#like if anything we should have learned not to take americas corrupt election process

[tododeku-or-bust]

um...who is biden running against though? it seems like he might win by default

Whatever you say 👍🏾

[antoine-roquentin]

Since World War II, every two-term Republican president has been more right wing than the one before. Dwight Eisenhower was first. Then Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. In between these five Republican presidents, there were four sets of Democratic administrations: Kennedy/Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

Each of these Democratic administrations made key concessions to the right, and these concessions produced resentment and frustration. Kennedy/Johnson went to war in Vietnam to prove that they were just as tough and anti-communist as the Republicans. Carter appointed Paul Volcker Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and began pursuing a ruthless anti-inflation policy that drove up unemployment and laid the foundation for the neoliberal era. Clinton sliced the federal budget and attacked the welfare system. Obama signed the Budget Control Act of 2011, starving the recovery of necessary stimulus and allowing extraordinarily unequal growth.

Carter, Clinton, and Obama all oversaw increases in inequality. The top 1%’s share of income increased under all three:

Democrats promise to help us and then let the oligarchs get their way. The frustrated American has nowhere to turn but the Republican Party, and Republicans attract them by becoming steadily more nationalist and more committed to liquidating the establishment and its institutions. Ordinary rank and file Republicans hate government because they think it’s too corrupt to do any good for them. Every chance the Democrats get to prove them wrong, they fail. Worse, they reinforce the view.

When Americans vote for Republicans, they’re often voting against the consequences of the right wing policies of Democrats. Think about it:

Nixon won in part because Americans didn’t trust the Democrats to end Vietnam, a war the Democrats started because they were afraid of looking soft on communism. Of course, Nixon then escalated the Vietnam War.

Reagan won in part because Americans believed that Carter’s economic policies–the right-wing policies of Paul Volcker’s Federal Reserve–hadn’t made them better off than they were four years ago. Of course, Reagan then escalated Volcker’s war on inflation.

Bush won in part because he promised to return the surplus Clinton had accumulated through miserly right-wing budgeting to the American people via tax cuts. Bush then gave that money to rich people and spent trillions on insane vanity wars.

Trump won in part because he promised that the people who were left out of Obama’s recovery–the “forgotten people”–would be his priority. Of course, he has continued to give piles of money to rich people and to prioritise inflating the stock market over ensuring ordinary Americans can pay their bills.

It wasn’t always like this. Franklin Roosevelt forced the Republican Party to adapt to him. Before Roosevelt, the Republicans were the party of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. They had little regard for the government’s ability to step in and protect its citizens’ fundamental economic rights. But after Roosevelt, the Republicans became the party of Eisenhower. They became a party that was comfortable building interstate highways with public money and wouldn’t dare raise a hand to Social Security.

McCarthyism broke the domination of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, and with it, the ability of the Democratic Party to set the agenda. From that point forward, the Democrats have adjusted to the Republican Party, and in the process they have normalized its excesses and encouraged it to go further. Nixon was comfortable secretly bombing Cambodia because Kennedy and Johnson lied about their wars. Reagan was comfortable driving unemployment through the roof in the early 80s because Carter had already begun the experiment. Bush was comfortable cutting taxes for the rich because Clinton had given him the surplus he could use to fund it. Trump has been able to prioritise the stock market portfolios of the rich because under Obama a skewed recovery had become our new normal.

Joe Biden loves to tell us that “nothing will fundamentally change”. If nothing changes, another Democrat will normalise what Trump has done and frustrate the American people into voting for someone even more right-wing.

Look at what’s happened with Bush. He’s more popular than ever before. In the 00s, we recognised that Bush was nuts. Bush believed the God wanted him to bring peace to the Middle East by spreading democracy by the sword. That’s crazy! He killed hundreds of thousands of people and accomplished absolutely nothing.

But Barack Obama destroyed Libya in 2011. The civil war in that country continues to this day. And many of the people who recognised that Bush was nuts made excuses for that, and they made excuses for Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State who urged him to do it. They acted like it was no big deal. And now people don’t think Bush’s wars were a big deal, either. They miss him. When Obama was first elected, the American people knew Bush was a terrible president. In January of 2009, Bush had a net favorability rating of negative 19. In the summer of 2016, it was plus 9. A year after that, it was plus 22.

The experience of the Obama administration made the American people decide that George W. Bush was okay. Worse, it made Trump possible. Some Americans moved from Obama to Trump, looking once more for hope and change. Many others stopped voting, because Obama broke their confidence in our political system’s ability to help them. They believed in Obama, and Obama let the rich get richer and let the forgotten stay forgotten.

The Democrats are a big part of how we got to where we are. And if we think that the Republicans are authoritarian nationalists, it is the Democrats who have encouraged them to become that way. The ordinary American cannot look to the Democrats to resist the ravenous elite. They look to the nationalist firebrands of the right because there is nothing else on the menu. The Democratic Party is the party of the Ivy League technocrats who scorn them and tell them to “learn to code”.

Joe Biden solidifies all of this all over again. He is the embodiment of keeping things exactly the way they’ve always been. The American people have been bludgeoned for forty years by oligarchs. They can’t take it anymore. They’ll vote for anyone who promises to make it stop. If the Democrats won’t stop it, they’ll vote for someone who will. The next Republican will be worse than Trump, and Joe Biden will make it happen if given the chance.

Donald Trump Doesn’t Pose an Existential Threat to Democracy

The Democrats say we have to stop Trump because Trump is an authoritarian who poses an existential threat to democracy. But for Trump to be a dictator, he would have to stage sham elections or ignore the results of elections that are free and fair. Trump hasn’t tried to hold a sham election–he’s tried to delay one that’s free and fair, because he knows that if he loses he won’t be able to ignore the result. He hasn’t even managed to secure his delay, much less anything more than that.

Authoritarians use crises to seize power. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán used coronavirus to consolidate power around himself. But Trump responded to coronavirus by running away from decision-making responsibility. Instead, he kicked decisions to governors and mayors. Coronavirus gave Trump an opportunity to centralise power around himself, but he chose to decentralise power instead. He likes the trappings of power, but is afraid of the real deal.

Trump talks a big game about cutting trade links with countries all over the world. But his trade wars usually bring us back where we started, with trade deals that are almost indistinguishable from those that came before. His new version of NAFTA is virtually identical to the old version of NAFTA. He has tried to push jobs and investment out of China, but they’ve been sliding down the coast to Vietnam instead of returning to America. His bark is worse than his bite.

Ultimately, an authoritarian needs the backing of the military. The military has to allow the authoritarian to hold sham elections, or to ignore the results of elections that are free and fair. But America’s leading generals largely despise the president. Our intelligence services loathe him. The military remains committed to the constitution and will arrest Trump if he loses and attempts to carry on. Trump knows this, and that’s why he suggested delaying the election–he knows he could lose, and he knows that if he loses he won’t be able to keep going.

Trump has treated protesters terribly–but he’s not the first American president to do so. The Hoover administration used tanks to bulldoze the bonus army’s camp in 1932, killing two demonstrators and injuring dozens. It was a brutal and shameful act, but it wasn’t the end of American democracy:

The Democrats said Bush had an “imperial presidency“. Then Barack Obama tried to outflank congress with a series of outrageous, unconstitutional executive orders, and many of the same people cheered him on. Now when Donald Trump throws out piles of orders that are probably unconstitutional, the Democrats try to get us outraged again. But the American people are used to the president trying to get away with things. Barack Obama made it cool.

Many of Obama’s unconstitutional orders were struck down by the courts. The Democrats tell us we should be worried that Trump is packing the courts full of stooges who will approve of everything he does. But judges aren’t very predictable. Neil Gorsuch has already voted against the president’s wishes on transgender employees. John Roberts increasingly votes against the president’s wishes to protect the court’s legitimacy. Many of the court’s liberals have historically been appointed by Republicans. Earl Warren was appointed by Eisenhower. John Paul Stevens was appointed by Gerald Ford. David Souter was appointed by George H.W. Bush.

Even if Trump really does pack the court, many on the left have called for packing the judiciary or reforming its structure. In the past, they’ve suggested doing this simply because they don’t agree with the politics of the current judges–not because they believe the judges to be authoritarian. If it’s really the case that Trump manages to load the judiciary up with raving authoritarian nationalists, the judicial reforms already under consideration by the left could be used to undo the damage.

The real concern is not a president who is allied with judges–it’s an authoritarian ruler who is allied with the military. Donald Trump alienated all the leading figures in our armed forces by ignoring their advice, leaking classified information to the press, and blatantly disparaging both them and the intelligence they gathered. Because of this, they will never support any authoritarian bid emanating from him.

We need to articulate a compelling left-wing alternative to the politics of the past 40 years. When Republicans are in office, we flip out over every little thing they do. We oppose it all. People who reject the status quo come to the left and look to the left for a new way forward. But when Democrats are in office, there is no meaningful left-wing opposition. Intellectuals point out the failings of Democratic presidents, but they are derided as bad sports. People who reject the status quo are pushed toward the Republican Party, and pushed into authoritarian nationalism.

A Biden Administration Will Create a Whole New Generation of Bad Democrats

The left hopes that replacing Trump with Biden will buy the left time. But Biden will pack his administration full of a whole new generation of vulgar careerists. It will be these people–not the left–who inherit the Democratic Party when he leaves. They will have the institutional knowledge and connections and access to money that are needed for success in American politics. They will continue servicing the oligarchs. And the Republican Party will respond by growing ever more bellicose, ever more grandiose, ever more willing to tear the whole thing down. Biden will accelerate the rise of new nationalist figures who might be able to do all the things Trump can’t even dream of doing.

We can’t have that, and for that reason I can’t support Biden, even as a matter of strategy. To give the left more time, we need to give the left something to oppose. We can oppose the Trump administration in its second term. But if it’s Biden, we’ll be stuck defending him as he slugs the ordinary American in the face. The American people won’t forget the black eye we’ve given them, and they’ll vote for the leaders who will be the death of us.

[phroyd]

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. prepared on Sunday to start building his administration, even as Republican leaders and scores of party lawmakers refrained from acknowledging his victory out of apparent deference to President Trump, who continued to refuse to concede.

With Mr. Biden out of the public eye as he received congratulations from leaders around the world, his team turned its attention to a transition that will swing into action on Monday, with the launch of a coronavirus task force and swift moves to begin assembling his team.

But more than 24 hours after his election had been declared, the vast majority of Republicans declined to offer the customary statements of good will for the victor that have been standard after American presidential contests, as Mr. Trump defied the results and vowed to forge ahead with long-shot lawsuits to try to overturn them.

While some prominent Republican figures, including the party’s only living former president, George W. Bush, called Mr. Biden to wish him well, most elected officials stayed silent in the face of Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen from him.

Mr. Biden did not respond to Mr. Trump’s attacks on the result, but he also was not waiting for a concession. On Sunday, he unveiled his official transition website as he prepared a series of executive actions for his first day in the Oval Office — including rejoining the Paris climate accord, moving aggressively to confront the coronavirus pandemic and restoring labor organizing rights for government workers — aimed at unwinding Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda and repairing the United States’ image in the world.

But Republicans’ silence suggested that even in defeat, Mr. Trump maintained a powerful grip on his party and its elected leaders, who have spent four years tightly embracing him or quietly working to avoid offending him or his loyal base. For many prominent Republicans, the president’s reluctance to accept the election results created a dilemma, making even the most cursory expression of support for Mr. Biden seem like a conspicuous break with Mr. Trump.

Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri was the most senior Republican to suggest that Mr. Trump had most likely lost and cast doubt on his allegations of a stolen election, but he stopped short of referring to Mr. Biden as the president-elect in an exceedingly careful television interview.

“It’s time for the president’s lawyers to present the facts, and it’s time for those facts to speak for themselves,” Mr. Blunt, the chairman of the Rules Committee, said on ABC’s “This Week.” “It seems unlikely that any changes could be big enough to make a difference, but this is a close election, and we need to acknowledge that.”

“I look forward,” Mr. Blunt added, “to the president dealing with this however he needs to deal with it.”

At the White House, there was little indication that Mr. Trump was dealing with it at all. As he played a second consecutive day of golf at his private club outside Washington, the president recirculated a groundless claim by Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House, who told Fox News, “I think that it is a corrupt, stolen election.”

Privately, the president’s advisers, several of whom have quietly been candid with Mr. Trump that the chances of success in any challenge to the election outcome were not high, had concluded they had little option other than to allow the president to keep fighting until he was ready to bow to the reality of his loss.

On Friday, a large group of them met with the president in the Oval Office to discuss the way forward, giving him a brutally honest assessment of his likelihood of prevailing. After another meeting at Mr. Trump’s campaign headquarters on Saturday, where political aides again laid out the small chances of changing the outcome of the race, Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, asked the group to go to the White House to outline it for Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the meeting.

Campaign officials continued to discuss their legal strategy for challenging the election results on Sunday and named Representative Doug Collins of Georgia, who lost his bid for a Senate seat on Tuesday, to lead their recount effort in the state.

On his first full day as president-elect, Mr. Biden kept a low profile, emerging publicly only to attend Mass, as he does most Sundays. Afterward, he visited the cemetery where his son Beau; his first wife, Neilia; and their daughter, Naomi, are buried. In a sign of one specific stylistic change coming to the White House, he also stayed quiet in another way: Aside from circulating a video posted by his presidential transition, he had not sent a single tweet by Sunday evening.

Leaders around the world sent their congratulations to Mr. Biden, underscoring the international community’s acceptance of the results, even by those who had cultivated close personal ties with Mr. Trump, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Boris Johnson of Britain. A few refrained, including the leaders of Russia and China, Vladimir V. Putin and Xi Jinping.

There were signs that Mr. Trump would come under increasing pressure to accept the election results. The nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, a nonprofit that assists in transfers of power between administrations, called on his team to “immediately begin the postelection transition process.”

“While there will be legal disputes requiring adjudication, the outcome is sufficiently clear that the transition process must now begin,” members of the group’s advisory board — including Mike Leavitt, the former Republican governor of Utah, and Josh Bolten, the White House chief of staff under Mr. Bush — wrote in a letter reported earlier by Politico.

“This was a hard-fought campaign, but history is replete with examples of presidents who emerged from such campaigns to graciously assist their successors,” they wrote.

Mr. Bush extended his congratulations to Mr. Biden in a statement issued after the two men spoke on Sunday.

“Though we have political differences, I know Joe Biden to be a good man, who has won his opportunity to lead and unify our country,” Mr. Bush said in a statement.

And a former member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet, Gary Cohn, also acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory, tweeting his “congrats” to “President-elect @joebiden and Vice President-elect @kamalaharris.”

“With over 145M votes cast,” he continued, “both campaigns should be applauded for getting an unprecedented number of citizens engaged in the democratic process.”

The silence from most other leading Republicans cut both ways for the president. While it allowed Mr. Trump to continue the fiction that he had not lost, it also left him to battle against the election results without the full, vocal support of his party behind him.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, has declined to say anything since Friday, before the election results were known, when he released a generic statement encouraging officials to “count all the votes.” No member of his leadership team has either, apart from Mr. Blunt’s carefully worded statements on Sunday.

In a brief interview later Sunday, Mr. Blunt said a public vetting of the Trump campaign’s claims of fraud could help reassure voters on both sides of the election’s legitimacy.

“I think it is best for both the president and Biden to have as much information out as is possible,” he said.

At the same time, just two Republican senators — Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — and a handful of House members had acknowledged Mr. Biden’s win by Sunday evening, while others were trying to cast doubt on the results.

“Every legal challenge should be heard,” said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader. “Then and only then will America decide who won the race.”

Speaking on Fox News, Mr. McCarthy questioned why news media outlets had called the presidential race for Mr. Biden, who was leading by tens of thousands of votes in key battleground states, before learning the final results of contests in competitive House districts — many of those in deep-blue California and New York — where thousands of mail-in ballots remain uncounted.

“Why would you call the presidential race first?” he asked.

News outlets call races after analyzing returns and concluding the outcome is certain, and the results in the congressional races in which ballots are still being tabulated — all but a handful of them in states that Mr. Biden easily won — have no bearing on the presidential race.

Still, some Republicans were grasping for evidence of wrongdoing. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina urged Mr. Trump to refuse to concede and fight on. He acknowledged, though, that a claim he circulated over the weekend that a postal worker was said to have overheard talk of what he believed was corruption taking place at a facility in Erie, Pa., remained unverified.

“Do not accept the media’s declaration of Biden,” Mr. Graham, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said on Fox News on Sunday morning. He called the election “contested” and urged: “Do not concede, Mr. President. Fight hard.”

Those comments reflected the advice of some of Mr. Trump’s top advisers, chiefly Rudolph W. Giuliani, his personal lawyer, who were urging him on Sunday to continue to fight the results.

A remarkably small number of Republicans called for the country to move on and acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory. Among them were three governors of blue states — Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, Larry Hogan of Maryland and Phil Scott of Vermont — and fewer than a dozen House Republicans.

They included the centrist Representatives Tom Reed of New York and Fred Upton of Michigan; Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump; and four lawmakers who will not be returning to Congress next year: Representatives Paul Mitchell of Michigan, Will Hurd of Texas and Francis Rooney of Florida, who are retiring, and Representative Denver Riggleman of Virginia, who lost his primary this year.

Representative Don Young of Alaska, whose race remains undecided after a re-election bid that was more difficult than expected, said he wished “the president-elect well in what will no doubt be the most challenging chapter of his political career.”

“It is time to put the election behind us, and come together to work for a better tomorrow for our nation,” Mr. Young said in a statement.

On “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Romney provided a contrast to many of his Republican colleagues. He said that he believed it was “appropriate” for Mr. Trump to pursue recounts and legal challenges in certain battleground states, but cautioned against widespread condemnations of the American system of elections.

“It’s important for the cause of democracy and freedom that we don’t allege fraud and theft and so forth, unless there’s very clear evidence of that,” Mr. Romney said. “To date, that evidence has not been produced.”

Mr. Romney noted that he had had a legal team ready to challenge the results of the 2012 election when he was the Republican nominee, but decided not to go forward once he saw such efforts would be futile.

