The Cosmic Emporium [Archive] - Page 17

Gio

15th December 2018, 14:20

Will share this here ...

https://thezombieshuffle.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/emotion-masks.jpg?w=640&h=505

3 Reasons to Let Yourself Feel Your Emotions

"Struggling with your feelings often leads to more suffering ...

From the time that we are children, many of us are told things such as, “Don’t cry,” and “There’s nothing to be sad about.” As a culture we are often taught that we should try to avoid unpleasant emotions at all costs. Thus, for many, the primary impulse when they are experiencing unpleasant emotions is to try to escape from those feelings through alcohol, drugs, restricting food, binging, busyness, compulsive sex, or a variety of other self-harming behaviors.

I believe that it is far healthier to “lean into” your experiences of pain, rather than trying to numb your emotions.

Here are three reasons why it is important to allow yourself to process and experience your true feelings.

1. When you numb sadness, you also numb happiness and joy.

The reality is that you cannot selectively numb emotions. Using negative behaviors to avoid your feelings may help you experience less sadness and anger, but they also stop you from feeling happiness and joy. Part of the amazing thing about being human is that we are able to have a range of emotions. Experiencing sadness and hurt is part of what makes it so incredible to feel joy and happiness.

Think of your feelings as waves in the ocean. They come and go, rise and fall. No feeling lasts forever; anger and sadness are necessary, helpful parts of the human experience. Additionally, all of our emotions contain gifts and help us grow as people.

2. Struggling with your emotions often leads to more suffering.

Trying to fight our feelings often leads to more suffering. Using negative behaviors to try to numb our feelings is akin to putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. They might make you feel better temporarily, but these behaviors do not “fix” the underlying problem. Further, using negative coping strategies to numb emotions causes people to feel even worse in the long term.

Rather than trying to suppress your feelings, work to be a mindful observer of them. Notice the emotions that you experience and where you feel them in your body. Then, try to cultivate a curious and nonjudgmental stance. Our emotions are often messengers which signal something important that we need to pay attention to.

Let’s say that you see a friend pursuing their life-long dream of writing a book and you are filled with jealously. If you take a moment to get curious about what this emotion might be telling you, you may discover that you too are passionate about the pursuit of writing. Or perhaps you are filled with anger and resentment towards a partner. Often feelings of resentment are the result of someone not respecting your boundaries, or an indication that you are not effectively communicating your needs.

3. Processing and experiencing your feelings is part of having a full life.

Anyone in the throes of an eating disorder, addiction, workaholism, or sex addiction can tell you that constantly trying to run from your emotions is exhausting. When you are focused on numbing your feelings rather than processing them and using healthy coping strategies, you prevent yourself from living a full and meaningful life. Hurt, frustration, pain, sadness, and anger are all natural and healthy parts of the human experience. When we try to suppress these emotions, we are unable to thrive. Part of having a full life is feeling all of your emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant. It is beaming with joy, and feeling like your heart is full of gratitude during some moments; it is also experiencing heartbreak and disappointment, and truly letting yourself sit with these feelings.

An integral component of being able to cope with emotions is the practice of self-compassion, which is simply treating and responding to yourself the way you would a loved one who was sad or struggling. You deserve to extend to yourself the same kindness that you would to others that you love. Beating yourself up for feeling sad, anxious, or scared often serves to make you feel even worse. Instead, work to say kind and gentle things to yourself and engage in compassionate acts of self-care.

Experiencing your emotions and being vulnerable with the people that you trust is a sign of true strength, not a weakness. Ultimately, the way to heal and move through painful experiences is to let yourself feel. You can do this by writing in a journal, through artwork, talking to a friend, or seeking help from a therapist—there are so many healthy ways to process your emotions.

Of course there are times (i.e. if you are at work or school) when it is not always feasible to process your feelings in the moment, which is when you can employ healthy distraction or coping strategies. Later, it is still important to process your feelings when you are in a better place to do so. Ultimately, you deserve to let yourself experience all of your emotions, and to treat yourself with kindness and care."

by Jennifer Rollin, MSW, LGSW - a social work psychotherapist who specializes in working with adolescents, survivors of trauma, eating disorders, body-image issues, and mood disorders. She also blogs on The Huffington Post.

Source page (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mindful-musings/201611/3-reasons-let-yourself-feel-your-emotions)

Gio

15th December 2018, 21:34

Gio

15th December 2018, 21:52

A hometown legend from my own DC/Metro area ...

Nils Lofgren: 50 years of ‘just being a guy in the band’

"As we learned a few years ago in the Oscar-winning film “20 Feet from Stardom,” sometimes the best singers in the band are those who are seldom center-stage. They have the game, just not quite the fame. The same can be said for guitar players as well, including one rock and roll hall-of-famer who is celebrating his golden anniversary in the business. NewsHour Weekend's Tom Casciato has the story."

Published on Dec 15, 2018

9:15 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWlsitB_AOI

Nils Lofgren - Goin Back -
Old Grey Whistle Test From 1975

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQjExmkCKF4

Gio

16th December 2018, 06:52

A Christmas Harrow ...

It's a Wonderful Trump

Published on Dec 15, 2018

8:55 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdQl7SxOHek

Also ...

Mark Ronson and Miley Cyrus ft. Sean Ono Lennon: (Happy Xmas) War Is Over

4:00 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2LD55qeHtg

And finally ...

Best Christmas Ever

3:19 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WvwX18oMR4

Gio

16th December 2018, 07:57

♫ The power of musical sound ♫

Watch as this precious blind and autistic girl plays the guitar for the first time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2JhqTRFJKc

Gio

16th December 2018, 17:23

One has to wonder after all these years how much of this is truth or disinfo ...
While Linda and her fellow Ufology colleagues have created a cottage industry of product ...
I still do believe the real agenda is embedded within the alternative media hype ...

For your inspection ...https://imgfast.net/users/2911/23/55/04/smiles/962334.gif

Linda Moulton Howe Reveals What Extraterrestrials Really Want...its Not Good!

