have a buddhaful day me

"

I’ll be doing something innocuous — reading a magazine, playing a game, something with a relatively low (but not zero) cognitive threshold, so that my brain is working but not focused — and a phrase will pop into my head. It’ll be novel (to me), typically a combination of terms that don’t usually go together, yet seemingly something meaningful. I’ll hop onto whatever digital device I have handy to see if someone else is already talking about the topic, to see if it’s already a real thing. Often it is, and I can return to whatever I was doing. But sometimes, it’s not — it’s a combination of terms that hasn’t before been seen by the mighty eye of Google.

“Forensic Futurism” was today’s term. And aside from a few pages including the two terms in an alphabetical listing, it’s a term without a pre-existing presence. So the rest of my afternoon was spent trying to figure out what the hell forensic futurism might be, and why it sounded like it should mean something useful and/or important.

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"The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America."

"With this defense authorization act, Congress will, for the first time in 60 years, authorize the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without charge or trial, according to its advocates. This would be the first time that Congress has deviated from President Nixon’s Non-Detention Act. And what we are talking about here is that Americans could be subjected to life imprisonment without ever being charged, tried, or convicted of a crime, without ever having an opportunity to prove their innocence to a judge or a jury of their peers. And without the government ever having to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I think that denigrates the very foundations of this country. It denigrates the Bill of Rights. It denigrates what our Founders intended when they created a civilian, non-military justice system for trying and punishing people for crimes committed on U.S. soil. Our Founders were fearful of the military—and they purposely created a system of checks and balances to ensure we did not become a country under military rule. This bill undermines that core principle, which is why I could not support it."