trump

These two are not mutually exclusive, but all the same the pollsters that blew calling this election, pretty much proved the folk wisdom: "there's lies, there's damn lies, and then there's statistics".

Even in the run up to the election, there could be found learned articles seriously debunking the statistical "sciences". If you don't ask the right questions, and if you yourself have too many assumptions, your results will be useless.

Certainly a college education is not a path to virtue. Lawyers, who have two degrees, and have to pass a bar examine, are not particularly known for their virtue. Lots of young people go to college to find a path to higher paying jobs, only to discover these days that going to college means not only acquiring crushing debt, but a college degree is not even a sure means to getting a job.

The folk wisdom of the School of Hard Knocks is based on the idea that life can teach virtue, precisely because it knocks you on your ass, whenever you screw up. Not everyone learns those lessons, but many do; and, whether they went to college in the process probably only made a difference in their way of speaking, and not in how they treated other human beings.

Training the human intellect does not create virtue. Human virtue is a function of the development of the heart, whatever bullshit the brain "scientists" are selling this week.

It is now coming to the attention of those who didn't manage to notice it (maybe), that Facebook was filled with all kinds of fake news. The closer we got to the election, the more fake news we got. Making fake news is not a sign of virtue.

In addition, it is not a virtue for the Media to sensationalize every story they tell. They do that for money, and don't care all about the truth. As a result, most of what we saw, and read, about Trump rallies, only noticed the outrageous folks, which certainly did not represent most of those who were there, and precisely not those who never came to the rallies in the first place. Lots of folks had jobs, and elders and children to care for, and that is virtue in action.

These folks presented to America the virtue of refusing to accept the false idea that even four more years of rule by the Democrats would lead to a good result. Everyone had their reasons for liking and not liking Trump, as well as liking and not liking Clinton. That's their right.

Going into a polling booth, and voting in private, is the expression of the heart of America's social religion - social in the sense that it is shared, has no doctrines, and what you do there in that voting booth is nobody else's business, but yours. The vote is not about intellectual concepts, or ideologies. It is about what is "right", and sometimes what is right is throwing out the last fools that have been ignoring the People, and giving some new fools a chance, just in case the new fools might do better.

Yes, its a crap shoot, but that is life, and life as a crap shoot is one of the first lessons you learn in the School of Hard Knocks.

Well, actually, more and more have just decided to come out of the closet. They have been inside the gate from the beginning of the American Democratic Constitutional Republic.

These barbarians are simply folks who believe might makes right, and wealth deserves privileges. Or, basically, that not all citizens are equal. Remember, women had no vote and slaves were only partially human way back when in 1788, the date the Constitution was ratified.

Citizenship is not just rights, but duties (responsibilities) as well. If you don’t want to learn stuff you don’t yet know, you are a “danger to yourself and others”. This little essay (and the last) means to help the reader.

In the movie The Matrix, there is a scene near the end where Neo sees the “matrix” code (see image). That’s where we are today - everyone needing to be “Neo’s’ - to “see” the “code” of the illusion of Party led electoral politics. If we “see” this “code”, we can manipulated it.

The Meaning of our public life (our life of politics and laws) comes to us through words, concepts, and ideas. From birth, and through education (whether the School of Hard Knocks or not), we are trained to conceive (see) our public life in certain illusory Ways. We are taught “beliefs”, not truths.

Everyone has a kind of collection of thoughts and feelings about our public life. Our “collection” (habits) is individualized. Nobody is the same. Nobody. So when we call someone a liberal or a conservative, or an alt-conservative, or a leftist, or a Republican, or a Democrat etc. - or if we conceive of ourselves in such categories - we are a bit asleep. We don’t “see”.

At the core of who we are as human beings is what lives in our hearts, not just our “intellect”. What lives in our hearts is what we care about - the power that drives us to actions. The “intellect” by itself is like the character The Architect in the Matrix movies. Intellect is a collection of abstract thoughts (generalizations) such as the names we noticed above: “when we call someone a liberal or a conservative, or an alt-conservative, or a leftist, or a Republican, or a Democrat etc.” To the extent we have a collective intellectual ideology of what public life is about, we live in an illusion of what the writer Owen Barfield called: shared representations.

However, because the core of our selves is what lives in our hearts, we have become open to being manipulated by those who seek to rule us. So we end up “divided” against each other by a style of public life that focuses on our differences, not on how we are the same - or the matters of heart we share.

This election has painted this reality in the most stark terms. Hate of the other emerges everywhere, and while political leaders talk about uniting us, they are not very good at that at all. Only we can unite with the “other”, through seeking to appreciate what their hearts yearn to do in the world.

This election has also brought us up right against our own prejudices. Neither “side” seemed to know how to understand the other, and the various presidential candidates (and all the TV ads the rich poured over all of us) had as their primary object to rule us by arousing our emotions against each “other”.

All this trash talk is part of the “code”. Also part of the “code” is the belief that politicians, the rich, corporations, have a right to rule us. We are all turned into “victims” by accepting the concept that our only “power” is the vote.

Each four year presidential race, and the every two year by-elections, are public rites of our shared political “religion”. We Believe in Democracy, and freedom, and equality, and brotherhood, in our hearts. As a consequence, going in the voting booth is a kind of political Eucharist. Voting is fundamentally a kind of private moral act in the public life.

The part we are not supposed to notice, is the effect upon our thinking, and about what we care about, by those who seek to manipulate us (for their own self-serving) purposes before we go into the voting booth. Before the vote, we are inundated with “code” about what it all “Means”, most of which “code” is lies (illusions). That is why we need to see the “code” - see the “lies”.

Most every American citizen has many shared values. We want good jobs, and good education for our children. We want services, like the police and fireman, that help us, not hinder us. We want Laws, and legal processes, that are fair. We want those who sell us stuff to actually create stuff we need, and which will not harm us. We do not want to send our children to wars, or to prisons. We want fair and equal access to health care. We want water and food as a right that we deserve just because we are a living human being.

Yet, Party driven electoral politics has, for many many decades now, served the rich and the powerful at the expense of the ordinary Citizen. The Matrix (“code”) of how we see the world is heavily manipulated to favor the rich and powerful, and to keep us divided. Most all of our elected officials are complicit in this.

This Country belongs to the Citizen, and it is time we joined together, stepping past the false “code” that keeps us from recognizing other Citizens has having common cause with much that lives in our hearts.

In the next: More next ... we will get into the specifics of the “how to do this” ... how to change the “code”.

So, ... following Facebook lately, I gain the idea that horrible stuff is coming from Trump's presidency. I also gain the idea that if we just, you know - love everybody, things will work out all right.

I'm not sure the folks being appointed by Trump are into the Love thing, though.

There was this movie Tora, Tora, Tora, about the attack on Pearl Harbor. As its success becomes apparent to the Japanese navy, the officers on the command ship get excited (in a sort of calm Japanese way, though), except for Admiral Yamamoto. Asked why the sour face (again in a very Japanese way) he replies: "I fear we have woken up a sleeping dragon."

Seems to me that what appears to be a turn to the serious Right, feared in many places all over the world, is just the opening scene in a much larger story. People everywhere have a lot more grit these days, and the kind of crap being thrown out by the neo-fascists will not find these people willing to just lay down and give up.

How do we know this? Its all over our art. Our songs***, our movies, our stories. Take the example of the character Ripley, in the first Alien film - a serious kick ass warrior woman. Then there is the Mother of Dragons from Game of Thrones. And, who is the lead in the most recent Star Wars? A serious kick ass mystic warrior woman Jedi.

Remember the black woman/mother bitch slapping her son for going all out of control in Baltimore?

Trump and company are not really ready to deal with what unchained women can do. Their attitudes about women are so 400 years ago. They have no idea what is going to happen, because women everywhere are already awake, and ready to birth and fly dragons.

***Muse: "Uprising": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8KQmps-Sog

#17
Donald Trump Is Not MY President!

Donald Trump is a liar, a cheat, a woman hater, a narcissist, and basically has the morals of a sleazy used car salesman. He is an extremely ignorant/arrogant human being, and would never have been nominated if: a) the Media didn’t give him five billion dollars free advertising in the primaries; and, b) if the GOP wasn’t so crazy (and lazy) in finding someone worthwhile to run.

Hillary Clinton is not much better, whose only advantage was the woman-thing, and the fact that so many of my fellow Citizens are also lazy, such that they didn’t know anything about what her “character” was really like. Head in the sand, and all that. The only reason I voted at all was because my girl friend wanted that, and who says no to someone they love, especially when what is asked is so trivial. All the same, I didn’t vote for Hillary, I voted against Trump.

Trump’s conduct was/is/ and will always be deplorable, and the fact that Hillary didn’t understand why people were going to vote for him, instead of her, made her deplorable too. The Clinton political machine thought they could do whatever they wanted, had already taken over the DNC institutional structure, and so with the help of the corrupt Media they kept the general public from knowing the truth about the amazing support Sanders was receiving. That’s cheating. In fact, that is treason to the Republic. But who the f*** cares about the Republic anymore anyway?

Obama and Hillary want us to act as if this transfer of power thing is crucial. It is not, and it is one of the Myths we have about our own Democracy. Please remember we don’t live in a Democracy, but in an Oligarchy. The Oligarchy doesn’t care who wins, because they effectively own both Parties. It is to the Oligarchy’s benefit that the “transfer of power” happen with as little conflict as possible.

So we get, now, in the Media, all this stuff which accepts that the GOP can put in power any totally useless asshole its wants. The Media won’t be complaining either, since the Oligarchy owns them too.

All this shit falling on the Citizens then is actually a good thing. That’s right - its good. Why?
Because we have been too tolerant of the bad stuff being done in the World in our name, and in America to us. Now is the time to stop being tolerant. And, if you look around, we are not accepting this stuff at all. Want to ban Muslims? Everyone is going to be a Muslim. Want to reduce (AGAIN!) the taxes on the rich? Go for it, just keep in mind this travesty pretty much woke everyone up, and even the GOP base, that voted for Trump, will notice.

The Heartland of America is not stupid. They were just tired of politics as usual, and sent a message. Sure, ... there are plenty of stupid and bigoted people out there, who now feel they have a license to act out. All the same, these idiots are in the minority.

So ... for me ... I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m being chased into a corner, and I plan to come out swinging. Do we need a revolution? Sign me up. Does it need to be violent? No. Help me spread the word, by helping me fund: The Grandmother War: http://www.thegrandmotherwar.com/
That’s a war we will win.

#18
Citizen of the Republic - Citizen of the World

“Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

The American Experiment, in self-governing by the Citizens, is not doing well. It presently has a kind of illness. Can we “cure” it? Of course, but first we have to have a suitable diagnosis.
Americans are, collectively, Citizens of the World, whether we want to be or not. The world is an integrated whole, and in the management of the economic life, in our response to climate change, everyone lives or dies together.

Up to the American and French revolutions, governance in the world was mostly held by aristocrats of blood - kings, queens, and such. Simultaneously with the still ongoing dying away of the aristocracies of blood, there came to be an appearance of what are called: the Western Democracies. An appearance, not a social reality.

The world at the time of these revolutions was becoming integrated economically. Trading empires arose, as did the industrial revolution. Natural Science wrested a kind of intellectual dominance over the prior religious institutions. Rogue waves of change arose in the last three hundred years of world social and political evolution, displacing ordinary people everywhere.

The hunger of human beings for power and wealth has not abated. While the aristocracies of blood died into empty forms, such as the United Kingdom has today, aristocracies of wealth arose. These aristocracies of wealth were a bit better at hiding their status, and their control (“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!” Mayer Amschel Rothschild). Thus is eventually born Central Banking all over the world.