UAMN TV
Published on Dec 11, 2018
Unbeknownst to a vast majority of the population, humanity has a long and complicated history with extraterrestrial beings. http://bit.ly/ExposetheAlienAgenda

Whistleblowers from the military and government explain that Earth is caught in the middle of a battle to retain ownership of our planet, and we are simply pawns in a galactic chess game. Linda Moulton Howe conveys information she has collected from several insiders who have come forward to reveal what they know about extraterrestrial races, long-term genetic projects involving humans, what happens to a soul as it reincarnates across many lifetimes, and much more.

30:46 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rImxgmeC3C0

Gio

16th December 2018, 18:11

♪ People forget
Forget they're hiding ♪

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/15726719_1264949280233624_7408345954800059940_n.jp g?_nc_cat=102&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=f6070b834a3642b80b858dd5648cdc11&oe=5CA511B1

Daylight capture/ Eceti Ranch

Eminence Front - The Who

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTdjz_6Hrkk&fbclid=IwAR0bk7PznGN2hkwTEUwdRbzV5bNlIewjRFg34mkSn KMIvNp87dNB0izGP60

Dreamtimer

16th December 2018, 22:12

♫ The power of musical sound ♫

Watch as this precious blind and autistic girl plays the guitar for the first time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2JhqTRFJKc

This one brought a tear to my eye.

Emil El Zapato

16th December 2018, 22:33

A Christmas Harrow ...

It's a Wonderful Trump

Published on Dec 15, 2018

wow, they went all out...very cool

Miley's been working on her legs... :)

Dreamtimer

17th December 2018, 02:49

I noticed the legs too. ;)

Gio

17th December 2018, 07:51

Thanks for the comments!

Gio

17th December 2018, 07:57

♪ People forget
Forget they're hiding ♪

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/15726719_1264949280233624_7408345954800059940_n.jp g?_nc_cat=102&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=f6070b834a3642b80b858dd5648cdc11&oe=5CA511B1

Shock the monkey ...
5G will be the next level of control ...

Clif High - Major Announcement, Changes on the Earth Like You've Never Seen

Leak Project

Streamed live 12/16/2018

2:23:09 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE5I6acdPD0

Gio

17th December 2018, 08:08

Going native ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/26/eb/bb/26ebbb1117695513a105b05e200a56f8.jpg

Gio

17th December 2018, 09:09

Addicted to the chaos of self doubt ...
Where may the apple befall ...

http://www.forcesofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/shock3.jpeg

Shock The Monkey

Peter Gabriel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnVf1ZoCJSo

Gio

17th December 2018, 16:30

This special item is for my feathered friend Giorgio over in Merseyside ...

https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1073975454980300800/TLQTCiD6?format=jpg&name=600x314

Foul-mouthed parrot uses Amazon Alexa to order things while owner is away ...

"Rocco the parrot is in trouble again ...

The parrot, which was kicked out of the National Animal Welfare Trust sanctuary for swearing too much, has learned how to use Amazon’s Alexa and decided to shop online when his owner was away, according to The Sunday Times.

Rocco, who is an African grey parrot and lives in Berkshire, U.K., reportedly learned how to use the smart speaker to order watermelon and strawberries. He has also attempted to order lightbulbs, ice cream and a kite.

Marion Wischnewski, the sanctuary worker who adopted Rocco after he was removed from the sanctuary for his foul mouth, said that she has to check her account every day to see what he has done.

“I have to check the shopping list when I come in from work and cancel all the items he's ordered,” Wischnewski told The Daily Mail.

Rocco loves to interact with the voice of Alexa and listen to music from Kings of Leon.

“They chat away to each other all day. Often I come in and there's music playing,” Wischnewski told The Daily Mail.

Fortunately, none of his orders go on to be purchases thanks to a parental lock that she put on the device."

Source page (https://www.ajc.com/news/national/foul-mouthed-parrot-uses-amazon-alexa-order-things-while-owner-away/TgtAT2OyvcgRvYfay1JVTN/)

Parrot Falls in Love with Alexa and keeps ordering things on Amazon

Published on Dec 16, 2018

2:43 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV57EnzsHgM

Gio

18th December 2018, 06:13

A Roo Update ... http://www.animated-smileys.com/emoticons/animated-smileys-animals-020.gif

Reuben the Bulldog: Roocovery

"Reuben is back from the vet and his surgery went well. He's got a lot of resting up to do, but is on his way to recovery. Your thoughts and prayers and well wishes were wonderful and we can't thank you enough for taking the time to comment. So glad to have him home!"

Published on Dec 17, 2018

4:38 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t72-4b1Qq9Y&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

18th December 2018, 06:20

Make mine a Manhattan ...

https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/woody-allen-secret-affair.jpg?crop=900:600&width=1910

Woody Allen’s Reported Relationship With 16-Year-Old: What We Know (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/woody-allen-16-year-babi-christina-engelhardt-770210/)

Gio

18th December 2018, 06:25

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c13c8323089175a92134f2f/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC121418.jpg

“Can we limit the government shutdown to just the White House?”

Gio

18th December 2018, 10:59

Straight off the MSM ...

Angling in south of the border ...

https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BBR5dlf.img?h=749&w=1123&m=6&q=60&u=t&o=f&l=f&x=918&y=511

The New York Times

Mexico’s Strategy for Dealing With Trump: Warn Him About China

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s new government has a strategy for dealing with President Trump.

Don’t anger him. Don’t cave in to him. Try to get him to help fund an ambitious investment plan to stem migration by creating jobs in Central America.

And if Mr. Trump cannot be persuaded, Mexican officials said in interviews that they would remind him that there is another player in the region willing to step into the vacuum: China.

That, in a nut shell, is the approach the Mexican government is betting can defuse the standoff over the thousands of migrants amassed at its border with the United States, hoping to make it across.

Mexico’s plan to try to raise money to develop Central America and southern Mexico was announced last week, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the country’s new president, introduced what he called a “Marshall Plan” to address the root causes of Central American migration: a $30 billion initiative to invest in the region and welcome migrants into Mexico with visas, health care and employment.

