The mind is being influenced all the time to think along a certain line. It used to be that only the organized religions were after your mind, but now governments have largely taken over that job. They want to shape and control your mind. On the surface the mind can resist their control… Superficially you have some say in the matter, but below the surface, in the deep unconscious, there is the whole weight of time, of tradition, urging you in a particular direction. The conscious mind may to some extent control and guide itself, but in the unconscious your ambitions, your unsolved problems, your compulsions, superstitions, fears, are waiting, throbbing, urging.

… This whole field of the mind is the result of time; it is the result of conflicts and adjustments, of a whole series of acceptances without full comprehension. Therefore we live in a state of contradiction; our life is a process of endless struggle. We are unhappy, and we want to be happy. Being violent, we practice the ideal of non-violence. So there is a conflict going on—the mind is a battlefield. We want to be secure, knowing inwardly, deeply, that there is no such thing as security at all. The truth is that we do not want to face the fact that there is no security; therefore, we are always pursuing security, with the resultant fear of not being secure.

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

– Rudyard Kipling

The joker called China!

Gist of the video:

• Humans keep a lot of animals for food. Around 23 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cattle, 1 billion pigs and 1 billion sheep every year.
• On a global scale, our meaty diet is literally eating up the planet.
• 83% of farmland is used for animal food production.
• That’s 26% of earth’s total land area.
• Livestock accounts for 27% of global freshwater consumption.
• Only a fraction of the nutrients from fodder end up in the meat.
• One kilogram of steak needs up to 25 kilos of grain and 15,000 liters of water.
• Meat just makes up 18% of our calories humans eat.
• We could nourish an additional 3.5 billion people if we can redirect the resources.
• 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions are created by the meat industry.
• Globally, we kill about 200 million animals every day.
• The majority of antibiotics we use are for livestock – up to 80% in the US.
• An average American throws out nearly a pound of food per day.
• Imagine, if animals were to think of humans, they would consider us killers of the planet.
• “Humans are rampant genocidal maniacs who thrive on suffering.”

Original Video is from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxvQPzrg2Wg
Video Sources can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/kgssourcesmeat/startseite

The answer is NO. The dynamics of the world order has changed drastically than what it was couple of decades ago. Below article from “The Week” magazine sums up the utter failures of adventures of regime changes in the recent past. The world is more chaotic now than what it was before when there were dictators ruling those few countries. In the name of democracy or protection or call it anything, a reason to invade has thrown life out into chaos not only of the invaded country but also of the world. No region is stable in the world due to this. Migration crisis is at its peak. But in the end, the fundamental question props up, “who is responsible for all this chaos in the world?” Well, god is nowhere in the picture as its a human creation. Either greed or ego has dominated every situation. Looks like the power hungry are directing their energies towards IRAN, for a change now although current IRAN regime is also responsible for the unfavorable conditions it has created for itself. Syria wasn’t successful for many who thought they could dethrone its leader like other places. IRAN won’t be easy as the world is more multipolar than what anyone could imagine half a century ago when there was only one super power dictating terms.

Meanwhile, you can read the full article here: http://theweek.com/articles/786525/americas-lunatic-lust-regime-change

Here’s an excerpt of the current world situation in terms of regime change which will make you understand the whole thing in a gist from the article:

“Overthrowing the government of Afghanistan was the most justified, since the Taliban had given refuge to Osama bin Laden and refused to turn him over after 9/11. But the U.S. military has now been stuck fighting there for over 16 years, with no end in sight, and with the Taliban constantly sowing chaos and threatening to make a political comeback (which is something we’ve now becoming more open to accepting). In the end, the two most likely outcomes of American involvement in Afghanistan are an interminable semi-occupation underwriting an unstable government contending with a permanent insurgency — or a return to a version of the very fundamentalist rule we deposed more than a decade and a half ago.

But that’s nothing compared to the utter disaster of regime change in Iraq. Life under Saddam Hussein may have been awful, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the continuation of his rule would have led to the deaths of 600,000 Iraqis (along with roughly 5,000 Americans), the displacement of millions more, the destabilization of the region (including the empowering of Iran and collapse of Syria into a civil war, the latter of which has led to another half-million deaths as well as a flood of migrants and refugees that has helped to catalyze a right-wing anti-immigrant movement across Europe), and the formation of a new terrorist organization (ISIS) that managed to surpass in brutality the one that launched the 9/11 attacks (al Qaeda).

The Iraq War has been a perfect storm of unintended, awful consequences.