Out of these rogue waves of change there arose the social form we call: an oligarchy. This form of indirect dominance and governance is less visible, sort of. Being a rather disorganized temporary union of folks sharing the same unrestrained appetites, the oligarchy is simply a loose collection of shared interests and associations that have no center. In assuming otherwise, the “conspiracy theorists” are quite wrong. The associations change allegiance all the time, and while having power and wealth from which they are able corrupt the various governments all over the world, all this happens without having any central controls (a top down hierarchical structure).

We worry, for example, about collusion between Trump and Putin, but they both owe a great deal to their respective ever changing oligarchical associations. They cannot keep their appearance of power without being supported by money powers.

We need to go a bit further back in history (“those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”) for this next part.

At the time of the founding of Western Civilization, the rulership of the State became a bit separate from the individual Citizen. This split in the social forms of that time grew, ultimately becoming a kind of threefold arrangement, with Media standing in between the ordinary Citizen, and those currently in power, in whatever particular form each individual State had.

The oligarchies soon recognized that to maintain their power, they needed to control Media, for it was through Media (and the arts that appeared there) that the Meaning of everything was collectively created. Against this tendency, with regards to the shape (form) of large groups of people, the people themselves began to individualize, a process taking place in the bedrock of their own consciousness. There were few Ways for the oligarchies to control this change of consciousness, although it has often been tried. This control over our thoughts had its most nightmare version artistically expressed in the novel of George Orwell: “1984“.

In modern times, this evolution of individual consciousness, and social powers, became reflected in the creation of Non-Governmental Organizations, that stood in opposition to the machinations of the oligarchies. In addition, outside of the control of corporate Media (and its propaganda) arose social media - a free media to go with the evolving individualism and its efforts to define Meaning individually.

A kind of deep moral war has broken out, all over the world. A principle component of this war, over the moral aesthetic of how we live together, is actually raging inside of human consciousness, and then from there spills out into the world of historical events. The so-called New Age recognized this, which is part of why traditional religious authoritarian social institutions have tried to suppress this evolutionary arriving of an individually morally free human being.

The truly “free” spiritual essence of the human being, not only hungers for political freedom, but even more crucially for inner freedom of thought. This spiritual essence declares: my thoughts, and my social will, belong to me, and no one is to control this - no one.

Would that the birth of this change of consciousness were to happen without pain, but if we are honest about what wisdom life teaches at every turn, we know that struggle and strife are as inevitable as breathing.

All the same, the striving for the keeping alive of the Republic in America is a sign of no little import. Trumps and Putins will come and go (“This too shall pass”). We are on the path to not just being Citizens of the Republic (our particular version of government that goes with our particular culture), but Citizens of the World - a World that is the most extraordinary flowering garden of individual art and meaning.

In reality, it is Art that rules the world.

#19
Critiquing the Trump Administration

Intellectually, there is no there there. Trump himself is a disorganized thinker. Because of this, he will draw to himself minds of a similar kind and nature. Disorganized thinkers prefer bluster, over perception and understanding. A clever sound bite is more sought after than is sound thinking. This happens because they never learned how to think critically, especially self-critically, in the first place.

The mind is more than a tool for counting money. All the same it needs to be sharp if it wants to think critically. In order to be sharpened, the mind needs to engage other sharp minds. You don’t sharpen your favorite sword on a corn dog.

Trump’s mind is gray and vague. That’s why he repeats himself so much when he speaks. It has no “light on” inside it. So in the following weeks I am going to simply write about the ideas and thoughts emanating from the pretend think tank that will have the fantasy it is creating actual workable policy. Other White Houses have had standards. This one will not.

Keep in mind that there is not much new here, either. The GOP, and the Dems, have been producing weak-thoughts for generations. We will be getting a lot of same old same old, but where’s the fun in just pointed out that? Critiquing can be an Art, as modeled by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. I am simply following a familiar tradition - pointing out the absurd that political minds manage to make, without the least effort whatsoever. A three year old could do better policy-thinking, while at the same time playing with mud.

Sure ... Obama was intellectually gifted, but you need to know he was working already for the Oligarchy, if you want to apply your critical gifts in a socially healthy Way. Didn’t know Obama was a part of the Oligarchy - then shame on you. Seventeen people in Obama’s administration had worked for Goldman Sachs.

Hillary was a member of the same crowd. There is a reason the Dems were so ineffective against the GOP. Both Parties work the same side of the street. Washington D.C. is political show business, where free market capitalism, deficit spending, and creating money out of nothing is never questioned. As was said in the wonderful movie, “The Harder They Come”: “no business, no show”.

One of the political facts, which many don’t recognize, is that not only does Trump and company have no actual mandate, no President in years has had an actual “mandate”. This time, for example, the vote was nearly a tie - a 50/50 split. But that only counts the actual vote. 43% did not vote, which is basically a vote for “none of the above”. So if your favorite got 50 million votes, which is not even a third of the eligible electorate - that’s no mandate at all.

Personally I plan to assault/insult Trump and company with the truth. They’ve never shown much interest in the truth, but someone needs to rub a bit of it in their faces. The following won’t happen, but all the same it would be funny were I to be sued for libel. Trump and friends actually fear suits (he just settled one), because if they claim libel, for example, they can be called to the stand to testify. The truth is a defense to a claim of libel.

Once under oath, in a court of law, the rules of evidence will serve as a very sharp sword to cut right through their life-long habits of lying. They tell a lie on the stand, and they can be “impeached” by showing they are not telling the truth. “Impeach” in this instance means that they are caught in the lie, have committed perjury, and can be charged and tried for the crime of committing perjury. That’s what brought Bill Clinton before the Senate, for his impeachment trial (which is then a way to remove a sitting president from office). The charge - lying under oath in a deposition.

Most Citizens only take an interest during the campaign cycles, which is to the advantage of the political Parties. Most people don’t know a lot of needed stuff (about Civics and the Law), which lets candidates claim to be able to do things they cannot do.

Presidents can’t create jobs, for example. They can propose legislation, but not directly. They need surrogate Congressmen and Senators to initiate legislation. So the West Wing folks and the Legislative branch folks have lots of negotiations, in order to propose, and then pass, legislation.
The Parties like to have bragging rights for what they accomplish, so a President likes to take credit where maybe credit is not due. On his own the President can only screw the economy, by running off at the mouth, and upsetting what goes on in the Markets. Trump is a real danger to do just that.

Markets, like the Dow, are not actually true indicators of the state of the economy. But since a lot of politicians and others act like they are, so down another rabbit hole we all go.

If this kind of stuff is news to you, that’s not a good sign. What I’ll try to do, as we go into the Trump-future, is help folks who read my stuff on Facebook to get a better grip on what is going on, than they will get from the Media or the Parties. Knowledge is a kind of power, and if you are ignorant of how our polity actually works, you will be living in a lot of Myths. Please try to wake up, and learn. Sorry to be a bit of an ass here, but by now a lot of you have to know that a great deal is at stake - for all of us, Trump fans or not.

“there is no true self government, in a political sense, if there is not an equal proportion of ‘self-governing’, by the individual of himself, in a moral sense” from my essay: Song of the Grandfathers: Unconventional Wisdom (real wealth) and the redemption of Social and Political Existence (civilization)

#20
Critiquing the Trump Administration #2

About to be appointed Attorney General, Senator Jeff Sessions: “I don’t characterize” groping women by the genitals as sexual assault.

Some background ...

The Justice Department of the United States of America is run by a cabinet officer called: the Attorney General. In general the Justice Department runs the FBI, tracks federal crimes, and decides when and if to prosecute folks for violating federal crime statutes.

Its mission statement: “To enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law; to ensure public safety against threats foreign and domestic; to provide federal leadership in preventing and controlling crime; to seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior; and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.”
FBI director James Comey is the guy who dropped the fake e-mail bomb on Hillary Clinton about ten days before the vote was cast in the recent election. The Justice Department tends to be political, although its internal rules, and federal statutes, say it should not be political.

When the future head of the Justice Department, makes a statement as did Sessions, it can appear he is offering a legal opinion. That’s not how our legal system works.

The Justice department may decide to prosecute someone for a crime, but during the trial they are just one more advocate for a “side”, just as the defense attorney is an advocate for the side of the defendant. At trial, only the Judge gets to rule on what is the applicable law, and only the jury gets to decide what are the true facts of the case. The prosecutor just represents the “governments” side.

This means, what was clearly obvious, that Senator Sessions was trying to make people feel that what Trump did in groping women was not illegal. He doesn’t get to say that. That’s for a court, a judge, and a jury to decide.

Another feature of the Justice department is the “solicitor general” who is “the law officer directly below the attorney general in the US Department of Justice, responsible for arguing cases before the US Supreme Court.”

The White House can go to the Department of Justice and ask for a legal opinion, where there might be some doubt as to whether the actions of the Executive Branch might be a crime. This was done during the Bush II administration regarding “enhanced interrogation”, that might possibly be torture. The famous John Yoo memos became quite controversial, but never were tested in Court.

Obama repudiated them on taking office, and a number of detainees, currently held at Guantanamo, can’t be prosecuted because their confessions, through “enhanced interrogation”, would not be allowed by American courts of law, which has long recognized that a coerced “confession” cannot be used as evidence.

#21
The world is full of many different kinds of people. Some are more passive, some more aggressive. We can note all manner of categories of difference. Each of us in life meets people we don’t like and would not like to be around. Sometimes they are family members, and sometimes co-workers and bosses.

Everywhere assholes. Although, one person’s asshole is often another person’s best friend.
One of the other aspects of the modern world is Media, such as television news. Television news is a commercial operation - that is it is designed to create profit, not really to inform. So to get viewers, and thus more money for the commercials, TV News sensationalizes what it reports. If assholes give better video, then TV shows them.

This can make us feel as if there are way more assholes in the world than there truly are. Then, of course, there are the assholes that are media savvy, such as Trump.

Media watching can be an addiction. Just keep in mind that what is on Media is an illusion - not a picture of the real world.

Right now Trump and his cohorts are making a lot of noise about all the awful things they plan to do. Media likes this, or has to like this because they are in a kind of competition for viewers. The fact is that most of what Trump promised in the electoral process, he has been backing away from.

Settled the law suit he was never going to settle. Not charging Hillary, after threatening at a debate to do just that. Never apologizes, but insists others apologize to him.

Media savvy? A con man like his tools and his fools. If we believe his threats, we will be turning ourselves into just another Trump-tool/fool?

#22
If you follow the stock market, for whatever reason, you may have noticed that the Dow broke through the 19,000 level, a region never before reached. Some attribute this to Trump, and a favorable effect he is having on the market. That is not true. In fact it is sort of the opposite.

The stock market has almost no relationship to the economy, and great deal of a relationship to the psychology of speculators that “play” the market. Most of these folks know the market is over-inflated, and the real value of stocks is probably far less than 2/3rds of the given market values.

Yes, it is once more in a bubble. Bubbles break, and Trump’s expected real effects are that he will crash the market, so the best bets (its gambling folks) are to help the market further inflate, and then get ready to sell it short (bet it will go down).

Selling short means to sell stock you don’t have just before the bubble breaks, and when it crashes, you buy the stocks at the lower price to cover the sales you made at the higher price.

You get to sell short if you are a high level player (see the movie “The Big Short”), which means they will let you buy stocks for money you don’t yet spend, or for a smaller amount of spending (on “margin”). Which means you owe money to the market to cover your purchases, and they can call on you to put up that money. They let you do this because your “fund” has the assets, and the assets are subject to call, kind of like your house having a mortgage.

Confused. No problem. Most people are confused, which is part of why the market makes just a few folks rich and a lot of other folks poor, because the tricks are hard to understand.

Anyway, the Dow averages are going up, because the more air in the bubble, the bigger the profits for those that play the game when it comes time to actually put up money to pay for the stocks you bought on “margin”, but can now buy for next to nothing because of the “crash”.

