from Bruce
Anecdotes
Death
• Marpa was a great Tibetan teacher who as a Buddhist taught that everything is an illusion. Unfortunately, his oldest son died and Marpa grieved greatly. A Buddhist monk came to him and said, “I don’t understand. You teach us that everything is an illusion. Yet you are crying. If everything is an illusion, then why do you grieve so deeply?” Marpa replied, “Indeed, everything is an illusion. And the death of a child is the greatest of these illusions.”
• A man dying of AIDS told his nurse that he would like to become a Catholic. Immediately, the nurse telephoned her priest and asked him to come right over. However, upon hearing that the man was dying of AIDS, the priest hesitated, saying that this was a controversial situation. The nurse responded, “This man is dying, and he will not live much longer. Get your butt over here now, or I’ll baptize him myself.” The priest came right over.
• When Wilson Mizner lay dying after a life devoted to gambling, illegal drugs, and the spending of money, a clergyman who was very successful in obtaining the deathbed conversions of rascals was brought in to him. Mr. Wilson declined to be converted, saying, “I don’t expect too much. You can’t be a rascal for 40 years and then cop a plea the last minute. God keeps better books than that.” A few minutes later, he died.
• In 1949, Mother Teresa found a dying man lying on a sidewalk in Calcutta. She asked a nearby hospital if she could bring the man in, but she was not allowed to. Therefore, she visited a pharmacist to get medicine for the man, but by the time she returned, the man had died. Mother Teresa had witnessed such callousness more than once. She said, “They look after a dog or a cat better than a fellow man.”
• Early American colonists suffered from high rates of infant mortality. Often, a family would keep giving their children the same Christian name until one child finally survived. In addition, women frequently died in childbirth. At some old cemeteries, the husband would be buried along with several of his wives and several of their children who had died as infants or in childhood.
• When Pope Pius II died, Dr. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., announced the death to his Harvard class titled “Intellectual History of America from 1776 to the Present.” He stated that because he had read it in the Christian Science Monitor he knew it was true, and he added, “I anxiously await my copy when Mary Baker Eddy decides to come back to life.”
• Bodhidharma, a Buddhist monk, founded both Zen Buddhism and early karate after traveling from India to China. According to legend, after Bodhidharma died in China, he was seen walking back to India while wearing one sandal. To check on the story, Bodhidharma’s coffin was opened — nothing was in it, except one sandal.
• “Shoeless Joe” Jackson was kicked out of professional baseball after being suspected of helping the Chicago Black Sox throw the 1919 World Series — despite batting .375 in the series. When he died, his last words were, “I’m going to meet the Greatest Umpire of all, now. I know that He will judge me innocent.”
• When Zen master Tekisui was on his deathbed, another Zen master named Keichu came by his house. He left a box of cakes for Tekisui, and he also gave this message to a servant to give to Tekisui: “You’re old enough to die without regret.” When Tekisui heard the message, he smiled.
• Franz Liszt was buried at Bayreuth, where he had died, although some people wanted his body to be moved and buried at Weimar. However, Liszt was of the Order of Franciscans, whose rules specify that members of the order must be buried where they die.
• Comedy writer Barney Dean refused to take hospitals seriously. On his way to the hospital where he would die, he told a friend, “You’d better take my wallet. I don’t want these nuns rolling me.”
• Rabbi Stephen S. Wise tells us that when a man named Freeman (alas, he doesn’t give a first name) died, he requested that this epitaph be carved on his tombstone: “He died learning.”
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Presenting
Michael Egan
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Music: "Hallelujah"
Album: This track is a one-sided single.
Artist: Sheila Green
Artist Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Info: This is a punk cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
Hallelujah Two Ways: The first version is by Sheila Green, and the second version is by Lynsey Moon.
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Genre: Punk.
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Reader Suggestion
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Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
One of the big boys of sumo got the boot, 10 days into a 15-day basho, for breaking covid protocols, and lying about it.
Former Secret Service Agent Says
Michelle Obama
The former Secret Service agent Evy Poumpouras says an upsetting part of her previous job was not being able to protect Michelle Obama from racist slurs or signs while on duty.
Poumpouras served on the presidential protective division for the first lady and President Barack Obama during their time at the White House. She also protected George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush during her 12 years in the Secret Service.
Writing in her 2020 memoir, "Becoming Bulletproof," Poumpouras recalled feeling "outraged" when seeing a racist sign directed at the first lady.
"As the first Black First Lady of the United States, Mrs. Obama had to withstand certain kinds of disparagement that none of her predecessors ever faced," Poumpouras wrote. "I was on her protective detail when we were driving to a school to deliver a speech; we passed someone on a bridge holding up a shockingly racist sign directed at her."
Poumpouras told Insider there was no protocol in place for dealing with spoken or written forms of racism.
Michelle Obama
Princess of Asturias Awards
Gloria Steinem
A Spanish foundation on Wednesday awarded one of the country’s most prestigious awards to U.S. writer and activist Gloria Steinem.
The jury that decides the Princess of Asturias Awards announced that Steinem has won its annual prize for communication and humanities.
It praised 87-year-old Steinem’s long career in journalism, her bestselling books and her dedication to feminism since the 1960s, ensuring her place as “one of the most significant and iconic figures of the women’s rights movement” in the United States.
The citation singled out her contribution to the legalization of abortion, pay equality and equal rights, as well as her fight against the death penalty, female genital mutilation and child abuse.
Gloria Steinem
‘Loneliest Elephant’
Cher
Cher’s rescue of an elephant long held in dismal conditions is a one-of-a-kind story, as would be expected from the singular star.
Even she was surprised by what her efforts — in concert with a team of animal aid groups, wildlife veterinarians and Pakistan’s legal system — achieved for Kaavan, she said during a panel discussion taping.
