I suppose the king of Norway could endow me with the Nobel Prize for Medicine. After all, I’ve done no harm, thereby adhering to the first rule of medical practice. As a consequence, I demonstrate great promise.
But of course there would be no political reason to hand me a Nobel Prize. The Nobel committee is nothing if not political, and there is no more political act than awarding the Nobel Peace Prize.
When American Empire completes its fall, we will not have the ability to sacrifice one big bank just to rescue an even larger corporate entity along with an ill-devised government program. Instead, we’ll be focused on the only economic system too big to fail: Earth.
Balance is a central tenet of Buddhism, foundational to the four noble truths and the eight-fold way. Balance is a superb notion and I strongly support, for individuals at least, balance, moderation, and many other principles of Buddhism. Indeed, had Buddhism found roots in this country a couple hundred years ago, we probably would have avoided, or at least delayed, the series of catastrophes we now face. But with fewer than one percent of the American population dedicated to Buddhism, it’s a little late for balance and moderation to work their magic at the scale of this country, much less planet Earth (as if even one percent of Americans give a damn about planet Earth).
Guest post by Emmanuela Mujica
I have new vision of the United States. I call it “Bucket-head Nation.” My inspiration came from a humorous scene in Werner Herzog’s latest film, Encounters at the End of the World. The scene portrays students in an Antarctic survival class wearing buckets on their heads to simulate the zero-visibility, white-noise conditions of the Antarctic tundra. The leader of the bucket-heads had the objective of leading the other bucket-heads to a location specified by the instructor. They failed this task twice because the leader of the bucket-heads misguided them. The scene ends with a shot of the disgruntled bucket-heads in a confused, clustered entanglement. Sound familiar?