#23
What to Do about Feeling Crazy and Powerless in the Age of Trumpism

The spiritual core of a human being knows it was/is/will be a creature of great power - a dragon free to roam the Earth and Heavens at will, and to sing and dance with all the other magical dragons.

Trump is just a harbinger: a herald, sign, indication, signal, portent, omen, augury, forewarning, presage; a forerunner of something. Against the true context of modern social-political reality he is just a finger pointing, and a goad to action. He is here briefly. He will go away.

Just as each human being has an inside, which we know more intimately than anyone else knows, so the whole Earth has a great world of “insides”. Everything has an “inside”, or what we see in ourselves as consciousness and self-consciousness (what a prior age would have called: soul and spirit). Even the stones.

Like to look at Nature? Keep in mind that Nature is looking back. The starry firmament, the green world, the rocks and water courses, the four-legged and the winged - all are watching us, waiting to be acknowledged. This is why Standing Rock is about the sacred. It is not just a political fight about power over land. It is a fight to care about and acknowledge the Divine Mystery that is everywhere in the world. Everywhere.

The real battle is between world views. One world view is the crass, cold, and intellectual conception that the world exists for us to own, and use however which Way we want, for the purposes of satisfying all and any appetites. The other world view lives in all the sacred traditions of aboriginal peoples all over the world - the view which speaks of Father Sky and Mother Earth.

What some believe the Bible to say, that man is to have dominion over the world, was a twist of the real meaning at a time when the first great patriarchal religion was destroying all the older Goddess religions. What those words really meant was not “have dominion over”, but to “engage in communion with”.

What is the great error of scientific materialism? To imagine that consciousness and self-consciousness (soul and spirit) just appear out of nowhere, exactly like the fantasy materialism calls the Big Bang. First nothing, then everything. Only another Great Consciousness and Self Consciousness can give birth to our soul and spirit. This is so obvious that so-called primitives all over the world have known this since forever.

Standing Rock and Trumpism go together, and it is no accident that this war between wisdom and scientific fantasy is taking place in America. There are no accidents. What happens if we seek the spiritual core of what this recent Election in America means? What happens if we reject the over-rational explanations, recognize that the Gods are once more Speaking to us, and that we should humble ourselves, perhaps learn to think on our knees, so as to really Hear the Message the Harbinger Brings?

But which Gods, you might justly ask? The answer: The mighty magical dragon gods the live in human beings. We are, collectively, doing this to ourselves. We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Still, the core question - the crucial question we are all asking ourselves: What do “I” do? What is “my” role?

The Divine Order of the World sets each of us into a particular biography, and a particular time. We are right where we, as individuals, need to be. We are the People we have been waiting for. Seize your power, make your choices, and act according to your own personal wisdom. Leave the Big Questions to the Big Helpers, whatever names we give to them.

There is plenty already to do in our own lives, and this Age is exactly about that. What seems to us, as massive world-wide horrible chaos and wrongness, is a mistaken perception, created in large part by the spiritually immature social function of massive Media Corporations, which sensationalize everything. The real social world, day to day, in just about all our individual lives, and involves waking up, living the circumstances of your particular day’s tasks, and then taking a rest.

The Hopi Prophecy calls this Age: The Day of Purification. John the Baptist said that the One coming after him, would bathe the whole world in Fire and Holy Breath; and, that One said: I come not to bring peace but a sword.

Will the Good, and Think with your Heart. The real changes are taking place “inside” us, and the events of the outer physical and historical world, are just secondary effects of those primary personal transformations.

If you have to have details of this time of Mystery, there is this: “Saving the Catholic Religion from the Roman Church - through deepening our understanding of the Third Fatima Prophecy”

#24
Critiquing the Trump Administration #3

Trump rightly asserts he has no legal obligation to separate his businesses from his practices as President. This is true, but at the same time the statement makes quite clear what has worried so many, upon observing his rise to “power”.

Trump recognizes no moral standards at all, only the “legal” ones. He never apologizes. He lies easily, and then makes up more lies to justify the lies he just told. Like a lot of CEOs of corporations, he considers his only obligations to be legal ones; and, if he can find a Way around them, that just shows how smart and clever he is.

This is the example he is teaching our children. There is nothing “right” that one need do. This will also be the most damaging of his legacies. He is, in effect, the anti-Washington, the anti-Lincoln.

The first day of law school I was told that the “legal” rules are the lowest expectations of social behavior, while moral rules were the highest.

Our polity has now “hit bottom”, and may well find a Way to penetrate even deeper into the destruction of whole “character” of America.

Most Americans do not live this Way. Most Americans, even the Trump voters, have some sense of what is right and wrong, in the moral realm. Some people thought that Obama was the anti-Christ of Christian theology, and now the some of the same people seem to be behind the election of Donald Trump.

About to hit movie theaters is Warren Beatty’s new film: Rules Don’t Apply. It is a movie about billionaire industrialist: Howard Hughes. Seems quite timely. Will Beatty play Hughes as a crazy rich person, as did Leonardo DeCaprio? What would the world have been like if Hughes had gotten into politics?

I don’t think Trump will show us that. Hughes actually had moral character, even if he also had OCD. Trump is part of the Shadow of America, that causes other nations to call us: The Great Satan. I think the bigger question is whether the Media will start to call him out, as it were, for being such an amoral jerk. Sadly, the problem for the Media is that they don’t seem to have much “character” either.

#25
There is, in the four corners area of the Southwest of the United States of America, a river canyon. Its been there a long time ... a very long time.

No doubt seas have some and gone. Asteroids have hit the planet. Waters, rains, storms, winds, lightening, thunder ... seasons, years, centuries, millennia have come and gone. The outer planets have danced meanwhile, and perhaps even mated.

If you get a chance to stand on the edge of it, go. You will be looking at something so large it ruins the imagination. So deep, you can not see the bottom. Turn and look left or right, and there is no end in sight. If there is a bit of mist, we cannot see the other side.

America is like this. Eternal and unending. America is a dream being realized in the imaginations of people all over the world.

Trump and company are like a mere summer storm. Full of noise and little light, soon gone ... gone forever. America will remain, because it is an Idea that lives, carved in the heart of every suffering human being .

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” it says on the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps those who don’t get, that already America is great, should be ones to consider leaving. Clearly they don’t appreciate the rest of us.

#26
He’s still not “my” President. He did not win an election, or a mandate. The Dems lost, which is not a win for Trump. It is just dumb luck that the other guy was so bad at picking a candidate and then running a campaign with no new ideas. Trump didn’t have any new ideas, either. Just hate and anger, and a base that didn’t care what they were doing to the rest of the country by following this creature.

Neither Party has had a “mandate” for years, although the winner of the non-democratic electoral college likes to pretend otherwise. Hillary still won the popular vote by almost 2 million more than Trump.

The tricky part - the part no one wants to admit that belongs to a Party, is that like previous elections, 43% of the eligible electorate did not vote, which is effectively a vote for “none of the above”.

What kind of message is a Party selling, when almost half of the potential voters stay home, sick and tired of the whole circus. Almost 50% believe these elections have no meaning for them, or that these elections will change anything.

Obama promised Hope and Change, and delivered basically nothing. If you don’t think so, you have not been paying attention. As much as anything, his presidency ensured the stay at homes were going to stay at home. People can’t eat words, which is all Obama was good at.

So Trump didn’t have the popular vote, and didn’t have much more than somewhat less than 30% of those who did vote. That’s no mandate. That’s politics as farce.

Now we have to look forward to four years of that “face”. That is not a face that inspires confidence. When I look at that face, I want to punch it. This is not about a good looking face. Its about a face which can’t hide that there is no mind there behind those eyes, but only a nasty hateful man who loves himself more than anything else.

#27
Once up a time there was a Land, that had become enchanted, and had fallen into a deep sleep. Its sleep was not peaceful, for the Dark lurked in dreams, and the People of this Land often had nightmares. Dreams in which the darkest of possible futures would happen, and from which there would be no escape.

Put People do not always sleep, and as we know, we often wake up through the dark dream, for a moment believing we are still in that dark dream. There is then to waking up a kind of disorientation, and confusion. So, what do we then do?

Well, mostly, we get up, have a cup of coffee to stimulate our thinking, and if we are lucky tell someone we trust about the dark dream. In conventional terms: we process the dream before going forward in Life. This is wise, for the dream was not an accident, but something from our Collective Unconscious, through which we rose into the Collective Imagination of our Day.

The dark dream left us confused and disoriented, and we needed each other to process. In this we can be reminded: that many hands/minds make light work. Sharing feelings has great value, as does Prayer for those who understand its subtleties.

The leftover of a dark dream can cause us to not see precisely what is our actual experience. So, after months of listening to Donald Trump, we have a set of ideas about him and his dangers, that are not going to be true. These ideas are hauntings - ghosts made by worries. We control the worries and the ghosts.

What America is is something far greater than Trump imagined. The make America great again was his own darkness imagined and shared. America has always been great, and if we look around and see the resistance rising everywhere against Trump’s mad dreams, we see that greatness.

We will not be putting up with his shit, plain and simple. He is not a king. If you haven’t seen this, next is the link to this speech recently given by the mayor of New York City. He basically said to Trump: “Go fuck yourself”. That mayor does a far better job of speaking for America than ever did Trump, with his Halloween clown clothes and stories. Have faith in yourself. Trump never understood America at all.

#28Is the Democratic Party going to serve itself - serve the Party, or is it going to serve the People? On the answer to that question hinges the next decades of politics in America.

If you want to look at this on the basis of issues, these are the crucial issues, although hardly yet articulated. Will the Democrat Party continue to blindly support free market capitalism, and the continued control of our currency by the Federal Reserve, a private bank?

Free market capitalism is usually argued as a kind of economic theology, using the term: regulation. The ideological position of the GOP has basically been: regulation bad, and taxes bad. Capitalists can only do their best if unfettered by regulations or taxes - this is the basic position.

This “voodoo” economics was called: “trickle down” economics. Its basic idea is that if the rich are getting richer, there will be more and better jobs, and everyone else benefits. The last decades, since former President Reagan made these ideas his basic principles, have shown this point of view to be completely false.

Jobs disappeared. Wages were stagnant. Meanwhile CEO salaries rose all out of proportion to actual corporate profits; and, the quality of life of ordinary Americans declined. Sane health care policies remain locked into compromises with Big Pharma and Big Insurance. The GOP controlled legislatures stood in the way of all that might be progressive, or benefit anyone but the 1% of the 1 %.

Endless wars were created, which enriched the Military Industrial Complex. The Fed stood behind special loan programs to students, making getting an education a process of acquiring crushing debt. Civil rights, in the form of privacy from government electronic intrusion, disappeared.

The Dems offered only token opposition, and certainly no real leadership in favor of the People. The GOP never really seriously pretended to be for the People, and their base finally revolted, ushering in the Era of the Donald. In fact, the Dems lost the election, and are now spending a lot of time in denial of any culpability at all. The Russians did it. The director of the FBI did it. The deplorables did it. Cheating at the polls did it. Everyone but the Dems did it. The Dems just joined the parade of sad and poor-me victims, that have been emerging all over American culture.

What’s the point?

Don’t go after the GOP, the Donald, or the imagined deplorables. Go after the Dems, and the politically correct non-thinking chorus of poor-me victim-hood.

How? Try to remember what it means to be a Citizen, a member of We the People. We the People made the constitution, not the political Parties, or the 1% of the 1%. If We did it once, we can do it again. And, for god’s sake read stuff. If there is one big flaw among We the People it is a kind of cultivated indifference and ignorance as regards having actual knowledge of the basic Idea of the American Experiment. Our Founders gave us a most precious gift, and if we can’t figure out how to be real American Citizens, then We squander the riches of the Ages they had gathered into the Constitution. Go back to the basics, or hide under a blanket with your so-called “smart” phone playing games. That tool links you to everything you need to know, but if you don’t use it to learn, then ... well, some later civilization’s historians will mark us as know nothing cowards, afraid of work, and lacking the courage to take the very kinds of risks as did our Founders.