“‘I don’t know anything about this. I’m just an entertainer. I can’t save this elephant,’” Cher recalled thinking when the animal’s plight was brought to her attention by what she calls “the kids” on her Twitter feed.
They demanded Kaavan’s release from a ramshackle, now-closed zoo in Islamabad, Pakistan, which launched the quest detailed in “Cher & the Loneliest Elephant,” debuting Wednesday on the Smithsonian Channel.
Cher accepted the challenge after seeing a photo of the 4-ton animal chained in a solitary, cramped enclosure and in apparent ill health, both physical and emotional.
Cher
Dropping 'Male-Specific' Titles
Penn State
With the intention of being more inclusive, Penn State University is looking to drop "male-specific" words like “freshman,” “sophomore” and “upperclassmen.”
Officials say the Penn State Faculty Senate approved proposition AD84 during their final meeting of the 2020-21 academic year.
They said the approved legislation would implement the use of gender neutral and non-binary terminology in course and program descriptions.
The recommendation says terms like “freshman” are male-specific, while terms like “upperclassmen” can be seen as sexist and classist.
Instead, titles like freshman/sophomore/junior/senior will be replaced with first-year, second-year, third-year, fourth-year and beyond, according to Penn State.
Penn State
Covert Internet Operations
Post Office
The post office’s law enforcement arm has faced intense congressional scrutiny in recent weeks over its Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP), which tracks social media posts of Americans and shares that information with other law enforcement agencies. Yet the program is much broader in scope than previously known and includes analysts who assume fake identities online, use sophisticated intelligence tools and employ facial recognition software, according to interviews and documents reviewed by Yahoo News.
Among the tools used by the analysts is Clearview AI, a facial recognition software that scrapes images off public websites, a practice that has raised the ire of privacy advocates. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service uses Clearview’s facial recognition database of over 3 billion images from arrest photos collected from across social media “to help identify unknown targets in an investigation or locate additional social media accounts for known individuals,” according to materials reviewed by Yahoo News.
Other tools employed by the Inspection Service include Zignal Labs’ software, which it uses to run keyword searches on social media event pages to identify potential threats from upcoming scheduled protests, according to Inspection Service documents. It also uses Nfusion, another software program, to create and maintain anonymous, untraceable email and social media accounts.
The Inspection Service’s expansive surveillance program has raised concerns among lawmakers and privacy and civil liberties experts, and the use of sophisticated software tools raises even more questions.
“The U.S. Postal Inspection Service appears to be putting significant resources into covert monitoring of social media and the creation and use of undercover accounts. If these efforts are directed toward surveilling lawful protesters, the public and Congress need to know why this is happening, under what authority and subject to what kinds of oversight and protections,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, deputy director of the Liberty & National Security Program of the Brennan Center for Justice.
Post Office
Tops Cherokee
Navajo Nation
The Navajo Nation has by far the largest land mass of any Native American tribe in the country. Now, it’s boasting the largest enrolled population, too.
Navajos clamored to enroll or fix their records as the tribe offered hardship assistance payments from last year’s federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. That boosted the tribe’s rolls from about 306,000 to nearly 400,000 citizens.
The figure surpasses the Cherokee Nation’s enrollment of 392,000. But it, too, has been growing, said tribal spokeswoman Julie Hubbard. The Oklahoma tribe has been receiving about 200 more applications per month from potential enrollees, leaving Navajo’s position at the top unstable.
The numbers matter because tribes often are allocated money based on their number of citizens. Each of the 574 federally recognized tribes determines how to count its population. Navajo, for example, requires a one-quarter blood quantum to enroll. Cherokee primarily uses lineal descent.
Tribal governments received $4.8 billion from the CARES Act based on federal housing population data for tribes, which some said was badly skewed. The Treasury Department recently revised the methodology and said it would correct the most substantial disparities.
Navajo Nation
Fired Out of a Gun
Tardigrades
We can now add "being fired out of a gun at high speeds" to the growing list of weird things tardigrades can survive.
How do we know? Scientists actually did it - and, believe it or not, it's for a good cause. They wanted to know if tardigrade-like organisms could survive certain conditions in space, in order to place constraints on where and how we might be able to find extraterrestrial life in the Solar System - and how we might avoid contaminating it.
Tardigrades, microscopic invertebrates also known as water bears and moss piglets, are globally ubiquitous, found both in terrestrial and water ecosystems pretty much everywhere. That's hardly a surprise, really: the tiny creatures are able to survive some insane conditions.
When conditions get nasty, they can dry out, reconfigure their bodies and enter suspended animation - called desiccation - for years. You can throw virtually anything at them: frozen temperatures, zero oxygen, high pressures, the vacuum of space, cosmic radiation, and even being boiled.
These so-called "indestructible" beasties made global headlines in 2019, when a spacecraft carrying some crash-landed on the Moon, prompting speculation about the tardigrades' survival on our satellite.
Tardigrades
Dania Chimpanzee Farm
Florida
A colony of monkeys has lived for about 70 years in urban South Florida, near jets taking off from a nearby airport and fuel storage tanks.
No one was quite sure where they came from. Until now.
Researchers at Florida Atlantic University say they have traced the colony’s origins to the Dania Chimpanzee Farm. The South Florida SunSentinel reported Wednesday there was a monkey escape from the farm in 1948, with most of the monkeys recaptured. But not all of them.
The rest disappeared into a mangrove swamp, where their descendants live today. The FAU team said the colony currently numbers about 41.
The FAU researchers traced the monkeys’ genetics and concluded they were brought to Florida from Africa. The monkeys were sold mainly for medical and military research.
Florida
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