December 24, 2017

Love to DU At The End Of A Hard Year and The Start of Another

As we gather round the table
To say a prayer for those we love
All the words that will be spoken
Will never be enough

To encompass all the feelings
That our brittle hearts can bear
All the storms that rage inside us
Fill our organs up with air

And the sound it makes - is an honest song
Our hearts sing an honest song

And all the time spent catching raindrops
All the time we've spent in bed
All the hours we have wasted
We will never see again

So be good with what you're given
For it's all you have to give
We are only passing shadows
In the mighty wind

And the sound it makes - is an honest song
Our hearts sing an honest song

So though I tremble in the darkness
In the cold and frozen snow
I am grateful for the winter
For the winter comes to show

That our trouble is never over
And our work is never done
But with the turning of the season
We will always see the sun

And the sound it makes is an honest song
Our hearts sing an honest song
Oh may our hearts sing an honest song

December 20, 2017

Ta-Nehisi Coates On Stephen Colbert -- His Take on Black Protest, Obama and How Far Gone We Are

Hope is for us to go to pastors for, not Coates as a black intellectual.

The discussion on whiteness is important.

December 20, 2017

From The Root: Cornel West Wants A Sit-Down With Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is not an endorsement of West as much as a look at his reaction to Coates reaction to him.

This shouldn't be about our taking sides. Allies listen.

December 10, 2017

Because It's Sunday, I Believe This, and I'm An Atheist

He's a good artist. Old school nineties, but good. Someone we should know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MF_Doom

December 9, 2017

Remembering Hitchens, as Trumpers celebrate armageddon in Pensacola.

December 7, 2017

Long May You Run, Senator Franken

Yes, you do have a great life.

Your great work has made our country and Minnesota better.

Thank you for doing what no other Democrat could have — forcing the recusal of Attorney General, Jeff Sessions.

May the Democratic Party continue your work.

If the Democratic Party isn’t to become a slow jam trainwreck that loses members who lose faith in its moral “high ground;” if the party can show your faith and strength on behalf of Americans, it will grow the spine to fight, it will win against the selling out of Americans and this democracy.

Long may you run, Senator Franken.

December 3, 2017

The Sexual Harrassment Song

December 2, 2017

The Ineradicable World View: Trump supporters do. not. care.

I take no satisfaction or pleasure in coming to this realization...It's taken me almost a lifetime...

Trump supporters do. not. care.

I'm a long term liberal progressive in a red region, where I see in the eyes of people who know, as Christians, that it is not right to for them to actually say they don't care.

Not caring, Christian or not, is the Trump supporters' view -- an "ineradicable" world view:

Jane Smiley put it best:

"... Winning without caring how -- or even caring -- is completely American…
... those undocumented whites and migrants who got here fought for control of this landbase...

...in frontier days, the knock-down, drag-out fight was a certain type of combat that people in frontier towns set up and bet on…Men would fight, and other men would watch the mayhem and cheer it on…an American form of recreation…...Genocide was America. Slavery was American. Witch-burning was American.

What conservatives hate about liberals is that liberals repudiate cruelties -- that conservatives know to be truly American -- in the name of something somehow larger, maybe alien.

Conservatives don’t necessarily embrace those cruelties, but they don’t mind them, either, because they think they are natural and American. Just simple scapegoating is pure American search-and-destroy.

Conservatives figure that if Americans killed off the native population, then so be it, since Americans did it, it must be okay….... the price you pay for living here..." Ten Days in The Hills (2008)

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Studying history, "The People's..." and otherwise, I see how right Smiley is.

This "ineradicable" world view -- however Trumpers' or Trump's billionaire cohorts put it, conveniently serves the Austrian School of economics well enough in their own push for dominance over generations, even as the country this "Society" sits in has played the "neutral nation" card, never imposing these economic ideas on its own people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pèlerin_TV_Tower

So Mueller takes years to collect evidence of collusion, Trump and his 26% don't care.

The Right's Billionaire Wing doesn't care, either. Their wealth extraction through U.S.A. land base controls continue now no matter who's president. They've kept alive corporate and wealth goals long after fighting liberal lefties left or ever will leave congress or this Earth. "Rational racism" attacks on any non-white people will continue. Confidence in their legal, social and corporate constructs show.

This view and those who back it are two main reasons why the 80% of the rest of us in America mustmust stop believing that there is any such thing as mutual interest with them. We have nothing in common -- no trafficking in their words, frames, games against democracy or cards against humanity.

No compromise with Trump's 20%, owners, or henchmen in congress, defense companies, military police enforcers, holier-than-thou christo fascist religionists (of ANY religion).

There are only concessions to extract, new gains to make, old gains to maintain. Even then, they will be back -- takawayism is their lifeblood -- even if it's to take away life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

To realize the existence of this world view is to also face that this view and associated forces will not end in our lifetime.

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-Histo…/…/ref=sr_1_1…
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/…/61a7Mz9PzQL._SX31…

All the more reason I'm a lifelong progressive Democrat.