“At some point, truth, freedom and democracy have to ascend,” he said, “and you step aside.”

Phroyd

[enkblogs]

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook:

Interested in opinions from the folks on here, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything political.

I think I’m most heavily rooting for Liz Warren, she’s got great politics and in my opinion the most intelligent candidate running. The only person who’s aggressively talking about policy and has actually gotten some great legislation passed under Trump.

Bernie would be the ideal for me, obviously, but I don’t think he’ll be able to get the centrist/Hillary voters, which is sad but it is what it is unfortunately.

My main issue with the two of them is their support for anti-sex work legislation, Warren even more-so. They’re both socially with the times but can’t seem to grasp the concept that sex workers deserve rights which is a shame and I hope they’ll figure things out in time for the elections.

All the other popular candidates are standard corporate shills and I’m not really interested in any of them.

I AM interested in getting Mike Gravel and Andrew Yang on the debate stage, as I think they’re bringing strong progressive ideas to the table and need to be heard. Mike Gravel specifically, we need him to get up there and beat Biden’s ass and hold everyone accountable for their bullshit.

EDIT: Zero interest in any candidate that isn’t firmly in support of universal health care. No exceptions.

Open forum below, just don’t fight.

...and then one of his friends posted this...

One thing i feel needs to be said is I think the struggle to appeal to the center for any leftist candidate is ultimately a waste of effort. 60% of the eligible voting population does not vote, and I don’t think it’s because they occupy some space in the middle, torn between two extremes. I genuinely think the majority of the country, especially working class communities, will eagerly support “far-left” policies like universal healthcare, tuition debt forgiveness, the green new deal, universal enfranchisement, universal basic income, etc. I don’t think there’s any valid reason to temper the political leanings of any candidate to appeal to the “middle”, as if every election depends on wooing them, when the fact of the matter is the left is specifically designed to protect and advance the interests of the, by volume, single largest economic or political group in this (or any country); the working class. I sincerely believe the way forward, towards any meaningful progress, will not come with capitulation to a voting block of centrists, who need to be bent over backwards for to be appealed to, but the rest of America, who have learned to give up on the idea that politics could ever impart meaningful change on their lives.

On a practical level, running the furthest left candidate possible, ideally Bernie (but I would happily vote for Warren) will serve the Democrats better, because it makes sense to me that the most ideologically consistent and uncompromising candidate will do a lot better to energize a voter base than someone who’s entire platform relies on capitulation to the right, as I fear Beto and Buttigieg are banking on to win the favor of the DNC establishment.

I don’t see this shift as Democrats abandoning the center, as much as the necessary consequence of the center abandoning the political process altogether. There just is no more time to find the perfect balance of governance between the left and the right, two forces that are diametrically opposed to one another, between which compromise comes as a universal defeat, when the grim reality is we are rapidly running out of time to make the changes we need to industrial and civil society in order to combat the effects of climate change. The right has no intentions to even acknowledge that these are the circumstances, while the center has no intentions of taking action. But, at the very least, the right offers a course of action to shape society to actual political goals, the implicit promise of the center to is maintain everything exactly as it is right now. I couldn’t imagine a bleaker future if I tried.

Now, that all being said, the ultimate reality of the situation is even if Bernie wins, he still won’t get nearly anything he wants to accomplish done due to congress. Even if there is an accompanying blue wave and Democrats walk away from 2020 with a supermajority, it is very possible that Democrats themselves will refuse to support Bernie’s policies, as the DNC is, in reality, a center-right political organization. And even if Bernie had the support of the DNC, there’s still the problem of the Supreme Court, which has shifted decisively to the right with the appointing of Brett Kavanaugh. When I say I have no faith in electoral politics to do what need be done, for the environment and for humanity in general, it is because the American government was deliberately designed to make the type of swift and immediate action we now require all but impossible. However, I do believe there is an avenue through which these political goals can be achieved, and that is through labor organization. Therefor, I think the single most important issue, that should be on any young progressive’s mind during this election season, is the issue of labor, of unions, of collective bargaining, and of automization. I am extremely critical of Yang, but I do appreciate him bringing the issue of automization to the forefront of his policy rhetoric, because the issue has the potential to single-handedly wipe collective bargaining off the map, relegating everyone who isn’t within the modern bourgeoise completely alienated from the political process. In the face of financial interests, special interest groups, lobbying firms, and flat out corruption, the ability to halt production, to halt transportation, to strike is the last avenue the working man has to impart his will upon the political process. It’s already been nearly strangled to death by the past 50 years of American labor legislation, we can’t let them kill it off for good. It’s really the people’s last shot.

tl:dr tell centrists to bend the knee and organize your workplace

...and I that's the first time I've maybe ever appreciated Facebook discourse

[whereareroo]

FREEDOM SCORE

WF THOUGHTS (3/18/21).

I'm depressed today. After you read this post, you'll be depressed too. Sorry.

America is supposed to be the "home of the free." Isn't that what the national anthem tells us? Isn't that what we've been taught forever? Isn't freedom an essential component of our national history?

I've always been proud to live in the land of the free. I was proud even though I was aware of the fact that America is an imperfect place. Too many Americans can claim, as Langston Hughes said in his famous 1935 poem, that "America has not been America to me." Despite my awareness of America's imperfection, I've always believed that we were on a march towards a more perfect union. Today, I am doubting my beliefs.

A few days ago, I was driving and listening to National Public Radio. They did a promotion for an upcoming segment on freedom in the world. I was shocked by a statistic that was referenced in the promotion. In a recent ranking of 84 "free nations" by a think tank, America ranked #53. That statistic stuck with me.

When I got home, I made a note to investigate the situation. Maybe I misheard the statistic? Maybe the think tank is a fake? There's no way that the degree of freedom in America ranks 53rd on a list of 84 countries! Right?

I easily found information on the think tank. It's called Freedom House. It's based in Washington D.C. It's been around since 1941. It's widely recognized as being the "gold standard" for organizations that study freedom around the world. Since 1972 it has been publishing an annual report, called "Freedom in the World," which assesses freedom in every country in the world.

The annual reports are detailed and dense. I suppose that the complexity is one reason that we don't hear about the reports in the mass media. The data set forth in the reports is used by academics, researchers, Congressional Committees, agencies at the United Nations, and other think tanks. Nobody disputes the data or the conclusions. If anything, the knock on Freedom House is that it isn't tough enough on America.

I think there's another reason that, particularly in the past 15 years, we haven't been hearing about these reports from our elected officials or the mass media. The reports show that freedom has been declining in America for at least 10 years. Why would anybody want to report that bad news? The keepers of our government, our elected officials, certainly do not want to highlight the decline of freedom in America. The mass media generally avoids such complex and depressing issues. We've been kept in the dark.

Despite my conclusion that Freedom House is a legitimate and respected organization, I was still hoping to find a way to discredit these reports. I didn't want to believe that America is #53.

I delved into the methodology. If the methodology is bad, even a good organization can reach the wrong conclusions. Unfortunately, the methodology seems very solid. To compile the report, a staff of 24 analysts studies data from all over the world. Before the annual report is released, it is reviewed by a team of 12 academics who study freedom all over the world. Then, everything is reviewed by 16 independent consultants. It's hard to question the methodology.

I still wanted to find a way to ignore the conclusion that America is #53. I looked for another organization that ranks countries. I learned that another respectable group is the Political Instability Task Force. It's funded by the CIA, and every year it ranks countries in terms of the level of democracy that exists. In the most recent ranking, America was #49. That's pretty close to #53. (I also found a third source that concluded that the annual Freedom House report has an 80% correlation to other respected reports.) At that point, I had no choice but to conclude that the Freedom House reports are accurate and that America has some big problems when it comes to freedom and democracy. Who would have guessed that 50 countries are doing better than us? Why isn't anybody talking about the fact that, compared to other countries, America gets a poor grade on freedom?

To do its "freedom ranking" for each country, Freedom House evaluates 25 issues related to political rights or civil rights. For each of the issues, the country is scored on a point system where "0" is the lowest score and "4" is the top score. Thus, the maximum positive score is "100."

America has been losing points in the following areas:

▪Electoral Fairness (because of voter suppression, voting obstacles, and foreign interference)

▪Electoral Corruption (big money is too influential)

▪Legislative Weakness (stalemates in Congress quash the will of the people)

▪Accountability (between elections, there is no way to remove bad players)

▪Transparency (too much is done secretly)

▪Politicized Judiciary (appointments based on politics instead of qualifications)

▪Overzealous Prosecutors and Discriminatory Prosecutions

▪High Homicide Rates from Gun Violence (causing various problems throughout society)

▪ Massive Inequality (gender, racial, sexuality, economic, educational, housing, health care, citizenship, religious)

▪Massive Economic Imbalances (income and wealth)

We all knew that we had problems in these areas. Were you aware of the fact that other countries are doing a much better job of overcoming these challenges? The result is that freedom is more widespread in other countries. Isn't that sad?

It's bad news that we're #53. There's worse news. Our "freedom score" has been declining steadily since 2010. In 2010, we scored a 94---which is still too low in my book. We're now down to 83. Yes, our freedom score has dropped 11 points in the last 10 years. We're not marching towards a more perfect union. We're going backwards. Over the past 10 years, only 24 other countries experienced such a large decline in their freedom score. I feel terrible that we're not in the top 50 with respect to freedom but we're in the top 25 with respect to anti-freedom trends.

Please don't tell me that our latest freedom score, a score of 83, is OK. In my school days, an 83 would be a "B" or "B-." Didn't you think that America would score an "A" or "A+" on the freedom scale. The truth hurts.

So what countries are kicking our butts with respect to freedom? You can probably guess some of them: Finland; Norway; Sweden; Canada; New Zealand; Denmark; Germany; Japan. You'll probably be surprised that we rank lower than countries like: Croatia; Argentina; Greece; Latvia; Chile; and Slovenia.

Freedom House characterizes 84 countries as totally "free." We're #53. Isn't that appalling. We're not even in the top half, and we're falling. It's awful.

Today is not the day for a detailed discussion about how to solve this awful problem. Let me just list a few very obvious steps that need to be taken:

1. We need to learn from other countries. What are they doing right? What are we doing wrong? We have to stop thinking that we're the experts on freedom. Obviously, we're not.

2. We need short term limits for all public offices. Career politicians seem to forget about freedom.

3. Our elections need to be fair. Voting must be easy for every voter. Incumbent politicians cannot be allowed to draw election districts that stack the deck. It's outrageous that that, throughout America, state legislatures are considering 250 bills that are designed to limit voting.

4. All election campaigns should be publicly funded at reasonable levels. We need to remove big money from the electoral process.

5. We should only elect politicians who take freedom--for everyone and at all levels--very seriously. If we don't wake up on this issue, we're going to be in a very sad place in 10 or 20 years.

6. All Americans need to vote. Those who are not enjoying full freedom in America need to protect themselves at the ballot box. It was nice that 158 million Americans voted in the last presidential election. Sadly, that means that 80 million eligible voters didn't vote. The system can't protect everybody, and bring freedom to everybody, if a big portion of the population refuses to elect leaders to champion their cause.

Through most of our history, there has been a slow but steady expansion of freedom in America. Sadly, we've fallen off the freedom trail. We're regressing. I'm confident that we can get back on track, but it will take work. As usual, the bulk of the work will have to come from those at the bottom of the heap. They need to engage in the political process and use their political power to demand equality and freedom. Most Americans will support efforts to expand freedom in America. In their hearts, most Americans still believe that universal freedom should be the ultimate goal in America. The forces in America that oppose widespread freedom must he removed from power.

Let me finish with more from Langston Hughes. He wrote "Let America Be America Again" in 1935. Sadly, despite all of the progress that we've made, we haven't created the America that Huges dreamed about. I urge you to read the whole poem. You should also read a bit about the life of Langston Hughes. As you consider the plight of freedom in America, reflect upon this passage from the poem:

O, let America be America again--

The land that never has been yet--

And yet must be--the land where every man is free.

The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

[newstechreviews]

Rising 34 stories above Bangkok’s Phetchaburi Road, the Thai Summit Tower is the headquarters of Thailand’s largest car parts manufacturer. Until recently, it was also home to an upstart political party headed by the company’s 41-year-old heir, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit. On the fifth floor, he and the fresh-faced activists of the Future Forward Party (FFP) would hold boisterous press conferences and hushed policy meetings. They gained 17% of the vote in last year’s general election despite being barely a year old.

That remarkable showing should have thrust 81 FFP lawmakers into Thailand’s 750-seat National Assembly. But the political establishment struck back. First, Thanathorn was banned from politics over shares he allegedly held in a media company. (Thai law says electoral candidates cannot hold such shares; Thanathorn insists they had been transferred to his mother.) Then, on Feb. 21, the party was dissolved over alleged funding irregularities. The legal action was described as “politically motivated” by Human Rights Watch. With it, the political will of 6.3 million voters was snuffed out.

Sitting down with TIME in the week before that decision, Thanathorn was sanguine. Over the past two decades, populist governments in Thailand have been removed from power twice by the military and three times by the courts. The FFP may have been a long way from Government House but the power nexus centered around the palace, the courts and the military was evidently spooked.

“The Future Forward Party is a vehicle, but even if they dissolve us, we will continue the journey,” shrugged Thanathorn at the time. “This year, I’m sure, with me leading, or otherwise, we’ll return to public demonstrations.”

That’s to be expected. In the parlance of travel marketing, Thailand has long been sold as the Land of Smiles, but it could just as fairly be called the Land of Protests or Country of Coups. The Southeast Asian nation of 70 million has gone through seven attempted and 12 successful coups over the past century, while recent years have been punctuated by color-coded street protests aimed at paralyzing the sprawling capital. (Urban and southern royalists typically don yellow; rural voters from populous, rice-growing northern provinces wear red.)

Today, people are taking to the street once again. Clad in face masks, and flashing the three-fingered Hunger Games salute to the sound of Thai rap, thousands of protesters have thronged the capital over recent months, demanding political reform of a military-backed government seen as bungling and corrupt. While political grievances have festered for decades, “the FFP dissolution was the last straw,” says Thitinan Pongsudhirak, associate professor of political science at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

In terms of numbers, these are the biggest demonstrations since those preceding the 2014 coup d’état. In their ambition, however, they are unprecedented. Protesters have drawn up a 10-point manifesto that includes reform of the sacrosanct royal family and an overhaul of political institutions including a new constitution and elections. Coup leader General Prayuth Chan-ocha—now serving as prime minister, largely owing to a new constitution dictated by the military—warned last month that the protesters “really went too far.”

University and high school students are in the vanguard. Thitinan hasn’t seen anything like it in 27 years of academia. “The students feel empowered, they are wide awake, pay more attention, nobody’s falling asleep in class,” he says. “It’s astonishing for me, personally, as a teacher.”

Young Thais are also being galvanized by the pandemic, given the damage to Thailand’s tourism-reliant economy, which is forecast to shrink by 8-10% this year—the sharpest contraction in Southeast Asia. Coronavirus’ role in stoking the protests has “been huge, as people don’t see a future,” Thanathorn says. “The anger is there. It’s waiting to burst.”

Soe Zeya—Reuters Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit of Thailand’s progressive Future Forward Party gestures to his supporters at a rally in Bangkok, Thailand on Dec. 14, 2019.

‘It’s divide and conquer’

Instability in Thailand matters. It is America’s oldest ally in Asia and has served as a bulwark to more authoritarian, left-leaning neighbors ever since the Thai establishment, backed by Washington, constructed a national identity and cult of personality around Massachusetts-born King Bhumibol Adulyadej. During the 60s and 70s, huge posters of Bhumibol, paid for by American taxpayers, were distributed across the country to help win over hearts and minds in the face of a communist insurgency. But as the Cold War thawed, Bhumibol’s influence faded along with his health. By the time of his death in 2016, he remained an object of veneration for ordinary Thais but his role had morphed from a guarantor of political stability to underwriter of enormous wealth for courtiers and brass hats.

The latter still grip the levers of power. In the diplomatic vacuum left by the isolationist America First policy of President Trump, the junta has pushed Thailand towards China. Bangkok and Beijing have inked joint development projects and arms purchases, and the Thais have repatriated Chinese dissidents with scant regard to due process.

“As Washington condemned the [2014] coup and the junta cracked down on dissent, Beijing sidled up with infrastructure funding deals and promises of no-strings support,” says Sebastian Strangio, author of In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century.

Meanwhile the relationship between palace and army continues to be extremely close (Thai historian Thak Chaloemtiarana calls it “despotic paternalism”) and the stock justification for every military intervention remains “protection of the monarchy.” Thanathorn is not alone when he says the generals are responsible for Thailand’s cycle of protests and coups.

“We have enough evidence to show that a military-sponsored information operation installs hatred into society,” he says. “It’s divide and conquer.”

The military is getting richer in the process, controlling golf courses, horse-racing tracks and muay Thai stadiums. It owns hotel chains, conference centers, free trade zones and even TV and radio stations. In parliament, the 81 senators who are also generals have an average wealth of 78 million baht ($2.5 million) each, but 40 years of a general’s official earnings amounts to 48 million baht ($1.5 million)—and that’s assuming not a satang (or penny) is spent. According to legislative documents obtained by the FFP, Thailand’s military had off-budget spending of 18 billion baht ($580,000,000) last year.

“It’s a state within a state,” says Thanathorn. “Even MPs cannot see through their budgets, cannot audit income [and] expenses. Imagine if we used this money for schools and hospitals.”

On Feb. 8 and 9, the venality turned deadly. In Korat, a city 180 miles northeast of Bangkok, a soldier went on a killing spree that claimed 29 lives and wounded 58 others. The deadliest mass shooting in Thailand’s history began with the 31-year-old perpetrator slaying a superior officer, as well as the officer’s mother-in-law, whom he accused of cheating him in a lucrative land deal. He was eventually cornered in a shopping mall and killed. “Rich from cheating and taking advantage of people” he posted online during the rampage. “Do they think they can take money to spend in hell?”

In the wake of national mourning, reforms were promised. Still, in a tearful address, Thailand’s top general, Apirat Kongsompong, referred to the military as a “sacred” institution.

