Western Women - The Most Privileged Demographic Ever

One of the best videos ever. Absolutely true.

Searching for a Miracle

A few months ago I showed you a video about doing hard time in a Zen monastery. Now here is a look at a Tibetan monastery in Russia where Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov had entered suspended animation nearly a century ago.

You're born, go to school, get a job, make money, get old, and die. Is that all there is to life? Two students disagree and decide to learn the ways of the Buddha to find more in life. Runs 24 minutes.

"We Don't Need More Copyright" - Tom W. Bell on Intellectual Property

"We don't need more copyright," says Chapman University law professor Tom W. Bell. "Probably we could dial it back and still enjoy this great wealth of culture that's been generated, that's already in our libraries."

Bell, a self-described "intellectual property skeptic," sat down with Reason TV to discuss his new book "Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good."

Contemporary copyright law is a statutory privilege that inevitably contradicts our constitutional rights to free expression. The prospect of litigation scares off artists who want to create new works that exist in legal grey areas, like mashups, tributes, or parodies.

Bell's solution rests on a much simpler idea: we should emphasize common law instead of copyright. Common law -- which is to say, the established precedents that govern ordinary property, contracts, and torts -- already form the foundation of the American legal system. It provides plenty of encouragement for artists and designers to create new works, without the statutory failures of the current system.

How might the arts fare in a world without copyright protection? To a large extent, we already know the answer. Perfumes, jokes, recipes, fashion, furniture, and automobile design have never enjoyed copyright protection. Yet there's no shortage of creativity in any of these fields. Artists still find ways to make money -- sometimes a great deal of it -- in the absence of special legal protection.

After meeting with policymakers on Capitol Hill, Bell is hopeful about the prospects for reforming the Copyright Act. Legislators are starting to accept what consumers have long understood about the digital age: modern copyright law hinders the very innovation it was designed to promote.

Runs about 8:30.

Ask a Monk: Friendship

Caring, attachment, and relationships in the Theravada tradition. Runs 14 minutes.

The Lost World of Tibet

Old colour films, from the 1930s to the 1950s, combined with interviews of survivors, detail the history of Tibet and the Chinese conquest. Runs 49 minutes.

Your Ego on Drugs

Michael Prescott started a discussion on psychedelic drugs and how they may just produce hallucinations instead of genuine experiences of non-physical reality like NDEs. He provided a number of examples of bad trips and experiences with insectoids and reptilians and contrasted this with the fact that there have only ever been a handful of reported hellish NDEs. He admits to being biased against psychedelic drugs and not being particularly interested in investigating further (though he shows some more interest toward the end).



The problem I have when reading about these bad trips is that the people usually seem like jerks and bums. They like doing drugs recreationally, looking for a trip rather than insight, they are generally dismissive toward the cultures that use them for spiritual purposes, they hang around with jerk friends, seem like moral relativists, and just exude an air of jerkness. It may very well be that when you pierce the veil of illusion and you're living a crappy life the entities on the other side admonish you to get your act together.



Regarding insectoids/reptilians, earth insects are just as real as earth humans, so why should spirit insects not be as real as spirit humans? I would expect the vast majority of non-physical worlds to be inhabited by non-humanoids. Especially in the lower worlds, where the more malicious or jerk spirits live.



Maybe this is a way of punishing people who reach too far for things they are not ready to possess. The universe is set up in such a way where one cannot gain without giving something up. One cannot gain the Truth without giving up the illusion of the separate self, and when people want both that's like trying to put two north pole magnets together – it just doesn't work. There's a reason people train for decades in preparation for genuine mystical insight, and why only a few thousand people at any one time really put the effort into it at all. It would take the average person possibly billions of years in lower spiritual worlds (which may be very nice heavenly worlds by earth standards, but they're still illusions, just nice illusions) before being able to ascend to the higher formless worlds. When people try to get the Truth all at once without doing the work of preparing their minds to accept it maybe a mechanism is in place to bring forth these more horrific entities. They still get shown the Truth, or as much as they can take in, but they also get kicked in the teeth for trying to fly too close to the sun.



The Truth is itself very traumatic to anyone who is not prepared to receive it. In many of the stories of bad trips the people are all heavily invested in the ego, they all want to pursue a life of sensory gratification, of worldliness, and at the same time they go and reach for the Truth, but the Truth is not material, it is not worldly. People are traumatized to suddenly experience that this life isn't real, that the separate self is a fiction the mind creates, that all this egoic worldly stuff is a lie. It's completely natural to feel broken down, like your life is worthless, when you see you've been going in the wrong direction all along, running in circles, chasing after illusions. It takes a lot of training to basically get over yourself enough to make the mind ready to accept the Truth, and to have the ego boundary shattered all at once, while being heavily invested in the lie, is going to be painful.