Mexican officials have compared the proposal to the plan to rebuild postwar Europe. This approach would represent a break with Mr. López Obrador’s predecessor, who considered giving in to Mr. Trump’s demands and allowing people seeking asylum in the United States to remain in Mexico while they wait.

And Mexico’s new plan is, in many respects, the opposite of Mr. Trump’s vow to crack down on migration, which includes building a wall, deploying the military and cutting aid to Central America.

In speaking about the contours of their new policy, Mexican officials told The New York Times that they would not force a confrontation with Mr. Trump by demanding that he accept the migrants onto American soil; that would only anger the American president, and he would not do it anyway, they said.

But at the same time, they said they were not going to strike a deal with the United States to keep asylum seekers on the Mexican side of the border. That would allow Mr. Trump to claim a victory Mexican officials are not willing to give him. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to aggravate already strained relationships with the Trump administration.

Instead, they want to change the focus of the conversation to expanding the economy of Central America and the south of their country by marshaling public and private investment to build infrastructure, develop the energy sector and create jobs in the region so people do not have to stream north in the first place.

They acknowledge that it may be difficult to convince the Trump administration to invest large sums in the region, a proposal they have only recently broached with American officials.

Buy they are hoping the perceived threat of China’s growing presence in the region can be used as leverage to bring the United States on board.

While it is unclear how much more China would be willing to invest in the region, in recent years it has increased its presence throughout Latin America, financing infrastructure projects, tightening ties with governments and even convincing a handful of Central American nations to switch their diplomatic recognition of Taiwan to China — a sticking point with the Americans.

The Mexican strategy to rely on the United States’ concerns about China’s expanding influence in the region reflects a growing sense in Mexico that it can no longer take cooperation with the United States for granted.

Both the White House and State Department declined to comment on the Mexican proposal.

“For a long time there has been this competition within Latin America for influence, where China is willing to invest billions in infrastructure and energy that the United States simply isn’t,” said Duncan Wood, the director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center.

The proposal is also a reflection of the distinct personalities of Mr. López Obrador and Mr. Trump: Both are mavericks — albeit on opposite sides of the political spectrum — and both are willing to break with long-established conventions.

“Partly because of Trump and partly because of Andrés Manuel, there is an opening there,” Mr. Wood said.

Unlike his predecessor, Mr. López Obrador is willing to chart an independent course in his response to the Trump administration — partly because of Mr. Trump’s hard line on migration and partly out of a conviction that the only way to tackle the matter is to go after its root causes.

And to do that, Mexico will look for help wherever it can find it, including China, which has already expressed an interest in Mr. López Obrador’s plan to lay hundreds of miles of track for a tourist train in the Yucatán Peninsula — a project widely opposed by environmental advocates.

Of course, that does not mean Mexico will make a sharp turn to China, given its longstanding relationship with the United States. Nor does floating the idea that China may participate make Mexico’s costly proposal any more plausible.

“The money is just not there,” said Mark Feierstein, the former senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council during the Obama administration. He noted that the United States was spending more than $650 million a year in Central America’s Northern Triangle, which is composed of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

But that may be beside the point.

“If nothing else, it is a good bargaining chip,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, of the idea that China could increase its investment in the region. “Both sides are laying down their frameworks and their points of view as to how they should proceed.”

The idea that China could increase its influence in Mexico emerged even before Mr. López Obrador came into office.

“I heard from senior Mexican officials during the transition that if the United States is not going to treat Mexico with respect, don’t be surprised if you see a Chinese submarine in a Mexican port,” said Juan Gonzalez, who was an adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden on Central America.

“I think it was hyperbolic,” he said of the outgoing officials’ warning, before adding, “I think Mexico sees increased political risk coming from the political process in the United States and they are diversifying their interests.”

Since taking office on Dec. 1, Mr. López Obrador has done nothing if not shake up the establishment.

He has announced the cancellation of the construction of a new airport, a multibillion-dollar project that was well underway, and temporarily suspended new auctions for oil exploration in Mexico. He has also cut salaries for government employees and proposed a measure to dismantle a much-vaunted education overhaul.

As he did on the campaign trail, Mr. López Obrador has focused on domestic issues — an inward-looking vision that differs from recent Mexican presidents who saw the global stage as the nation’s future.

But the migrant crisis forced its way to the top of the agenda, proving a frustrating first test for Mr. López Obrador.

The arrival of thousands of migrants traveling in caravans from Honduras and other Central American countries raised the profile of an existing problem, increasing the stakes and forcing Mr. López Obrador to decide how to manage it just days after taking office.

For decades, Mexico kept its head down as hundreds of thousands of migrants — many of them Mexican — made their way into the United States. But in recent years, the nation’s status as a transit country has changed.

Mexico is becoming a destination, not just a portal to the United States. Every year, more people apply for asylum in Mexico, and many more choose to stay and seek work. A bottleneck in the United States has meant that thousands of migrants are stuck waiting months at the border for their initial asylum interview with the American authorities.

In 2014, at the urging of the Obama administration, Mexico adopted a tough policing strategy along its southern border with Guatemala that essentially amounted to detention and deportation. But that also failed to curtail the flow of migrants.

Today, with about 10,000 migrants having entered Mexico in caravans that focused global media attention on their plight, mass roundups and deportations are not an option, officials say. Nor is striking a deal with the Trump administration to host the migrants indefinitely.

So Mr. López Obrador’s government is trying to fold them into Mexican society — and raise money to invest in projects that would boost employment and prosperity in the region.

“It’s not enough just to point out that the causes of migration have to be dealt with,” said Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s foreign secretary, adding that Mexico wants to counter the idea “that the best way to confront migration is through exclusion and control.”

This is, in part, a recognition that Mexico forms a part of a busy migration corridor and that, with or without help from the United States, it has to deal with the issue.