“What the hell? It’s a freaking army,” says Tony Davis, a Bangkok-based security analyst for IHS-Janes. “Every country needs one but do your job properly instead of floundering around in business activities.”

For Thanathorn, Korat offered “the best opportunity in 100 years” to push for reform. “We should not let those families suffer for nothing.”

Mladen Antonov—AFP/Getty Images A Bangkok inscription on a sky train bridge is seen through the hole of a banner during a commemoration of the anniversary of the 1932 revolution which ended absolute monarchy with heavily symbolic events in Bangkok on June 24, 2020, demanding reforms to a political system dominated by the arch-royalist army.

‘He’s pressing all the buttons’

Despite his considerable wealth, Thanathorn has long been an iconoclast. His uncle served as minister of transport between 2002 and 2005 and is now a senior figure in Thailand’s biggest pro-military party, but Thanathorn insists his family were always outsiders. His grandfather emigrated to Thailand from southern China’s Fujian province in the early 20th century. In 1977, Thanathorn’s father started Thai Summit, and he says he grew up in a middle-class household, walking or taking the bus to class like his peers. It wasn’t until high school that the family firm started booming on the strength of lucrative contracts with Japanese auto firms, beginning its transformation into an empire with $2.5 billion in annual revenue.

“That’s when I could see the gap between me and my friends,” Thanathorn says.

It’s also when Thailand’s glass ceiling became apparent. “When we began having wealth, my parents wanted to be recognized, to be one of the elite,” he says. “They tried to donate, to mingle with politicians and people in power. But we learned no matter how much we tried, we cannot be one of them, because we are new rich. So my parents stopped trying.”

But they refused to spoil the princeling. From the age of ten, Thanathorn was sent during school holidays to toil in restaurants, washing dishes and scrubbing floors. At a hotel, he lugged bags and cleaned rooms. He loaded pallets of goods onto sooty trucks at a warehouse.

“I wasn’t very happy about it at the time,” he laughs, “but I learned the gap between rich and poor. But back then, I didn’t think that it was structural. I didn’t know whether this gap was about opportunities or individual performance.”

It was while studying mechanical engineering at Bangkok’s Thammasat University that he had an awakening. “In my second year, I went to a slum in Bangkok for the first time,” he says, “My thinking changed drastically because I saw the social struggle.”

Thanathorn became a student activist for progressive causes, campaigning for issues like compensation for those evicted to make way for state development projects. Then he studied at Nottingham University in the U.K., where he became involved with the student branch of the far-left Socialist Workers Party. “I learned the way they mobilize, the way they organize,” he says. Afterward, a joint masters in global finance between Hong Kong University and NYU beckoned.

For Thanathorn, those studies laid bare the realities of Thailand’s kleptocratic economy. Minimal property taxes mean the rich can sit on huge assets, while many sectors are sealed off from competition. For example, craft breweries have sprung up across the world to cater for a new generation of beer fans. In Thailand, however, selling small-batch brew is banned under a decades-old law that shields two huge family-run corporations, which monopolize 90% of a $5.7-billion market. And while in most countries, several duty-free concessions are assigned for commercial airports—Seoul’s Incheon International Airport has a dozen—in Thailand, one firm with close government ties has been awarded the sole concession to Bangkok’s main airports for over two decades without formal bids, creating a multi-billion-dollar family empire from scratch. In Thailand, “you create billionaires within one generation without innovation or anything,” says Thanathorn.

After completing his studies, Thanathorn had plans to pursue a career in international development with the U.N. But following his father’s death from cancer in 2002, he returned to Thailand to assume leadership of Thai Summit at just 23, helming it for 17 years until he founded the FFP.

His political style wasn’t without detractors. Many disagreed with Thanathorn’s abrasive tactics, such as his public shaming of senior establishment figures—not done under Thailand’s strict social codes.

“He’s pressing all the buttons that are guaranteed to rile [the elite] instead of framing the problem in a manner which they cannot dispute,” says Davis.

Even those who have built a career out of needling the establishment harbor doubts. The political artist Headache Stencil—dubbed “Thailand’s Banksy,” says “Thanathorn is more like a revolutionary than a political leader … But he can shepherd the transition to someone else who is calmer and more suited to lead.”

But large numbers of voters were won over by the self-styled “billionaire commoner” with the sharp, handsome features and boy-band spiky hair. According to a late 2019 poll by the National Institute of Development Administration, 31% of respondents tabbed Thanathorn as best qualified to be prime minister, with Prayut named by just 23%.

Jonas Gratzer—LightRocket/Getty Images Protesters perform a ‘Hunger Games’ three finger salute during anti-government demonstration in Bangkok on Aug. 16, 2020.

‘Thailand’s inconvenient truth’

Father to four young children, Thanathorn professes a love of reading everything from Khaled Hosseini to Game of Thrones. “I preferred the books to the TV series,” he says.

There is certainly no end of palace intrigue in Thailand. After a string of scandals—and with his lavish, eccentric lifestyle—King Maha Vajiralongkorn, Bhumibol’s son, has failed to command the same respect as his father. The four-times married, former Air Force pilot once promoted his pet poodle, Fu-Fu, to the rank of Air Chief Marshall. Since ascending the throne, he’s consolidated power while spending much of his time overseas. In 2017, the King introduced a new salute and haircut for the armed forces to match those of his own bodyguards. That same year, a 1936 law was amended to give him full control of the Crown Property Bureau, which manages the palace’s estimated $30 billion fortune. Last October, he ordered the transfer of two prestigious army units to his direct command, making them an effective “praetorian guard,” says Davis.

On Sept. 2, reports emerged that the King’s former consort, Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi—who last year was arrested, stripped of all royal titles and had her family home demolished for disloyalty—was suddenly deemed “untainted” and had her privileges restored. The hashtags #FreeOfBlemish and #ReformTheMonarchy were top trends on Twitter in Thailand after the news broke.

“The King’s treatment of Sineenat as a possession, put away and taken out at his will, is one of many reasons why protesters in Thailand have broached the taboo topic of the monarchy,” says Tamara Loos, professor of history and Thai studies at Cornell University.

That such lurid plots play out against the backdrop of Thailand’s worst economic crisis since 1997 incenses young Thais. Unbound by the same existential fear of creeping communism as their parents and grandparents, today’s youth demand a more equitable society. But the Thai monarch is protected by what are considered the world’s harshest royal defamation laws—known as lèse majesté or Section 112—that carry a penalty of 15 years in prison, and which have increasingly been used to quash dissent.

On June 4, a Thai democracy activist, Wanchalearm Satsaksit, was kidnapped in Cambodia and is believed murdered. He was on a government list of 29 exiled activists accused of violating Section 112, of whom at least eight have disappeared or been discovered dead. The situation inside Thailand is also deteriorating. On 9 July, a man from Thailand’s northeast was thrown into a psychiatric hospital for wearing a shirt emblazoned with, “I’ve lost faith in the institution of the monarchy.” One protest leader, human rights lawyer Anon Nampa, who has been outspoken in calling for royal reform, has been arrested three times in recent weeks and charged with sedition. “Thailand’s inconvenient truth” is how Thanathorn describes co-option of the royal institution.

“Let me be clear about this: reforming the monarchy does not equal abolishing the monarchy,’ he says. “It’s the powers and goals of the monarchy that don’t suit the principle of democracy that have to be changed.”

Thanathorn says he and the current protesters “share the same ideas about the future of the country” but have chosen different paths—within the system and outside it. His ban from politics means he cannot stand for election, though a loophole has seen him appointed by sympathetic lawmakers to a budget scrutiny committee, which has already trimmed $1 billion from the books, including the cancellation of two Chinese-built submarines for the military. Thanathorn has also broken a taboo by openly questioning the royal budget.

It’s a risky strategy. The government still holds all the cards, including the backing of the parliament, military, palace and judiciary. Thanathorn has already been charged with seeking to abolish the monarchy and sedition, though was acquitted on both counts. Other than disappeared and caged activists, in recent years two anti-establishment Thai prime ministers have been forced into exile and convicted in absentia on charges they claim were politically motivated. Thanathorn insists he won’t flee his homeland even if it means jail—or worse.

“So be it, I’m not afraid,” he says. “If I don’t do this, I don’t see anyone else doing it.”

[gerasc0ph0bic]

So Here It Is...

This is actually my third draft of the first chapter of my book, “38″. You may see that I have taken current events and exaggerated them, blending them into a fictional future where xenophobia, racism, and sexism has taken control of the United States. I wrote this before Trump was elected or was even running for office. But when I heard what he was saying and saw the effects of it, I edited the book to reflect what was happening. I am still tweaking it, but I would love if people commented and shared. 

Chapter 1 - Memorial Day 2067

Three taps on the door.

Disoriented, I turn to look at the clock, the numbers slowly coming into focus. 6:40. It could only be one person. Tired and sore, I fumble around for the remote and turn on the audio feed. My mouth is dry and my voice cracks as I speak, which only adds to my peeved mood, “It is too early for this 35. Not today.”

“Nice try, 38. You are not getting out of this one. It’ll just be a couple minutes and then you can continue to roll around in bed and wallow in self-pity.” Even though I can’t see him, his face appears easily in my mind complete with his smiling brown eyes and condescending smirk.  

“Fine. Give me a minute to get a robe on.”  

“Tick tock, 38.” I grab my robe from my closet and braced myself for the horror of the day. So many mixed emotions race through my mind. How can a day that should be joyful bring so much sadness?

I unlock the door and 35 walks through the door. Suddenly I am in his arms, his hand rubbing my back. “Happy birthday, Faye.” I pull him inside and slam the door.

“Shut up, Jake, before someone hears you. You are not supposed to know my name, let alone my birthday.”

“It’s 6:45 in the morning. No one is awake, and we have a few moments together before the ceremony. So can we please take advantage of this instead of fighting?” He kisses me gently on the lips.

“Ok, fine.” I give in, and let my body mold with his, as if it is in its natural state, and I finally allow myself to relax.  

That’s when the memories hit me like a landmine, unexpected and unavoidable. No matter how much I try to push them back, they rush to my mind. The lights, the sound of guns firing endlessly, the Canadian soldiers beckoning us to come forward, unable to do anything but wave. The feeling of being helpless, the pain, the loss, force themselves forward in my head.  

Shocked and overwhelmed by my own mind, I push Jake away and collapse onto my bed. No matter how much I try, the tears don’t stop and I start shaking as pictures of my past flood my thoughts. Ten years have passed since I lost my parents, but the pain never numbed. We are taught to use our pain. It gives us strength to fight. I learned to push the pain away, deep into my mind, only letting it release when I needed the adrenaline. However, on days like this, the memories fight back, and if I let my guard down, they win.  

“You can get through this, Faye. I’ve seen you fight this before, and today shouldn’t be any different.” Even when he tries to be strong, I can hear the worry in his voice. We've been together too long for him to hide it. I look up at him, still standing by the door. He didn't even bother getting ready for the day. He is wearing the same white t-shirt and gray sweat pants as the night before. I try to smile, but the feeling of being happy makes me cry even more. How could I be happy when there has been so much loss?

“It’s memorial day, Jake. How could you forget something like that?”  

                                                        ***

 

The Corruption began when President Shepherd was elected in 2032. He had dreams of a new and glorious country where the traditional values of what he called the Golden Age of America could return. He dreamed of a country where education and jobs abounded, where the people could be protected from the evils of the rest of the world. He wanted to build a wall, far more superior than even the Great Wall of China, that would encircle not only the US Mexico border, but the entire country. He wanted a country where education was no longer inferior to its neighbors. He wanted to make America great again.  

His arousing speeches seemed to spark a renewed patriotism in the American people. They rallied together in support of Shepherd. Although charismatic, Shepherd was not as intelligent as other presidential candidates. In some ways, one could even say that he was not suited for the position at all. Now and then he would make remarks that would sound racially insensitive, or cruel towards certain groups of people. Some of his plans even seemed unrealistic. However, these did not turn his followers against him. Instead, they absorbed everything like it was a new gospel and only grew in numbers.  

For his first term, he was true to his word. He began to make the USA more self-sufficient. The United States no longer relied on foreign products. More jobs were created in the forms of increased military security and led to less crime. Reformed education allowed the general population to be more successful in the fields of science and engineering. To some, this was truly a new Golden Age, to others, it was a nightmare they could not wake up from. The fear of terrorists had created its own form of terrorism. Innocent people of different religions and races began to be questioned at every turn.

"Are you here legally?"

"Are you carrying any weapons?"

"Do you have any connection to the extremists in the Middle East?"

The fear only grew deeper, leading some to simply drive questionable people from their communities, and others to even kill. Though the murders were tried and punished, one could claim Shepherd might have approved of the violence.  

Shepherd’s popularity and shocking continued success led him to be reelected in 2036.  

It was during this second term that Shepherd's ideals became as violent as his followers.  

The president initially based his second campaign on making America beautiful and united. This amazing country needs to reflect the success that we have made together. We are one people and we should fight the ugliness that we have regretted for so long. His inauguration speech brought tears to the eyes of the people and cheers could be heard wherever you went.  

Shepherd started with the cities.

President Shepherd believed that the growing turmoil of Camden, New Jersey needed to be taken care of. However, unlike presidents in the past, he believed the problem could be fixed by erasing Camden off the map with a newly developed bomb. The impact of the bomb was specific and could be calculated so that the damage was contained within a certain perimeter. Before the bomb arrived, Shepherd made an announcement. Anyone living in the United States illegally must present themselves to the nearest police station where they will be processed and contained until arrangements can be made to take them back where they came from. It is time for America to be free from these people taking away our jobs, raping our women, and selling our children drugs. We must take a stand. If they will not leave voluntarily, we will take them by force. No one knew about the bomb save the developers and select government officials. No one knows how Shepherd was able to get approval from Congress, or if he consulted them at all.  

The bomb came without warning. Thousands of people were killed and hundreds were forcefully taken from their homes for questioning. Men, women, and children were ruthlessly questioned not only about their citizenship, but the citizenship of their parents and relatives. Staying in the country illegally became impossible.

 After Camden, there was Detroit and any other city with a low income or high immigrant population. Shepherd created a specific military operation whose only job was to weed out anyone living in America illegally. They targeted Hispanics and Arabs initially. As time went on, African Americans and Asians were also questioned. Although there were some who had families in America legally for generations, they were deported by the corrupt organization. Some tried to start an uprising, but Shepherd had eyes everywhere. The uprising fizzled out before the planning was done, and those who were involved in the planning were either deported or taken in for questioning.  

Shortly afterwards, President Shepherd issued Decree 39 for the Wellbeing of America, “Any person not registered as a citizen of the United States of America will be immediately deported. “Birth Right Citizenship will no longer be applicable to those born to illegal immigrants. Their children will be deported, and any citizen found to have illegal immigrants as immediate family will be questioned as to their location."  

It became clear that the president was molding a new government behind closed doors. The democracy that had built the very country he wanted to save, and the traditional values he so desperately fought vanished before the people's eyes. The president surrounded himself with officials who were just as xenophobic as he. No one held him back some out of respect of his supposed greatness, others out of fear.  

The president decided that specific identification was required for citizens and those of different religions, specifically Islam, and those who were being deported. Citizens were given chips in the back of their necks. They resembled the kind put in dogs by a vet. However, they were extremely difficult to change without the proper equipment. The chips also held more information. They kept track not only of personal identification such as a name and birthdate, but also race, religion, social security number, education, family history, and medical records. Those who were Muslim were usually deported, but those that remained in the country were forced to where a brightly colored badge on their clothes. It resembled the badges forced on the Jewish peoples during the Holocaust. Every American citizen's information was held in a database run by specialists in the CIA trained to pick out anyone suspected to be a criminal.  

Then he attacked the homeless. They are not true citizens. They have made no effort to change their ways and are drunkards and addicts. They do not deserve to live in this beautiful country. His goal was to deport the homeless. When they and others tried to protect them or tried to organize protests, shots were fired and they kept firing until the protesting stopped or when the homeless were dead.  

As 2039 neared, the people held their breath. Who would be the one to fix this travesty? Would someone clean this mess, or continue to create more? Few men and women dared to enter the race, unsure of what promises to make, or what Shepherd would do next.  

Then the unthinkable happened.

Shepherd decided to run for a third term. This law keeping me from running is outdated. Why do we need so many old laws. I wanted to make this country great and a great country needs new great laws. With enough support from congress and the senate, the law was redacted, freeing Shepherd to do as he pleased.  

Shepherd was reelected for a third term in 2040. Enough of the citizens approved of what was going on in Washington DC and very few people questioned it. Those who disapproved and were caught speaking out were deported or thrown in jail.  

The founder of The Cell, 01, saw that the USA was losing its freedom and that it was only getting worse. He had dreams of the pre-Shepherd America, where the Constitution was upheld, and the people were safe. He had only himself and his pregnant wife, but he was determined to make a difference. He began to gather a wide range of followers. Lawyers, doctors, scientists, politicians, farmers, construction workers and stay at home mothers all began to follow his new philosophy.  

Underneath the new America, a network of tunnels, shacks and houses appeared, unknown to the President or his followers. It was a new Underground Railroad befitting the new Civil War that was occurring. Each man, woman, and child was given a job. Slowly, they started gaining control of small towns and local government, gaining enough ground but staying quiet. Their firsts missions were small, gaining power in local government and moving towards Washington. They paved the way for some to escape into Canada or Mexico. Those who wanted to stay were put to work. They moved further underground and built tunnels that connected the different Cell posts all around the country. 01 knew it would take years to really make a difference, but his plans were precise. By 2043, 01 had members in the military and federal government. Every move he made was done legally, so it would not be questioned by Shepherd. There were no riots, no murders. Not yet. He needed time to gain enough power.  