From the last line of the Declaration of Independence: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

#29
Do We Get the Government We Deserve?

Sort of, ... would be my answer.

Obviously in many places there are no choices before regular people, who just have to survive the internal wars between tyrants, army generals, and interfering CIA-type folks, coupled to the influence of large multi-national corporations.

In the so-called Western Democracies, in Europe and the Americas, the situation is a little more open. Or, appears to be so, although many will argue that choosing (as in the USA) between one Party and another, when both serve the local Oligarchy, is not much of a choice.

The key word, however, is: “Deserve”. Deserve is not the same kind of word as: “want”.

Actions have consequences. Often consequences produce results we do not “want”, but in point of fact “deserve”.

Do the American people deserve Donald Trump? Certainly, although the “why” varies from group to group.

Those who voted for him, in spite of his grossly amoral character, just because they were angry - they deserve him because he will not provide them what they believe they wanted.

The Media deserves him because they created him. He is their “monster”, born in the drive for profits at the expense of truth, and now they will hypocritically turn around and pretend to call him out for lying, or other defects. Sorry folks, but when you not only left the barn door open, but helped the crazy-horse escape, you don’t get to pretend its not your fault when he starts messing with you, exactly as you deserve.

The GOP - that is the Party, not their base - played seriously two-faced and forked-tongue for decades. Telling their base one thing, and then doing another. The GOP is so far into being the slave of the Oligarchy, that they think their chains are made of gold, which they are. A well deserved fool’s gold, now exposed and delivered by a serious Rhino (Republican in name only).
Ah, and then there are the Dems, and along with them those who believe they are liberals, and only do good. From the Party, a chance for something new - Sanders, but instead the Party did all kinds of tricky (probably illegal too) ways to go with the damaged tool of the banks, claiming it was all about that she was a woman. Like the GOP, the Dems are a Party in well deserved disarray

Then there is the 43% of the electorate that didn’t vote at all. They had good reasons for not participating, given the lack of any candidates (including Stein and Johnson) of the stature our Nation actually needs. I think they got, and deserved, the bragging rights for just going on about their business, trying to survive the crazy the 57% was inflicting on all the rest. If we started putting “none of the above” on our ballots, more folks would join that 43%.

So, did “we” deserve Trump? Yup! Until the ill fitted shoe of political Party driven electoral politics is taken off, and then thrown away, we are going to “deserve” a lot more.
“Uncommon Sense: the Degeneration, and the Redemption, of Political Life in America”:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/degeneration.html

#30
Dear President Obama,

You have reached a milestone few men in life ever reach. After eight years in the Presidency of the United States of America, you will be graduating to a new, and higher level, of potential: that of Elder Statesman. You will thereby be relieved of the petty, and sometimes onerous, requirements of Party Politics. You will acquire a new, quite spiritual, freedom.

No one can gainsay your accomplishments. Yet, as a Citizen of the United States of America, I too have responsibilities and duties. There is something I must ask of you, ... one more task.

In these perilous times a great deal is at risk. What will then be the content and inspired direction of the Obama Farewell Address? As you prepare, I urge you to read two such addresses: George Washington’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s. Just those two (links below*).

I wish for the core of your address to refer to Standing Rock. You know what I mean.

When our Nation was Founded, we stole lands from the People already living here. No sane person can say otherwise. Thus did America acquire a great debt, and considerable karma. You, yourself, bear within your own history links to another great crime of the early years of America: Slavery. This too is both debt and karma. Should someone want to suggest otherwise, just have them read this statement from the Sermon on the Mount, in the section which begins: Judge Not.
The statement: “You will be sentenced to that sentence to which you sentence others.”** No more poetic, and pithy, recognition of karmic debt exists in the whole of the Gospels.

History, which we must learn to read, moves not in repeating circles, or cycles, but in spirals. Yes, history circles around, but always returns at a higher level. People evolve, and become better at just being human.

This is the juncture that faces us in the events at Standing Rock. Standing Rock is in fact, in the sense of the Spirit of America, more significant than the craziness of the coming Trump presidency.

You are a scholar, a thinker, and a writer. To this fact we can point, with humor, that you give great “speech”. That’s what America needs: a great Farewell Address, that reaches beyond the immediate political crisis, to the spiritual, and karmic debt, crises of theft and racism being re-enacted at Standing Rock.

Nobody can say what you can say, because nobody else is you. Your heart has been forged in the sixties, the war in Vietnam, and one political crisis after another. You have sacrificed a great deal, and while we need to honor you, you also need to honor us. To help us face what is coming. To grab the Past, pull it into the Present, and give us guidance for the Future.

What you say in your Farewell Address will reverberate through the whole world. Everyone will take note, and within that moment you can reclaim for America its moral heart, that has been up to this time so effectively harmed by vanity wars, corporate over-reaching, and difficult choices in foreign policy, including torture, drone strikes and fundamentally amoral aberrations. Recall Washington: Beware of foreign entanglements. Recall Eisenhower: Beware of the Military Industrial Complex.

You will soon just be: former president Obama. With that change you will find a freedom that the responsibilities of that office did not allow you to have. Use that freedom, and that moral authority, not just for Americans, but for the Whole World. Make America once more a true beacon of light on the hill, above the fray of savagery, duplicity, and selfishness, that would compromise the next thousand years.

One other bit of advice, if I may. Make this farewell speech, an act of humility. Avoid any temptation for grandiosity. Define for us, and for yourself, the spiritual/moral freedom we all, as individuals, need to express. Your speech is not just another policy statement. It will be an eloquent work of Art.

*http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/…/dwightdeisenhowerfarewell…
**"The Unvarnished Gospels, by Andy Gaus

#31
Trump and Company - the Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight

We the People are worried that this Gang of 18th Century Thugs will cause great harm. They think they are modern with their stepping away from major Media, and using Twitter, while planing to send Trump on tours where he gets to be cheered by his base.

Will that strategy work - the strategy of ignoring major Media, while at the same time expecting them to cover his thuggish rock ‘n roll tour? A dangerous game, because if the major Media ignores his tours, no one will know. He might get a bit desperate if his latest attempt to gain headlines from outrageous tweets doesn’t work, such as the thing about taking away the citizenship and putting in jail those who burn the flag. Desperate folks tend to escalate their actions, and radical actions always have unintended consequences.

Just ask the anti-Vietnam War liberals, that thought they could change the world, and instead drove the whole Country into the arms of Nixon, and his gang that couldn’t shoot straight either. A lot of them ended up in prison, except for Nixon who got a pardon he didn’t deserve.

If We the People are listening carefully, we can already see that many who voted for him, out of a passion to not consent any more to politics as usual, are beginning to suffer from buyers remorse. The ordinary hard working people from the heartland of America are not as stupid as Trump seems to believe they are. They were just very angry, and the major Media played along by giving him billions in free publicity.

Campaign strategies and tactics never work when it becomes time to govern. If he doesn’t actually govern, and mostly lets all the previously failed policies of the GOP run amok (lower taxes on the rich, screw around with social security and such), his base is now awake. You don’t want to mess with angry Americans, who are finally paying attention.

The Trump-Gang believes they won, when the reality is that the Dems lost, in part because 43% of the eligible electorate didn’t even vote. The Gang, and their mobster-like leader, are the truly stupid folks. They got lucky, and mistake their favorite hates for something that will work, when it comes time to govern, and that they’ll get the cooperation of the Congress for all their reactionary ideas.

Remember, Congress has to run again in 2018, and if the Trump Mob is failing to please their former base, the ... well now that they got the ire up of several million people, they just may decide to invade Washington as if it actually was, as it appears to be - a foreign territory occupied by cheats, scoundrels, liars, and other types of political scum.

The base didn’t love Trump for his policies, which changed everyday. They didn’t really love him at all. They just used him to stick a wooden stake in the political vampires that have been sucking on everyone’s blood for years.

Just look at the smiles on the GOP senators and congresspeople. They think they won something with the Trump debacle. Well, actually, yes. They won the dunce prize. They think things are going to just be all warm and peachy. It might take awhile, but when you set the villages of the heartland on fire, using a monster, don’t be surprised if there soon is a mob with fire brands and pitchforks, just outside your fantasy castle.

#32
What Do You Do, When You Finally Admit, that Your Government Routinely Lies to You?

Not just a little, but a lot. It is your government and it demands taxes, and dying in wars, and oaths at trials, ... basically a long long list of expectations regarding the behavior of its citizens. But all the time it lies. Candidates lie. Sitting senators and congresspeople lie to the public, and the press. They lie to each other.

Corporations lie. Everywhere liars and cheats. Most of us lie too. If we might get caught doing something we shouldn’t do at work, or in a marriage, we lie. At school. Perhaps, even, in a Church community. The social lies - the “white” lies.

The world is so full of lies that we swim in it, like a fish swimming in water that it sort of knows is polluted, but is too busy just staying alive to do something about it.

Lying is normal. Sadly, and often with consequences, but still normal.

We are basically powerless against the lie. The head of the National Security Agency is asked, under oath before the Congress, whether or not the NSA is spying on the America people. He says no, the NSA is not. Months later, he admits publicly that he lied. That he committed a felony before Congress, on tape for everyone to witness. Nothing is done.

One could probably walk down the street, in any city of town, and if we can gain the attention of someone playing with their smart phone, and ask them if they believe the government routinely lies, most would say: “Of course, isn’t it obvious?”

A few years ago folks, that lived through the anti-Vietnam War protest movements, wondered why current citizens were not having million-people protest marches about the endless wars in the middle-East. Snowden reveals that the NSA is not just snooping, but they are not controlling their people, who snoop on their own relatives, and celebrities. The so-called American security apparatus zooms to over ten times larger in costs, and in people with access to secrets.

Many wring their hands, and join groups working to stop these horrors. But no mass movement arises in “protest”.

The Trump Mob gets ready to mess as much as possible with our civil rights, on a scale not seen in a long time. The possibilities of outright fascism arising in the United States of America seems to many to be right around the corner. Same with civil unrest, race wars, world wars, sea levels, no water, no food - an endless list of terrible things, waiting in the wings.

I worked 18 years in the trenches of mental health. In old movies, I was one of the guys in the “white coats”, that handled otherwise troubled or dangerous people. One of the skills that had to be learned very early on was not to “corner” people. Not to put them in a position where they would feel trapped, and having no choice. That’s when things got violent. It wasn’t what they did, it was what I did by giving them no options that led to the violence.

We have been witness to this in the social phenomena we call “terrorism”. A war that begins because various States, and their corporate partners, trap people and leave them little choice given that we have all the big guns, while they only have their lives to throw into the machinery that is destroying their Way

#33
The Citizen: Magician, Fool, Anarchist, Inventor, Comedian, and all around Superhero.

So there you were. Went to bed early, so as to get up in time to take the subway, and ride an hour to work at a Starbucks. Except, the lady you voted for the day before didn’t win, and the man you most hated in all the world did.

Speechless through the day. Got together with some friends after work, drank some wine, and smoked a couple of joints. Some even cried a bit. Wasn’t this the time a woman was supposed to win?

Or, ... in an alternative reality ... went to bed early because the meat delivery truck you drive needs you on time. Woke up to discover the guy you voted for, and didn’t expect to win, actually did win. Later at your bar you party hardy, scream and shout, but some of the nazi-like salutes bother you. You wanted to screw the politicians, but you didn’t want to mess up the whole world.

By nature you saw yourself as Christian, and through your family, linked to the land, even though the farm had been lost to agribusiness years ago. There’s a bit of a sour taste in your soul now, and the rabid nature of some of your so-called friends scares you.