But that didn’t keep a Democratic president who ran for office in part on his opposition to the Iraq War from making the very same misjudgments as George W. Bush before him. In Libya, Obama overthrew the tyrannical government of Moammar Gadhafi, which cheered American do-gooders, but he made few if any arrangements to guarantee order. The perfectly predictable result was chaos in the resulting power vacuum. Subsequent years have brought economic collapse, the rise of tribal warfare, instability, violence, and even the return of the slave trade — not to mention even more of those migrants and refugees headed to Europe across the Mediterranean.”

Media operates through five filters: ownership, advertising, the media elite, flak and the common enemy – Edward S Herman & Noam Chomsky

1 OWNERSHIP
The first has to do with ownership. Mass media firms are big corporations. Often, they are part of even bigger conglomerates. Their end game? Profit. And so it’s in their interests to push for whatever guarantees that profit. Naturally, critical journalism must take second place to the needs and interests of the corporation.

2 ADVERTISING
The second filter exposes the real role of advertising. Media costs a lot more than consumers will ever pay. So who fills the gap? Advertisers. And what are the advertisers paying for? Audiences. And so it isn’t so much that the media are selling you a product — their output. They are also selling advertisers a product — YOU.”

3 THE MEDIA ELITE
The establishment manages the media through the third filter. Journalism cannot be a check on power because the very system encourages complicity. Governments, corporations, big institutions know how to play the media game. They know how to influence the news narrative. They feed media scoops, official accounts, interviews with the ‘experts’. They make themselves crucial to the process of journalism. So, those in power and those who report on them are in bed with each other.

4 FLAK
If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins. When the media – journalists, whistleblowers, sources – stray away from the consensus, they get ‘flak’. This is the fourth filter. When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flak machine in action discrediting sources, trashing stories and diverting the conversation.

5 THE COMMON ENEMY
To manufacture consent, you need an enemy — a target. That common enemy is the fifth filter. Communism. Terrorists. Immigrants. A common enemy, a bogeyman to fear, helps corral public opinion.

Now you know how to filter everything that goes on around you? Do not believe everything blindly. Pause for a moment and question the authenticity of anything that is pushed onto you. No one will save you unless you want to help yourself. God is always busy. Don’t depend on him.

Religion as we generally know it or acknowledge it, is a series of beliefs, of dogmas, of rituals, of superstitions, of worship of idols, of charms and gurus that will lead you to what you want as an ultimate goal. The ultimate truth is your projection, that is what you want, which will make you happy, which will give a certainty of the deathless state. So, the mind caught in all this creates a religion, a religion of dogmas, of priest-craft, of superstitions and idol-worship—and in that, you are caught, and the mind stagnates. Is that religion? Is religion a matter of belief, a matter of knowledge of other people’s experiences and assertions? Or is religion merely the following of morality? You know it is comparatively easy to be moral—to do this and not to do that. Because it is easy, you can imitate a moral system. Behind that morality, lurks the self, growing, expanding, aggressive, dominating. But is that religion?

You have to find out what truth is because that is the only thing that matters, not whether you are rich or poor, not whether you are happily married and have children, because they all come to an end, there is always death. So, without any form of belief, you must find out; you must have the vigor, the self-reliance, the initiative, so that for yourself you know what truth is, what God is. Belief will not give you anything; belief only corrupts, binds, darkens. The mind can only be free through vigor, through self-reliance.

– J Krishnamurti, “The Book of Life”

Karma implies, does it not, cause and effect, action based on cause, producing a certain effect; action born out of conditioning, producing further results. So karma implies cause and effect. And are cause and effect static, are cause and effect ever fixed? Does not effect become cause also? So there is no fixed cause or fixed effect. Today is a result of yesterday, is it not? Today is the outcome of yesterday, chronologically as well as psychologically; and today is the cause of tomorrow. So cause is effect, and effect becomes cause, it is one continuous movement: there is no fixed cause or fixed effect. If there were a fixed cause and a fixed effect, there would be specialization; and is not specialization death? Any species that specializes obviously comes to an end. The greatness of man is that he cannot specialize. He may specialize technically, but in structure he cannot specialize. An acorn seed is specialized, it cannot be anything but what it is. But the human being does not end completely. There is the possibility of constant renewal; he is not limited by specialization. As long as we regard the cause, the background, the conditioning, as unrelated to the effect, there must be conflict between thought and the background. So the problem is much more complex than whether to believe in reincarnation or not, because the question is how to act, not whether you believe in reincarnation or in karma. That is absolutely irrelevant.

– J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life