My mother joined The Cell in 2043. She was trained as a professional housewife. Her assignment was to marry a lawyer in New York City, who was paid off my federal officials to forge paperwork. That man was my father. Every part of their meeting was planned. She seduced him and married him, just as she was trained to do. She used his connections to gather information about the government in New York City, which helped the Cell gain more ground during the elections. Then she got pregnant. Everything changed. She became obsessed with wanting to leave the country. One night, my father found her packing. Overwhelmed and exhausted, she told him everything. She knew he loved her and part of her loved him as well. He had suspected her involvement with an anti-government group from the way she asked questions at a party, and who she associated herself with. He loved her enough to let her, and he approved of it. He confided in her that he was being threatened by the government who said he and his family would be killed if he did not cooperate. He told her that most people who were deported were killed. The president feared being attacked by his neighbors, and wanted to kill those who could know his secrets. He wanted her to stay, and raise the baby in New York. He would not stop her from running, but he wanted to help her in her mission. So she stayed and raised me in New York. 

When I was 13, their cover was blown. A government spy had found evidence of my parents’ terrorist involvement. Before I even knew what was going on, we were on the run to Canada.  

                                                     ***

Now here I am. Ten years later, a trained professional nurse, ready for assignment. The love of my life tracing pictures on my back with his fingers, as I slowly begin to calm down.  

“I didn’t forget about Memorial Day. I just thought that maybe this year would be different. I thought that maybe we could get through it together instead of you pushing me away again.” I can see the hurt in his eyes. “Today is important for us. Did you forget that?” He was getting assigned too. For years he was being trained as a monitor, but he recently requested a change in assignment. He wanted to be with me. I was to go to the surface permanently, to gain information from a hospital as a nurse away from him, for as long as the Cell ordered me to.

“I’m sorry. Jake, I know how much this means to you, what it means for us. I want this, but if I focus too much on being assigned to you, I will be even more disappointed if it doesn’t work out. We have to be prepared for anything.”  

“I know. I just want to be there for you. No one knows you like I do.” He squeezes my hand. “I have a present for you.” He pulls out a small piece of paper from his pocket.  

It’s a picture of my parents. My mother's strikingly red hair that clashed brilliantly against the blue sky behind her. My father's deep blue eyes turned towards her and his strong arms wrapped around her waist. They smiled at each other, alive and well. I feel my hand begin to trace the outlines of their faces which I never forgot, but have not seen in ten years. I wipe my tears away before they have a chances to fall onto the fragile paper.  

“Where did you get this?”

“I did a computer search when you told me your name. The Cell did a good job in erasing all trace of you but they also trained me in finding information no one else can find. It was on a photographer’s website from over 20 years ago. You look just like them.”

“I don’t know what to say.” I just stare at their smiling faces, careful not to get any tears on the fragile piece of paper. “I love you, Jake.”

“I love you too, Faye.”  I put the photograph on the bedside table, and lay down for a couple more minutes of rest before the day begins. Jake curls up against me, holding me together.  

7:30 am. My alarm is the one to break the perfect peace, and Jake leaves to return to his room quickly and without another word. I don my gray uniform, a button up shirt with my number embroidered on the sleeve and a knee length pencil skirt, and force my frizzy ginger hair into a tight ballet bun. It’s Memorial Day. Assignment day.  

A few minutes later, the intercom buzzer rings.  

“38, time for breakfast.” Jake sounds more official. As a walk for the door, my stomach churns. In a few minutes, we will learn of our futures. I stick my new picture carefully in my shoe and open the door. Faces neutral, Jake and I head to the cafeteria.

Gray.  

After ten years of only seeing gray, the color sickens me. In the tunnels, we are one. No one stands out, and everyone has the same purpose. Take down Shepherd. Dark and dreary, the members of my class fill the hall. Every face is solemn. Today we remember those we lost. Soft conversations can be heard, whispers mixed with tears. I can almost feel mine coming back, but Jake quickly squeezes my hand under the table. He does know me better than anyone else. As hard as I try to keep my emotions to myself, I feel them building. My face is flushed and I squeeze my eyes tightly together.

“38? Are you alright?” A voice from behind startles me and I turn to see 23. His golden hair looks strange in the cafeteria lighting, almost white. I feel Jake tense up next to me.

“She’s fine, 23,” Jake blurted out before I could open my mouth. The tension from years of stupid arguments builds slowly between them and I, once again, must be the bigger person.

“I am fine, 23, thank you for asking. 35 is fine as well. How are you?”

“Well enough, given the circumstances at the present. Are you ready for placement?”

“I think so, but like many, I’m nervous. I don’t know what to expect. Has your father told you of your placement yet?”

“No. He believed that I should be notified with the rest of our class.” He looks down at his feet, his face slightly red as if embarrassed. “I hope you don’t think that I receive special treatment because of my father.”  

"That's what we all believe actually," mumbled Jake, just loud enough to be heard. I dig the heel of my shoe into his foot.

“Of course not. I’m sorry, 23,” I said through my teeth. “I never should have asked.”  

“Well, if you can excuse me, I must go finish breakfast. 38, 35.” He walks briskly away, and I can see Jake’s shoulders relax in the corner of my eye.

“What the hell, 35. Why do you have to be such an idiot.”  

“He just pisses me off. Him and his freaking entitled attitude.” Then in a whisper, “You know why I’m angry. You should be the one defending yourself. The fact that you can just talk to him so casually, frankly, pisses me off.”  

"Not all of us can afford to remain pissed off at another Cell member. I have to keep reminding myself that, after everything we've been through, he's my ally. He's yours too, so get over yourself."  

He begins to mumble incoherently under his breath and ignoring him I get up and head toward the ceremony.  

                                                         ***

I walk into the one room in this underground maze that I have never seen. Only those being assigned and full members are allowed in. The hall has no seating. On the far side of the room is a stage with a single black podium. The walls are covered with murals painted in shades of grey depicting the Corruption. Seeing the paintings forces me back into the reality of the world I live in. Sometimes on days where I fail at certain tasks, when I find myself lost in the tunnels, when the world around me seems like it might fall apart at any moment, I forget my purpose. When I see the devastation in the pictures, the horror that the country has gone through, I remember.  

My peers filter in and remain standing as the high council makes their way to the front of the room. The silence follows them.  

01 stands in the middle.  

Trembling, I stand waiting to hear my fate. No introduction is given, no heartwarming speech. 01 begins to read the names of the assigned couples to enter the surface. When the incident with my parents almost revealed the existence of the Cell, rules were drastically changed. The members of the Cell were no longer allowed to marry outside of the Cell. Instead, each member was assigned a husband or wife based on strict compatibility markers, placement and mission.  

“45 and 78.”  

“84 and 62.”

“83 and 94.”

A hand grasps mine as each couple makes their way to the front to receive the time and place of their assignment. “We’ll be ok, Faye. No matter what. I love you," Jake whispers.

“I love you too.”  

For what seems like hours, we stand there, hand in hand, watching others we barely knew step forward to get their assignments. Every couple receives an envelope containing the date and time of their meeting with 01. There, they will get the details of their missions. Some will go to small towns and live generally normal lives, making subtle but important differences. Others will be sent to large cities, New York, Chicago, even Washington DC, to gather intel to advance our cause.  

The group dwindles down as the couples leave to get to know each other, or head off to their meetings. “38,” My posture straightens when my number is called. Jake’s grip tightens and we prepare for the next number.  

“and 23.”

[alexsmitposts]

Mueller’s Deep State Ploy Against Russia America has been at war with herself since 1787. America’s war of independence has gone on for centuries now, a war against the Deep State and the banking interests that brought about century after century of European war, fueled colonialism and engineered two world wars in the 20th century. Russiagate, the Mueller report and the corrupt Trump presidency are simply another page in this long saga. We begin. Decade after decade, Soviet propaganda held to one theme, that the United States used its military and economic might to rule the world on behalf of criminal elites. With the fall of the Soviet Union, a new era of world peace and prosperity was to emerge. Instead, something else happened, war upon war, hot war, cold war, economic war, and a resurgence of colonialism and bullying. How does this apply to “Russiagate?” The story isn’t simple, nothing is today. Here is what we know. The Russia investigation was always fake, a cheap ploy to kill time while the Deep State consolidated power inside the US under a puppet president with a long personal history of criminality and emotional instability. It wasn’t just Russiagate. It was also the fake Skripal poisoning, the fake Russian based gas attacks in Syria, an opportunity to re-create the Cold War and the old boogeyman that the Deep State needed to distract the public. Evidence? Despite promises, the US has seized 40% of Syria including all oil reserves and is now entrenched as a permanent occupying power. The US is now fabricating another “coalition of the willing” as cover for military intervention in Venezuela. Donald Trump just vetoed a congressional resolution to stop US military action against Yemen. Donald Trump, by executive order, and in violation of the Geneva Convention, awarded Syria’s Golan Heights to Israel and has announced his intention to further award the West Bank to Israel as well, despite dozens of UN Security Council resolutions to the contrary. Trump has deployed American missiles and AEGIS systems along Russia’s borders, in violation of the INF treaty On April 19, 2019, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitri Peskov made the following statements, from TASS: “’We regret the documents of this sort are causing direct influence on the development of Russian-US relations, whose condition leaves much to be desired,” Peskov said. ‘Speaking less seriously I should say that in a similar situation our Audit Chamber would’ve certainly probed into what the taxpayers’ money has been wasted on. Anyway, it’s up to the US taxpayers to ask such questions.’ He stated that as before Moscow dismissed the charges of intervention in the US presidential election, because there was no such interference at all. ‘The latest version of the Mueller report contains nothing new. All that information had been published by different sources and mass media earlier,’ Peskov stated.” Russia had been “blindsided” by events in the US and, having made this statement, Peskov was perhaps unaware of the furor going on in the US. When an American Attorney General issues a legal opinion, as William Barr had, it isn’t typically expected that he will lie outright yet this is exactly what Barr did. Trump was never exonerated. What did become clear is that the Mueller investigation, which found considerable, perhaps even “endless” criminal wrongdoing by Trump, was fake. One thing the investigation did make clear is that Trump knew he was guilty. From the Mueller report, in reference to a Trump statement made to then Attorney General Jeff Sessions on May 17, 2017 when Trump learned of the Mueller appointment: “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fXXXXd.” What this tells an insider is that Trump himself wasn’t aware “the fix was in,” and that Mueller had a long history of gutlessness, cowardice and selling out to the highest bidder. The “fall guy” in this fix was to be Russia and behind that, the American people, the Constitution and America herself. The strings, as always, the Deep State taking control in Washington as always. The Mueller debacle was a plan, it bought time, two years, and had one purpose, to “inoculate” Trump against prosecution for years of criminal acts that were expected to end with Donald Trump dying in prison. Background William Barr and Mueller had, since the 1970’s when both worked for the CIA engineering coverups for corrupt practices there, as outlined in the Gene “Chip” Tatum book, The Mule. From Tatum: “Robert Swan Mueller III has been the go to man when secrets go awry. Recruited as a CIA asset in Vietnam as an member of the Phoenix Project it was embedded in him that there are no borders, no limits, no restrictions, and no repercussions. With these standards ingrained in his persona, Mueller became an invaluable asset in protecting what today is called “The Deep State”. When the need arises, invariably the Deep State handlers call on “The Mule.” With the release of the redacted Mueller Report in late April 2018, a number of things should be clear. They aren’t. In fact, nothing is clear except that US Attorney General Barr lied when he claimed Trump was exonerated by the report, far from it. What is clear is that none of this had anything to do with Russia but that Russia was used to provide “cover and deception” for Trump. You see, Trump came into office with dozens of lawsuits hanging over him, some for sex assaults, including children, criminal fraud tied to Trump University and the Trump Foundation and income tax evasion. When Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney, described Trump to congress, he knew what he was talking about, from Time Magazine, February 27, 2019: “Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney of President Donald Trump, testified publicly Wednesday that the President is “a racist,” “a con man” and “a cheat,” in remarks before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. “I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump’s illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience. I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is,” Cohen said Wednesday in his opening statement. “He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat.” The Real Target, the Constitution America’s constitution was always a weak document. Prepared initially without the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments that guarantee due process and personal freedoms, the “Magna Carta” basis for what some assumed wrongly was the real heart of the document, America has always been vulnerable. At the outset, America was subject to the same economic pressures the nation states of Europe bowed to. In fact, each nation state of Europe found its economic roots in the banking houses of Venice and her merchant princes. For the US, birth was defined when, in 1689 William of Orange with a mercenary army of 40,000 arrived in England to collect a 15 million guilder debt for those same Venetian princes. England got a central bank, today known as the Bank of England and both England and their American colonies fell under the economic stranglehold of the Deep State. When America broke free by declaring independence in 1776 and through ratifying the Articles of Confederation in 1781 after 4 years of debate. After the defeat of the British, pressure was put on the new nation to replace the Articles and in 1787 a new constitution was ratified. The problem was that those who penned the new document were not those who fought the war but rather those with continuing economic ties to Britain and those who had taken over that nation on behalf of the money lending houses of Europe. In 1913, scholars at Columbia University led by historian Charles A. Beard penned a controversial examination of the constitution. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, the result, helped fuel the progressive movement and provided an academic framework for challenges to limitations within the constitution. Beard provided the fuel to pass the Seventeenth Amendment which established popular election for Senators who had, under the constitution been picked from among wealthy elites much as with the British House of Lords and the Nineteenth Amendment which gave women the vote. Beard’s work, long under attack and now virtually erased from the academic and legal world, hypothesized, with extensive primary document support, that the “Framers” of the constitution were intent on building a “failed state” with limited opportunity that empowered Europe’s banking houses to take control over America’s government. However, history will show that not all Americans chose to submit, among them presidents like Andrew Jackson. Daniel Feller in his “King Andrew and the Bank,” written for the National Endowment for the Humanities, outlines the struggle against a central bank than defined America prior to the Civil War: “Yet, in its day, nothing galvanized American political conflict more than banking, currency, and finance. In the republic’s first half-century, no subject, save foreign relations and war, gave greater vexation to American statesmen or aroused more heated public debate. The creation of the original Bank of the United States in 1791 sparked the first major division within President George Washington’s administration, which later ripened into the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties. Jackson’s veto in 1832 repeated the process: It became the touchstone issue in his reelection campaign and precipitated the organization of the Whig and Democratic parties, the latter, still surviving, now the oldest mass political party in the world. The very language of Jackson’s veto, departing sharply from all that came before, furnished a political grammar since claimed by Populists, Progressives, New Deal liberals, socialists, free marketeers, libertarians—in short, by just about everybody.” Among American presidents who opposed a European and by that we mean Rothschild controlled central bank were Jackson, of course. Then came President Lincoln, but he was assassinated. Lincoln refused loans from the Rothschild’s at interest rates up to 40% and chose to print “greenbacks.” Then came President Garfield, but he was assassinated. Then came President McKinley, but he was assassinated. Last was John Kennedy who issued $4,292,893,000 in “United States Notes” through the US Treasury after an announcement that the US was ending its central bank with Executive Order 11110. After Kennedy was murdered, the “notes” were quietly removed from circulation. That executive order in its entirety, now otherwise removed from all public records and history books: Executive Order 11,110 AMENDMENT OF EXECUTIVE ORDER NO. 10289 AS AMENDED, RELATING TO THE PERFORMANCE OF CERTAIN FUNCTIONS AFFECTING THE DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY By virtue of the authority vested in me by section 301 of title 3 of the United States Code, it is ordered as follows: Section 1. Executive Order No. 10289 of September 19, 1951, as amended, is hereby further amended- a. By adding at the end of paragraph 1 thereof the following subparagraph (j): (j) The authority vested in the President by paragraph (b) of section 43 of the Act of May 12,1933, as amended (31 U.S.C.821(b)), to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury not then held for redemption of any outstanding silver certificates, to prescribe the denomination of such silver certificates, and to coin standard silver dollars and subsidiary silver currency for their redemption and – b. By revoking subparagraphs (b) and (c) of paragraph 2 thereof. Section 2. The amendments made by this Order shall not affect any act done, or any right accruing or accrued or any suit or proceeding had or commenced in any civil or criminal cause prior to the date of this Order but all such liabilities shall continue and may be enforced as if said amendments had not been made. John F. Kennedy The White House, June 4, 1963. Conclusion Seemingly endless fake reports of Trump issuing arrest warrants for “Deep State operatives” and ending US participation in the Rothschild controlled Federal Reserve System are more game playing and deceit. Trump has run up trillions in new debt already and America’s coffers have been emptying into the waiting hands of the Rothschilds at a record pace. The global jockeying, the endless tantrums, all of it is a game, cheap theatre. Follow the money, from the pockets of the poor and middle class into the rich and powerful. War and politics are for show and no more.

[higgzbosen]

Shame.