“Finally, the issue of the Northern Triangle and migration is seen as a regional issue,” said Rafael Fernández de Castro, the director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a former Mexican presidential adviser. “There is a window of opportunity. The knowledge and awareness have never been as clear as they are now.”

Mr. López Obrador is also signaling an interest in playing a broader leadership role in the region, as Mexico did during the 1970s and 1980s.

“Mexico wants to take back leadership in the region,” said Rodolfo Cruz Piñeiro, director of the department for population studies at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana. “Mexico is telling the U.S.: ‘I can control this region for you, but I need your economic help.’”

“What will the U.S. ask?’’ he added. “That’s the great unknown.”

By AZAM AHMED and ELISABETH MALKIN (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/mexico-s-strategy-for-dealing-with-trump-warn-him-about-china/ar-BBR5mtZ#image=BBR5mtZ_1|2)

Gio

18th December 2018, 12:07

Speaking of ...

How China became a superpower: 40 years of economic reform

DW New

Published on Dec 18, 2018
40 Years ago China opened up its economy to the rest of the world. A move, that ultimately turned China into a global economic powerhouse, second in GDP only to the US. Today China looks back over four decades of economic reform that have made it one of the most powerful economies in the world. In his speech at the Great Hall of the People in the Chinese capital Beijing Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed to press ahead with economic reforms. But he also made clear that Beijing will not deviate from its one-party system or take orders from any other country. His comments come as the United States demands more transparency in trade relations with Bejing.

6:08 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SBnK9XIlZE

Dreamtimer

18th December 2018, 13:30

I bet Rocco the parrot dances to the music.

We need to get Rueben and Rocco together.

The Rocco and Roo show!

Gio

18th December 2018, 20:36

♪ Tell me lies ...
Tell me sweet little lies ♪

https://i.imgur.com/U6Yo8E5.gif?noredirect
Sarah Huckabee

Little Lies
Fleetwood Mac

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JjQGVtZrE0

Gio

18th December 2018, 23:08

Being confectionery correct ...

Chocolate Body Moment - JRE Toons

Published on Dec 18, 2018
Another hilarious moment animated by PaulyToon from the Joe Rogan Experience Fight Companion - November 10, 2018 (https://youtu.be/MwLUCreNy5I).

2:46 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5Pk5VIbBsY

Gio

19th December 2018, 09:37

Continuing ... https://imgfast.net/users/2911/23/55/04/smiles/42363.gif

A Tour of LEIDEN, NETHERLANDS | The Birthplace of Rembrandt

Gabriel Traveler

"Exploring the beautiful city of Leiden, Netherlands, where the artist Rembrandt was
born and learned to paint."

Published on Dec 18, 2018

21:28 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiABNTyp59M

Gio

20th December 2018, 09:25

So' you want to be in pictures ... https://www.amperordirect.com/mm5/website_v3/images/emoticons/movie.gif

https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/1500x845/2018/12/thr_mobile_la_thr_joe_4547_hirez_splash.jpg

L.A.'s Housing Crisis Hits Hollywood: The Entertainment Workers Living in Their Cars (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/meet-entertainment-workers-living-cars-housing-crisis-1169781)

Gio

20th December 2018, 10:27

A trickery dickery clock ...

Trump Withdraw Troops Syria A Ploy For More Conflict

Morris

Published on Dec 19, 2018

6:34 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpsYObUilNk&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

20th December 2018, 14:35

The latest stuff ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

New World Next Year 2019

corbettreport

"Welcome back to New World Next Week – the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news" ...

All news item links listed below YouTube shownotes

Published on Dec 20, 2018

27:07 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsnscncaKHo&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

20th December 2018, 14:41

An ancient autistic ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/b1/f8/ab/b1f8ab53beea70fc86f5395e4d01fe52.jpg

Gio

20th December 2018, 14:47

Hello EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND! Exploring the City at Night

Gabriel Traveler

Published on Dec 20, 2018

12:15 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6HqVU3iAAA&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

21st December 2018, 03:10

The wheels are truly coming off this White House administration ...

https://storage.googleapis.com/afs-prod/media/media:4bcc43ea74c64a79beb190f72797e8c9/2000.jpeg

Mattis resigning as Pentagon chief after clashes with Trump

WASHINGTON (AP) — "Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned Thursday after clashing with President Donald Trump over the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria and after two years of deep disagreements over America’s role in the world.

Mattis, perhaps the most respected foreign policy official in Trump’s administration, will leave by the end of February after two tumultuous years struggling to soften and moderate the president’s hardline and sometimes sharply changing policies. He told Trump in a letter that he was leaving because “you have a right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.”

His departure was immediately lamented by foreign policy hands and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, who viewed the retired Marine general as a sober voice of experience in the ear of a president who had never held political office or served in the military. Even Trump allies expressed fear over Mattis’ decision to quit, believing him to be an important moderating force on the president.

“Just read Gen. Mattis resignation letter,” tweeted Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. “It makes it abundantly clear that we are headed toward a series of grave policy errors which will endanger our nation, damage our alliances & empower our adversaries.”

Mattis did not mention the dispute over Syria in his letter or proposed deep cuts to U.S. forces in Afghanistan, another significant policy dispute. He noted his “core belief” that American strength is “inextricably linked” with the nation’s alliances with other countries, a position seemingly at odds with the “America First” policy of the president.

The defense secretary also said China and Russia want to spread their “authoritarian model” and promote their interests at the expense of America and its allies. “That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense,” he wrote.

The announcement came a day after Trump surprised U.S. allies and members of Congress by announcing the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Syria, and as he continues to consider cutting in half the American deployment in Afghanistan by this summer. The news coincided with domestic turmoil as well, Trump’s fight with Congress over a border wall and a looming partial government shutdown.

Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria has been sharply criticized for abandoning America’s Kurdish allies, who may well face a Turkish assault once U.S. troops leave, and had been staunchly opposed by the Pentagon.

Mattis, in his resignation letter, emphasized the importance of standing up for U.S. allies — an implicit criticism of the president’s decision on this issue and others.

