Gwyneth Paltrow's life is a WAR (video)

I. Rony, Wisdom Quarterly; Maeve Reston (latimes.com); Gwyneth Paltrow (goop.com)

What'd I say, right? Designer Amy Kehoe, superstar Gwyneth Paltrow, and designer Todd Nickey attend a Goop event in Los Angeles (Michael Buckner/Getty Images/latimes.com)

 
Cindy calls Gwyn's war comments ignorant, selfish

Online comments are hurt like war

When Gwyneth Paltrow stirred controversy this week by comparing her daily struggles with Internet trolls to the “dehumanizing” experience of soldiers at war, she messed with the wrong woman: Cindy McCain [wife of the horrible, Sarah Palin-picking, NDAA-promoting, Ukraine-stirring, Hillary-loving, Vietnam POW and Senate Republican war hawk].

 

Hillary Clinton-John McCain friendship blossoms (again)

Hearing about Paltrow’s comments, the wife of Arizona Sen. John McCain took to Twitter, calling the actress “a joke” and stating that “My 2 sons serving in the military should talk to her.” (McCain’s son Jimbo served in Iraq as a Marine, and her son Jack is a Navy lieutenant).

In an interview on Thursday with HLN Now TV, she went a step further, calling Paltrow’s comments “ignorant” and “selfish” and offering to take her to meet with veterans.

 

Katy Perry: I'm on meds

“I would encourage Gwyneth Paltrow -- and I would be happy to go with her -- to go sit down with some troops who have served in Afghanistan or Iraq and talk to them about what really goes on, and perhaps meet some of the young men and women who have lost limbs from this,” Cindy McCain said on HLN Now TV. “It’s Hollywood; I don’t know what else to say.” More

COMMENTARY

Shut your trap, shut it, shut it!

Hey, dummy! Leave Gwynny alone!!! Don't you realize she's going through the Holocaust of "conscious uncoupling" -- which ex-husband Chris Martin ends his silence on like Godzilla clearing his throat before doing an extended Coldplay whine song? Why don't you go send some care packages to your war brood? And leave the Gooper to carry on shining her superior light on the rest of the world? Pick on Katie FED UP Couric, or Ann Coulter or, hey, have you noticed he's talking to close family friend and Democratic war-loving elitist Hills Clinton?

(ABC News) GMA Buddhist Dan Harris takes Katie Couric's "Fed Up" 10-Day No Sugar Challenge. Why? Sugar is killing us, making us mental, sickly, and possibly obese.

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Losing Zen Buddhist activist Matthiessen (NPR)

Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Weekend Edition Sunday (NPR, April 6, 2014)

Bhumi/Gaia is a precious thing, nurturing and full of intelligence (NASA/colourbox.com)

 

Zen (counterpointpress.com)

Author Peter Muryo Matthiessen has died in New York at the age of 86 from acute myeloid leukemia. He was a novelist and naturalist, who wrote 33 books, among his best-known being The Snow Leopard and the novels Far Tortuga and At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was made into a Hollywood film.

He is the only writer to ever win the National Book Award in the categories of Fiction (for Shadow Country) and General Nonfiction (for The Snow Leopard, which also won for Contemporary Thought). 

 

He was also a political activist, a Buddhist teacher, co-founder of The Paris Review and, briefly, a spy.

 

In his first nonfiction book, Matthiessen staked out the territory he would revisit the rest of his life -- the destruction of nature and natural peoples at the hands of humankind. Wilderness in America, published in 1959, is a history of the extinction of animal and bird species in North America:

Species appear, and left behind by a changing earth, they disappear forever, and there is a certain solace in the inexorable. But until man, the highest predator, evolved, the process of extinction was a slow one. No species but man, so far as is known, unaided by circumstance or climactic change, has ever extinguished another.

Wilderness in America led to a series of assignments from The New Yorker that in turn led to a series of books....

 

Matthiessen traveled to New Guinea in 1961 with Michael Rockefeller, who disappeared and may have been the victim of headhunters (or so the legend goes). He wrote about trips to Africa, the Himalayas, South America, and Antarctica. 

 

But he said he never intended to write nonfiction. "Fiction is my first love, and that's the way I began," he said. "And frankly, when I began nonfiction, I did it for money."

 

McKay Jenkins, the author of The Peter Matthiessen Reader and several nature books, says that's astonishing. "That's kind of like Babe Ruth wanting to be remembered as a pitcher," Jenkins says. "Matthiessen is held in such high regard as a nonfiction writer by nonfiction writers that they sometimes say, 'How is it possible that this guy can be such a virtuoso fiction writer, and give his equally substantial body of nonfiction work such short shrift?' Because all the rest of us are trying to do what we can to mimic his nonfiction work."

 

Matthiessen was remarkable in a lot of ways. He was born in Manhattan in 1927 to a wealthy family. After a stint in the Navy, he attended Yale, where he began writing short stories -- and where one of his professors recruited him into the CIA [like someone somewhere did Barry Obama, Johnny Kerry, Bush Sr., Karl(yle) Rove, Dick Cheney...and the even the fleeing Dalai Lama. The Company gets around.]