I know this sounds stupid and contrite to say, but I don't know how else to convey the disappointment I feel in our nation. Everything that has transpired and the horrible possibilities that await us was completely avoidable. There were so many opportunities to act on the numerous warnings that bad things would happen if we put 45 in control of the country. Yet here we are. Only 7 months in and it's so obvious that this is a disaster now and only calamity seems to loom before us like the darkest of storm clouds on the horizon. Growing up in the 70s, I learned to be wary of the russians. The fear of nuclear war was a very rationale fear shared among the Americans everywhere when I was growing up. It wasn't an actual fear of fighting, it was the escalations of fighting that worried not just us but the world. Shit got to that it was over for all of us. There was no bigger foe of the russians than the Republicans as I grew up. The Republican party worked very hard to take the lead on anything that would show not only their distrust of the red menace, but would revel in their distaste for the communists. It was their thing. The pussy democrats could never handle the cunningly evil agents of communism. Only the Republicans could protect us. Yet here we are. We not only have an orange man child sitting at the desk with the "football" but he is under suspicion of colluding with the Russians to get there. There is a possibility Republican president of the United States has worked with a hostile foreign nation in order to do what exactly it's really hard to tell, but the sheer fact that this question is even asked should scare the shit out of all of us. This is a serious issue that can no longer be minimized and dismissed. It's hypocrisy at its most buoyant that 5 he very party that has rolled the big bad ass fight those commie bastards card for decades but when the red monsters mess with the elections, it's not outrageous enough to defend the country from outside attacks that you get so greedy to go after health care. That's is the bigger threat? That deserve your attention? Your priorities are corrupted and your spines are weak under the pressure of your own rhetoric. Shame on you most though because your party leaders knew about the russians efforts and were told what was going on. But they said nothing. Because it was their guy who was going to win, if the russians were successful then yea, wow that's bad right. You also were told of your candidates on goings, but you did nothing. Why? Recently it has become very evident that the only thing that matters now as this legislative term moves on wasting your time on greedy plans to make profits for greedy people off of human suffering. Now more than ever the win or just a win becomes so important, but it was never a win for America was it? I really don't think it would have been a win for the majority of Americans that would have been effected by this effort to rid our nation of Obama care. How utterly disgusting that a few small fraction of that industry profit so hugely from doing nothing but " administrating" the process. If you went after that greedy bunch and put them out maybe, but that's who you were actually talking about making America great for. Not for the red states, red fucking dots that exist in those states. Little men with lots of money to get the ears of weak men like the leadership of the Republican party. They knew what was coming and did nothing. They knew what was going on and they could have stopped it. But here we are. It's not right that we should even have reason to ponder the idea that 45 is drinking the red vodka. It runs so counter to the DNA of the Republican party, it's almost like having a non-white guy be your candidate. You know it's coming at some point as the demographic changes, so you work hard on including diversity, but your very nature is embracing exclusion. But this should be like finding out Ronnie and the Duke were the original broke back mountain. It ain't so. No way that none in our party would ever be a Russian agent or confidant. It's OK to bang them though. For what it's worth even putin has said that Russian working gals were the best, so yea it's OK to do that right? Yet here we are. So easily avoided. But still we are heading down what I can only surmise will be histories most absurd periods where the travesty that will most certain assail us was so completely avoidable that pridefully ignorant ambivalence could be the only thing stopping anyone from doing anything to avert certain disaster. It's so preposterous it wouldn't hold up as a plot to a movie. Yet......so how do the republicans stomach the notion that they have let their party be taken over by such a disaster as 45. How they try to give the current situation away with the benefits of doubt on their side, yet for the past 8 years they acted as they were at war with the president, I'm sure it had nothing to do with the color of that man. Nothing at all. But now it's his naiveté of the orange one. He is learning on the job. No. Not right, bullshit. Your just as guilty of this abortion of democracy as are the people who were conned into wasting their hard earned rights to vote for this blasphemy of humanity. How in the world can any be convinced that this man, and I say that in only the most basic representation of the gender, he is no man. Deferments don't fight wars and neither do the rich. Like they also rarely work for what they claimed to have earned. How could he with the spoon of plenty feed the hearts and minds of the hungry and needy that outnumber his kind many fold, but he is supposed to drain the very swamp that he is known to frolic in. You ignore this like you ignore the oncoming constant trickle of more "forgotten" meetings or discussions with the Russians. Your very AG has committed perjury and recused himself from anything to do with it and 45 wants to bash his biggest fan when he started this insane March to doomsday. Just like a rich arrogant prick to cast away something someone when they no longer can get them what they want no loyalty from the wanna be king who demands it from his subjects? You can't be surprised that he is turning on him, look at what he did to that douchebag Christie. Not that I care for the little golam looking racist, but to look like you may have betrayed your own nation for this and then lie about it in front of the very people you worked with for years, to be pissed on by this orange buffon, you actually deserve far worse "my precious" Shame on our nation for taking for granted its greatness and throwing it away like this. It may not be the total end of our country but I am fearful it is going to along time before the damage will be repaired and the lives lost on the follies of the orange hulk. In a nation of laws, precedent is the basis for progression and the status quo, 45 may not be the last one to exploit the office for the gains of a small few, but every expansion of power allows those who come after to push it even more.....

[perpetualcollapse]

The noise in my head

2016 really did a number on me. The election brought everything crashing down until all thats left is a crushing sense of dread and hopelessness about the future. In fairness though, it was’t just the election that made me feel this way.  As an artist and creative person it has become so hard to make a living. After years of working for corporations that wear you down by degrees until you feel like a husk (being under paid and over worked the whole time), I moved into teaching— while this is far more rewarding I arrived at the moment the schools were being corporatized. It’s nearly impossible to find full time work. As an adjunct instructor you can’t advance in your profession, and you get paid only a fraction for what you do, leaving you grossly underpaid and again overworked. My art practice has been on life support for so long any sane person would have pulled the plug already, but I hang on. I work all the time. Days, nights, weekends and rarely get any genuine time off. 

This isn’t living, it’s surviving. I must admit I am surviving quite well, but at a cost. My artistic and personal life have suffered immeasurably.

I’m not alone. Most people I know work multiple jobs, with financial uncertainly always hovering nearby. It’s immobilizing. Half the country has spend the last decade or more groveling to barely get by while a fortunate few live in a bubble of wealth and privilege. Is any kind of work worth hundreds of percent more than any other? No. It’s perverse.  What is assigned value is so distorted. Anything that makes a quick profit, no matter how dishonest or damaging to the world is KING. Everything else is looked down upon by the champions of this wicked lie which frames the rest of us as failures in every practical respect. I can reject this all day long, but still need that money in the bank to survive. It is a violation of spirit, of everything ‘America’ claims to be, and still serves up as a slick illusion in commercials, programs and all manner of social messages 24/7. The ‘American Dream’ of possibility has been hopeless warped into ‘what you can get away with’ as the results of the election so painfully prove.  As an artist it is my work to create something to make this visible– visceral, to the world, but how can I when I work all the time? It’s intentional. Republicans declared war on the youth and intellectuals of the country after the student led protests in the late 60s. That and their tacit war against the civil rights movement have redefined everyone who wasn't rich and white or who didn't blindly follow their doctrine of corruption into enemies. THEY ARE THE ENEMY of what this country was created to be. The forces of this evil (and it is an evil) are most of our politicians, who have chipped away at our standard of living to gain power and more wealth for themselves as they sell us out to the biggest donors.  Show me a national level politician who isn’t filthy rich. You can’t. It only gets worse and worse.. Are we finally at a breaking point? I don’t know. Americans’ capacity to accept less and call it the same appears to be limitless. The same can be said of being fed lies. The whole concept of “Post–Truth” should scare every thinking person into action, yet I am afraid it won’t in enough numbers too make a difference until it’s too late. It may already be too late, even for the planet. I started this blog because I was too busy to make art or write seriously (had a text based blog before this) and visuals can say so much on their own and tumblr makes it so easy. There is a value in that, though it is difficult to qualify. I love the personal curation here and on platforms like Pinterest and especially instagram which require original work— it is one of our few ways we can easily express ourselves in this hyper-commodified world. I follow all kinds of art, alternative, culture, style and tech blogs. I learn something new constantly, but it won’t make me a dime, but it’s still worth it. I started this as a visual reference and kind of virtual scrapbook. I love getting glimpses into other people lives. It make me feel less isolated and often gives me hope and is very inspiring. There is a great value to that.  Since the election I haven’t been posting much or if I do its information in reaction to our precipitous devolvement in to some kind of neo-fascism because I’m so distressed and am struggling to process it. In light of our situation mere entertainment feels vulgar to me. I feel a need to inform, but I am also completely burned out from the whole thing and my daily routine. Plus, honestly, no one (or hardly anyone) is really going to read this. If it somehow survives, maybe someone digging in the digital ruins in the future? who knows... the point is I may as well be talking to myself. Maybe the possibility that someone is listening, reading or viewing is merely the need for connection, acknowledgement that this is actually happening and I’m not alone in how I see it. Just the idea that someone may see it, nod knowingly before moving on to the next thing is enough for me to make the time to do it.

I want to get back to using tumblr as a way to decompress (I can’t even look at Facebook these days, and can barely tolerate the bad news everyday). This is one very little way I keep from losing myself. 

Some perspective: I want to acknowledge that I am very aware I am lucky (in the biggest picture). Very, very lucky. As a cis white male, even a gay male I experience so much less strain that so many others and I know it. I am very aware and very concerned that so many other people, especially trans people and people of color are suffering in very real and very terrible ways. Even though I feel paralyzed in the scope of what I can do, I can voice my views and stand with those who genuinely need support. I will get by, but some of those people are in real and present danger. We can reach out to each other in solidarity, we can stir ourselves to take any action we are capable of. We can contact our representatives, we can become a chorus of voices against the tidal wave of fear, lies, and stupidity. That has a value too.

[redwoodpress]

“Babel”

I watched my TV screen weeks ago as state after state bled the color red, foreshadowing a death that would break across not only my TV, but my America. Subtle whispers of profanity escaped my lips the same familiar way they have when tragedy affected my life, as every border dripped into the next, like a color by number sent from hell. The only thought that kept coming back around, “This is America. This is America. This is America.”

So many of you called me to weep into the phone, asking the static silence between us to change the outcome. Your fears were sent to me from other countries. The defeat that landed on your bones you gave to me that night and we tried to carry it together. You ranted, screamed, went silent. We all processed in a myriad of ways. I walked onto my school campus and familiar faces were gone. Protests broke out, everyone split like the Red Sea, and that night I cried myself to sleep because I realized I wasn’t Jesus and I couldn’t hold the weight of your emotions in my hands. I was tired for you. I was tired for me. I was tired.

I told a friend the other day that if the phrase, “God is in control” has become a language that is only used to silence you, I will not say it right now. I won’t erase your pain with empty Christian jargon.

You are mourning, I am too. I am listening. There is nothing but love in my heart for you. Before I say more, know that if I have any internalized racism in my body, I don’t want it. I never did. But we have the choice every day to love or hate each other. This is humanity.

Friends, we were destined to fall. From Genesis to now, we are still falling into some bad dream. Whether it’s Greek mythology or it is literal, whether the world was created in seven days or Charles Darwin’s view on creation wasn’t that far off, whether you kiss the bible or you want it to burn in the hell it speaks of, we are still broken. This is America. This is the world. This is sin. Hate me for bringing God into this conversation. Hate me for talking about sin; but look around, is anything else working? Do people, on an individual basis, suddenly believe you and fall at your feet when you argue? Are we getting anywhere?

I tried to remember as I sat in my astronomy class that this world is a dot in an expansive universe. It’s still spinning, at just the right angles, to keep us alive and well. We have made it through the Depression, two World Wars, the Holocaust. I am not decreasing those events, nor invalidating the present. But we are still here. We have felt deep loss and time has given us just enough to keep growing through and out of the pain. We watched 9/11 as children-we feared that day as something so strong and mighty fell. As dust storms chased after people like a horror film and fires choked them out of life; we wondered if we would ever recover. We are still standing.

But we will never have perfect stability.

Former wars, pointless like Vietnam took innocent lives as it depicted faulty images on our televisions. Media took us in its grimy hands and left us isolated, confused, devastated. Language made blanket statements out of us, human documents that anyone could read and somehow understand, instead of individuals who have been written by complex experiences, loss, love, heartbreak, humiliation, triumph. It became “us” and “them”. Power, privilege, oppression, entitled, injustice, white supremacy, woke-there are a lot of hot words floating around, and not everyone knows what they mean. The words reinforced the borders; pathways to individual people are getting caution taped. Dialogue is broken and conversations are dead-one word out of someone’s mouth is suddenly cause to crucify them, instead of educate.  I hear a tower of Babel; we’re all speaking a language that no one will listen to. The definitions have trapped us all. Enough.

We were told to love our enemies. We were told to bear with one another in love. Anger is good, hate is not. Focus. Fight for people, instead of just fighting.

We will never have perfect stability.

There will always be angry, ignorant, white men in the middle of America who hate African-Americans, the LGBTQA community, women, immigrants, Muslims. There will always be people in those groups who hate those white men back. Social media will always be a faulty platform to write atrocious things to people in anger.

Honestly, we chose to hear what we wanted to hear. We were living in the fear of the question, “Is it this bad? Is America this bad that these are the best candidates?” And then as politics progressed the fear ate us alive and vulnerability gave us no other choice than to believe a lie. That politics was all we had. That media from terrible sources defined us. And we became the borders that Trump talked about. They were both racist, corrupt, aggressive in sexual assault or passive in preventing it, drunk on power, drunk on money, fallen-whether they said it like a badge of honor on national television or did it behind closed doors. They still are. We lived within the walls of corruption before Trump even talked about his damn wall. Before he got elected, we chose hope against all odds in unimaginable filth. And then the nightmare came true and we threw out hope and fell back into filth. Hate. We let a single man get inside our heads and spin us in circles.

It’s a shame, it’s embarrassing and surreal. Because I look at the rest of the world, having been to third world countries, and their generosity is uncanny. They have nothing and their hands are open and they say, “Here. Take it from me. Take the shirt off my back.” Their hands are open for not only us, but for the seemingly improbable truth of hope.

And we are here, screaming our own pride into every facet of communication available, and to be honest, it’s making me sick. The story isn’t about us. Other countries seem to understand this.

We’re all yelling about self-love, and that’s important, but I have more things to do than to just love myself. There are a lot more people who need love, and it’s about time we start doing it.

Fighting for the orphan and the widow isn’t optional. Fighting for immigrants isn’t optional.

We are better than this.

We’ve worshiped fear. We’ve set up an altar and bowed down. One side mentions God and the others say they are privileged and white and don’t understand pain. Another side speaks out about their very real oppression and injustice and the others tell them that it’s not happening. Our experiences are not the same, you’re right. I am not you. But to be honest, I told myself that God was in control because I had nothing else; I was horrified at the state of our country. I didn’t say that God was on the throne to suddenly diminish that systems are still broken and people are still in need. I didn’t say it as a means to turn a blind eye to injustice, and I know many did. I say that God is control because I cling to nothing else, our world is chaotic, and I have nothing left that brings the sweet waters of peace. Maybe that sounds privileged, but it’s what I have right now.

The divide is getting wider, we have to stop it.

We somehow thought we should stack up our pain and struggle next to each other and let them compete. We’re not the same but we have both held hands with fear, and eaten depression for breakfast, and been paralyzed by tragedy. I don’t want to be in this game anymore, and nobody wins when we compare scars. Fear is real, fear is valid. But fear is still just that-fear. It’s easy, it’s natural, it’s a reflex, and it is something we can fight. Whether you are more affected by this election or not, we still have choices to make about the demons that tuck us in at night and how we are going to send them back to hell. We’re in this together, let’s act.

I don’t ask for ignorance. I don’t ask you not to feel, not to cry, not to see darkness, because we have faced a death of sorts. But I urge you, in this time, to look around at the people taking care of one another. I urge you to look back and see the ways people took care of one another in times of war, disaster, tragedy and learn from them. Look at how people love each other and wake up when nightmares become realities. We can do the same-give, share, find peace in calamity. People are reaching out with both arms in places they cannot see light for others doing the same. If we generalize others into groups without families, personalities, capacity for love and loss, capacity for understanding, we become our own boot camps of hatred. If we don’t help each other realize that, we will be alone, aching over an unstable America, asking it to be heaven. This is not heaven.

By the same token: I didn’t go to church for 5 years because I disagreed with a lot of the things the evangelical church was doing, or not doing. I was questioning, and I was frustrated that the church was not doing one of its primary jobs, to seek justice, peace, and love. This is what I proclaimed obstinately and obnoxiously over people who argued their case. I recently just sat in the car with my best friend after our church service. She has been a church-goer her whole life. She is someone who has watched me go in and out of churches most of my adult life, going once and picking it to pieces like a 5 year old at dinner. I consistently found something to be angry about. She told me that day, “I never wanted to argue at you about how church and community was right because I knew you had to come to that conclusion by yourself. I just knew I was always going to be at least your one friend who always went and I would let that speak.” I almost cried because her patience astounded me. She is a loyal friend because she doesn’t try to make me believe her, she’s just there for me, exemplifying what it’s like to live a life pursuing a God who loves all and waits for all.

So my point is, if I’m not around people who are different than me, how does anything change? If she didn’t stick around, I would have never been part of a group that has changed my life and pushed me forward into change and made me a better person. And if someone like me who is frustrated doesn’t stay, then how does the culture there ever change? Turn your frustration into finding solutions. Otherwise it’s for nothing.

We can’t afford not to change.

So I’m still going to sit next to someone who doesn’t agree with me politically. Do you know why? Because if I wait for them, like I know God waits for me, then maybe we can bridge the divide. My silence and cold shoulder only closes all doors between us. And you know what? This waiting doesn’t take any energy out of me, not nearly as much energy as it takes to be angry.

It doesn’t mean I’m not going to fight for justice; it just means I am going to focus on the people who are in need, instead of fighting at the people who are not.

There are times under the sun for everything. Right now, it’s time to grow up, even when the adults or the peers in our lives haven’t, even when mom’s we barely know get on our Facebook to scold us. We live in a time that people our age spend nine hours a day on social media; we can talk all day about change, but we have to live it. And quite frankly, it’s time to disregard the thoughts of people who don’t believe in peace. It’s time to forgive, even when it’s difficult. In the end, a bitter heart is only hurting you.

Don’t burn bridges. Light a flame to lead people out of their shadows. That’s more important.

History does not dictate how we move forward. Be present. Move. There will always be people who live in the past; we get to be the minorities, whites, women, men, LGBTQA community, immigrants, Muslims who don’t. So let’s move the conversation forward, too. Embrace your ancestry, but ask yourselves-who are we? Who do we want to be? That’s the question we have left, let it propel us forward into truth.

We can’t say that “Love trumps hate” and then cut someone out of that, regardless of who they are, no matter how much they piss you off. You have to give them margin to change, because you would want the same. Redemption is a story and it’s rolling, but we’re going to miss it if we don’t wake up. That means pursuing love when it’s difficult and grace when you don’t want to in a culture that tells you to do whatever feels right for you. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really work because whatever feels right for you is often easy, and it means to hate people and stay bitter.

We can’t do anything about the way we grew up, but we can do something for the way the ones after us get to grow up. We are not our ancestors. We don’t have to be our history books. We don’t have to lick our wounds. We are not our Facebook statuses. We are all made of the same stuff, flesh and bone; please recognize that.

Can we work together? I’m so tired of not working together. I’m so tired of division.

The color of my skin does not erase the fact that we are called to forgive each other, just as much as the color of my words don’t erase the oppression you encounter because of your skin color.

We will never have perfect stability.

But stability is stone cold cement, founded by old ideas, like the walls of Jericho.

Like the walls of Trump’s hate.

We are built by truth, love, grace, courage. And we move.

The sound of your voices are bleeding through. Can you hear them?

