[00:00:14] Speaker A: Welcome to my Bob Thurman podcast.
I'm so grateful some good friends enabled me to present them to you.
If you enjoy them and find them useful, please think of becoming a member of Tibet House US to help preserve Tibetan culture.
Tibet House is the Dalai Lama's Cultural Center in America.
All best wishes. Have a great day.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: This is episode 332 shambaba politics and Climate Change. A Thanksgiving message for 2023.
[00:01:24] Speaker C: Happy Thanksgiving. Here I am, happy as a clam in front of the Kanal Chakra Mandala, which I love. And I especially like it because I was initiated by His Holiness of Dalai Lama, and I especially like him, and also because it reminds me of the eventual advent of shambhala in everyone's view, which is already here in my know. I was deeply inspired by a wonderful Christian teacher, David Spangler, who he's not prominent nowadays, and I think he's living peacefully. He's younger than me, and he lives in the Seattle area, I think. And I haven't seen him in way too long. I think he's kind of a little quiet, or else I'm just missing his circles. But he and I had this wonderful meeting up about this sort of Armageddon thing, because he had been as a youth, he was somewhat recruited by his family members, like, you know, to be a great evangelist and teach about the New Jerusalem and Armageddon and this kind of thing. And then he became a medium for John, which it's never said, but I always think it's John of Patmos reincarnated. But the Christians can't say that because they don't want to have a formal reincarnation doctrine. But I always thought it was because he had refused to do their version of the Rapture, which puts Jesus's return as a very violent business. And he said that the New Jerusalem is already here, and there's this sort of like, network of light on this planet's surface. He did this when he was at David Spengler network of light. And if you love others and you're kind and you're gentle and you're intelligent and wise, and you then will find that you are standing on this thread of light, well, then people who are angry and frightened and hostile to other people and abusive and manipulative, they are kind of falling through the cracks, and that's already happening. In other words, the way he interpreted the Book of Revelation as a Christian and he is still and has always been a faithful Christian. He just didn't want to think badly of Jesus as coming back with a sword and banging people and killing them and forcing them to convert to some conquest ideology version of Christianity that is not the one that Jesus taught. Which is love thy enemy, even much less love thy neighbor as thyself overcoming selfishness and violence, of course showing that even violence couldn't kill him as a beloved person.
So I love that guy, and he inspired me at the time because I always had that feeling about shambhala because the Buddhists also have a kind of apocalyptic thing with a big war and then the good guys win and the bad guys get quieted down and calm down and then everything is fine.
But they don't say everybody has to be a budhist but they just say everyone will be okay for spirituality without any conquering using religion as a conquering ideology.
That's what shambhala means that spirituality and gentleness and world peace flourishes.
And that's what I believe and therefore I believe Shambalah is already here.
And why is it not seem to be here? And this is what my podcast today on Thanksgiving is. And what I'm giving thanks for is people who are nowadays getting in really trouble and a lot of a hard time because of bad leadership.
And we all love regular people who do regular work in a climate and a circumstance where you can live well enough by doing your duty and you're not where you can slave away all day long and all night and you still can't get by. Which is what happens when wealth gets too concentrated in powerful people at the top.
And I'm not anticommunist and I am really anti the fake pretense of communists which are these dictatorships. So don't think I'm talking about that. I am talking about democratic socialism or socialistic democracy or democratism.
We could have a king as far as I'm concerned on top of that. But like the King of England actually powerless in regard to politics and unable to take know king of Sweden, King of Holland. They only have some little bit of moral and social ethical prestige that makes them a model for people. And they can try to ask people to come on now, don't be idiots about governments but they don't have actual political power. So you can have a socialistic thing like England should be having has had and Holland and Norway and know that's what I mean by so when people are just people and they insist on living peacefully they're in shambhala even though some bad people are raking the planet. And then in that light there's horrible news on the climate frontier as well as good news. But the horrible news is more money than the good news. Trillion dollars was spent in 2022, I believe is a reliable figure that I've seen, and only half a billion, I think. No, it's a trillion has already been spent in 2023, and half a billion was spent in total of 22. And let's hope another half a billion or maybe a bit more spent. Now, although that figure includes 40%, which is supposedly what China is spending, which they may be pretending they're spending on climate because they're maybe making products they hope to sell for climate, but they're doing it with factories powered by coal powered power plants so still that more carbon is being put up than ever was. Every year. It's increasing every year, even though we're in this crisis.
So there that's. My first quote I wanted to say today on Thanksgiving, I'm giving thanks that we have 8 billion wonderful people on human beings on our planet. And we have trillions of beautiful animal people who are also people actually caught in the unfortunate, less fortunate animal form, let's say have been human, will be human again, giving beginningless and endlessness of life. So cheer up about it.
