Question Everything

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Did Curiosity Really Kill the Cat?

There is a common saying that Curiosity killed the cat. This is curious. It is as if whoever made up this saying wanted to prevent people from being curious. I maintain that LACK of curiosity leads to fatal consequences.

The Kalama Sutta and Its Relevance to Today

The Buddha in the Kalama Sutta admonished his listeners, “Don’t believe what is spoken by authorities, or is based on ‘well, everybody knows that'”. Examples abound where whole populations have been hoodwinked into disaster.So when ‘the authorities say that…..’this is Truth and that someone who opposes it is totally wrong, or ‘crazy’, that is the Dharma door to do some research, independent of the official bounds of debate. Has the major media or the government insisted on something which later turned out to be false.
I don’t hold out much hope, because it appears to me that the vast majority of the population is either too complacent, or too isolated –as Henry Thoreau put it–leading lives of quiet desperation, to question fundamental narratives.
How else to explain why well over 50% of the national budget is spent on ‘defense’, while on almost every metric, the country is falling behind, educational, life expectancy, infrastructure, economy (half the population can’t afford a financial emergeny or two weeks without pay).
And yet, as George Carlin so presciently stated it about 30 years ago, ‘Nobody seems to notice and nobody seems to care’.

Learn from “The Other”

We can often learn from “the Other”, that is from those whom we would least want to learn from, or respect. Often, they might even be an enemy, even a mortal enemy. That is because enemies use truth as a weapon. Against you. So here is an example.

While the US military budget is said to be about $850 billion, other figures point out that if you factor in the so-called ‘black budget’–stuff we citizens are not supposed to know about–you know, for our own good. The nuclear energy budget which includes nuclear weapons, the various ‘Intelligence Agencies’ (intelligence?…really?), numbers such as $1 trillion, $1.2 trillion and today, Garland Nixon, a Youtuber with an interesting mix of Law Enforcement studies, Russian studies and even Zen studies, quoted one expert as saying it is actually $2 TRILLION!

How to justify this? Here is a dandy little quote from one of history’s least respectable people, Hermann Goring, Commander of the Luftwaffe, that Nazi airforce. He was captured after the fall of the Nazi regime, tried, sentenced to death, and cheated his executioners by taking a cyanide pill. So here is what he said:

goering quote

https://www.mit.edu/people/fuller/peace/war_goering.html

Keep this in mind. How many countries has the US invaded because they were an imminent threat, even though the US is surrounded by two innocuous neighbors and thousands of miles of oceans? Reagan actually worried that Nicaragua was going to invade! And the tiny island of Grenada. Iraq and Afghanistan are thousands of miles away, yet, just like Goering said, they dragged us into those, and many other wars, the latest being Ukraine.

On the other hand, in Ukraine, the US did in fact stage a coup, overthrowing their government, and that government did actually attack those who resisted the coup, and did plan to take over a Russian military bases. So who’s threatening whom here?

Conclusion

When making decisions about various policies, keep in mind the great George Carlin’s dictum:

“I don’t believe anything the government tells me….NOTHING!’

After this video was made, the US did bomb white people in Yugoslavia for the crime of being neutral and socialist. And it did loot Russia after the Soviet Union disbanded and foolishly let Western bankers in to teach the joys of Wall Street Capitalism.

But the points he makes: severely restricted media, illusion of realistic elections, the US of war to protect the super rich at or expense, still hold more true than ever. Use your head!

 

1 thought on “Question Everything”

  1. We are the slaves of the modern age, we live happy and content because we live in democracy and freedom.
    I say; we live in democracy to pay the politicians who rob and kill us and we have freedom to work and pay bills.

    Reply

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