 P.S. This article doesn’t give you an excuse to suddenly start bashing millennial “snowflakes” and call them lazy, entitled, and stupid. It also doesn’t give you an excuse to bash all white people, all people of color, or the church. If you are, you’ve done a tremendous job in missing the point. And please don’t read one paragraph of something and say you understand all of it.

��˔�

[dwestfieldblog]

DELUSIVE ENLIGHTENMENT MEGLOMANIA

2019...and a true two minutes to midnight on the doomsday clock. Now there's a king hell lead entrance eh? Annihilation and dystopia, coming soon to a planet near you...'One total catastrophe like this, is just the beginning' What did I learn last week? The name of the Egyptian god who created the universe by masturbating was Atum. Worth mentioning eh? Seeds of creation in atoms, his chosen warrior must have been Onan the Barbarian. And...Ethyl formate is in the centre of the galaxy, tastes like rum and smells of raspberries. Close your eyes and you are there. 'Meta programming the human bio computer' Dr John Lilly. 'Art and science have their meeting in method'. Bulwer Lytton. A long collage from the magician's hat......

Back in late January, the dubious blue shaded Bono of U2 was railing loud and hard against the evils of capitalism...surely I am not the only one to see the deep level of irony in this...A multi millionaire from writing songs with a number of offshore investments and minimal tax payments (well, only a few humans actually want to pay the tax demanded, but some of them can afford to pay it)...Without capitalism it is a touch unlikely he could have made so much money and kept it... only the corrupt in various regimes get to be so rich -  and precious few musicians get this much moolah...Some messianic front men should never be allowed to do anything other than sing and dance. Still haven't found what you are looking for?

Anyway, Jesus said 'When you give arms,do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your arms may be given in secret'. Or maybe it was alms. Arf. Don't show your hand too early:-) Ace of spades high. Speaking of which...

White House Spokesperson Sarah Sanders mentioned on a religious TV network that God 'wanted' (Useful Idiot) Trump the gurning Golden Reptile 'to be the American President.' Perhaps that is true...maybe he will be the last moron leader that will make people truly aware and take more care over who they choose to elect in a democracy. Fnord. 'Well ah trust him cuz he aint a politician and he speaks his mind'. Duhh.What does he actually say when he speaks his mind? He has certainly been a gift (in more mysterious ways than one) to Presidents and populists in other dubious countries as proof of how useless free elections can be and how simple it is to affect them from afar and within. A standard bearer who carries his nation's flag so low he should be arrested under the U.S law for defamation. Germaphobes like walls, but a touch pointless when you have such filthy hands. A new world disorder....Love the title of the book 'Crippled America' by D. Trump with a scowling picture of the blonde psychopath on the cover. Says everything about the USA today. And love even more the idea of his Space Farce/Force... Flash Gordon meets Star Trek. Trump as Captain Kirk and Pence as Spock. Tired of being the policeman of the world, time to be the Warriors of the Universe and have laser space fights with China. (Wonder how their president chooses to interpret the I Ching? May he live in interesting times.)

'Sovereign' internet for Russia...(or 'the World Wide Web without the world', as the BBC World Service put it) a new law being prepared to control exactly what internet goes in to the Motherland and protect their people from freedom. Arf. Wouldn't want any false news or manipulated election results going on there eh? Or access to non Kremlin approved news. We shall see if this actually passes into legislation. What do the majority of Russian people actually think about this? Goddess bless Pussy Riot, Tatu and Vladimir Vysocki. Mr. Putin, remember Dostoevsky.  ( A week after writing that, 15,000 demonstrated in Moscow against the proposed new laws. There is already a law making it illegal to insult a member of government. Not much room for satire or polite criticism, but Russia has never pretended to be a democracy.)

World leaders in more and more countries following the old western lead in starting a war on the basis of an outright lie and receiving no punishment for it. (Perhaps at the gates of Saint Peter. ) Well, if the ones in 'Christian' democracies can get away with war crime atrocities under the pretence of righteousness and liberation, why not them? And let's not forget the ever useful catch all word 'terrorist', carte blanche to get away with murder and invasion on false pretexts. Terrorists are not shopkeepers, students, quiet religious folk or disaffected individuals without guns who disagree with their government and march/write songs in demonstration to protest apparent/ obvious wrongness. Terrorists use fear, manipulation and extreme violence to maintain, assert and spread their power. (and how many governments fit that description?) They don't make pop videos, they make snuff movies.  

Step by incremental naughty step Hungary and Poland becoming ever more damaged, Britain, Europe and America being gleefully and carefully encouraged to pull themselves apart. I have never (well, from the age of about seven, so that is almost never) been a believer of what America and Britain did to dominate the world in olden times Whatsoever. BUT, life under a Sino-Russian world government?? FECK that. All those wannabe socialists from western universities are going to have a screaming bloodily rude awakening in a red dawn. Or perhaps they have such a well built narrow reality tunnel that all will seem just fine and dandy when 'their' system wins and will thrill to the new accepted literature. Slightly depressing how this current apparent time stream appears to be developing.  

(Maybe a temporary control in the chaos is all most generations can wish for. Perhaps only a sidestep into the actual flow of the river which seems to be chaos is all that is needed to evolve into a deeper awareness. 'Sink or swim' appears to be false option perpetuated by alpha types. Flow, surrender control, and in the Being so, a (deep breath) an open hearted universal view...Makes astral sense to some of us.)

Totalitarianism is a foul bastard swine whatever side or form it takes, political or religious. Read interviews with those who survived life under the Nazis AND the Communists. Or those who escaped extremes of the main religions, those in new age mind warp sects, having their souls drained via manipulation and enforced delusion. Cowed into kowtowing, despising the manipulations but knowing how much it hurts to think and feel...and so choosing the easier path of submission. Some people are proud of endlessly suffering pain, but only very rarely does their endurance create a stronger person. Survive yourself. As the song says, 'The final conflict is within'. Stand, kneel, adopt the lotus, just don't bend over and expect anything positive to come your way. (Unless...yes you can guess the rest...)

And as for all the student snowflakes no-platforming dissimilar voices to harm their delicate ears and cluttering up the channels tweeting meaningless self righteous rubbish, shouting so loud there is no actual debate...where do you imagine your place will be in the new world scheme? Outsiders will be enslaved or executed by 'popular' demand. You are not Chinese dissidents in prison, however you might feel. You have the right to be heard, (even as you deny that to others) but not the right to deafen and attack. Did you ever wonder about the past mentality and spirituality of those who could stand and watch a heretic/ witch' being burned to death at the stake or these days, those who can sit in a small invited audience to watch a man be fried alive in a chair? Those men who could watch and take part in a gang rape? To coin an old comedic phrase; 'That's you, that is.' Dig into the dirt and get to the molten core of morality. Find yourself there, then choose the height of your evil, the depth of your Love without ego. Ethics. Arf. Thus spoke Westfieldthruster.  

'The black man motivates, the other man imitates'...Damn straight.

'But I'm confused between sexual, murder, magical and medical, is the difference metrical or imperial, septic, fertile, feral or sterile?' Health and deficiency. (J>B)

(Diary...There is no one in my life in any way for whom I do not have respect. Empathy and compassion I have, long term patience too but after my respect is gone then so are they. Deleted. This will very highly likely apply to myself. But I have never done anything with a woman that I wouldn't allow her to do to me, if she wished to. (So I am still a gentleman eh? ) Remember lonely boys, She might be a goddess but she's still human. Meanwhile again...Situation Normal, All Fecked Up...

After a certain age, recklessness ceases to be quite as attractive as once it did in youth, as 'Death becomes real'. (Dylan Moran) Illnesses and disabilities, permanent or otherwise increase in number with the procession of years and the long journey through suffering can make a human paranoid and fearful. Imagining the worst of declines can seem very logical. The 'unpleasant preliminaries' as Cohen said. Most of us have made up our minds (in a very literal sense) about what comes next or what doesn't and it is fairly easy, given how we adjust reasoning to fit with the least unpalatable truth to find a comfortable justification for our various behaviours. Self destructive types (which most of us seem to be in one way or another) use rationality to declare that if everyone dies including the thinker, then why not do what you enjoy the most for as long as you can. I do this and know of many others after the age of thirty who reached the same conclusion and followed through past sixty and beyond. Smoking, drinking, drugging, fighting can lead to some of the worst types of deaths. But even those who never did any of these things suffer strokes, dementia, heart attacks and chronic end of life pain. Just consistently negative thinking can make people ill, just in less obvious ways than smokers etc. So we/I seek to 'justify'.  

Reactions to stress matter. A lot, But how many working people with families have the time to sit under a Bo tree or read Eckhart Tolle etc? Most of us appear to attract some mental/physical cataclysm as a way of taking stock and making a 'brutal re-appraisal of the situation'. (HST) Very often this is the only way a human stops what they are doing and starts thinking about Being. We all do what we do to keep various feelings and thoughts at bay, but the brain (and thus the body. 'Where a thought goes, a chemical goes with it'; Deepak Chopra) are not fooled and store it all up until overload occurs. Getting old is not for cowards. Shame I seem to be one, such die many times before their deaths. Endless physical pain and mental fear can do that and it is very hard to see that as an Initiation sometimes. And these days, most of the time. Glad I have a gun. How many of us can hope to die 'peacefully in our sleep'? Tranquillisers? Not quite the Portal of Daath, more like the gateway to the abyss. Which as uncle Frederick said, stares right back into you when you look long.

For those with patience, it is easy to say that meditation might well be the best way to re-programme the mind into letting go the poisons. To un-wire and react to stress in a more positive way. Discipline. Old habits die hard. Older habits die very badly. Alpha theta delta waves and LSD therapy? Chinese Auryvedic Reki Tantric massage, more sex for the endorphins and oxytocins? Some people will read this as a very dull and obvious piece of writing. Others will know all about the idea of suicide as a 'problem focused strategy'. Get on with dealing with and solving the attacks from within and without...Want the truth? A truth. There have been thousands of days when the only thing that kept me going was the thought of unwinding my useless tension with whisky for a few hours every night. And it is that lazy thought which has been killing me for the last 22 years. A liver is a remarkable organ unless you flood it with alcohol, the power of her regeneration is astounding until the tipping point is reached. Milk thistle isn't going to solve this. Can you tell how I feel today?

What causes that 'tension' Dave? The usual. Overthinking, self hatred, anger, desperation, guilt, regret, doubt, all the classics. Most of us seem to have these in various combinations during our lives. A generalisation but seems to be a fair one eh? Some people deal with the negatives in highly positive and/or immoral ways... regular holidays, saunas, horse tranquillisers, painting, flagellation, righteous causes, deviant behaviour, local politics, role playing (well, we all do that one way or another), virtual reality games (also), teaching things we should know better before we set ourselves up as such, conning the gullible with vague promises of better things, healers as politicians and vice versa seeking money and power/sex, lying to ourselves on an hourly basis, doing anything to be 'happy' and sustain the illusion that we are somehow promoting our immune system and to bring meaning to our existence. Burning through the days, raging with light because it seems sexier than being peaceful, Attempting immortality (in physical form) through health supplements, work, sport and having offspring. Faking our 'realities' until they temporarily become real. Working on massive ideas because we are captivated by the energy within them and the possibilities of a better life, curing dis-ease via mental, physical, chemical and spiritual research, using ourselves as a laboratory, exploring exactly what Will-Power truly means. Further and deeper into realms of the without which is truly inner, the macrocosm which is the microcosm. '100 books you must read before you die', the first of which is your own. Your very own Book of the Dead. A lifetime preparing before the next step.  

Been there, done that. Next. (How arrogant.)

So, survive, evolve and move on...He writes with dead eyes and in daily pain. Normal is very overrated, whatever my foul mental weaknesses, I regret very little. Could always Do more. But Being is key. There is only a time limit on the flesh. 'Who will deliver me from this body of death?' What seems important to you? Really, truly? Define 'important' and instinctive reasons why. Or not...to hell with me, in hell I seem to be and to hell I go. Pathos and hubris simultaneously. Woo-hoo. Etc.

One more final 'time' for the universe...'God' is/was/probably possibly a telepathic scientist, architect of infinity, quantum physicist, astral engineer and a psychic musician. ALL. WE are tiny sparks and mirrors of 'God', parallel possibilities, all serving the purpose of existence, which is (so I seem to choose to believe) to Evolve and experience all that matter can. We do not all need to be Einstein, Da Vinci or Beethoven but we all are on various levels, perhaps less 'grand' (depending on perspective) but the Poet/ Creator is within us all every time we appreciate Nature, enjoy humour or a story well told, think of some connection for ourselves...Small things Matter:-) As the bishop said to the actress. Smaller things are Quarks. Arf.  

Stanislav Grof... COEX...(Condensed experience montage. ) Eg, 'You are re-experiencing the birth process, remembering pre birth inter uterine events, reliving ancestral or archaeological crises of people/animals from whom you are descended, seeing the  sub-atomic energy whorl from which Form appears, previsioning the Superhumanity of the future...all at once!'  (That was, apart from the LIGHT that smashed into me for five seconds in a garden in 2008, exactly what I experienced in the Reconnection. It went far higher the next time. I do regret I didn't practice.

1.Amniotic universe – the womb. The only world that life knows at this point. Blissful feeling of peace and joy in a healthy womb. 2. Cosmic engulfment – no exit – Equilibrium disturbed, contractions begin- unbearable feeling of being stuck in hell with no way of escaping. 3. Death verses rebirth struggle – second clinical stage of childbirth, intense struggle for survival.4. Death versus rebirth experience – the child is born. Intense ecstatic feelings of liberation and love. New world begins. ...

I found this scrawled by me on an old A4 scrap of paper, not sure who actually wrote it, perhaps E. Tolle. Along with 'Conscious Ego...Self Image/Persona/... Subconscious memories...Shadow/Denied psychic material... Anima/Animus/ Opposite sex qualities...Collective Unconscious/Universal+archetypal processes.  In a cycle learning and relaying...'Information received, decoded and transmitted by a structure'. (Definition of intelligence by R.A.W.).  

An infinite number of reality tunnels threading in a spiral of a labyrinth between matter and the non physical. The 'Akashic Record' to tap into and imprint our own levels of experience, the Eye recording Itself. Individually/collectively. Why do we think? Why remember? Why care? Why create? What is the chemical programme which sparks curiosity and fascination? The survival trip is a journey to.....

.....................................................................................................................

Back in Middle School...I knew before I started the run/essay etc, that it was mine. No pride or ego, just knew I had already won. A calmness descended, not grit and determination, just KNEW it. And so it was, every time. Another example from life of no planning, just Being, THEN doing it. My entire life was full of these. Thinking never worked out for me. Everything good which has happened has been spur of the moment choices, instinct, following what (or who) I Love. TRYING (or trying too much) usually ends in tears. Parallel to this is the absolute negativity of my/the mind. Agree to be optimistic as a behaviourally rewarding hobby...he almost giggles.

Reprogramming takes effort and how many of us can say we are not lazy? The most regular homework I give to students is to just to write diary type paragraphs about things they notice or feel on various random days. I have been given some wonderfully honest expressive stuff. What would we reach across/back and tell ourselves at younger ages? What would we attempt to avoid or undo? This exercise is pointless if we feel negative or sadness over it. So don't. Arf. Self forgiveness is a beautiful thing, valuable and worthy. So are we. Stay warm and in flow:-) Last famous words unknown. Happy rebirthing Easter day again. And again.

'Today I broke a personal best, successive days alive':-)

LOVE.

[theconservativebrief]

On November 9, 2016, just a few minutes after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, a man named Vyacheslav Nikonov approached a microphone in the Russian State Duma (their equivalent of the US House of Representatives) and made a very unusual statement.

“Dear friends, respected colleagues!” Nikonov said. “Three minutes ago, Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections, and a second ago Trump started his speech as an elected president of the United States of America, and I congratulate you on this.”

Nikonov is a leader in the pro-Putin United Russia Party and, incidentally, the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov — the guy who invented the “Molotov cocktail.” His announcement that day was a clear signal that Trump’s victory was, in fact, a victory for Putin’s Russia.

Longtime journalist Craig Unger opens his new book, House of Trump, House of Putin, with this anecdote. The book is an impressive attempt to gather up all the evidence we have of Trump’s numerous connections to the Russian mafia and government and lay it all out in a clear, comprehensive narrative.

The book claims to unpack an “untold story,” but it’s not entirely clear how much of it is new. One of the hardest things to accept about the Trump-Russia saga is how transparent it is. So much of the evidence is hiding in plain sight, and somehow that has made it harder to accept.

But make no mistake: Trump’s ties to shady Russian figures stretch back decades, and Unger diligently pieces them together in one place. Although Unger doesn’t provide any evidence that Trump gave the Russians anything concrete in return for their help, the case he makes for how much potential leverage the Russians had over Trump is pretty damning.

I spoke to Unger recently about what he learned, how he learned it, and why he thinks Russia’s use of Trump constitutes “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history,” as he puts it in the book.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

I’ll ask you straightforwardly: Do you believe the Russian government successfully targeted and compromised Trump?

Craig Unger

Yes, absolutely. But let’s go back in time, because I think all of this began as a money-laundering operation with the Russian mafia. It’s well known that Trump likes doing business with gangsters, in part because they pay top dollar and loan money when traditional banks won’t, so it was a win-win for both sides.

The key point I want to get across in the book is that the Russian mafia is different than the American mafia, and I think a lot of Americans don’t understand this. In Russia, the mafia is essentially a state actor. When I interviewed Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who is a former head of counterintelligence in the KGB and had been Vladimir Putin’s boss at one point, I asked him about the mafia. He said, “Oh, it’s part of the KGB. It’s part of the Russian government.”

And that’s essential to the whole premise of the book. Trump was working with the Russian mafia for more than 30 years. He was profiting from them. They rescued him. They bailed him out. They took him from being $4 billion in debt to becoming a multibillionaire again, and they fueled his political ambitions, starting more than 30 years ago. This means Trump was in bed with the Kremlin as well, whether he knew it or not.

Sean Illing

Let’s dig into this a bit. You claimed just now, as you do in the book, that the Russian mafia has been using Trump-branded real estate to launder money for over three decades. What evidence do you have to back this up?

