Prejudice without "acting prejudiced"

Below is an interesting exploration of prejudice (or reverse prejudice?) and privileging - even when there seems to be no overt or conscious prejudice. The article and studies cited seem especially relevant regarding politicians, pundits and celebrities of sports and media. Thought provoking.

WHAT DOES MODERN PREJUDICE LOOK LIKE?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/04/22/177455764/What-Does-Modern-Prejudice-Look-Like?ft=3&f=111787346&sc=nl&cc=es-20130428

If we look, what privileging or "modern prejudice" do we discover in our life?

Are there ways we have acted based on this?

If so, how to notice when this arises, how to practice with this arising?


(c) 2013 Elihu Genmyo Smith

Difficult Circumstances make for Happiness - Dalai Lama

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/newsmakers/conflict-peace-enlightenment-wisdom-dalai-lama-041130372.html?vp=1http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/newsmakers/conflict-peace-enlightenment-wisdom-dalai-lama-041130372.html?vp=1

Thermals

"When [the hand-launched Tactical Long Endurance Unmanned Aerial System] TALEUAS encounters a thermal it senses the lift and spirals around to take advantage of it. Vultures and eagles use the same technique, and Kevin Jones, who is in charge of the project, says he has often found TALEUAS sharing the air with these raptors. On some occasions, the birds found that the thermals they were attempting to join were too weak for their weight, as the drone is more efficient at gliding than they are.

TALEUAS’s endurance is limited only by the power requirements of its electronics and payload, which at the moment are battery powered. Dr. Jones and his team are, however, covering the craft’s wings with solar cells that will generate power during the day, and are replacing its lithium-polymer battery with a lithium-ion one capable of storing enough energy to last the night. That done, TALEUAS will be able to stay aloft indefinitely.

TALEUAS does, however, depend on chance to locate useful thermals in the first place. Roke Manor Research, a British firm, hopes to eliminate that element of chance by allowing drones actively to seek out rising air in places where the hunt is most likely to be propitious. As well as thermals, Mike Hook, the project’s leader, and his team are looking at orographic lift, produced by wind blowing over a ridge, and lee waves caused by wind striking mountains. Their software combines several approaches to the search for rising air. It analyses the local landscape for large flat areas that are likely to produce thermals, and for ridges that might generate orographic lift. It also employs cameras to spot cumulus clouds formed by rapidly rising hot air.

Perhaps the most ambitious scheme for a robot glider, however, is the artificial albatross proposed by Philip Richardson of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts. Like its natural counterpart, this artificial bird harnesses wind shear—the difference in wind speed at different heights—in a technique called dynamic soaring.

The air is quite still near the surface of the sea even when it is blowing strongly just a few metres above, so an albatross can rise to gain height like a kite in a breeze, then glide down in any direction. By repeating this trick it can fly thousands of kilometres without flapping its wings, and by tacking it can travel anywhere, regardless of the wind direction. Dr Richardson hopes to replicate this with his robot bird. If he can, he will surely break all records for the time a heavier-than-air artifact has stayed aloft."

 

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21572927-unmanned-gliders-powered-drones-are-old-hat-latest-robot-aircraft-are-wafted

Crime and Punishment

A thought provoking article worth reading:

Smart on Crime

Being tough on criminals hasn’t worked, but neither has being lenient. Here’s how to prevent—and punish—crime the right way.

Mark A.R. Kleiman

 

When I was young and irresponsible, I met with the domestic policy team of a Democratic presidential nominee. To my suggestion that the candidate run on smarter crime control—and the gross failure of mere toughness as a strategy—the head of the team said, “No, crime isn’t our issue; it’s their issue.”..........

http://www.democracyjournal.org/28/smart-on-crime.php?page=all

No-fear

by Elihu Genmyo Smith

In the Diamond Sutra the Buddha states, “Those beings shall be most remarkably blessed, Subhuti, who are not alarmed, not frightened, not distressed by what is said in this Sutra.” Or to say it another way, those who are not frightened, not distressed when not attaching or clinging “to a self, a being, a life and a soul.” This is our life of wisdom and perfection – non-self, non-being, non-life, non-soul; this not-other, non-attaining. Because this is so, the greatest gift we can give is no-fear, the gift of this moment as is. The way we give no-fear is being no-fear–being no-fear we give this gift of no-fear.

No-fear is not the opposite of fear.....

 

The rest of this article is at http://prairiezen.org/Readings/Text_list.html

Mind/thought beyond body - or ?

How are our notions of self and other, mind and body, reflected or amended by the scientific findings linked to below? How does this fit into dualistic notions of body-mind-self and other? "Mind melds" move from science fiction to science in rats - Yahoo! News

http://news.yahoo.com/mind-melds-move-science-fiction-science-rats-144950902.html NEW YORK (Reuters) - The scientists call it a "brain link," and it is the closest anyone has gotten to a real-life "mind meld": the thoughts of a rat romping around a lab in Brazil were captured by electronic sensors and sent via Internet to the brain of a rat in the United States. The result: the second rat received the thoughts of the first, mimicking its behavior, researchers reported on Thursday in Scientific Reports, a journal of the Nature Publishing Group. ...

Tibet and China - self-immolation and political options

An issue of the journal Cultural Anthropology on the topic
of Tibetan self-immolations with many interesting articles
from different perspectives:

http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/526

And another article of related interest:

http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/ret/pdf/ret_25_12.pdf

And the Dalai Lama on the political options and future:

http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/episodes/2012/04/interview-with-the-dalai-lama.html

After posting this, was sent the following:

http://world.time.com/2013/03/08/good-lord-in-china-christian-fundamentalists-target-tibetans/