Diamond.
Buddhists do not deny the existence of various gods or deities who are more fortunate than human beings who possess certain powers which human beings usually lack.
However the powers of these deities are limited because they are also transient beings. They exist in happy abodes and enjoy their life for a longer period than human beings.
When they have exhausted all the good karma they have gathered during previous births, these deities pass away and are reborn somewhere else according to their good and bad karmas.
According to Buddha, human beings have more chances to accrue merits to be born in a better condition and the gods have less chances in this respect.
Whether they are great or small, both human beings and deities are perishable and subject to rebirth.
Worshipping and offering in the name of such deities cannot bring anybody the final bliss, the Nirvana, the uprooting and final dissolution of the volitional formations (referred to as samskaras or sankharas), structures within the unconscious mind that are the cause for the material incarnation of the beings.
Which means the END OF SUFFERING. The person who attains Nirvana is never born again._(♡)_
Source: http://www.thebuddhism.net/2012/11/13/what-is-buddhism/
How to start a home rain barrel project
Water is precious and becoming more scarce. Try a rain barrel in your yard to use ‘free’ water for irrigation and limit what you run from the tap.
Remake Project had been launched by the website Booooooom.com asking you to adapt a famous painting in photo.
Following the success and the many works submitted by users, the site is currently completing a compilation of the best projects in a self-published book. You have until February 22, 2013 to send your work.
“Self Portrait 1889″.Vincent van Gogh
“Pot Pourri”. Herbert James Draper
“Le Désespéré”. Gustave Courbet
« Weeping Woman”. Picasso
« Study for Portrait”. Francis Bacon
The Picasso one is brilliant.
(via maanson-faamily-vaalues)
http://expanded-eye.blogspot.fr/2013/05/circle-of-life.html
Expanded Eye.Needles Side.Thonon France.
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SOLUTIONS: Boycott Monsanto IN YOUR GROCERY CART!
A new app, Buycott, helps users avoid companies that support issues or corporations they disagree with. Many are using it to boycott Monsanto and the Koch brothers. (Photo: Buycott)
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Want to Steer Clear of Monsanto? ‘Buycott’ App Shows You How
Tens of thousands flock to download app that lets users shop more conscientiously.Here’s how the app works: First, users join campaigns boycotting business practices that violate their principles—such as products made by Big Food companies or corporations that have fought GMO labeling. When an item is scanned, “Buycott will then trace the product’s ownership back to its top parent company and cross-check this company against the campaigns that you’ve joined before telling you whether it found a conflict,” according to the company’s website..
New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More By Scanning …
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(via cultureofresistance)
My eye caught a dark form lying on the river bottom. It took me a few moments to comprehend what I had stumbled upon. Lying peacefully in the shallow waters of the river, only a few meters from shore, was a full-grown cougar. The contrast between the serenity of the scene I was witnessing and what must have played out here in the cougar’s final moments made me shiver. It was the first shiver of many, as I stripped down and waded out into the icy water to get this shot. x
(via damnnlyssa)
(Source: gooddaysunshinee, via damnnlyssa)
When I was a kid, the highest spot on our little South Texas ranch was the walkway at the top of our oil well’s tank battery. From there, you could take in a good piece of the gently rolling brush country. For a time, before it all came crashing down in the early 1980s, you could see the drilling rigs, the tank batteries, and the new oil-field roads carved through that patch of DeWitt County. Maybe you could spot men, like my dad, coming home from hard but good-paying jobs offshore or in the oil patch. The well on our ranch never produced much, and it was plugged once the boom turned to bust. And what a bust it was. In 1981, the oil and gas industry accounted for 18 percent of Texas’ economy and one-fifth of state tax revenue. When global oil prices tumbled, the Texas economy went into a deep depression, and workers went into other fields. At our place, the tank battery came down, leaving just a rusting “Christmas tree”—an assembly of valves and pipes—to mark the spot. Oil giveth and oil taketh away.
It seemed like that was the end of the Texas oil business. Of course, no one could’ve foreseen the fortunes awaiting in North Texas’ Barnett Shale, South Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale, East Texas’ Haynesville Shale, the Panhandle’s Granite Wash Shale and West Texas’ Cline Shale. No one foresaw that oil prices would climb to near-historic highs and stay there. No one foresaw that hydraulic fracturing (fracking) would be combined with horizontal drilling to open up gargantuan new domestic reserves.
The boom is back, probably bigger and longer-lasting than any before. The stats tell part of the story: In the past two years, Texas’ oil production has gone up 71 percent. Texas is now home to one-fifth of all drilling rigs worldwide. The Eagle Ford, which stretches 400 miles from Laredo northeast into East Texas, is attracting more capital investment than any other oil field on the planet. Just half a decade ago, the Eagle Ford was little more than a blotch on a geology map.
Last year, there were over 1,000 new wells sunk in the Eagle Ford and more than 352 million barrels of oil produced, far exceeding most analysts’ expectations. You don’t need to stand on top of a tank battery to see the night sky lit up with flares; in the rush to get oil out of the ground and to market, many producers are burning off any natural gas that comes up from their oil wells.
The Permian Basin’s Cline Shale could be bigger still. The Cline, which underlies 10 West Texas counties and is 10-times thicker than the Eagle Ford, could contain as much as 30 billion barrels of oil. Not that long ago, the game in the Permian Basin was tertiary recovery—squeezing the last drops out of dying fields.
Unthinkable as it once seemed, some experts now believe that the U.S. could surpass Saudi Arabia in oil production within eight years and become a net exporter. State Rep. Jim Keffer, the Republican chair of the House Energy Resources Committee, recently called it “a miracle.”
So much for peak oil. So much for the withering away of the carbon-based economy.
The vast energy and wealth generated by this oil renaissance is staggering. But at what cost? Can we afford to continue the carbon emissions that come with an oil-dependent economy? Oil money has a way of virtually silencing debate about climate change. It has a way of blinding us to the connection between Texas’ carbon emissions and its record-breaking heat and drought. It has a way of rendering mute the increasingly urgent warnings from climate scientists, including many in Texas. The planet has undergone just .8 degrees Celsius of warming so far and already the disruptions to the environment, from extreme weather events to a massive reduction in Arctic sea ice, have been greater than expected. Many scientists now believe it is virtually impossible for the planet to avoid 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) of warming, a threshold that the world’s governments have decided shouldn’t be crossed. Beyond that, things will get much worse, much faster. To avoid further catastrophe the impossible must be made possible: Texas, and other oil-rich places, will have to leave most of the carbon, the oil, in the ground. Oil markets go up and they go down, they boom and they bust. But we only get one chance to avert catastrophic climate change.
smh fuck this city and fuck walmart.