Craig Unger

You really have to go back 20 or 30 years to understand who the key Russians were, what role they played in the Russian mafia, and how they related to Trump.

The very first episode that’s been documented, to my knowledge, was in 1984 when David Bogatin — who is a Russian mobster, convicted gasoline bootlegger, and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin came to that meeting prepared to spend $6 million, which is equivalent to about $15 million today.

Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob.

“One thing Vladimir Putin got right was his insistence that American democracy is also corrupt, and I think he’s showing us exactly how corrupt it is”

Sean Illing

Okay, to play devil’s advocate, can we say definitively that Trump knew who he was dealing with or what he was getting into? Or did he just naively have his hands out?

Craig Unger

Look, I can’t prove what was in Trump’s head, or what he knew or when he knew it. But I document something like 1,300 transactions of this kind with Russian mobsters. By that, I mean real estate transactions that were all cash purchases made by anonymous shell companies that were quite obviously fronts for criminal money-laundering operations. And this represents a huge chunk of Trump’s real estate activity in the United States, so it’s quite hard to argue that he had no idea what was going on.

Sean Illing

How did Trump first become a “person of interest” to the Russians? Why would they target this fringe celebrity character 30 years ago, long before his ascent to the presidency was even fathomable?

Craig Unger

First of all, the Russians have always wanted to align with certain powerful businessmen, and they have a history going back to the American businessman Armand Hammer in the 1970s and ’80s, whom the Russians allegedly turned into an asset. But it’s not as though they zeroed in on Trump 30 years ago, and only Trump.

Russia had hundreds of agents and assets in the US, and Gen. Kalugin, the former head of KGB operations in Russia, told me that America was a paradise for Russian spies and that they had recruited roughly 300 assets and agents in the United States, and Trump was one of them.

But it’s not just the money laundering. There was a parallel effort to seduce Trump. Sometime in 1986, Russia’s ambassador to the US, Yuri Dubinin, visited Trump in Trump Tower and told him that his building was “fabulous” and that he should build one in Moscow, and they arranged for a trip to Moscow.

According to Gen. Kalugin, that was likely the first step in the process to recruit and compromise Trump. Kalugin told me he would not be surprised in the least if the Russians have compromising materials on Trump’s activities in Moscow, something they were quite good at acquiring.

Sean Illing

But we still don’t have any evidence that such compromising material exists, right? Did you talk to anyone who has seen it or is sure of its existence?

Craig Unger

No, and I won’t say that I’m 100 percent certain that it exists. I spoke to several people who assured me that it exists, but I could not corroborate those accounts. I have no idea if they’re right or if any tapes will ever emerge. But in a way, all of that is beside the point. The real evidence of compromise is already out there, and we’re talking about it now.

Sean Illing

Speaking of which, tell me about Bayrock Group, a real estate company that operated in Trump Tower.

Craig Unger

Bayrock was a real estate development company located on the 24th floor of Trump Tower. The founder was a guy named Tevfik Arif and the managing director was Felix Sater, a man with numerous ties to Russian oligarchs and Russian intelligence. Bayrock proceeded to partner with Trump in 2005 and helped him develop a new business model, which he desperately needed.

Recall that Trump was $4 billion in debt after his Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt. He couldn’t get a bank loan from anywhere in the West, and Bayrock comes in and Trump partners with other people as well, but Bayrock essentially has a new model that says, “You don’t have to raise any money. You don’t have to do any of the real estate development. We just want to franchise your name, we’ll give you 18 to 25 percent royalties, and we’ll effectively do all the work. And if the Trump Organization gets involved in the management of these buildings, they’ll get extra fees for that.”

It was a fabulously lucrative deal for Trump, and the Bayrock associates — Sater in particular — were operating out of Trump Tower and constantly flying back and forth to Russia. And in the book, I detail several channels through which various people at Bayrock have close ties to the Kremlin, and I talk about Sater flying back and forth to Moscow even as late as 2016, hoping to build the Trump Tower there.

Sean Illing

I don’t think you say this explicitly in the book, so I’ll ask you now: Is there any evidence at all that Trump actively sought out Russian money by making clear that his businesses could be used to hide ill-gotten gains?

Craig Unger

That’s a difficult question. I’m not sure he made this crystal clear, and I don’t know that he had to. I mean, just look at how these transactions take place. Trump doesn’t have to say anything. Trump’s organization was desperate for money, they knew the caliber of people they were dealing with, and they were either okay with this or deliberately chose not to do their due diligence.

You might say this is something other real estate developers do as well, and maybe that’s true, but those developers don’t become president of the United States.

Sean Illing

A few minutes ago you referred to Trump as a Russian “asset,” and this circles back to the question of whether Trump was actively working with the Russians or whether he may have just been a useful idiot who didn’t know he’d been potentially compromised.

Craig Unger

In the book, I use this term “asset,” and the difference between an “asset” and an “agent” to me is whether or not the person is knowledgeable. And from my point of view, it’s impossible to prove what was in Trump’s mind. I can’t prove that he was actually knowledgeable. At the same time, if he did this kind of money laundering 1,300 times, it’s reasonable to surmise that he was aware of what was happening.

Sean Illing

Part of what’s so puzzling to me is trying to figure out how money and ideology intersect in all this, if they intersect at all. In other words, Trump seems much more motivated by money than political ideology, but I keep wondering if his drift into politics was in any way influenced by his financial entanglements.

Craig Unger

It’s an important question, and it’s not clear what the answer is. One weird anecdote that jumped out to me was this story about Ivana Trump, whom Donald married in 1977. It turns out the Czech secret police were following her and her family, and there’s a fascinating file I quote in the book that says they started tracking her in the late 1980s, and one of the Czech secret police files says that Trump was being pressured to run for president.

But what does that mean? Who was pressuring him? How were they applying the pressure, and why? And did it have anything to do with potentially compromising materials the Russians had on Trump from his 1987 trip to Russia?

What we do know is that Trump returns from that first trip to Moscow and he takes out full-page ads in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Boston Globe — and it’s fascinating because the ads essentially pushed the same foreign policies that he’s pushing today. They were anti-European, anti-NATO — basically they were aligned with the Soviet plan to destroy the Western alliance. And Trump takes out full-page ads in major American newspapers affirming this view. Maybe that’s just what he always believed. In any case, it’s worth noting.

“Trump was working with the Russian mafia for more than 30 years. He was profiting from them. They rescued him. They bailed him out.”

Sean Illing

I’m curious about how you collected all of this evidence. Did you go to Russia? Did you interview most — or any — of the people directly involved in these transactions? Did you compile this information yourself or rely on other sources?

Craig Unger

It’s stunning what you can find out through public sources. I did not go to Russia. I had a source who tipped me off to the name Semion Mogilevich, one of the highest-ranking bosses in the Russian mob, whom I had never heard of before, and that led me to a database online that revealed ownership of homes in the state of New York — purchases and sales.

And so I went to Trump properties, and every time I found a Russian name, I would research it, and it was stunning. I’d often take their name, put in Mogilevich in Google, and it was like hitting the jackpot on a slot machine, time after time after time.

There were countless people who were indicted for money laundering, or they were gunned down on Sixth Avenue, and there was just a huge percentage who seemed to have criminal histories, and that sort of got me started. I also had a wonderful research assistant who speaks Russian and she grew up in Brooklyn, and she was a terrific asset and helped break the language barrier for me.

Sean Illing

The subtitle of your book is “The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia,” but it’s not clear to me which part of the story is new. What did you uncover here that wasn’t previously known?

Craig Unger

The insights I gained from Gen. Kalugin are completely new, but honestly, a lot of what I did was simply compile all this disparate stuff that was out there but had never been pieced together neatly in one place.

For example, a lot of the Russian-connected stories were published in the crime pages of the New York Post or the New York Daily News, but they were always just straight-ahead crime stories you could see in a tabloid. There was no sense that this had any geopolitical implications or forces behind it.

So part of what I tried to do was assemble all of this in a coherent narrative that laid it all out in a comprehensive way. We have all these seemingly random crime episodes that appeared in tabloids again and again, but it turns out that much of it was connected to a much larger operation, one that ended up ensnaring Trump and the people around him.

Sean Illing

Trump is obviously the focus here, but as you mentioned earlier, he’s not the only asset targeted by the Russians. What do we know about Russian efforts to compromise other prominent American figures?

Craig Unger

One of the things I hope this book shows is that there’s a new kind of war going on. It’s a global war without bombs or bullets or boots on the ground, and the weapons are information and data and social media and financial institutions. The Russian mafia is one weapon in this global conflict, and they’ve been fighting it smartly since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Russians start businesses and front companies and commodities firms that appear legitimate but essentially work to advance the interests of the Russian state. They’re very good at getting people entangled financially and then using that as leverage to get what they want. This appears to be what they’ve done with Trump, and now he’s president of the United States.

Sean Illing

Maybe the most troubling part of all this is that the Russians simply exploited our own corrupt system. They studied America’s pay-for-play culture, found its weak spots, and very carefully manipulated it. As long as our system remains unchanged, we should expect this kind of exploitation.

Craig Unger

Absolutely. There’s an old saying that sometimes the worst part of the scandal is what’s legal, and the Russians, to their credit, studied our system and campaign finance laws and they exploited it masterfully. They’ve used pharmaceutical companies and energy companies and financial institutions to pour money into our politics, and we really have no idea the extent of their influence.

One thing Vladimir Putin got right was his insistence that American democracy is also corrupt, and I think he’s showing us exactly how corrupt it is. Trump is just the most glaring example, but surely there are others, most of which we know nothing about.

Sean Illing

The case you lay out is pretty damning, but I’m left wondering if any of it really matters. As you said, most of this stuff is hiding in plain sight, and although the special counsel investigation is underway, there’s a subset of the country for whom no amount of evidence is enough to persuade them that something wrong has occurred, and Congress has demonstrated its uselessness pretty clearly. So how do you see all this playing out?

Craig Unger

It’s hard to say. I think we’re on a collision course that will either end in impeachment or with Trump reverting to unconstitutional measures to stay in office. That is simply my opinion. However this plays out, it’s clear that we’re in uncharted territory here, and it’s hard to see how this ends well for anyone.

Original Source -> Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades

via The Conservative Brief

[ianmkeenan]

Pot Over Pills - Protect Your Freedom to CBD!

Listening to the CNN Special - "Pot Versus Pills" - speaking about FDA-approved opioids versus cannabis-based medicine that can work on both pain as well as inflammation, we want you to be cognizant of your Food and Medicine Freedom!

INTRODUCTION

Could there be something so powerful that the United States Government is trying to silence those that know its powers?  This wouldn’t be the first time… administrative and bureaucratic arms of the federal government have become corrupted by big-money interests and use fear to scare people into submission.

I refuse to be scared - because there is no point in living if I can’t tell the truth.  The truth shall set me free - and I hope it will set you free as well.

Have you heard about CBD?  These three letters stand for ‘Cannabidiol’ - one of over 113 known cannabinoids (or phytocannabinoids) found in the cannabis plant.  Cannabis can be called hemp or marijuana, which we will decipher and define more later.  This particular naturally-occurring plant compound - CBD - has been found in thousands of studies to benefit humans in a variety of ways.  From inflammation-based diseases to nervous-system based diseases - the discovery of a human’s Endocannabinoid System (or ECS for short) has paved the way for researchers to learn how we are pre-wired to be responsive to cannabinoids, like CBD.  The best part?  There are no known negative side-effects of using non-psychotropic (won’t get you ‘high’) cannabinoids - meaning they represent a safe and natural alternative to prescription drugs.  CBD (and most of the other cannabinoids in the cannabis plant) are non-psychotropic - meaning that they cannot get you “high” - this allows for them to be used with children, people with balance issues, people that don’t want to be ‘high’, the elderly, and even pets!

ALL PRESCRIPTION DRUGS ARE SYNTHESIZED.  

Most all prescription drugs are not natural - and your body can process parts of them, but because the compounds are synthesized, your body will never recognize those artificial compounds completely - that is why there are so many side-effects.  You can hear the long list of side effects during these drug commercials with happy background music and people smiling, laughing, and playing.  Some side effects are arguably worse than the initial ailment.  The reason why prescription drugs are synthesized is twofold - first, when a compound is molecularly synthesized, drug companies can patent the molecule because it is NOT naturally occurring - it was produced in a lab.  Secondly, this allows for the drug to be manufactured IN a lab (versus produced in nature) - which gives scientists the ability to “accurately” dose medications.  

I believe that it is people’s natural right to decide for themselves if they want to consume prescription drugs.  I have nothing personally against prescription drug companies, but I also believe that people have a natural right to choose plant-based medicines that are not created in a lab.  Nature, in my opinion, can do a fine and miraculous job of producing high-quality compounds that can have amazing healing qualities for human beings and animals alike.  And although you will not find precisely dosed pills in nature - you will find essential oils, teas, and compresses made from the simple stems, leaves, fruits, and flowers of these plants. Plants are amazing - and cannabis is an amazing plant for anything with an Endocannabinoid System.

HYPOCRISY - THE U.S. GOVERNMENT PATENT ON CANNABINOIDS AND CBD

The United States government has a patent (#6,630,507) for the antioxidant and neuroprotective properties of cannabinoids.  You may be saying to yourself - I did not know that the government could patent things, I thought only individuals or businesses could do that!  Well, apparently this is not the case - our government can patent things as well, creating a lot of questions for how that patent would then be licensed or used in the future.  It is almost like our government is preparing to work hand in hand with drug companies that can use the patent - and stop individuals, farmers, and small businesses from being able to access the use of cannabinoids.

From the abstract of Patent #6,630,507 (1):

“Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism. This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and HIV dementia.”

Although this patent on CBD is impossible to change at this point, it is still possible to question.  Why on God’s green earth does the government have a patent on something through one agency and then have another agency telling people that it is “illegal”?  See, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) still ’schedules’ all of cannabis as a ‘Schedule 1 Drug’ - this is the worst of the worst scheduling reserved for highly addictive and dangerous drugs like heroin, meth, and cocaine (2).  One government agency arrests people for this plant (DEA) - another agency has a patent on it (Department of Health and Human Services, or, DHHS and the National Institutes of Health or, NIH) - and yet another agency is working with a pharmaceutical company to develop a prescription drug that has CBD in it (Food and Drug Administration, or FDA).  This hypocrisy creates layers of confusion amongst government, businesses, individuals, and law enforcement agencies.

A MORE NEFARIOUS PLAN IN THE WORKS?

Once the FDA approves a synthesized CBD drug, it will have the administrative (but not constitutional) authority to proclaim that CBD is a drug, and therefore can only be prescribed by doctors and sold by FDA-approved drug companies.  This will represent a grave danger to Americans because the synthesized CBD that will be created and manufactured in a lab IS NOT the same CBD that you will find naturally occurring in the cannabis plant.  If the government stops non-pharmaceutical companies from being able to market naturally-occurring CBD, then the public will ONLY be able to consume the synthesized form of CBD that their bodies do not wholly and completely recognize.  There will still be negative side-effects.  CBD that has been synthesized and patented by a pharmaceutical drug company IS NOT NATURAL.

In theory, our Constitution is supposed to protect our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.  The very first component of survival is food and water.   If something exists in nature, then no one (including our intrusive government) is supposed to be able to patent it.  Plants are natural - plants grow naturally in our environment and are outside of the scope of what a company or the government can patent.  Individuals living in America have a natural and constitutional right to grow plants - it is our natural and constitutional right to feed ourselves.  It is our natural and constitutional right to heal ourselves.  That’s right - I said it - we can HEAL OURSELVES with plants - without having our money and souls siphoned by the ‘sick care system’ that exists in the United States. We do not have to ask permission from government to consume plants.  We must protect our right to consume plant-based medicine - this includes naturally occurring cannabinoids that exist in nature.

Cannabinoids are a naturally occurring plant compound and can be found in other plants besides cannabis (See page six “Cannabinoids in the Plant Kingdom”) - these plant compounds are just most prevalent in cannabis.  Other precious plant compounds that are found in cannabis include: terpenes, polyphenols, and essential fatty acids.  These plant compounds exist in most all plants - and because they are a naturally occurring part of the plant - the government and big pharma should not be able to stop people from experiencing them in their most natural form.  Consuming the plant raw, extracting the essential oils of the plant, or drying and preserving the plant material are the three most natural ways to use plants for health and healing.  Using plant-based medicine is very different from taking prescription pills that have been ‘FDA-approved’.

FDA-APPROVED - WHY IS THIS A GOOD THING AGAIN?

Both FDA-approved opioids and illicit derivatives of these opioids (many people get hooked on prescription drugs and then turn to cheaper or more available alternatives on the street) killed more people in 2016 than the entire Vietnam War - around 62,000 people.  That is more than guns - accidental deaths and homicides combined.  FDA-approval does not automatically mean that a drug (or anything) is safe - it just means that it met whatever standards are set by the people running the FDA.  Because of the ‘revolving door’ between government and big business - many of these people from the pharmaceutical industry are the very people creating the ‘stamp of approval’ for what passes for ‘FDA-approved’.  Basically, many people working in administrative agencies of the US government have been bought and paid for by people in industry - they get people elected and then get special treatment when it comes to the rules and regulations that are created by these entities.

The theory of protecting people is understandable - there are individuals with no ethics or morals who trick people and lie to people, and in theory, having a government agency to keep people safe from the intent of these hucksters is a good idea.  But it is just an idea - because of the size and corruption of many administrative agencies - their powers (granted to it by taxpayer money) to scare people and threaten people are often used for the benefit of big business versus actually protecting the rights and interest of the individual American.

WHAT DO WE DO?

The war on the individual and personal freedom has existed since ancient civilizations and continues to exist today in the United States, which is still much more free than most of the human population.  It is our job to protect our natural and constitutional right to grow food and medicine.  This is something that no government agency should be able to take away from its citizens.  Non-psychotropic cannabis, also called hemp, cannot get people ‘high’ and has a large list of benefits to humankind.  We must continue to free this plant from ALL of these government agencies’ desires to stop its growth and development.  We must work at a County and State level of government to combat the out-of-control federal agencies that are choking individuals, farmers, small producers, and small businesses.  We can and must win - our ability to build our immune systems naturally as well as combat systemic disease - rests in our ability to grow and use natural plant-based medicine.

