Billy_T wrote:

….Fuck this shit.

————

Hey, what happened to the BT that wanted to get back to some spiritual grounding?

Dark Times, comrad. For sure. But…be a light
Channel all that anger into some Art or Music or…drugs or somethin 🙂

Are you near an Ocean? Lake? Mountain trails? Get away from humans for a while. Recharge.

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“…Every man, plant and creature in Existence,
Every woman, child, vein and note
Is…

A harbinger of joy,
The harbinger of
Light.
Hafiz – “The Subject Tonight is Love”

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link:http://www.sodiumhaze.org/2016/11/10/it-was-the-rise-of-the-davos-class-that-sealed-americas-fate-naomi-klein/
It Was the Rise of the Davos Class That Sealed America’s Fate |
Naomi Klein
Submitted by admin on November 10, 2016

They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?

Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.

For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.

3500_7

Trump’s message was: “All is hell.” Clinton answered: “All is well.” But it’s not well – far from it.

Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk of Trump’s support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.

It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate change at the same time. It could take on bad trade deals and police violence, and honour indigenous people as the original protectors of the land, water and air.

People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together.

Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner of a people’s agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.

Bernie Sanders’ amazing campaign went a long way towards building this sort of coalition, and demonstrated that the appetite for democratic socialism is out there. But early on, there was a failure in the campaign to connect with older black and Latino voters who are the demographic most abused by our current economic model. That failure prevented the campaign from reaching its full potential. Those mistakes can be corrected and a bold, transformative coalition is there to be built on.

That is the task ahead. The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni who took the Bernie campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring progressive leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime. We are “leaderful”, as many in the Movement for Black Lives say.

So let’s get out of shock as fast as we can and build the kind of radical movement that has a genuine answer to the hate and fear represented by the Trumps of this world. Let’s set aside whatever is keeping us apart and start right now.

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Amerian Liberals Unleashed The Trump Monster
link:https://www.newcoldwar.org/american-liberals-unleashed-trump-monster/

By Jonathan Cook, published on Jonathan Cook, Nov 9, 2016

The Earth has been shifting under our feet for a while, but all that liberals want to do is desperately cling to the status quo like a life-raft. Middle-class Britons are still hyper-ventiliating about Brexit, and now middle-class America is trembling at the prospect of Donald Trump in the White House.

And, of course, middle-class Americans are blaming everyone but themselves. Typifying this blinkered self-righteousness was a column yesterday, written before news of Trump’s success, from Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, Britain’s unofficial stenographer to power and Washington fanboy. He blamed everyone but Hillary Clinton for her difficult path to what he then assumed was the White House.

Well, here is some news for Freedland and American liberals. The reason Trump is heading to the Oval Office is because the Democratic party rigged the primaries to ensure that a candidate who could have beaten Trump, Bernie Sanders, did not get on the ticket. You want to blame someone, blame Clinton and the rotten-to-the-core Democratic party leadership.

But no, liberals won’t be listening because they are too busy blaming Julian Assange and Wikileaks for exposing the truth about the Democratic leadership set out in the Clinton campaign emails – and Russia for supposedly stealing them.

Blame lies squarely, too, with Barack Obama, the great black hope who spent eight years proving how wedded he was to neoliberal orthodoxy at home and a neoconservative agenda abroad.

While liberals praised him to the heavens, he poured the last U.S. treasure into propping up a failed banking system, bankrupting the country to fill the pockets of a tiny, already fabulously wealthy elite. The plutocrats then recycled vast sums to lobbyists and representatives in Congress to buy control there and make sure the voice of ordinary Americans counted for even less than it did before.

Obama also continued the futile “war on terror”, turning the world into one giant battlefield that made every day a payday for the arms industry. The U.S. has been dropping bombs on jihadists and civilians alike, while supplying the very same jihadists with arms to kill yet more civilians.

And all the while, have liberals been campaigning against the military-industrial complex that stole their political system? No, of course not. They have been worrying about the mass migrations of refugees – those fleeing the very resource wars their leaders stoked.

Then there is the liberal media that served as a loyal chorus to Clinton, trying to persuade us that she would make a model president, and to ignore what was in plain sight: that Clinton is even more in the pocket of the bankers and arms dealers than Obama (if that were possible) and would wage more, not less war.

Do I sound a little like Trump as I rant against liberals? Yes, I do. And while you are busy dismissing me as a closet Trump supporter, you can continue your furious refusal to examine the reasons why a truly progressive position appears so similar to a far-right one like Trump’s.

Because real progressives are as frustrated and angry about the status quo as are the poor, vulnerable and disillusioned who turned to Trump. And they had no choice but to vote for Trump because there was no one aside from him in the presidential race articulating anything that approximated the truth.

Sanders was ousted by Clinton and her corrupt coterie. Jill Stein of the Greens was made invisible by a corrupt electoral system. It was either vote for Clinton and the putrid status quo, or vote for Trump and a possibility for change.

Yes, Trump is very bad. He is as much a product of the plutocracy that is now America as Clinton. He, like Clinton, will do nothing to fix the most important issue facing humankind: runaway climate change. He is a climate denier, she is a climate evader.

But unlike Clinton, Trump understood the rising popular anger at the “system”, and he was articulate enough to express it – all it took was a howl of pain.