Somewhere in the back of these folks minds, as described above, there’s a voice saying: “karma’s a bitch”. As President Bartlett, in the West Wing TV show would say: “What’s next?” The world turned upside down, nothing is quite the same, and both winners and losers are void of course.

The Hopi Prophecy calls this Age: The Day of Purification. Christ said: I come not to bring peace, but a sword. John the Baptist said Christ would baptize us in Fire and Holy Breath. The Third Fatima prophecy sees the world going through a state of great destruction and chaos.

People, we sometimes call “preppers”, are moving to Montana, Idaho, or anywhere as far as possible from big cities - acquiring guns, saving food, learning to live off the land. Some Christians have been saying we live in the End Times, as described in Revelations, and work to hasten it, so that they can flee the Earth in the Rapture.

All those people may not be crazy at all. The American Department of Defense is getting ready for hard times, as climate change escalates and nothing is being done. Somewhere in Scandinavia sits a giant shelter where seed stocks are being saved against a time of world chaos. On the fringes of worry are people saying that Aliens will attack. Everywhere dark dreams for the future.

Then there is the individual, with their nose to the grindstone, carrying a lot of debt, and searching for love and companionship on Internet dating sites. Both the collective unconscious, and the collective imagination, look into the future and do not see arising an age of light, regardless of how many New Age former hippies expect one.

What if the general Way we see the world is seriously dysfunctional? I mean to refer to the Way of natural science, which denies the spirit, and holds that reality is only matter - only stuff. Suppose Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson were/are just shills for the religion of scientism, that doesn’t actually know as much as it claims to know. Suppose the New Atheists believe in false gods, which they call macro-Darwinian Evolution, and Big Bang Cosmology.

Worst of all, suppose this time of chaos and confusion has a purpose, and was intended by Invisible Cosmic Beings whose nature the religious presume to know, but do not in fact know. Suppose the reason the Aliens appear to have not been contacting us, is because out there in Cosmic Space reality is not stuff - not matter. Suppose, instead, that they have been right next to us all this time, whispering in our hearts, comforting us, and trying to help us find our individual Way.

Suppose each human being is: Citizen, Magician, Fool, Anarchist, Inventor, Comedian, and all around Superhero. Each of us is special, and the fact of our lives being filed with trials only means that we are Loved, yet at the same time because of deeds in past and future lives, we have also to face Justice. Karma is actually a “bitch”, given that its rules are governed by the Divine Feminine Mysteries. Mothers never do give us a break, do they. And, if Justice and Love dance together in each individual biography, the whole world is a Mystery Temple.

Wake up, look around, and stand within the world in awe and wonder. The world is not at all as it seems, or as reported by the Press, or described by self-serving politicians and corporate toads.
Breathe. Stop. Sit down. Hold back the Habit to rush. You are not your body, but rather an invisible mind/sun/heart of great power - a newly born, fire breathing dragon, destined to fly with the Winds among the Stars.

#34
The Bill Gates Disease

This is a kind of mental state that is acquired by folks who are successful in one field, and then believe that this means that their genius can succeed in any field.

Trump believes because he won the election (actually the Dems lost it), he can now feel he is smart enough to govern. Because of his own mind-set, he also feels that if he appointed like-minded people to his Cabinet, they don’t need to know anything either.

It is not fascism we need fear, but arrogant ignorance. The world, including our Country, is a complex place. Simplistic answer will not work. We had so-called “wars” on poverty, drugs, and now terror, and none of these simplistic approaches to the complexities of social reality worked, even in a little bit. They all made more trouble.

That is what the Trump Mob promises - stupidity holding the levers of power - a literal wrecking crew. Unfortunately, this is not a situation where if you break it, you own it. In this situation, if you break it billions of people all over the world suffer.

Is it hopeless? I don’t think so, but resisting self-righteous idiots may well require that many people take a lot more personal risks. Standing Rock is just a prelude.

#35
The Real Illuminati

This organization is real, although that is not its main “name”. Part of the Way it hides from us, is by encouraging an exaggerated conspiracy type image of itself. In point of fact, many tales have been created, and these many versions are like the misdirection in which a stage magician engages. We look here and there, but not where we need to look.

The main feature of this “Lodge of Enlightened Ones” is the belief that ordinary mankind is not fit to run the world. The masses cannot be trusted, therefore a system must be in place that rules for our benefit. They believe, in fact, that what they do is for humanity’s best future.

In addition, since many of those, who seem to rule have wealth and power, certain members of the “Lodge” are to also have wealth and power, so that they can move as equals in these circles. What would surprise scientific materialists, is that the Lodge knows with certainty that human beings have immortal spirits. As a consequence wars, and massive numbers of dead, are an okay outcome of a Lodge-based intervention in history.

The Lodge then creates, as did the Free-Masons, levels of “initiation”, or “degrees”. This structure also has many lies and deceptions, for lying to benefit humanity is seen as a virtue. Individuals can rise through the degrees, but never even know how far above are others, who supposedly have been given even greater means of insight into the spiritual structure of the world.

So, we could say that behind such oddities as the Yale Skull and Bones Society, the Bilderberg Group meetings, or the Bohemian Grove gatherings each summer in Northern California, are Lodge members, who mix in with the sons and daughters of the various wealthy families, as well as the government and corporate officers that also participate. The “Rites” are design to make the proto-initiate feel important, for they believe they have been included in a special group, of which there are very few members.

The higher members of the Lodges pretend to knowledge and power that they actually do not possess. They are tricksters, and cheats, who have massive ego problems, just by believing they control the world from the heights of their associations.

In reality, they are to be pitied. Their lives exist in a kind of karmic cul de sac (a false path that leads nowhere). There is no reality to the idea of elites, as against the ordinary masses. Every single individual biography is Loved, and each as well must experience karmic Justice. To the Cosmic Christ, and the Holy Mother there is no human being that is less or more important than any other. A thug running a brothel in Thailand is no worse or better than the Catholic Pope, in the Eyes/Hearts/Minds of the Divine Mystery.

All of us have unique meaning, and all of us are the right person, in the right place, at the right time.

No doubt Lodge figures are buried inside and around the coming Trump presidency. They will encourage certain actions, and try to retard others, in order to achieve the outcomes they believe are correct and healthy for humanity.

There is a place, a kind of purely spiritual state of being, in between death and a new birth. In some systems this is called: The Midnight Hour. At the moment we are each individually united with the Highest Beings, who exist inside of Eternity, and outside of Linear Time.

From this mountain-top place of vision we see all our incarnations, and then precisely why we want, with joy, to enter in the the realm of Earth Existence in any particular Age. Because this Age is so pregnant with developmental possibilities, billions have come to the dance and the party of modern times. This is the behind the scenes driver of the so-called population explosion. Certain important experiences live in modern biographies, and most of these effect our long term moral development.

All you have to do to confirm this, is pay attention to the artists that create modern dramas in film and television. Everywhere the same story - tales of sometimes even horrific moral choices. Art sees what both Religion and Science do not. That is why the modern world burns with intense moments of social chaos and conflagration. Wars and weather reduce life to its simplest dimension, and we have to make choices, concerning which our moral texts and Bibles cannot advise.

We are, apparently, on our own. What is worse, is that there is no right or wrong choice. Just the choices you create.

That loneliness is not accurate, however. We not only have each other for company, but trillions of helper spiritual beings for guidance and comfort. The truest song of the world is thus:
Will the good, and think with the heart. Be good and kind company. Trust each other, and the Divine Mystery. All is not as it seems.

For more details, should anyone need over 300 pages of them: “The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything”: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/artofgod.html

#36
What To Do, When Its Time to Blow Shit Up.

Knowing the law might be a help. From the Patriot Act: “A person engages in domestic terrorism if they do an act “dangerous to human life” that is a violation of the criminal laws of a state or the United States, if the act appears to be intended to: (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping. Additionally, the acts have to occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States and if they do not, may be regarded as international terrorism.”

So, if an act is dangerous to human life, and intended to etc. etc. etc.

Let’s turn this around, first, by asking if there are any actions which are dangerous to American Citizens, and their freedoms. What kind of “terrorism” would that be? Can a government terrorize their own Citizens? Well it happens all over the world, and here in the good old US of A, between Kent State, and Standing Rock, and the Civil Rights Movement, and the anti-Vietnam War movement, and domestic electronic surveillance etc. ... its pretty clear our government has no compunctions about terrorizing its own Citizens. No compunctions at all.
In some older posts of mine, perhaps months ago, I wrote of a kind of hierarchy of responsibility for our Nation’s difficulties. As the least responsible, but still responsible, I placed the American Citizen himself. The next most responsible, obviously, is the political class who can’t manage to do anything without screwing the people, toward which this political class has a moral duty of care. Read the Constitution if you don’t get this.

Above the political class is the 1% of the1%, who corrupt our political class, even to the point of being able to write the legislation that is meant to restrain their excesses. Got to be a serious bit of corruption, when Monsanto gets a legislative act that specifically names and exempts them from various kinds of legal liability. These people have no shame at all.

I’ve saved the best, or actually the worst, for last: the Media. Want to know some history rent the movie Good Night, and Good Luck, about Edward R. Morrow, and Senator McCarthy.

Recently Media gave about 5 billion dollars of free advertising to the worst of the worst, as far as qualifications to be president of anything, much less the United States of America. Media basically gave the keys to the White House to Trump, in exchange for commercial profits that the Media made by running his insane bluster 24/7.

Now that Trump has those keys, what is the Media doing? It is still being dragged around by its nearly sexual appetite for profits, such that whatever stupid thing Trump does, or says, it will get more play than if Christ came back for a Second Coming. Recently Trump announced he saved a bunch of jobs (which turns out not to be true - surprise!), and that he has plans to divest himself of ownership control over his various businesses and properties. Plans?

This stuff is not News, it is Theater. Media has a lot of News it could run, asking of the Trump Mob a lot of good questions, but serious investigative reporting is not as sexy - basically not good TV. Where’s the hot visuals when a reporter is explaining how Trump is screwing all of us once more?

Maybe, when it is time to blow shit up, the owners of Media should be high on the list. Why? Because they’ve already been promised by the Trump Mob, and the lame GOP, that collectively these powers in D.C., that care not a bit for the Citizens, are going to put a stake through the FCC - the Federal Communications Commission. What’s the FCC? That’s the body that regulates Media. Kill it, and there are no more legal protections from Media abuses.

So ... back to trying not to get arrested for domestic terrorism, when opposing our own government’s terrorism against us.

A video on the 10 best sniper rifles (one dude’s opinions): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQeIc4D6ubQ
“Counting Coup” a short story about a sniper, working for us, in modern times: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/coup.html

#37
Love Without Limits

Love is in-exhaustible. You can’t run out of it, ever. If there is a force in the whole universe, that is self-sustainable, that force/energy is Love.

However much you give, you will always have more. In point of fact, the act of giving instantaneously ignites the re-supply.

All the same, the stalker, who believes he loves the object of his obsession, does not love that object. The stalker only loves himself. The same with the narcissist. People addicted to self-love don’t actually love themselves at all. They lose themselves in the rush, and only imagine they are experiencing love.

This does not mean to not love yourself. Not at all. Didn’t He say: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”? In fact, the better you are at loving yourself, the better you will be at loving others.

Take, for example, the act of forgiveness. To learn to truly forgive, which is certainly an act of love, we must first learn to forgive ourselves. That is the core lesson of forgiveness - forgiving yourself. Who do we know more intimately than any other person, but ourselves. We know far better our own darkness and wounds, so in learning to love ourselves in spite of all that stuff, we then truly learn to love others, who we really hardly know at all. Didn’t He also say: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

Love is not always kind and nice. A family with an active drunk or addict has to learn to practice “tough” love. “Interventions” are required. The excessive self-love of the drunk or addict has to be met with the strength of love that says: No more.