They might be extinguished in some great extinction that poor Greta is upset about and I'm most upset about it. But on the other hand, the individuals dying are reborn and they might hopefully decide even maybe for negative reasons because humans did stuff that caused them to be exterminated. Maybe they'll be born in a different animal form closer to the human one, which is dominating the planet, not because we are more nasty and powerful, but because we are more cooperative and empathetic. And so our individual weakness is compensated for by our collective genius of making destructive means. So therefore, we control the other animal species on the planet and to such an extent that we are wrecking ourselves actually and fighting with the other humans and we are wrecking the whole place so we can make it worse. But that's because we have evolutionarily positive attributes of being able to get along in groups in a better way than the Chimpanzees and others. And we are reaching the point on the planet where we can get along with everybody on the planet. There will be no alien bad races or no humans who are unworthy of good life like all of us can have because we are in this beautiful planet that can feed us all if we take care of it.
Okay, so for the coen here that I want you to reflect on in Thanksgiving, thank goodness for the 8 billion wonderful people.
-2000 tyrannical, over, powerful, even freaked out and stressed by the excess power. Frightened themselves by it. Even though they seem so powerful to us ordinaries and somehow the fear of them and their wish to conquer and dominate and continue to manipulate and their disrespect for we ordinaries is causing them to create so much damage to us and so much damage to the planet that they could wreck the whole thing within another 2030 years. And we really would pass tipping points where we'd have, like, 150 degrees Fahrenheit for months and weeks on end. In different areas of the world with people dying from plus 95 wet bulb day and night, inability to rest and crashing the energy systems in such poor places and people dying from heat mass millions.
Kim Stanley Robinson so brilliantly illustrated in his cliffhi that is climate Sci-Fi novel which everyone should read the Ministry for the Future.
Okay, so this is the Cohen. There's few thousand over here and 8 billion over here. But old obsolete systems of tyrannical dictatorship either open overt dictatorship or sort of corporate money, dictatorship and oracles combined, when it becomes fascism overt fascism, these systems are disempowering the 8 billion to be able to control, which control doesn't mean exterminate. Control means have democracy and vote them out, cause them to retire, send them to rehabilitation for ex dictators, hopefully not have to do some horrible things to them so they can mend their ways and try to find happiness themselves and stop being afraid.
That's the trick. And how come this is not happening? How come we can control a few thousand people, us billions? Because they have managed to corrupt our democracies here and there with some flames flickering in Europe and America and Japan, here and there, that we want to, and here and there in the global south that are threatened here and there, too. But we will keep them. We will support them. We will manage to do it, I'm sure, because we have such a huge numerical advantage. It's really no contest if we can exercise that advantage.
Okay?
And I read recently about the white paper revolution at the end of the COVID lockdown in China, where you get arrested for holding up a white piece of paper because they know you want to write in that, let Xi retire, Xi Jinping, let this dictator, having changed the term limits for a leader, let him retire instead. That's what the white paper meant. So they're getting arrested for that. And this will inevitably happen. But actually, now this brings me to the politics. I don't want to go on for length on this Thanksgiving. I want you to feel thankful that I'm not going to be talking for too long, so I will try not to. And this brings me to politics.
Terrible atrocity afflicted by Hamas on this. Nice people, nice Israelis living in southern Israel. And I understand that the majority of the people in the south were the sort of do gooders, among the most strongest do gooders. They were trying to get along with the Palestinians they were flying kites with, like they were the ones on those kibbuts and other places were the ones trying to ameliorate the horrible oppression that the leadership were doing.
And I wanted to make some statements about pro Palestine statements and pro Israeli statements both. And I realized it was impossible. If you say one or the other, then you're just completely canceled by everybody. I didn't say anything for some time on my podcast or in my Unwritten substac. I write them, but I don't publish them yet. So I don't know why, for family reason, but because everything's so polarized. However, I want to say today, I want to just draw your attention to think about the bad leadership in all these cases of these conflicts that are going on. Bad leadership, not bad people, not bad nations, bad leadership. Okay.
Kingpin is Putin, who is a KGB trained person, trained in the sort of killer intelligence service from the Cold War, which we have our own in the Americas. So I'm not being specially anti Russian.
I love the Russian people, actually.
They are real people and we want them to be free, and they haven't been since the KGB reversed Gorbachev's Glasnov's open, restructuring, trying to create, to give his people he was leader, give them democracy so they can control that.
