Gwen, who’s angling to get back in the water.
Sanders will give birth to her second child at home later this year with the assistance of a midwife. Her pregnancy has so far been healthy and she […]
Here is a trend report about alcohol consumption that I found quite interesting. Younger people are drinking less or not at all while Boomers are drinking more.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Young adults in the U.S. have become progressively less likely to use alcohol over the past two decades, with the percentages of 18- to 34-year-olds saying they ever drink, that they drank in the past week and that they sometimes drink more than they should all lower today. At the same time, drinking on all three metrics has trended up among older Americans while holding fairly steady among middle-aged adults.
These findings come from an analysis of Gallup trends on Americans’ self-reports of their alcohol drinking habits. To allow for reliable analysis of the trends by age, the data are reviewed in three three-year time periods: 2001-2003, 2011-2013 and 2021-2023.
Young Adults Now Vie With Elders for Lowest Drinking Rate
Gallup’s long-term measure of alcohol consumption asks U.S. adults whether they “ever have occasion to use alcoholic beverages.” While the national average has been steady in the low 60% range for over 40 years, the age trends reviewed for this report show that the rate has declined 10 percentage points over the past two decades among younger adults, aged 18 […]