Now here's Ken Wilber discussing psychedelic drugs for 18 minutes.

Dante's Peak

I watched Dante's Peak today for the first time in years. Did you know you have to wait about 40 minutes before anything happens? They want to set up the bullshit love story between the single mom and Pierce Brosnan, who is one of the least convincing scientists I've ever seen. It's a movie about a volcano, I came to see the volcano, I don't care about what all these humans are doing.

Anyway, there is a subplot with a NASA robot that looks like it's wasting a lot of time (and it is), but the radio transmitter turns out to be something useful during the last five minutes. It's kind of an ass pull solution to having Pierce and his new family survive.

Oh look, another subplot with the stubborn mother-in-law, who dies anyway, to inject even more unneeded melodrama into the story! Pierce and his new family go out of their way to rescue her, twenty minutes go by, they get trapped by the volcano, and wouldn't you know it the old woman jumps into the acid lake for no reason, gets seriously burned, and dies two minutes later. But they needed a way to get Pierce and his new family trapped so they could use the stupid NASA thing that they wasted another twenty minutes explaining, so they had to do this, right?

Pierce's boss justifiably refuses to go against all reason, evidence, and the opinions of nine other scientists, and order an evacuation of the town because of Pierce's gut reaction. It doesn't matter that Pierce has NOTHING supporting him (except the old frog in the pot aphorism, which he pulls out of nowhere and looks ridiculous compared to the nine other geologists real life stories of hundreds of real life volcanoes that did the same thing and didn't erupt). It doesn't matter that there has been no activity for a week and that Pierce comes off as a lunatic who is trying to score with the mayor (and probably does when they're trapped in the convenient cave). Nope. Pierce's boss is evil (and FAT! They have to make the designated villain the fattest person in the whole movie, because we all know fat people are evil and sexy beefcake Pierce Brosnan is good because he's sexy.). Pierce's boss MUST die in a mudslide, get flipped over, and girly scream before being crushed to death. He's probably the only person in the whole movie we actually see get killed and they had to give him a comical death because if you EVER disagree with Pierce Brosnan about ANYTHING you MUST DIE! It's not even enough that he apologised on the phone to Pierce before getting killed. Nope. You must die. And girly scream. I'm surprised they didn't show him peeing his pants, given everything else they did to humiliate him.

But the dog has to live, right? THE DOG HAS TO LIVE! And hey, it looks like it was never in any danger ever. Good job. You saved the dog that was in maybe thirty seconds of the movie. The humans who did absolutely nothing wrong? Nope. Kill them with extreme prejudice. But the totally unimportant dog has to live.

The volcano has liquid lava and then explodes, which I'm not saying could never happen, but I don't think it ever has. Sure, it can happen. The atoms in my body can quantum tunnel into orbit around Jupiter and I can freeze to death, but it probably will never happen. Having highly fluid lava pretty much rules out the possibility of an explosive eruption, which requires very thick lava that traps all the gas inside until it blows.

Pierce finds an abandoned truck with no keys and hotwires it in two seconds. Because all geologists can hotwire all vehicles if they are sexy enough.

Pierce then drives his magic truck through a lava flow safely. I'll give you a few minutes to let that sink in. Pierce drives his magic truck through a lava flow safely. The tires should have burst the second they touched the lava, and everyone inside should have been killed by the heat at the very least. We see the wheel wells raging with flames, for five minutes while he's driving through lava, LAVA, and nothing happens. He just drives through lava and nothing happens.

They outrun the 800 mph pyroclastic flow which instantly obliterates the whole town, but we all know an abandoned truck caked with volcanic ash that Pierce Brosnan hotwired then drove through lava can travel at 801 mph. He drives it into a cave, which should have been a death trap, but he's Pierce Brosnan, so he lives. And now he has a new family because there's nothing traumatising about surviving a volcanic eruption. Nope. Pierce gets to bang the single mom and gets to play daddy to her two kids who are the reason the whole second half of the movie even happened, because they are too dumb to live. And how did the 8 year old boy even reach the peddles on the truck, let alone drive it ten plus miles up the volcano to rescue the stubborn mother-in-law? Doesn't matter, because happy ending.

This movie really blows.