I think our family, staunchly Catholic and Irish at the outset, apart from Mum, who had intelligence AND humour, were all basically indentured as iron-collar slaves into the Irish Roman Catholic Realm...which is pretty much exactly like the Tibetan Mahayana Buddhist realm, if you study these things....and, really, in no way differs at all...except there's probably a lot more, a lot more child sex abuse in the Tibetan Buddhist realm... but, anyway, it does, and perhaps should, take at least a lifetime, or two, to escape from the clever and various notions of a Really Big Faith. It's not all bad, of course, either Catholicism or Tibetan Buddhism, it's just, well, mostly bad. You can still have fun with the good notions in it...but, like having dinner, there's no need to swallow everything on the plate. Both are fundamentally about money and control, and, well, yes, money and control have their uses, to be sure...but there are other things of interest as you go along and find things out for yourself.

Thai Royal Anthem

Junior Brown - Apache plus another instrumental (guitar pyrotechnics!).MOV

Pete Seeger: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

I see the Hong Kong protest folks are getting more destructive and violent hoping/demanding to get a savage response from Beijing so then they can Cry Freedom! Help Us! Independence! Democracy! But that isn't going to happen. The island is just going into a very deep economic recession, that's all. They brought it on themselves. They'll just have to work their way out of that as these years go sailing by.

Johnny Cash - Hurt

I do like this Turkish fable: "The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the Axe, for the Axe was clever and convinced the Trees that because his handle as made of wood, he was one of them"