References:

1. https://patents.google.com/patent/US6630507

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Schedule_I_drugs_(US)

*************

That’s Natural is NOT CORPORATE – our shareholders and stakeholders are our customers.  We care very much about the hemp plants and processing that become a part of our product.  We are dedicated to our customers’ health and well-being. That’s Natural products are considered to be full spectrum – meaning they contain cannabinoids and terpenes from the whole plant. Every mammal has an endocannabinoid system, which is fueled by these cannabinoids and terpenes. By providing pure, potent, and trusted products, That’s Natural continues to strive to meet our customer’s needs – something we have been doing for twelve years! With 100% traceability of where our hemp comes from, you can be confident in what you are putting on, or in, your body. For more questions regarding our CBD products, please visit our Questions and Answers page.

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

The Russian Embassy Twitter accounts troll like Trump, but with better English

Who needs long-winded phone calls and Marriott conference rooms when you can conduct international diplomacy via subtweet?

The people behind the Twitter accounts for the Russian embassies in the United Kingdom and the United States know this well. For the past two years, these accounts — along with others representing the embassy in Canada and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs — have been trolling Western powers with an eclectic array of biting, nonsensical, and often quite funny tweets, especially if you don't consider their human consequences. Ethics schmethics. 

Trump may have been declared a "master of Twitter" by the Chris Cillizzas of the world. But when it comes down to it, the Russian Embassy has his tighty little whiteys in a knot. It doesn't take much — unlike Trump, they know not to put a space before a period — and yet, they clearly trump Trump when it comes to the morally flatulent medium they love the most, Twitter.

We regret to report that this matters.

SEE ALSO: Donald Trump's 'pee tape' controversy, explained

To be clear, these tweets likely matter less for actual negotiations. It's hard to imagine, for example, that Rex Tillerson ever faxed over a printout of the latest Russian Embassy Hercule Poirot "dig" to his State Department. They're far more important for symbolic and representational reasons. 

Like Trump, the Russian embassy has learned how to circumvent traditional media outlets and go straight to the gullible humans of Twitter. And as much as reputable news sources like the New York Times and The Guardian might want to ignore the accounts, they can't once they start trending. 

These marginally grammatical posts work. Every damn time.

What results is the complete degradation of diplomatic language. At least sometimes it's a little bit enjoyable?

Take a look at our grand moral decline in action:

1. Obama's expels diplomats, so Russia tweets a baby duckling

In December 2016, America had a slightly different relationship with the Putin regime. We were not, as we are today, their unpaid interns. Not too long after President Obama got wind that the Russians were trying to influence our election, he instituted new sanctions and expelled 35 Russian diplomats from American soil. The Russian Embassy UK responded promptly and diplomatically by tweeting clip art of a duck.

President Obama expels 35 🇷🇺 diplomats in Cold War deja vu. As everybody, incl 🇺🇸 people, will be glad to see the last of this hapless Adm. pic.twitter.com/mleqA16H8D

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) December 29, 2016

Charming. 

This tweet came on the heels of another equally "dervilish" tweet. Less than a month before, the UK Embassy compared Russia to a strong man and Europe to a concentration camp full of gay pigs.

If Russia is in decline, why worry? Maybe, real worry is West's decline and that we manage things better? pic.twitter.com/WqG4uT5Pqt

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) October 22, 2016

You've got to respect a foreign power with that level of shamelessness. Of course, we Americans held our president-elect in much higher regard, as evidenced in his tweets from that time:

Donald Trump used a Star Of David to accuse Hillary Clinton of being corrupt https://t.co/rdbFtLBqO0 pic.twitter.com/5XXx3Oj2hb

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) July 2, 2016

As much as we'd love to not evaluate Russia's fetishistic connection to barnyard animals, it's still worth noting. 2016 was the year the Russian Embassy on Twitter fully dropped the banal tweet format in favor of pig cartoons and began composing tweets the way all the cool diplomats are doin' it — bad memes. 

DNC hacking is revealed as inside job: will Russia-bashers be left unemployed? (not likely) pic.twitter.com/2n8CpOCX8e

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) December 15, 2016

.@BarackObama: "USA mistakes on its policy in Iraq led to ISIS consolidation". Admission long overdue pic.twitter.com/QBaYEMoQNB

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) December 7, 2016

Lavrov: US so far failed to produce the promised proof of Russia’s involvement in US election pic.twitter.com/nQJLs8Jfcb

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) December 1, 2016

We've spent about 30 minutes trying to figure this one out and have gotten nowhere.

Statements that loss of Aleppo represent a humiliating blow to the West quite revealing: it is geopolitics, stupid! pic.twitter.com/5K1rr4Dz0q

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) December 2, 2016

Honestly, your grandmother has done better work in Printshop.

The tweets were an important and depressing harbinger of even more depressing things to come.

2. Russia is accused of poisoning a former spy in the United Kingdom, and responds with a ... law of physics joke

You know the type of person who is so desperate to prove that they're funny, they'll go for every joke, every time, regardless of the cost to their audience?

That's the Russian Embassy UK. After Prime Minister Theresa May accused the Russian government of poisoning a former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, as well as his daughter, in Britain, the Russian Embassy responded with a hard-hitting middle school physics principle.

6/7 Any threat to take “punitive” measures against Russia will meet with a response. The British side should be aware of that. pic.twitter.com/DFAaB5orQE

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) March 13, 2018

And the hits kept coming.

Kremlin spox Peskov: Russia, having nothing to do with Sergei Skripal poisoning, is ready to cooperate with UK, but sees no reciprocity. UK media proved their “quality” – no more trust in them. pic.twitter.com/YM0fGt12L5

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) March 14, 2018

Then there was this particularly enjoyable John Grisham-inspired tweet.

Presumption of innocence 2.0: no idea what happened, no idea why it happened, but Russians are to blame. pic.twitter.com/JmK9tNgd3i

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) March 7, 2018

As well as this sick barometer burn.

The temperature of 🇷🇺 🇬🇧 relations drops to ➖2️⃣3️⃣, but we are not afraid of cold weather. pic.twitter.com/mand9YyoaE

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) March 14, 2018

In the past, a banal public statement would have sufficed. Most average consumers of the news would ignore it, if it even made their Twitter timelines. But by attempting to meme their way out of guilt, the Russian Embassy UK managed to reach an audience who'd otherwise never have noticed the story. They come across as "relatable," especially for audiences who could care less about #EmbassyDrama. 

But this bombastic tone — especially when addressing gravely serious situations — is familiar to both the Russian Embassy UK and President Trump, who has done things like complain that the "fat" president of North Korea doesn't want to be his friend. Both accounts make international diplomacy relatable to the troll set, who make a significant share of the Twitter audience.

3. Russia loves #FakeNews

Trump's repeated use of "fake news" to denote everything he doesn't agree with has become one of the defining characteristics of his presidency. And it's a tactic the various Russian accounts have taken up for their own misinformation campaigns. 

Not much has changed in the past 100 years or so. Russia-bashing and blaming Russia in the Western media for almost everything has truly become #FakeNews and #Propaganda. pic.twitter.com/URBxxhyIgF

— Russia in Canada (@RussianEmbassyC) March 14, 2018

These accounts, particular the Russian Embassy in Canada, see the "fake news" cry as a way to completely discredit any scrap of news that they deem unworthy or damaging to them — which, if you're any account tied to Russia, is pretty much every single bit of news about the country and its meddling in the world. 

Where do fake news & propaganda really come from? Make no mistake, it's global MSM like BBC. https://t.co/rh9Mbe61Y6

— Russia in Canada (@RussianEmbassyC) September 20, 2017

It's not just that both Trump and these Russian accounts seem unwilling to accept as truth anything that paints them in a negative light. It's that they're both hell-bent on subverting traditional norms and undermining the press. At least with Trump you can sense the significant influence of ego. But Russia's motivation feels more sinister. It's part of an effort to sow confusion, distrust, and general chaos across the internet (and the world) via, ironically, fake news. 

Thanks @nytopinion for great example of [#fakenews] zero fact checking of articles about Russia > https://t.co/7B6OC9KfEr < pic.twitter.com/jmBjS03Rp2

— Russia in USA 🇷🇺 (@RusEmbUSA) March 8, 2017

And, unlike Trump, these Russian accounts know how to be cheeky, fully embracing their role as trolls. They employ a sarcastic humor that plays well to the online world, taking just enough edge off with the attempts at exaggerated humor to slip it past the defenses of many, a hidden knife compared to Trump's over-sized sledgehammer.

What a timely video, especially with all the #FakeNews and Main Stream Media propaganda circulating on the internet!#BlameRussia #Russophobia pic.twitter.com/SRswyiL4iq

— Russia in Canada (@RussianEmbassyC) March 16, 2018

And Twitter itself is ultimately giving these accounts the extra heft they need to be taken seriously by giving them the coveted Blue Checkmark Of Verification. While Twitter has recently re-examined its verification process thanks to white supremacists, it's done little to confront this sort of thing.

Twitter has suggested verifying everyone on Twitter (well, non-bots, one would assume) because as the platform's product director David Gasca put it, users often mistake verification for credibility. 

In a discussion about the verification issue a few weeks ago, Gasca said, "In user research, when you ask people what do you think when you see the checkmark, they think of it as credibility. Like, Twitter stands behind this person … Twitter believes what they’re saying something great and authentic, which is not at all what we mean by the checkmark. So it creates a lot of confusion."

Indeed, it does, specifically in this case. And that's exactly the way Russia likes it. 

4. Sowers of general chaos

Trump is always good for a few social media grenades every week that send us all skittering away in one panic or another, and these Russian accounts seem to relish in similar chaos. After all, if it's instability they're after, dropping elbows on Twitter is a sure-fire way to really kick things up a notch and keep people on their toes.

Hi there, @statedeptspox. Calm down. Your propaganda machine is out of control - you’re spamming all of us

— MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) March 7, 2018

Whether it's trolling the U.S. State Department (above) or ridiculing the many accusations leveled against Russia in one swipe (below), the Russian accounts never miss the opportunity to leverage their stature as official accounts to tweet, well, whatever the hell they want, decorum be damned.

All “Russia investigations” (not only in the US) are destined to end as @ConawayTX11 brilliantly concluded: “only Tom Clancy could take this series of inadvertent contacts, meetings, whatever, and weave that into some sort of a spy thriller that could go out there”#JackRyan pic.twitter.com/rX4QEP7R3p

— Russia in USA 🇷🇺 (@RusEmbUSA) March 13, 2018

The accounts tend to rely on sarcasm as a means of deflating their opponents without really addressing the issues. It's all about trying to take the power of that narrative away from the opponent rather than rebutting them. (Though Trump and Russia do their fair share of "No, you're the puppet," too).

Crimea🇷🇺 is OK https://t.co/btvuBxkzR8

— Russia in USA 🇷🇺 (@RusEmbUSA) March 23, 2018

Praise God it's not Russia this time pic.twitter.com/irebYz8aKE

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) May 4, 2017

The game? If you don't like the narrative, then do something outlandish to change it. It's not a new trick by any means but Trump has been playing it effectively and so, too, are the Russian Embassy accounts.

US administration🇺🇸 ordered the closure of the Russian Consulate in Seattle @GK_Seattle🇷🇺. What US Consulate General would you close in @Russia, if it was up to you to decide

— Russia in USA 🇷🇺 (@RusEmbUSA) March 26, 2018

The difference, though, is that, with Trump, there doesn't seem to be any real strategy to the random madness of his tweets. He might think there is, but it comes off looking helter-skelter. The Russians are much savvier, though, more self-aware. Reading through their tweets and responses, you can see a through-line of thought, a consistency in pushing propaganda in spite of the seeming randomness.

In both cases, though, the end result is the same: destabilization. Russia is wielding these Twitter accounts as a successful propaganda arm with little oversight from any outside parties. And though Trump may be relying more on erratic behavior than cynical plotting, we're still paying attention.

To really special people like @LouiseMensch and @funder who keep telling the world that @POTUS is a Russian puppet. pic.twitter.com/eURm0zhjKP

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) April 10, 2017

After all, it doesn't matter if the table gets overturned because you carefully flip it after much thought and planning or because an overgrown child knocks it over during a tantrum. 

[baileylaplata-blog]

URUGUAY POST!!!!!!!

So on Tuesday I got back from my first trip outside of Argentina!!! Uruguay was absolutely amazing. Montevideo is a beautiful city, the air was much cleaner and the streets felt safer. We rented bikes and rode to the southern most point of Uruguay which was really beautiful and tranquil. On our slow trek back to Buenos Aires, we stopped in Colonia for another 2 days and that was beautiful as well! My favorite part of the trip was being able to sit by the water on my last night and watch the sunset. It gave me time to be alone with my thoughts and process my travels so far and think critically about the things I have observed. 

The biggest theme that arose in Uruguay, I would say, was the HUGE economic differences between Argentina and Uruguay right now. To be quite honest I didn’t know much about the country of Uruguay before going there, but quick research in my spare time led me to learn that Uruguay is considered by many to be the most developed and progressive country in Latin America (it also has really high rankings on an international level as well). For example, did you know that 95% of the country’s energy use comes from renewable resources? Wow! 

What I don’t understand is why Uruguay is doing so visibly better than Argentina. In Uruguay, it was a luxury that we could take money out of ATM machines without a hassle. In Argentina it is a long process to withdraw money because a lot of the machines are empty- the country physically does not have the cash to fill them. This leads to the government printing more money, which leads to inflation, which leads to people not being able to pay for the things they used to factor in easily into their budget. A family from La Plata told us that this year their salary gets them about 80% of the things they used to be able to buy in previous years. In Uruguay life was much easier because we were able to pay with our credit cards- in Argentina many places don’t except them for fear of people not being able to pay the bill later. I took US dollars out while in Uruguay and already sold some to my host mom- she, along with many other Argentinians right now, prefers to keep her money in a more stable currency. 

Obviously I have seen tough economic times before- I lived through the 2008 collapse. But never have I actually experienced inconveniences caused by the economy of the government. It’s yet again another example of my previous thinking- “bad things happen, but they don’t happen to me.” or “government policies can hurt people, but they never really will affect me.” This mindset is the epitome of privilege- something that before coming here I thought I did a good job of taking into account. But it’s clear now that I haven’t. Not even close. I know in December I will come home and I will be in a country where the cash is stable and my house will always be warm and I can drink a big glass of milk (in Argentina, the cattle capital of the world, inflation has affected the price of dairy so much that I haven’t had milk in over a month!) and I will read something about the unstable government of Argentina in the New York Times and I will think about this experience. Something about this image makes me feel guilty and gives me the constant question of “what did I do to deserve being born a white rich american?” 

PART 2: DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ*

*Unless you’re reading this blog 

Yet another interesting aspect of my life here has been the constant questioning of things I used to swear were true. For example- the New York Times would never lie to me and would always give me (while albeit liberal) an informed and complete story. What I didn’t expect was for this trust in my favorite paper to be challenged while talking about the elections in Venezuela. While talking with a professor about the current situation there, the starvation and unrest against Maduro, the professor cut me (and the other W&M students) off and asked us “what’s your source?” 

Imagine being doubted on something like that!!!!!!!!!!! And when we followed with NYT, her only remark was “don’t trust everything you read.” Upon further investigation, we learned that in the perspective of Argentina and other countries in Latin America, the fault lies not only in the tyranny and corruption of Maduro (and, from their eyes, much less so), but also in the United States for imposing NeoLiberal tariffs on food and other goods that would have helped the starving people. Once again, I am shook by how much I don’t think about the modern day economic imperialism that my country uses to manipulate smaller powers abroad. Still spinning off of Pence’s visit to Buenos Aires, she continued with “the only reason the US doesn’t put tarriffs on Argentina is because our president [Macri] is doing Trump’s bidding now. If we weren’t, the US could use the same reasoning [invalid elections] to starve our people too.” To clarify, the reasoning behind this is because Macri is exactly like Trump- rich boy, only cares about wealthy, favors big business, doesn’t care about human rights (which, considering the history Argentina has, should be a priority).  It is because of this that reading Pence’s speech in Buenos Aires made me feel physically ill. 

I’m lucky, though, because Argentine people here hate the US government but LOVE us american students. They think our accents are the funniest thing. When I went to volunteer at an elementary school last week, I was treated like a celebrity- people were taking pictures with me, asking me questions, surrounding me. It was a really really amazing day because I spoke with kids from the ages of 13-18 about the history of the dictatorship and what they can do now to be more aware of human rights violations in their communities. In one section, they had to write a list titled “NUNCA MAS...” followed by all the things they want to eliminate from their daily lives- things like homophobia, police violence, xenophobia. My most powerful moment was seeing a kid write “USA” on his paper, then remember I was in the room and cross it out. He doesn’t know I saw him do this, but I wish I told him he should keep it there. If he really feels that way, which he rightfully should, he shouldn’t have to censor himself in his own space for my benefit. It was a moment that I continue to think about over a week later. I think I am going to continue volunteering with the kids for my internship. I will help them plan the big event in November in which 20-30 thousand kids from all over Argentina will come present projects they have been working on that bring attention to human rights violations in the past and the present. I will mainly be organizing food and supplies and venues and other logistics because this is not my history to share, but being around all these passionate kids is really inspiring. I think what my education in the United States lacks the most is an open dialogue about these topics in schools. Why am I still learning the scope of my country’s history and the real effects of this imperialism now? Why did I describe the United States as “post-racial” until my freshman year of college? Why does the United States still do nothing to commemorate the horrible things that happened on our soil? I’ve been to a concentration camp in Germany. I have been to numerous torture sights and prisons since coming here and studying the dictatorship. Why don’t we have a plantation museum that shows the atrocities slaves had to live with? Why don’t we have a museum that commemorates the genocide of Native Americans instead of celebrating Columbus day every year? 

This blog post quickly turned into more of a rant than anything else, so I think I will end this here. I am looking forward to a week of enjoying university classes and napping while I can. Stay tuned for photos of my first finished scarf!