So, ... Americans have just had an election for President that has led to a lot of confusion on the one hand, and to expressions of hate, judgment, and insane thinking on the other. The Country suffers.

What do patriots do when the Country suffers? They give away aspects of themselves. They love. They care. They sacrifice. They don’t draw more power to themselves, or declare themselves the perfect embodiment of righteousness. They serve ... selflessly.

2000 veterans are going this weekend to Standing Rock. To do what? To love. To put “others” before self.

Meanwhile in Washington D.C., the opposite is happening. People filled with the vanity of self-importance, are running around pretending they know how to govern this Country; and, they don’t mean by that to love this Country, but rather to rule - through power - the Citizens of this Country.

This is not fascism we face, but something that wants to reanimate the type of government we fought a revolution over. A regime of blind obedience to a “king-like” figure, and his court of fools. The Trump Mob is in love with the idea of wielding powers, which before they could only imagine having. All of a sudden a group-dementia has take hold of D.C., and believes it can tell Americans how live, what to do, all in the name of the false economic religion: free market capitalism, and central bank currency value manipulation.

This has been creeping up on this Country for a long time - all the way back to the Revolutionary War. The Founders made the Legislative Branch, or the People’s Branch, the most powerful, but ever since the Executive Branch has been claiming more and more power, which powers, under GOP legislative ideologies, have been unconstitutionally transferred out of the Legislative Branch and into either the private bank, the Federal Reserve, or to the Executive with the War Powers act.

People go to Washington D.C. get drunk on power and addicted to the related wealth, and the town fills up with fiefdoms filled with little kings, princes, queens and courtiers. It is as if the aristocracy of blood was never really overthrown.

This calls for a tough love intervention on the part of the Citizens. Such an event is already happening. Trump and Company won because they fired up the Heartland, who were so frustrated by having all their needs ignored, would choose to vote for any fool, that wasn’t a professional politician - the only choices they previously had.

That’s the real analogue to the Boston Tea Party. Not an organization, but a ferocious act of will. A giant fuck you to the whole political class, their corporate owners, and the Media that supports them. And, this is not even the first act of a Second American Revolution, its just a prelude.

Americans do stuff. You get their ire up, you better get out of the way.

#38
The Mystery That Is America

For a lot of people, any idea of a spiritual reality is difficult, if not impossible. Science seems to have banished “spirit” to the realm of non-ideas. To conceive of the Earth, or another human being, as having a fundamental spiritual reality must be evidence of a diseased mind.

Most religions will use such terms, but seem to want to “own” the underlying reality, as if “spirit” could ever be “owned”. Many religious persons “possess” their beliefs, and no one is to be allowed to argue against them. Clear thinking about the New Atheists reveals the same psychological phenomena - the “belief” in the truth, of macro-Darwinian evolution (speciation), and Big Bang cosmology, is not questioned. This in spite of the fact that scientists know they have to use the word “theory”, or be otherwise caught up in a lie.

Some moderns will use the term “the Universe”, in much the same way George Washington used the term: Divine Providence. This mostly happens because the human mind is forced by the circumstances of the individual biography to explain the existence of a kind of beneficent order to our lives. An order that seems often to transcend the concepts: chance, random, coincidence, and so forth.

Many professional gamblers study “luck”, because experience teaches there is something to this “luck”, and in fact it is useful to oppose a “lucky” person at a gambling table, by having someone nearby who is recognized as a kind of source of “anti-luck”. Tim Tebow had a lot of “luck”, frequently prayed on the football field after a manifestation of his “luck”. Then, all at once, his “luck” abandoned him.

I am not offering proof here of anything. Just pointing out the multitude of ways modern people notice the unusual character of the events of history.

We have a word: America. Most people use it with some kind of individual meaning. A common such use is to say that America does this or that bad thing in the world, which “use” reveals that the speaker/writer can’t distinguish between the American People, and the American Government. Most of what the establishment powers in America choose to do, has not been agreed to by the American People.

As I go forward here, I want to use the term: America, to refer to something transcendent of either the People, or the actions of the holders of power who believe they rule here. Perhaps a “spiritual America”, as it were. An invisible Being, within whom we live, that has its own course to travel in the world of Reality. A kind of beneficent spirit that wants the best for us, and would guide us if it could, to finding the best in ourselves.

People can look inside themselves, and feel this spirit. And that is exactly what America is, in the sense I am describing here - a feeling. Something very much of the heart. We cannot own this Spirit, by the Way. Nor does It own us. We are engaged in a dance of co-participation, which “dance” can best be understood through a kind of story or tale.

We may have heard certain words. For example, “America is great, because America is good.” Or, “Crown thy good, with brotherhood.” This Spirit-America is often celebrated in Song. I’ve put many links below as helpers to appreciate the “feeling”. These Songs do something magical I can’t do in mere linear words. Play some of them, and enjoy. They are very individual, and by that all the more perfect examples of The Mystery That Is America. Something the ambitious onces, gathering in heartless Washington D.C., have not any “feeling” for at all.

“America” by Jonathan Yusuf Ali: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3Qc_GNDWgw&feature=plcp
Madison Rising - “The Star Spangled Banner”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8C7i9kdEf8
“AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL” by Ray Charles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRUjr8EVgBg
Joni Mitchell ~ “Woodstock”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aOGnVKWbwc
“Old Glory”, by Marc Wendt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0ARlABqA4s
“The House I Live In” - with Frank Sinatra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhPwtnGviyg
Willie Nelson - “Living in the Promiseland”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfiqENNv47Q
Whitney Houston - “Battle Hymn Of The Republic”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSvH4s-4sCQ
Arlo Guthrie - “City of New Orleans” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvMS_ykiLiQ
Elvis Presley - “If I Can Dream”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwqbuus8QPU
Stevie Wonder - “Sir Duke”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6fPN5aQVDI
Neil Diamond - “America”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKQ26iSBG-E
“Oh, Susannah” James Taylor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haTbdk0U52A
The Impressions - “This is My Country”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_esbRoOeR0
Linda Ronstadt - “Back In The U.S.A.”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbOWDe2GQoo
“Blowing In The Wind” Bob Dylan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWwgrjjIMXA
Woody Guthrie- “This Land Is Your Land”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxiMrvDbq3s
John Denver - “Take Me Home, Country Roads”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vrEljMfXYo
“Fanfare for the Common Man”, New York Philharmonic, James Levine, composed by Leonard Bernstein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLMVB0B1_Ts
Three Hours Native American Music | Tribal Drums & Flute | Relax, Study, Work & Ambience https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zgh26Y0qwI

#39
Trump Is Not the Problem

Trump is just the big zit on the nose of the cold hearted, morally lazy, Way that Party Politics have taken over our government, for the benefit of the 1% of the 1%. Trump, personally, is not the enemy of the People, to the same degree that the political Parties, and the Media, are the enemy of the People.

Let’s carry the war to them, all the while letting our anger at Trump be the fuel that inspires our rage against the political machine, that has too long denied our needs.

Trump, and his ilk, have defined the Battlefield, which is public perception. This has been true for a long long time, it is just that the Trump-Mob are more successful than ever, in making the Media dance to their tune.

Imagine Trump, and his personal “Joseph Goebbles” (Nazi Propaganda chief): Steve Bannon, having a few drinks and plotting the next days subversion of the News Cycle. Trump and Bannon know the Media is addicted to the sensational, because Media is addicted to the profits that come with high ratings for their alleged “news” shows.

So T & B feed that Media-Beast, the raw red meat of some new outrageous action that T takes, using the most simple of tools: Twitter. Right away Media bites down on the bait, and the next 24 hours of the News Cycle is about the Tweet. This latest Tweet is more sensational than any dry news analysis of Trumps fake move over the Carrier business trick, or the latest changes in many law suits haunting Trump.

What the Electoral College has to face, given Trumps latest lies (which still are way under-reported), is that Trump wants the College not to notice that he plans to use his office to enrich his business enterprises. His words, as any sane person knows, have no meaning. Those words are just dust in the eyes, so as to hide what he is actually doing, or not doing. We still don’t know about his taxes, or have any real information about his wealth.

Now one of the understandings of the Arts of War (sure, a little Sun Tzu goes a long way), is that now that Trump has defined the Battlefield, that Battlefield becomes for him a trap and a cage. He has taken a fixed position, and we remain free to move ourselves to the attack from any direction. What is this Battlefield?

Public Perception as maintained by the Media and Twitter News Cycle.

Regular political thinkers (fake strategists) are looking to the next Legislative Session in Washington These thinkers too are playing on a fixed Battlefield, as the only place they know from which to rule. Both T & B, and the political Parties, have forgotten the People, who are completely free to attack from any front.

George Washington, a very good general, designed overall battle strategies, yet left to each local commander, just how to proceed given that they were the folks on the ground, actually facing the enemy. What is offered here is just a general design. Each individual is a commander of where to apply their rage, and creativity, as the “situation” unfolds.

We might tend to believe that major Media, or even Twitter, is the place of the Battle. Just remember that the actually Battle is about public perception. Where can individuals in small communities, take “actions” that effect this perception?

First, remember that Media feeds on the raw red meat of the sensational, AND, that there is, every evening, a national news cast, and a local news cast. Most people watch their local news, for weather, and for sports and for what tragedies befall their neighbors. Big media gets stuck on things like the fire in Oakland, which produces great TV (burning buildings etc.).

Look at your local newscast, and notice what it is showing. You have to scout out the Battlefield.
All over America are thousands of local news stations, each of which has offices and studios for live broadcasts. Take your protests there - right at their front door. Do not bring violence or destruction (or spray paint etc.) Just be there, and dance and do art, and theater. Change it from day to day.

Make clever signs. These will be better than Twitter. Make them short and Pithy. Find and invite people who you don’t ordinarily agree with. Make a place for the Trump fans too. Everyone gets to come. Bring food, and music. Talk to each other. Make peace, and find common cause.
Don’t expect the local news station to bite on every morsel you offer. Be smart, create variety. When you have a chance invite the people that work there to your celebration, don’t make them your enemies. They are just doing a job, just like you.

Use your smart phones. Flood Facebook and other social Media. Invite Trump to come to your party. Exclude no one. What will CNN, and the major Media do after a while? Craving the sensational, you become a better story than any T & B can ever tell, in part because the visuals change all the time.

Don’t worry. From day to day you will know exactly what to do next. How? It will be on the major Media News. T & B will see their control over the narrative of the news cycle slip away, and local politicians will come by where you are, just to get Their picture taken, being addicts for attention themselves.

Above all, have a good time, and be as kind as possible to everyone.

#40
And so it came to pass, that on December 4th, 2016, a profound moral re-alignment arose on the Northern Plains of America. The ancient people, the Native Americas, had stood their ground against the powers that would continue to rape and plunder, with selfish appetite, the treasures of our Mother, the Earth.

At the right moment, a large group of mostly non-native Americans, arrived, and joined in the resistance to greed and other horrible crimes against the Earth, and the Peoples of the Earth. These veterans of many foreign wars, had won by great and grave trials, the spiritual right to stand with the Native Peoples, at a place aptly named: Standing Rock.

The dark powers could no longer fight their wars of terror, now exposed in this moral light and courage, wrought by these two communities coming together.

It was a moment of seeming outer coldness, the beginning onset of real physical Winter. But Winter is a time of clarity of purpose, and the heart-marriage of the Native Peoples, and the new races that had arrived in these lands more recently, was something long awaited. The Hopi Prophecy called this marriage, the appearance of the True White Brother.

Meanwhile, down in Washington D. C., and in New York City, the spiritual strangulation of the Americas was ending. The craven and false monument to George Washington, the so-called Father of Our Country, had been damaged in a earthquake, and the spiritual powers of this Land, that the Free-Masons had tried to capture with their occult architecture, no longer tortured the hearts of the many races that made up the People of Peoples - the true Americans.