“While the U.S. remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies,” Mattis wrote.

Last year, Republican Sen. Bob Corker — a frequent Trump critic — said Mattis, along with White House chief of staff John Kelly and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were helping “separate our country from chaos.”

Tillerson was fired early this year. Kelly is to leave the White House in the coming days.

“This is scary,” reacted Senate Intelligence committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., on Twitter. “Secretary Mattis has been an island of stability amidst the chaos of the Trump administration.”

“Jim Mattis did a superb job as Secretary of Defense. But he cannot be expected to stand behind a President who disrespects our allies and ingratiates himself to our adversaries,” said William Cohen, who served as defense secretary under Bill Clinton and knows Mattis well.

Mattis’ departure has long been rumored, but officials close to him have insisted that the battle-hardened retired Marine would hang on, determined to bring military calm and judgment to the administration’s often chaotic national security decisions and to soften some of Trump’s sharper tones with allies.

Opponents of Mattis, however, have seen him as an unwanted check on Trump.

Mattis went to the White House Thursday afternoon to resign after failing to persuade the president in a tense Oval Office meeting to change his decision on withdrawing troops from Syria, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation but not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Another U.S. official said that Mattis’ decision was his own, and not a “forced resignation.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Trump said a replacement would be chosen soon.

“The president’s national security team’s job is to give him advice and it’s the president’s job to make a decision,” said press secretary Sarah Sanders.

At the start of the Trump administration, the president had gushed about his respect for Mattis, repeatedly calling him “Mad Dog,” despite Mattis’ own public insistence that the moniker was never his. Instead, his nickname for years was CHAOS, which stood for “Colonel Has An Outstanding Suggestion,” and reflected Mattis’ more cerebral nature.

The two quickly clashed on major policy decisions.

During his first conversations with Trump about the Pentagon job, Mattis made it clear that he disagreed with his new boss in two areas: He said torture doesn’t work, despite Trump’s assertion during the campaign that it did, and he voiced staunch support for traditional U.S. international alliances, including NATO, which Trump repeatedly criticized.

Mattis was credited by some in the administration for blocking an executive order that would have reopened CIA interrogation “black sites.” Trump has said the Pentagon chief convinced him it wasn’t necessary to bring back banned torture techniques like waterboarding.

En route to his first visit to Iraq as defense secretary, Mattis bluntly rebuffed Trump’s assertion that America might take Iraqi oil as compensation for U.S. efforts in the war-torn country.

The two also were divided on the future of the Afghanistan war, with Trump complaining from the first about its cost and arguing for withdrawal. Mattis and others ultimately persuaded Trump to pour additional resources and troops into the conflict to press toward a resolution.

U.S. officials say there now is active planning in the Pentagon that would pull as many as half the 14,000 U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by summer. They say no final decision has been made.

Trump also chafed at the Pentagon’s slow response to his order to ban transgender people from serving in the military. That effort has stalled due to multiple legal challenges.

More recently, Trump bypassed Mattis’ choice for the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Gen. David Goldfein, the Air Force chief, was Mattis’ top choice, but Trump chose Gen. Mark Milley, the chief of the Army.

The Pentagon has appeared to be caught off guard by a number of Trump policy declarations, often made through Twitter. Those include plans that ultimately fizzled to have a big military parade this month and the more recent decision to send thousands of active duty troops to the Southwest border.

Mattis has determinedly kept a low public profile, striving to stay out of the news and out of Trump’s line of fire.

Those close to him have repeatedly insisted that he would not quit, and would have to either be fired or die in the job. But others have noted that a two-year stint as defense chief is a normal and respectable length of service.

Born in Pullman, Washington, Mattis enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1969, later earning a history degree from Central Washington University. He was commissioned as an officer in 1972. As a lieutenant colonel, he led an assault battalion into Kuwait during the first U.S. war with Iraq in 1991.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mattis commanded the Marines who launched an early amphibious assault into Afghanistan and established a U.S. foothold in the Taliban heartland. As the first wave of Marines moved toward Kandahar, Mattis declared, “The Marines have landed, and now we own a piece of Afghanistan.”

Two years later, he helped lead the invasion into Iraq in 2003 as the two-star commander of the 1st Marine Division. As a four-star, he led Central Command from 2010 until his retirement in 2013."

_Source (https://apnews.com/6ebe8b39476240d194c57c7dbb54d43e)_
By ZEKE MILLER and LOLITA BALDOR

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Robert Burns contributed.

Gio

21st December 2018, 04:39

Give him what he really wants steel slats ...

https://politizoom.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/12/trump-jail.jpg

The TV Is Telling The President What To Do

"The President isn't signing a resolution to fund the government
thanks to advice from his top advisor: the television."

8:38 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF0CHEdvQCc

Gio

21st December 2018, 05:23

Speaking of normal ...

Don't Ask Will Ferrell About Professor Feathers ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qGMtOu5HPU

Gio

21st December 2018, 11:05

Mark this day ...

https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/francis-1.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1236&h=820&crop=1

Pope to priestly sex abusers: Turn yourselves in

By Associated Press

December 21, 2018

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis is vowing that the Catholic Church will “never again” cover up clergy sex abuse and is demanding that priests who have raped and molested children turn themselves in.

Francis on Friday dedicated his annual Christmas speech to the Vatican bureaucracy to abuse, evidence that a year of devastating revelations has shaken his papacy and caused a crisis of confidence in the Catholic hierarchy.

Francis acknowledged that the church in the past had failed to treat the problem seriously, but vowed that going forward, it would never cover up or dismiss cases again and would “spare no effort” to find justice for pedophiles.

He urged victims to come forward and issued a stark warning to abusers: “Convert and hand yourself over to human justice, and prepare for divine justice.”

Source page (https://nypost.com/2018/12/21/pope-to-priestly-sex-abusers-turn-yourselves-in/)

Gio

21st December 2018, 13:06

A seriously funny premise ...

Colin Quinn Thinks the United States Needs to Break Up

Late Night with Seth Meyers

"Colin Quinn shares the premise of his show Red State Blue State and
the changes he's noticed in what audiences expect from comedy."