So and he's the one, by the way, we said, of course we're not expanding NATO and this and that, because we don't need to, because you're withdrawing from your domineering business in Eastern Europe. So that's who we promised. We didn't promise the KGB that we know KGB will not be withdrawing. Putin was so angry that he was in Germany, living it up as an elite intelligence killer guy, and he's a great catastrophe of the 20th century, he said, so he was going to rebuild it so we wouldn't make him any promise. And we had to answer the demand and the claim and the cry, the plea for protection from the Baltic, tiny little Baltic states on the edge of Russia there, and from the Romanians and from the Poles, who would be first to be wiped out by KGB to get back into East Germany and wherever even they want all of Europe. They always did. So you can't make promises, like to them to abandon the democratic, lovely EU people, who used to include even the English before they got corrupted by London ground and by a bunch of weird old fashioned dukes and barons, with the king unable the queen and king unable to do anything about it because of their powerlessness.
So Putin, putin sent Lavrov to the Ayatula because he's losing badly in Ukraine.
He's killing his own people, much greater rate than he's killing Ukrainians.
He seems to be holding a line that's built up with a bunch of mines in the ground and stuff. And Ukrainians don't have endless people. And also, although they have soldiers, they are not the type of generals and lead political leaders who want us, just don't care how many of them are killed. So they're going slowly and methodically and everybody's acting like, oh, Jesus can't break because they're losing, blah, blah, bull. Only they're doing great. They've chased the Russian fleet out of Crimea. They are completely they're doomed to succeed.
Putin's oligarchy, which is not Russia, his little oligarchy vertical of power is a terrorist organization. He has openly admitted, in order to quell pragozin and assassinate him, first quell him by deceiving him and then assassinate him. In order to do that, he had to openly admit that Wagner was his instrument, which Wagner is a terrorist group.
So he's pulling strings of these bad political leaders not only in Russia, but also he's supporting a leader who is killing the women in his own society in order to enforce a ridiculous unfashionable dress code, namely the Ayatollah Kameni with His Majlise troops, who are secret police, killing Iranians and imprisoning and executing women because they don't dress right.
So obviously lost control of his country but still has domineering and murderous lethal control over his people.
So he sent his minister, Lavrov to him, putin did.
He said I'm losing badly in Ukraine. And if it becomes really open that I lost the traitors, the useful idiots I have in America, like the insurrectionist Republicans led by my faithful Trump, who wants to give me Ukraine. And who wants to have a penthouse in Moscow with me, next door to me, and who is a complete traitor and therefore could convert America to being in my pocket. And I need to hold on so he'll have a chance to win. If it's shown openly what a loser I am, then the fact that he's a loser might be awoken in people's minds in America. And I can't betray America and destroy American democracy, which I've been doing. Gray zone warfare. For 30 years about we KGB people have been doing. And we have some fools who are working for us.
Bannon, the current speaker, whatever his name is.
And of course, the kingpin is the loser.
Even pathetic capitalist, the bad capitalist in the incompetent capitalist, namely Mr. Durmf, who really comes from East Germany, his lineage.
So I need your help. Ayatollah and you know what?
Israel has really dictatorial crazy government just now, minority, tiny little government trying to wreck their democracy. The main Israeli people don't like they're protesting in the street, they're sort of weak even some say they won't serve in the military. So we're guaranteed to get a really proper crazy recession out of him. But I need you to call up Hezbollah guy, tell him to attack in the north. I need you to call up Hamas guys living in Qatar in comfortable hotels with lots of money and tell their people under the boot in Gaza to commit suicide, to stir up a huge flip out in that place and wreck the nice Israelis and wreck the peaceful, ordinary Palestinians. I don't care what happens here, but that will really weaken Biden, who is supporting Europe, to support Zelensky, my enemy, who is beating me up. So please, let's create chaos there. And by the way, I'm creating nice chaos in Sudan through my Wagner chief there, who is now my loyal follower since I got rid of Brigoshan.
So it's this cabal of these dictatorial leaders that is to be blamed, not the Palestinians and not the Israelis and not the Ukrainians and not the Russians and not the Sudanese and not the Iranians, but the bad leaders, not the Lebanese, for sure, but the horrible dictators who could use religion sometimes they do. KGB now is great because they're unified with the corrupt patriarch of orthodoxy in Russia. They bought him off. He's disobeying his own boss, his own pope in Istanbul and supporting the vertical of power, the terrorists who pretend to be the government of Russia, but they're actually terrorists. They're actually Wagner worldwide, supporting any kind of terroristic dictator anywhere.
So my statement to everyone and the Israeli people are so freaked out oh, anti Semitic. The Palestinian Palestinian people are also so freaked out. Oh. Everybody's anti Semitic. Actually, guess what? The Palestinians also have a Semitic language, which is what Semitic refers to. Actually.
Nothing to do with the nation of Israel, nothing to do with the nation that has been still born. It's being strangled in the womb by bad leaders. Not by Rabin, not by Barak, not by all the people protesting the destruction of the Israeli magnificent Israeli Supreme Court and this magnificent of Israeli democracy. One criminal guy who's under indictment for corruption, like our guy indictment for 91 counts of bribery, lying, corruption, insurrection.