In 1953, Matthiessen co-founded what would become one of the most important literary magazines of the 20th Century, The Paris Review. But he did it as a cover for his CIA activities -- the only adventure in his long life that he said he ever regretted.

 

"I was a spy," he said. "When I went in there, it was the end of the Cold War -- Russia was a great menace out there in the distance. It was considered very patriotic to join the CIA. I didn't know my politics were going to veer leftward, and that I would really come to despise the CIA."

 

Matthiessen's politics led to a lifelong career as an activist. He wrote books about union [American farmworker] organizer Cesar Chavez, the American Indian Movement...

 

After Matthiessen's second wife, Deborah, died of cancer in 1972, he embraced Zen Buddhism and eventually became a priest and teacher. In his 1978 book, The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen wrote about a spiritual journey in the remote mountains of Nepal, and the impossibility of capturing experience in words:

The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind, but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day. LISTEN

Peter Muryo Matthiessen [was] a two-time winner of the National Book Award, a longtime Zen practitioner, and Bernie Glassman’s first Dharma successor. He [was] an active Zen teacher in Sagaponack, New York.

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Climate chaos continues: Polar vortex (sutra)

Ven. Piyadassi Thera (translator), edited by Wisdom Quarterly (Suriya Sutta, SN 2.10)

Geoengineering the world's weather is new to the MIC and its HAARP. Give them time.

Oh, Surya (Sol), please come back! We liked global warming better than this new Ice Age.

 

Yogic Sun salutation (worldiniowa.com)

Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was living near the city of Savatthi at Jetavana in Anathapindika's hermitage.

At that time Suriya (Surya) the Sun deva was seized by Rahu lord of titans (asuras). Thereupon, calling to mind the Blessed One, Suriya the Sun deva recited this stanza:
 

"O Buddha, Hero, wholly free of all defilements, honor to thee. I have fallen into distress! Guide me."
 

Thereupon, the Blessed One responded by addressing a stanza to Rahu lord of titans on behalf of Suriya:
 

"O Rahu, Suriya has gone for guidance to the Tathagata, the Noble One. Release Suriya. The buddhas radiate compassion on the world (of beings).
 
"O Rahu, do not swallow the dispeller of darkness, the shining one, the radiant and effulgent traveler of the sky. Rahu, release Suriya."
 

Thereupon, Rahu lord of titans released Suriya and immediately came to the presence of Vepacitti lord of titans and stood beside him trembling in fear with hair standing on end. Then Vepacitti addressed Rahu in this stanza:
 

Indian mythology describes astronomy.

"Rahu, why did you suddenly release Suriya? Why have you come trembling, and why are you standing here terrified?"

"I have been spoken to by the Buddha in a stanza (requesting me to release Suriya). If I had not released Suriya, my head would have split into seven pieces [a common Indian idiom frequently met with in the sutras]. While I yet lived, I would have had no happiness. (Therefore, I released Suriya)."

The asura Rahu is mentioned explicitly in a pair of sutras from the Connected Discourses of the Pali Canon. In the Candima Sutta and the Suriya Sutta, Rahu attacks Chandra the moon deity and Suriya the sun deity before being compelled to release them by their recitation of a brief stanza conveying their reverence for the Buddha. The Buddha responds by enjoining Rahu to release them, which Rahu does rather than have his "head split into seven pieces." The verses recited by the two celestial deities and the Buddha have since been incorporated into Buddhist as protective chants (parittas) recited by monastics as kind of post-Vedic mantras.

Tropical winter: Thailand, snow in Vietnam

Wisdom Quarterly; P. Gosselin (No Tricks Zone, Dec. 20, 2013), The Daily Sheeple

Donkeys freezing to death where they stand in Turkey during cold anomaly 2013

 

Climate extremes: saving Death Valley

A flurry of Middle Eastern and Asian news sites are reporting an “unusual” cold sweeping across vast areas of Asia and the Middle East.
 
The Thai online Pattaya Mail reports “Hundreds of thousands of residents of northern and northeastern Thailand are suffering from the current cold snap, with many areas having been declared disaster zones....

It's sunny in  80s in wicked Hollywood

“Some 100,000 people are suffering from the cold and in need of winter clothing. ”
 
The German language Thailand-tip.com reports that the “Meteorological Institute forecasts temperatures in the north to fall another 4-7°C by Thursday.”
 
Snow in Vietnam
The Asian Correspondent reports that residents in North Vietnam “were treated to a rare sight Monday: snow,” writing that “the white stuff” is a “rare sight in this part of the world.”
 
Not only is Southeast Asia being hard hit by unusually bitter cold, but also vast areas of Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Some of these regions are typically famous for very warm temperatures. More
 

Asia to remain gripped by bitter cold. Forecast anomaly for next seven days (wxmaps.org)

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