Published on Dec 21, 2018

5:08 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHY5XVMZeno

Gio

21st December 2018, 13:24

Trump's presidency gives it a new meaning ...

http://stonehengetours.com/stones-wintersunset.jpg

December 21st, 2018

Winter Solstice, the Northern Hemispheres darkest day of the year.

Gio

22nd December 2018, 02:47

When you're gone ...

http://static.atimes.com/uploads/2017/01/000_Was8958507-630x378.jpg

I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better

The Byrds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KPbLi5Dh00

Gio

22nd December 2018, 04:03

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c13c8323089175a92134f2f/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC121418.jpg

“Can we limit the government shutdown to just the White House?”

And Congress !

https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/partial-government-shutdown-to-start-at-at-midnight.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1328&h=882&crop=1

Gio

22nd December 2018, 04:21

The latest ...

Stop The World

Max Igan - Surviving the Matrix - Episode 360 - American Voice Radio

"Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past."
- George Orwell

thecrowhouse
Published on Dec 21, 2018

54:14 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZOJeAoFWSc

Gio

22nd December 2018, 17:29

"Can you hear me now" ...

https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/flag.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1236&h=820&crop=1

How arrest of Chinese ‘princess’ exposes regime’s world domination plot

By Steven W. Mosher

December 22, 2018

"Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in Vancouver on Dec. 6 led to immediate blowback.

Furious Chinese Communists have begun arresting innocent Canadians in retaliation. So far, three of these “revenge hostages” have been taken and are being held in secret jails on vague charges. Beijing hints that the hostage count may grow if Meng is not freed and fast.

Even for a thuggish regime like China’s, this kind of action is almost unprecedented.

So who is Meng Wanzhou?

Currently under house arrest and awaiting extradition to the US, she will face charges that her company violated US sanctions by doing business with Iran and committed bank fraud by disguising the payments it received in return.

But to say that she is the CFO of Huawei doesn’t begin to explain her importance — or China’s reaction.

It turns out that “Princess” Meng, as she is called, is Communist royalty. Her grandfather was a close comrade of Chairman Mao during the Chinese Civil War, who went on to become vice governor of China’s largest province.

She is also the daughter of Huawei’s Founder and Chairman, Ren Zhengfei. Daddy is grooming her to succeed him when he retires.

In other words, Meng is the heiress apparent of China’s largest and most advanced hi-tech company, and one which plays a key role in China’s grand strategy of global domination.

Huawei is a leader in 5G technology and, earlier this year, surpassed Apple to become the second largest smartphone maker in the world behind Samsung.

But Huawei is much more than an innocent manufacturer of smartphones.

It is a spy agency of the Chinese Communist Party.

How do we know?

Because the party has repeatedly said so.

First in 2015 and then again in June 2017, the party declared that all Chinese companies must collaborate in gathering intelligence.

“All organizations and citizens,” reads Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law, “must support, assist with, and collaborate in national intelligence work, and guard the national intelligence work secrets they are privy to.”

All Chinese companies, whether they are private or owned by the state, are now part and parcel of the party’s massive overseas espionage campaign.

Huawei is a key part of this aggressive effort to spy on the rest of the world. The company’s smartphones, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, can be used to “maliciously modify or steal information,” as well as “conduct undetected espionage.” Earlier this year the Pentagon banned the devices from all US military bases worldwide.

But Huawei, which has been specially designated as a “national champion,” has an even more important assignment from the Communist Party than simply listening in on phone conversations.

As a global leader in 5G technology, it has been tasked with installing 5G “fiber to the phone” networks in countries around the world.

In fact, “Made in China 2025” — the party’s aggressive plan to dominate the cutting-edge technologies of the 21st century — singles out Huawei as the key to achieving global 5G dominance.

Any network system installed by a company working hand-in-glove with China’s intelligence services raises the danger of not only cyber espionage, but also cyber-enabled technology theft.

And the danger doesn’t stop there.

The new superfast 5G networks, which are 100 times faster than 4G, will literally run the world of the future. Everything from smartphones to smart cities, from self-driving vehicles to, yes, even weapons systems, will be under their control.

In other words, whoever controls the 5G networks will control the world — or at least large parts of it.

Huawei has reportedly secured more than 25 commercial contracts for 5G, but has been locked out of an increasing number of countries around the world because of spying concerns.

The “Five Eyes” — Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the US — have over the past year waged a concerted campaign to block the Chinese tech giant from dominating next-generation wireless networks around the world. Not only have they largely kept Huawei out of their own countries, they have convinced other countries like Japan, India and Germany to go along, too.

Yet Huawei is far from finished. The company has grown into a global brand over the past two decades because, as a “national champion,” it is constantly being fed and nourished by the party and the military with low-interest-rate loans, privileged access to a protected domestic market, and other preferential treatment.

These various state subsidies continue, giving Huawei a huge and unfair advantage over its free market competitors.

Huawei stands in the same relationship to the Chinese Communist Party as German steelmaker Alfried Krupp did to Germany’s National Socialists in the days leading up to WWII.

Just as Germany’s leading supplier of armaments basically became an arm of the Nazi machine after war broke out, so is China’s leading hi-tech company an essential element of the party’s cold war plan to dominate the world of the future.

As far as “Princess” Meng is concerned, I expect that she will be found guilty of committing bank fraud, ordered to pay a fine, and then released. Even a billion dollar fine would be chump change for a seventy-five-billion-dollar corporation like Huawei.

The real payoff of her arrest lies elsewhere. It has exposed the massive campaign of espionage that Huawei is carrying out around the world at the behest of the Party. It has revealed how that Party dreams of a new world order in which China, not America, is dominant.

The two Chinese characters that make up Huawei’s name literally mean, “To Serve China.” That’s clear enough, isn’t it?"