Trump isn’t the antithesis of liberal America. You liberals created him. You unleashed this monster. It is you in the mirror. You stayed silent, you took no stand while your country was stolen from you. In fact, you did worse: you enthusiastically voted time after time for those who did the stealing.

Now the path is clear and the route fast. The precipice is ahead, and American liberals are firmly in the driving seat.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. He is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Also by Jonathan Cook:

No, Hillary Clinton is not less evil than Trump, Nov 7, 2016

Tomorrow, Americans get the chance to vote for a system – resource-hungry, war-peddling corporate capitalism – in two iterations: one has funny hair and a permatan, the other wears lipstick and trouser-suits. Yes, there are some policy differences too, or rather emphases – and Hillary Clinton’s supporters are desperately exploiting them..

Yup. I think i’ve read about fifteen articles now, basically saying that same thing.

And yet — i fully expect the DNC-NeoLiberals to go right back to the same ole sorry ass policies. I dunno whether they are simply ‘benefiting’ from those policies or if they are ‘true believers’. Not sure about that.

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— X — wrote:

wv wrote:

Well, most of the mountains have been blown up by the out-of-state-coal-barrons
or fracked into toxic-soup by the out-of-state-Oil-barrons.

So there’s that.

I’m very sorry to hear that.

————-

Thats ok. folks around here can still lay on their backs
and look up at the moon and the stars.

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“The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago… had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
~Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life,

nittany ram wrote:

I also attended a taping of “The PTL Club” with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

My mother was a big fan so we stopped at their studios in Virginia on the drive back from a vacation in Florida. I was only 14 or so at the time. I don’t remember much but what I do remember was surreal. We were seated in upper part of the balcony. I remember a young boy walking down to the front of the balcony to take a picture of the stage where Jim and Tammy Faye were. Before he could even get the viewfinder to his eye, a couple security guys grabbed it from him and confiscated it. The boy ran crying back to his mother. I don’t know if they ever gave the camera back to the kid. I just know I couldn’t wait to get out of there. It felt very ‘cultish’ to me.

In college I dated a girl who said she was a witch. She told me she was 400 years old. She was a computer science major. Very smart and pretty. I went to her apartment once and she had lit candles everywhere. She dumped me pretty quickly though. She was into motorcycle guys and I was a VW Beetle guy.

————
“Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?”
― Annie Dillard

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— X — wrote:

wv wrote:

I’m just gonna drink my tea, slowly, and eat my toast. If someone has a better suggestion
let me know.

Smell the toast.
Smell the tea.
Hear the birds outside.
Be aware of yourself.
Breathe in the universe.
Breathe it back out.
Butter and jelly. Always butter and jelly.

—————
“Now and again it is necessary to seclude among deep mountains
and hidden valleys to restore your link to the source of life.
Breathe in and let yourself soar to the ends of the Universe;
Breathe out and let the Cosmos back inside. Next, breathe
up all the fecundity and vibrancy of the earth. Finally
blend the breath of heaven and the breath of earth
with that of your own, becoming the breath of Life itself.” M. Ueshiba

—-

“Inhale, and God approaches you. Hold the inhalation, and God remains with you. Exhale, and you approach God. Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God. ~Krishnamacharya

——–

Moyers: Is that why you begin (Meditation training) with something as simple as eating a raisin?

Kabat-Zinn: …so we say ‘Look the first the first Meditation exercise we’ll be doing isnt
breathing, it isnt sitting in the lotus posture….We’re just going to eat a raisin — but
to eat that raisin mindfully, with awareness. You look at the raisin, feel it, smell it,
and with awareness bring it to the mouth gradually, and see that the
saliva starts to get secreted by the salivary glands just as you bring it up.
Then you take the raisin into the mouth and you begin to taste this thing that
we usually eat automatically.

Moyers: And usually a handful at a time.
.
Kabat-Zinn: Yes, and you’re onto the next handful before you’ve finished
chewing this one…Your life is the sum of your present moments….
Jon Kabat-Zinn

So is that the emblem of Amerika now: Two Bald Eagles stuck in a drain ? 🙂

I dunno. I’m gonna continue to make toast and tea in the morning
and just live my life. Trump-Hillary and Republicrats will go on lying, destroying
polluting, fracking, toxic-sludging, drilling, blasting, and making plastic shit.

I’m just gonna drink my tea, slowly, and eat my toast. If someone has a better suggestion
let me know.

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— X — wrote:

wv wrote:

But religion is about fairy stories

What do you believe? What’s the origin and ultimate meaning to life?
In 4 words or less, please.

——————

Mystery. Embrace the Mystery.

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“There are no others.”
Ramana Maharshi.

Agamemnon wrote:

<span class=”d4pbbc-font-color” style=”color: blue”>Politics is Religion. imo</span>

————–
Well i dunno. If
you mean both cause posters to argue and insult one another, then yes.

But religion is about fairy stories and politics is about
genocide, inequality, power-distribution, etc.

I voted for Merlin Olsen, btw,
so don’t blame me.

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How the heck do you get stuck in a storm drain? Are they on drugs?

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We used to call articles like that little “outrage of the week” articles. You can dig up that kind of story on both sides anytime you want. There’s always examples of dum reps and dum dems to be found. Right?

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