Those guys don't represent us Americans.
He didn't even represent us when he was supposedly president. He just did business from the White House, which he's incompetent at doing. He's not a competent businessman.
He just didn't lie and cheat. He's a gangster. So is Putin.
They all just want to keep their control of the world. But guess what? Even Mother Nature doesn't want them to control. She was sent stiffhoans and hurricanes and floods. She's so distressed by their disequilibriating the planet with their greed burning dinosaur carcasses as oil and coal and gas 2000 wrecking the lives of trillion of 8 billion plus trillion animals.
This is ridiculous and we can recognize it. So let us all be on this Thanksgiving Day, pro Israel, pro Palestine, pro Ukraine, pro Russia, zelensky threatens to liberate the Russians from this criminal, terrorist, gangster oligarchy that is occupying the Kremlin. Illegitimately without proper democracy of real elections. Sure, they have some supporters who are so confused by fake propaganda like we have, our oligarch has fake Fox News, even pretends they hate it. But meanwhile, they're lying up a storm and our people are so confused, they think that the worst businessman known to the public, who owned two casinos and the house, lost in both cases, which that's impossible. The house never loses in casinos. But he lost in two cases because he's so incompetent.
And yet they think he's better at business than Joe Biden, who has created 15 million jobs, more than all five previous Republican presidents, including some of the more weaker Democratic ones.
And who is preventing a recession in a complex situation where post COVID should have been a recession, preventing it by strengthening the middle class is moving to deal with climate change and trying to restrain, but not insanely in a balanced way, the oligarch, our own oil oligarchs, because we're so right, we're capitalists. Social capitalism is fine.
Not laissez faire capitalism, not piratical capitalism, as Buckminster fully used to call it. Social capitalism is good. We make more money. That so. And then you can share it more effectively.
So let us give thanks for the endurance of the russian people who believe me, once Putin topples, they will throw him out with gusto. And that our job at that time will be to help him go to Hawai like we took Marcos.
Let him be rehabilitated, let him relax his fear of his own bodyguards behind his long, 40 meters long table, of his own ministers, of his own generals, of his own terrorist gangster.
He's the godfather of these gangsters who they can rebel against him like Pergosian did. Let him live free of fear and stress. We don't want any ill to come to any of these ex dictators. Even they have caused the death of so many, because vengeance is mine. Say it's. The Lord karma will get him anyway in future life, because of this killing. We don't have to. We can try to help him do some reparations, do some repentance in life, so it'll be less heavy when he goes forward.
Okay, so this is my podcast. That's it. I'm going to be brief, I think. I hope less than 30 minutes. And love to you all on this wonderful Thanksgiving time.
Thanks to our Native Americans, they didn't allow themselves to be exterminated. They're there giving us environmentalist lessons. Now we have secretive interior. As native person, they want us to learn to take care of our water and our trees and our soil, get rid of monsanto, horrible and agribusiness, poisoning the soil, putting cancer in the soil and the processed foods against us.
They want to help us overcome that, heal us. After all this they suffered, they still want to. I give thanks, Martin Scorsese, showing how they were abused, the beautiful Osage people.
Finally, they produce a prima ballerina, really, the regular people, the individual, peace loving neighbor, friendly, nice people in all the countries.
Only time they forced to behave badly by bad leaders, but they eventually vote them out when they have a chance.
Okay, and we give thanks for that.
This continuation of the 20th century's bad wars, cold, hot, is only because those leaders think they're still in the 20th century and are still trying to rule by fear because they're scared.
So we have to reassure them as we vote them out. We can love them too if they stop causing harm.
Okay? But meanwhile, we're not going to be confused that they are what they've able, they're coercing their nation into doing.
And we're not going to hate their nation and their people because of their bad behavior.
Okay? And thanks to you for listening, and I don't know, a few of 20 or 30 maybe will, and you spread this meme.
Don't demonize any whole peoples of any kind and give them all a space to vote their leaders in and out genuinely. We will then have peace.
Okay? Thank you very much. Geowadi nyoduda Duchi kolo tripjon.
By the merit of this little talk and the merit of your listening to it, inspiring me to speak then, however few we are.
May we soon become enlightened, perfectly awakened and enlightened. And may we help others to become equal to us. Since we don't do that in order to somehow domineer on anybody, we want to bring them equal to realizing the beauty and the joy of life.
Wisdom is bliss. All right. Thank you. Bye.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: The Bob Thurman podcast is produced through Creative Commons no derivatives license. Please be sure to like, share and repost on your favorite social media platforms. And it's brought to you in part through the generous support of the Tibet House US. Menla membership, community and listeners like you. To learn more about the benefits of Tibet House membership, please visit our
[email protected] menla.org and Bob Thurman.com tashi delek and thanks for tuning in.