Source page (https://nypost.com/2018/12/22/how-arrest-of-chinese-princess-exposes-regimes-world-domination-plot/)

Chris

22nd December 2018, 20:05

Huawei is, has been and always will be the technological arm of the Chinese Red Army. It is a very serious threat. When Western intelligence agencies are worried about its power and reach, you know it is a serious situation. Some countries (such as Canada and France, I believe) have started taking down Huawei's telecom infrastructure, because they realised it is used for spying and the Chinese Army has a direct backdoor into their industrial and consumer equipment.

Gio

23rd December 2018, 10:15

The ongoing mystery of a peculiar celestial object ...

Eugene Bagashov: Oumuamua -- Surprising Data Leads to Strange Theories | Space News

ThunderboltsProject

2018 has witnessed the deepening of an ongoing astronomical mystery. Last year, we reported on the discovery of the first asteroid which is believed to have originated from outside the solar system. The possible interstellar traveler called Oumuamua has challenged astronomers to explain its origins and nature. Debates have raged over whether the object is actually an asteroid or comet. More recently, based on its anomalous acceleration as it moved away from the Sun, some scientists have even proposed that it may be a kind of alien technology. In part one of this three-part investigation, physicist Eugene Bagashov continues his analysis of this intriguing and perhaps very significant celestial object.

Eugene's previous discussions of 'Oumuamua: Interstellar Asteroid Raises Mysteries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qisQ5_LadBQ

Interstellar Asteroid Continues to Puzzle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm6nQahrgXU

Published on Dec 15, 2018

15:09 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr0LX8VVCHI&feature=em-uploademail

Part 2 ...

Eugene Bagashov: Oumuamua's Strange Acceleration and Other Anomalies | Space News

ThunderboltsProject

In part one of this presentation, physicist Eugene Bagashov began his analysis of the ongoing mysteries surrounding the first ever so-called interstellar asteroid, 'Oumuamua. Eugene scrutinized the rather surprising hypothesis that the object is not natural, but rather a kind of extraterrestrial technology. That hypothesis arose primarily from 'Oumuamua’s peculiar acceleration as it moved away from the Sun. However, as Eugene will explain, this is certainly not the first instance that the velocity of an object in our solar system has puzzled astronomers, only one of several enigmas Oumuamua presents. Based on the limited available data, Eugene continues his analysis of this intriguing celestial traveler.

Published on Dec 22, 2018

16:17 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJgpFDU4dwE&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

23rd December 2018, 11:14

The latest stuff ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

***

Mt Adams/ Trout Lake, Washington

Yesterday with storms a coming...

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/48378628_10210687596581104_1000950980260397056_n.j pg?_nc_cat=107&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=02387134babe2716a68b0f644616d3c7&oe=5CD061CA

Below - early this morning ...

It's beginning to look a lot like ...

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/48397235_10210692751629977_969355547268612096_n.jp g?_nc_cat=104&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=07db57b14d7dd3ac7b6492e9c305f57c&oe=5CA20896

Gio

23rd December 2018, 11:23

Tis the season ...

https://i0.wp.com/i.pinimg.com/736x/61/f9/bb/61f9bb66cc0e79f06246876ba2f4f512--christmas-humor-merry-christmas.jpg

Gio

23rd December 2018, 11:32

While on the East Coast ...
It's getting better all the time ... http://www.animated-smileys.com/emoticons/animated-smileys-animals-020.gif

Reuben the Bulldog: Fresh Air Therapy

"The weather is fine so it's time to get out and stretch some stubby, funky English bulldog legs."

Published on Dec 22, 2018

4:32 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJVX-Gra7s0&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

23rd December 2018, 11:50

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5a2efb0a3f8ec91405e4a614/4:3/w_960,c_limit/Cobb-The-Worst-Part-of-Donald-Trumps-Visit-to-the-Civil-Rights-Museum.jpg

Donald Trump’s Survival Strategy: Chaos, Diversions, and Lily-Livered Republicans

By John Cassidy

"Amid all the hot air that has been exhaled over the past twenty-some hours over the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis and an impending government shutdown, the sharpest comment I saw came from the eighty-year-old Leon Panetta, someone who has seen and done virtually everything in Washington—from serving in Congress for sixteen years to heading the Office of Management and acting as the White House chief of staff during the Clinton Administration, and serving as the director of the C.I.A. and Secretary of Defense under Barack Obama. When interviewed by CNN’s Erin Burnett on Thursday evening, Panetta bemoaned Donald Trump’s failure to heed, or even listen to, the advice of his advisers, such as Mattis, and added, “He enjoys chaos because he thinks chaos produces attention for him.”

Perhaps the point isn’t wholly original, but it cannot be overemphasized. From the days when Trump posed as a fictitious spokesman called John Barron and tried to place favorable items in the New York tabloids, his primary goal has been to garner attention. Long before the development of the Netscape Web browser and the invention of the term “Attention Economy,” he intuited that attention was the ultimate scarce resource, and that he or she who commands it is in a very powerful position. Eventually, this insight took him all the way to the Presidency. Now, as a tangle of investigations envelops him, his family, and his Presidency, Trump is relying on it to try to extricate himself.

In geostrategic terms, announcing just before Christmas the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria was a boon for Damascus, Ankara, and Moscow. Politically, it was a stunt designed to garner attention and please the base. The fact that it ended up costing Trump his Secretary of Defense is not something that will concern him; he has long been opposed to Mattis’s Atlanticist view of U.S. security policy. In an October interview with “60 Minutes,” he called the former Marine Corps general “sort of a Democrat,” and also said, “He may leave.” We don’t have it on the record, but it’s fair to assume that Trump hated the narrative that Mattis’s presence in the Administration was the only thing preventing disaster. And, as someone ultra-sensitive to slights, it surely didn’t escape his notice that, according to Bob Woodward, Mattis had compared him to a fifth or sixth grader.