In a time, when the only sometimes great every four year Rite of Celebration of a fantasy democracy was falling into complete disarray, the Land spoke through its true voices, the Native Peoples. Hearing their Song, the other races came to Standing Rock, to be together, and to act as the Hopi have always suggested: to honor the Land with Ceremony.

Nor did all come, whose hearts wanted to be there. Yet, many knew what was at stake, and were there in spirit. Without the Care of the Land, human beings cannot live.

In this time, when such words as spirit and magic have been declared by an un-natural science to have nothing to do with Reality, it was quite exactly and precisely, spirit and magic that won the moment, on a Sunday, announcing the coming Age: The Day of Purification.

In the light of moral sacrifice, the dark powers will flee. All the same, while more will be required, what we do together cannot be resisted.

From my personal journey: The Songs of the True White Brother
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/twbhp.html

#41
Spiritual Currents and Undertows

Whatever an un-natural scientists wants to assert, spirit is real. Every person who “thinks” knows spirit directly in that moment of thinking. Throw out “spirit” and there is no appreciation of the “meaning” of existence, and it is precisely this meaning that we all crave - even the un-natural scientist.

Right now the News is dominated by the Trump-Mob, and far too much of the Media seems unable to discipline itself in favor of the truth. What more ancient folks called: “the Father of Lies”, is being allowed to rule our conscious understanding of “political” meaning. It is the Father of Lies that lives in the Trump-Mob, and asserts that facts are just opinions and anything goes.

Ignore their vain songs, and listen instead to your own heart. There, in our hearts, will the truth live. If you are Christian, there is this in Luke: “The Kingdom of Heaven is inside you”. Don’t let fake “Christians” tell you otherwise.

Some “spiritual history”:

On the cusp in the European invasion of the Americas, in North America, two spiritual teachers appeared. Among the Eastern Native Americans, came “the Peacemaker”. [ http://www.firstpeople.us/…/ThePeacemakerAndTheTreeOfPeace-… ] Among the Plains Indians came “Sweet Medicine”. [ http://archive.adl.org/…/curriculum_conne…/cheyenne_way.html ]
These teachers had two main purposes, only one of which was to prepare these Nations to acquire the spiritual strength to engage the white European races, whose coming could not be prevented. Even the Hopi Prophecy of the Pahana knew the white brother was coming. [ http://www.pahanalives.com/hopi.html ]

The Peacemaker may have come from the North, while Sweet Medicine seems to have come from the South. Pahana, the “true” white bother, was to come from the East, from the Rising Sun. To the Hopi, the true white brothers were “sun clan” or the “children of the Sun”.

No one was predicting what would come from the other cardinal direction: the West. They came all the same, and we know them as Tibetan Lama’s, Zen Masters, Yogi Masters, Sufi Masters, and so forth.

America was destined to be the first People of Peoples, and so all the world’s wisdoms had to come here too. All of them. This was the other, more hidden, purpose of the teachings of the Peacemaker and Sweet Medicine.

Human consciousness evolves. What the consciousness of the ancient Greeks was like, is unlike the consciousness of a modern European. What the consciousness of the ancient Greeks was like, is completely different from that of the ancient Egyptian.

So America was not just to be a mixing of races, but a complex stew pot of spiritual understanding, that was destined to cook and simmer together for a long time. Anyone not asleep in America has been touched by these various streams of spiritual wisdom that have found their way to influence this Land, and the Peoples that live here.

If we were go to Standing Rock and talk to people, we would meet all of these different Ways. “In my Father’s House are many mansions."

Washington D.C. is the home of the Father of Lies. That is his temple. Our hearts are the real temple, for each of us carries a part of the Great Whole, which the Native Americans called: the Great Spirit.

“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

The Father of Lies is destined to fail. Chart your own course. Whatever the News-noise machine has to say, it will deny the truth, and it is you, who are the truth.

#42
We attribute to the Trump-Mob more power than they will have. It is our fears that drive these erroneous attributions.

We live in the final stage of a civilization - Western Civilization. When a civilization fails, it fails because all its institutional structures become too rigid - too fragile.

What we see today is the edges of the coming chaos, forgetting that when one civilization lets go, the process is one of metamorphosis. From the caterpillar will emerge the butterfly. Without the chaos, new and more living social forms cannot be born.

Many thinkers have applied their own biases to trying to notice the stages of civilization, but the best one I have read of describes the final stage as bureaucracy. This is our stage, witness all the endless paperwork just to do anything. We have huge governmental organizations, such as the IRS, the NSA, the Veteran’s Administration, and on and on and on.

While the Trump-Mob seems poised to take over the government, what it faces is a government drowning in rigid unchangeable structures of organization. From one point of view we can describe modern Society, and its Governments, as having a great deal of momentum (a tendency to keep doing what it is already doing), coupled with great inertia (can’t easily change directions at all).

“Officially, as of 2009, the federal government employed 2.8 million individuals out of a total U.S. workforce of 236 million — just over 1 percent of the workforce. But it’s not quite as simple as that. Add in uniformed military personnel, and the figure goes up to just under 4.4 million."

The Trump-Mob gets to change/replace about 4000 jobs, most of which are positions of formal administration of already existing very large complex government institutions.

Getting those to do something different from what they are already doing is worse than trying to herd cats.

Many levels of government are ruled by powerful bureaucrats, who will not be replaced, and will not change what they are already doing. In addition, given the Trump-Mobs lack of finesse and understanding, much of government is run by people who are serious experts in the fields. A Trump-Mob agent will not be able to just walk into someone’s office and give an order.

In addition, the Trump-Mob has to face outsiders, in foreign businesses and governments, over which it has no control whatsoever. Trump’s view of his prowess is that he is a deal maker. So far all he has done is to break already existing deals that took our government decades to put in place. That is, he has authored more chaos, not more order.

#43
“Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky tacky, Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes all the same."*

*[“Little Boxes” is a song written and composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962, which became a hit for her friend Pete Seeger in 1963 and the theme song for the Showtime program Weeds in 2005.” Wikipedia] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUoXtddNPAM

We also use the word “boxes” to describe how thinking frequently takes up a subject, and places it inside a “box”. The use of such “boxes” is common today, in almost all the dialogues, written and spoken, concerning the Trump Event.

When you read a newspaper (or Twitter, or Facebook), or watch something on TV (or Facebook, again), we usually get some opinion that is not well thought out, and in fact uses all kinds of “boxes” (labels) as a shorthand to describe something, such as: “alt-right”, “neo-nazi”, liberal, conservative, and on and on and on. All generalizations are “boxes”, and they are all made of mental “ticky tacky”, and they all look the same.

What makes them mental “ticky tacky”? Mostly mental laziness. Mental acuity, on the other hand, requires not just work, but a sense for Art as well. If you don’t get that, oh well.

Part of what this means, in our uses of “boxes” of meaning, is that the metaphorical and the poetic often come closer to the truth than does the dry and the analytic. The following is an “experiment” in meaning:

Seats of earthly power attract wolves and pirates. Those with the least moral scruples generally succeed, because murder and violence does not bother them. Cases in point: Putin, in Russia; Assad, in Syria; and, Erdoğan, in Turkey. In America, our few moments of truth and light, ended in murders: Lincoln, JFK, Dr. King, and John Lennon.

The 1% of the 1% is fundamentally a criminal empire at its heart. What few laws we have are routinely violated, such as all the “pollution” of our water courses: Love Canal; Flint Michigan; and most recently, Standing Rock. The whole economic history of America is based upon: slavery, lies called treaties, and the legislative thefts of land by our government, which then gives it to businesses that ruin the Earth in their rapacious greed.

Some criminals are very clever, and in America one of their masks was to provide “elections”, as if those regular Rites, of noise and senseless slogans, actually meant anything. The same folks (like Goldman Sachs) always ended up in “power”, regardless of which political party won the election.

Then came the most dangerous pirate/wolf of them all: The Joker. Our artists warned us in the movie: The Dark Knight, that he was coming. The Joker has no real agenda, but lives in the rush of being an agent of Chaos. He does not create, he only destroys, and without doubt he is completely Mad. Deranged. Crazy.

The 1% of the 1%, in letting live the illusions of elections, rather than just trying to run America as some kind of dictatorship (the Oligarchy is a loose association of pirates and wolves, that itself always verges on Chaos). Think of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. When we took him off the board, the middle-East fell into complete chaos, because only a ruthless dictator can maintain order by putting down, and/or disappearing his enemies (competitors).

What does this mean?

Trump will only wreck stuff. He is very unlikely to be re-elected, but for the American People, maybe its time we stopped believing in an electoral pipe dream. Our government will never be run by “saints”.

At the same time, the instincts of artists, working out of the collective unconscious and collective imagination, made a very interesting point in The Dark Knight. It wasn’t the Batman, hero - avenger, that did the right thing. It was some ordinary people, including “normal” criminals, on a couple of boats in the middle of a river, that decided to sacrifice themselves, rather than to descend into the evil toward which The Joker was trying to push them (watch the movie again, if you don’t get this).

Whatever criminal empire tries to rule Americans (the latest being the Trump-Mob), our reaction belongs to us, however crazy is this effort to make us do stuff we don’t want to do. Clearly, since the election, our basic will-response is exactly what was seen in that movie: We will not submit to being coerced. Period. Ever.

For some help: The Grandmother War http://www.thegrandmotherwar.com/ and: Economic and Social Rebellion http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Rebellion.html

#44
Sometimes the words health and illness are relevant to understanding how societies and cultures work. Those words are only part of what is needed, but there is something to them that can be valuable.

Most of us get “sick”, which means we show symptoms. Colds and Flues involve stuffy noses, headaches, and internal disarray. Those are symptoms. They come after the imbalance that is the seat of the illness.

We tend to try to repress the symptoms, but that doesn’t fix the seat of the imbalance. At their best, symptoms are the signs that the body is on the road to healing itself of the imbalance.

Apply this kind of thinking to social illness (or imbalance). American Society and Politics has been out of balance for a long time, and from this point of view (which is only part of what we need to understanding our present day dramas), the uptick in goofiness is those kinds of symptoms that show that the social body is in the process of healing itself of the underlying disease-imbalance.

Some say we are divided. Well we were divided, and had been for a long time. Now the divisions are more obvious, and the consequences of not treating them out of wisdom, more dangerous.
If we don’t treat a fever of the body in the right way, we get worse, not better.

Now we have a social “fever”. It is getting too warm, and people are troubled by what they perceive as the crazy alt-right that has come out of the closet, seemingly inspired by the Trump Event.

So, if we want social health we have to: a) let the fever run its course, because it does something valuable; and, b) help the fever cool down, because it can’t just go on without treatment. A paradox, but that’s Life.

The politicians, and Trump is a master at that, don’t care to heal our society. They gain when we are divided. So if we want to un-divide ourselves, that’s up to us. We need to cool down ourselves, and find ways to work with those who are different from us.

We’ve been socially “ill” a long time. Now we are getting better, because the “symptoms” are more openly present. The politicians don’t care to help us, so we are left with helping ourselves.

#45
Why, for some people, do they never have enough? A billionaire wins the White House, and starts putting other billionaires into his cabinet. What makes these folks even begin to believe they are qualified to govern the Citizens of the United States of America?

Why do some people want to assert that America is a Christian Nation, when clearly, to anyone who actually reads the Gospels, Christ would be ashamed to have that mantel placed on His already overburdened shoulders?

Who is America for? The rich? Apparently, for the Koch brothers, and their ilk, act as if they know best how the world should be.

Why are there so many lies, and so many fools who choose to believe them?

What will it take for the ordinary hard working American People to be free of the dominance of our public life by wealth? Do the People need to go to war? To become violent, in order to no longer be wage slaves? To be able to go to school without acquiring crushing debt? To become ill, and be helped through all the possible miracles of modern medicine?

Are we actually divided? Or is that just another lie we’ve been sold?

Why does Big Pharma gain all its wealth from selling us drugs, that cause all those deadly side-effects, and at the same time cost so much money? Why does Monsanto try to own the genetics of all the plant life of the world?

What makes some people unable to share, be kind, and just get along?

Whose Country is this anyway?

So far, it looks like it belongs to the liars, cheats, pirates, murderers, and thieves.
What, however, if our problem is one of perception, aided by a Media Empire that gains from making us believe something else is going on?

Most ordinary people get up in the morning, and have the Day in which to live. Each individual circumstance varies, with some waking up after sleeping on the streets, and others in their cars, while some wake up in 600 count sheets, with a penthouse view, and a maid to do the laundry.
Can something be done to change things?

Suppose we had a great general, say George Washington, back again, but not in this life as rich as he was before. Could he raise an army to fight a Second American Revolution?

I don’t think so. If there is one thing I’ve learned in my 75 years is that most people want to have their own thoughts, and make their own life choices. They don’t want to join an army and have a revolution. They like their coffee in the morning, their TV at night, and all the other distractions the Oligarchy makes available. They know there are a lot of places they could be living that are worse, and they do not want to rock the boat enough to get fired, or deported, or end up in prison.

The normal range of human fears.

Still, we also want to make things better for ourselves, our families, and others. It is just that We have to manage the risks we take. Only us. No one else.

What the Trump Event has done, better than Pearl Harbor, or 9/11, is show us the necessity of finding our own individual way to do what we decide is the right thing to do. We are past needing to be led into foreign Wars, and each day more and more of us understand that we will individually have to find our own Ways to Peace, even if it just with the asshole next door.

Some will go to Standing Rock. Some will work in a homeless shelter. Some will say: “Screw everyone else, I’m going to get mine.” Each decides what their own biographical reality can handle.

If you are an American Citizen, you do share some realities that have been forgotten. We the People are the real government. The politicians work for us, even though they want to pretend otherwise.

Read the Constitution. And then, Think about it.

#46
Reality is more than just Trump and Friends

Some years ago, I was talking to my youngest son (now in this thirties), about his “generation”, which seemed a bit disengaged. I had this “feeling” about them, which when I mentioned it, he choose to agree. I felt that they were waiting. They knew the world they had come to inhabit was screwed up (this was about the time of Columbine), but their full and engaged participation had to wait, “for the other shoe to drop”.

Something had to come to confront them, that was still in the future at the time he and I spoke. Some kind of challenge that wasn’t there yet. I now believe that this era that will follow the Trump Event, is that challenge. The world turned very sour in an unanticipated way. The Trump Event is their Pearl Harbor, and the enemy is not over there somewhere across the seas. He is right inside the gates.

He is your neighbor, or an old friend from childhood. Or a boss, or a favorite singer, or actor. A parent, or former beloved teacher. The Trump Event is not just something happening down the street, across town, or off in a distance city. It is happening right inside your life. It could not be closer, and this is true for us all.

Fear and ignorance circle around us, as much inside us as outside us. Much is and will be asked, that has never before been asked. The world was already a serious place, and then just over the course of one night, the world upped the ante, and asked: Are you all in, or not?

#47
Can the talking heads on TV news shows, like CNN, Fox, ABC etc ... actually help us?

Let me think about this for about 2 seconds ...

Nope.

#48
The Trump-Event - the Answer to the Question: Why?

Here’s the basic facts: 1) an obviously psychopathic narcissist becomes President-elect of the United States of America; 2) a whole lot of apparently sane people voted for him, and still trust him today; and, 3) everyone who believes that they can turn this situation to their personal and egotistical advantage, is trying to do just that.

A few more general basic facts: A) people are not always rational; B) people who are too rational don’t know what to do with the not-rational, overly emotional, people; and, C) When a massive social dislocation, that has to accompany the End of a Civilization is happening, people will cling to any “flotation device” that comes by, because they know that the shit is very much hitting the fan - everywhere.

The increase in the social-disorder in the world is accompanied by an increase in the soul/spiritual disorder of the human mind. A case in point:

Getting up in the morning, and having an encounter with the News, is like waking up and finding that the sky is now pink, grass is blue, the dog and the cat have switched mind-sets, your best friend is having an affair with itself, and you are not entirely certain you can handle even one more day of insanity.

This then produces a condition we (and others) might call: a retreat from reality. The problem is that no one knows anymore what reality is, or ought to be.

The brain scientists are clearly not helpful at all, being convinced that the material brain is the cause of multiple types of shared (and unshared) illusions about realty: i.e. reality is not reality. They say this with a straight face. Enough said on that point.

For a lot of people, the best we can do is cling to routine, and hope that someone who is really seriously losing it, is not driving next to us on the freeway, or in the alternative about to enter our place of work carrying an AK-47 assault rifle, several sticks of dynamite, and loaded with enough coffee (or other uppers) to keep going for a week without sleep.

Routine is the balm for a mind on the edge, but the problem is that routine refuses to stay routine. We suspect that drug and alcohol consumption is on the rise, mostly because we ourselves are using more and more as a means of pretending the abyss is not just around the next corner.

Attendance is up at Churches, and people are still going to Trump rallies, which is essentially the same thing.

Madmen in generally are looking a lot more sane, and some of us should watch the old movie about the armies that fight over a town, which destruction releases a whole flock of folk from the local nut house, with the result that when the fighting is over, anyone sane left standing joins the crazy people in going back inside the insane asylum, and locking the gate behind them. “King of Hearts” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060908/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_58

I don’t think this is what the people promoting the concept of a New Age of evolved consciousness had in mind.

If you found an answer to the initial question of “Why?” in all this, you can thank me by sending me money, and/or drugs, as soon as possible. As to the money, no checks please, and as to the drugs, oxycodone is preferred.

This commercial has been presented to you by a man who just woke up at 4 a.m. and could find no reason to go back to sleep. The potential terrors of the coming day require keeping one’s eyes open, and being on the highest level of military alert, all the while glad (as will be most of you as well) that I have not yet bought any guns.

I’d advise prayer, but when I listen inside I hear the angels laughing their asses off.

#49
The Trump-Mob’s Powers - a Reality Check.

Read the Constitution, please .....

First mentioned in the Constitution is the Legislative Branch, sometimes called: the People’s Branch. The idea of “checks and balances” does not mean the three Branches are equal, only that each is capable of restraining the excesses of the other.

The Legislative Branch has all the cool powers. All of them. The President can veto legislation, but even his veto can be overcome by a sufficient majority in the Legislative Branch. The Judicial Branch can declare legislation, or executive actions, “unconstitutional”, but in spite of the ideological b.s. of the GOP, the Judicial Branch really can’t make up laws (although the Court did just that when they made Bush II president in 2001).

People with powers don’t like to play by the rules, so Washington D.C. is a kind of war zone.
The capacity of the President to create “executive orders” is limited. He can’t just do anything he wants, this being a very gray area, and the other two Branches can always interfere. Under the War Powers Act, the Legislative Branch gave the President the power to take quick actions in order to defend the USA from sudden attacks, but maintaining a War requires funding, and the Legislative Branch still writes the checks.

The Big Bad Thing is that the military-industrial complex actually exists, and because we are not really a democracy, but an oligarchy, the 1% of the 1% often get the Legislative Branch to write a great deal of legislation that favors those folks.

The Founders did create the whole thing, with the idea that the source of the Powers of Government came from the People, and that the People too could act in ways to restrain excesses by the central government. Government only has as many powers as we let it have, when we leave to the political Parties all the basic acts of governance. All the same, what we gave in creating the Constitution, we can take back.

The weakness in Washington D.C., besides having to get money to be elected, is the fact that the Congress of the Legislative Branch has to get re-elected every two years. Another weakness is that Trump woke a lot of folks up, and his win demonstrates that 23% of the eligible electorate (the red-state heartland) can actually elect a president. They voted, basically, against politics as usual, which is actually what Trump is trying to deliver: More politics as usual.

Like most presidential candidates, his first actions are to screw those who voted for him.
All the same, the single most powerful person in Washington D.C. is Paul Ryan, not Donald Trump. As Speaker of the House, he controls (with compromises, obviously) who gets to be chairman of the many congressional committees, and those folks have a lot of power - a lot.
They could get angry at the Trump-Mob (administration), and start to subpoena any member of the administration they want. The Trump-Mob does not want to get into a pissing contest with Congress, nor with the Senate either. Deals have to be made, otherwise the Executive Branch can’t function.

Now many will assume that because the GOP ostensibly controls everything, that the GOP will move in lock-step, toward whatever goal King Donald wants. Not going to happen.

Senators and Congresspersons like their powers, and privileges very much. Plus, the Congress has to get re-elected every two years. Plus, the Congress has to get re-elected every two years.
What Trump did was make the heartland believe they just might get what they have always wanted: To be paid attention to. To have their issues (health-care, jobs, not losing your children in foreign wars etc) get taken care of.

Everyday members of Congress have to call folks in their home state for money to run for re-election. Most weekends they have to go home and show up kissing babies, which is why Congress generally has only a four-day work week.

Want to screw with the GOP and the Trump-Mob. Join the local Republican Party, and participate. Don’t whine and hide under the bed, but get directly involved. The Congress has to call home for money, and come home to kiss asses. Congress is the People’s House, remember, and the Founders knew that if the People did their jobs at home, Congress (the most powerful Branch) would have to toe the line.

If you do not participate at the local level of GOP politics, don’t complain about anything. Participation is being a Citizen, and the heartland is awake, and is really not all that crazy. They are just ordinary hard-working patriotic Americans, who want what everyone wants for their children.

Ignore the Dems. They blew it. The GOP heartland just won an election. Marvel at that one.

#50
Why Do Things Have to Get Worse, before They Get Better?

Of course, maybe they won’t get better, either. That is the awful fact, which haunts the American People. Both Parties promised to make things better, and Trump won (sort of). But will things actually get better?

Which “things”, by the way?

If we wanted to generalize, we might say: Our quality of life. Less worry. Regular jobs. Safe streets for our children to play. Ordinary “things”.

We “fancy” that the politician can deliver on their “promises”, which is a serious self-generated delusion. There is no evidence they are able to that which we believe we need them to do. A promise of a job is not a job.

Life on the Earth is not the same everywhere. Other places appear to have far worse “things” to worry about - such as Aleppo in Syria (although Flint, and Standing Rock, and Detroit are not exactly free of being “war-zones”, it is just the wars are basically economic, not bombs and stuff. Death still lurks around too many corners).

Basically our lives have certain shared qualities, wherever we live on the Earth. Horrible people, of no real character, want to use us to advance their own agendas. Against this, there are those who share our struggles and suffering. We generally are not alone.

We can feel helpless, and to a certain degree we are factually helpless to change what we otherwise wish would change.

But what are the spiritual truisms? You can’t change the world, but you can change yourself. The Lord helps those who help themselves.

In dark times, a lot of people hang together, and find in their shared company, a resource with which to meet that lack of caring we wish we would obtain from above - from the seats of government as it were.

Maybe the real “revolution” happens in all the little encounters in life, where kindness and sympathy are freely shared. Those “things” we can effect, and change when needed. Our “attitude” is ours, and we can create it’s character, whatever the bad people do to us.
Yea, we suffer, but there is no reason to suffer alone; and, not only that, but singing and music and tall stories are a really good way to pass the time, while the selfish are busy burning the world to ash.

When Christ said that “poor will be with you always”, perhaps one of the “things” He meant, is that when the dust clears, the egotists will have killed each other off, and the meek will have actually inherited the Earth.