Threatening to shut down parts of the federal government in order to get funding for a border wall is another surefire attention-grabber. The only surprise here was that, after initially telling Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer that he would force a shutdown and take ownership of it, he signalled that he may be willing to compromise. But once Ann Coulter, La Pasionaria of the Deplorables, reminded him of his obligations to his most ardent supporters, he quickly recanted. On Friday morning, he upped the ante on Twitter, calling on Mitch McConnell to go to DEFCON 1 to insure the passage of a spending bill with funding for the wall: “Mitch, use the Nuclear Option and get it done! Our Country is counting on you.”

Far from being disturbed by the prospect of hundreds of thousands of federal employees being furloughed for an indefinite period, Trump was revelling in setting the news agenda and the fact that he had torpedoed a compromise in the House of Representatives, thereby displaying his dominance over the G.O.P. leadership. Hours after the House passed a spending bill that included more than five billion dollars for his wall, he tweeted, “No matter what happens today in the Senate, Republican House Members should be very proud of themselves . . . I am very proud of you!” Turning his attention to a looming vote in the Senate, he added in yet another tweet early Friday morning, “Shutdown today if Democrats do not vote for Border Security!”

From a conventional political perspective, this looked like madness. Last week, a Marist University/NPR poll showed that Americans, by a majority of almost two to one, think that Trump should compromise on the border wall rather than push for a shutdown. As the acute political analyst Ronald Brownstein pointed out earlier this week, Trump is doubling down on a strategy with little over-all support that failed abysmally for the Republican Party in the recent midterms.

But Trump isn’t a conventional President, and these are anything but conventional times. At this point, his only goal is immediate survival. NBC News recently reported that Trump has told friends that he is alarmed about the prospect of impeachment. But he probably believes that, if he can get through the next few weeks and months, and the delivery of the Mueller report, he can regroup for the start of the 2020 election campaign, when he could have dozens of dueling Democratic primary candidates to feast on.

Wishful thinking, maybe. But, as long as Trump can maintain his high approval ratings among Republican voters, he has reason to doubt that the G.O.P. leadership will ever abandon him. He has the tactical advantage that he doesn’t recognize many of the moral, legal, and historical constraints that hemmed in other Presidents. And he lives by Steve Bannon’s maxim that the way to counter his critics in the media and elsewhere is to “flood the zone with shit.”

The New Yorker
Source page (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/donald-trumps-survival-strategy-chaos-diversions-and-lily-livered-republicans)

Gio

23rd December 2018, 12:40

♪ Someday soon we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now ♪

***

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Judy Garland w/ Margaret O'Brien

Bonus ~

The Story Behind 'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas'
Listen/read here (https://www.npr.org/2010/11/19/131412133/the-story-behind-have-yourself-a-merry-little-christmas)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKG5X0QMSWA

Gio

24th December 2018, 12:10

An early Xmas present ...

From hunters to hunted ...

https://i1.wp.com/www.schwartzreport.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/priests-let-us-prey.gif?resize=768%2C780&ssl=1

Illinois Attorney General finds 500 more Catholic clergy accused of abuse

CHICAGO (AP) — "Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan on Wednesday issued a blistering report about clergy sexual abuse, saying that Catholic dioceses in Illinois has not released the names of at least 500 clergy accused of sexually abusing children.

The preliminary report found that the church's six archdioceses have done a woefully inadequate job of investigating allegations and in some cases did not investigate them at all or notify the state's child welfare agency. Madigan's office said that while the dioceses have disclosed 45 more names of those credibly accused, the total number of names disclosed is only 185 and raises questions about the church's response to the crisis.

"By choosing not to thoroughly investigate allegations, the Catholic Church has failed in its moral obligation to provide survivors, parishioners and the public a complete and accurate accounting of all sexually inappropriate behavior involving priests in Illinois," Madigan said in a statement. "The failure to investigate also means that the Catholic Church has never made an effort to determine whether the conduct of the accused priests was ignored or covered up by superiors."

The report does not include some key details such as when the allegations were made. It also does not accuse the dioceses of withholding the names of `credibly" accused clergy, only that the list of names of accused clergy is far longer than has been made public.

A Madigan spokeswoman said that the allegations date back decades and include some priests who are now deceased.

The Illinois disclosures are a new blow to the credibility of the church, which has struggled to contain the scandal amid mounting accusations of negligence. In August, a Pennsylvania grand jury report alleged that hundreds of priests abused at least 1,000 children over seven decades in that state. The report prompted Pope Francis to call U.S. bishops for a retreat at a suburban Chicago seminary next month to debate how to respond.

Larry Antonsen, a Chicago leader of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said Madigan is doing the right thing and needs to continue. He said Illinois should convene a grand jury with subpoena power, as in Pennsylvania.

"There's more that needs to be done. The Catholic Church does not do a good job of policing itself, and you can't expect them to do that," Antonsen said. "It's hard to know what to believe because so much of what they're doing is in secret and not out in the open, but this is a step in the right direction."

A leading attorney who has represented survivors of abuse called for the additional names of priests to be made public.

"The Illinois Bishops must release these names immediately so that survivors can heal and no other kids are harmed," said Minneapolis-based Jeff Anderson.

Madigan's office said the problems went beyond a lack of effort. In some cases, the report found, efforts were made to work against the accusers.

"When the Illinois Dioceses investigated an allegation, they frequently found reasons not to deem an allegation `credible' or `substantiated,"' according to the report. Not only did Madigan's office find a "pattern" of dioceses failing to substantiate allegations that came from one person, "The dioceses also often found reasons to discredit survivors' stories of abuse by focusing on the survivors' personal lives."

Illinois church leaders expressed regret about the abuse, but pointed to steps they have taken to address what has become an international crisis.

Chicago's archbishop, Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, in a statement said that although he regretted "our failures to address the scourge of clerical sexual abuse," the archdiocese has been a leader in dealing with the issue, including a policy since 2002 of reporting "all allegations of child sexual abuse to civil authorities."

The Springfield diocese said that it reviewed paper files of clergy dating to its 1923 founding and provided Madigan's office with documentation of each instance of abuse, regardless of whether it was deemed credible, according to a statement.

The Diocese of Joliet said in a statement that it took steps such as establishing in 1993 a review committee made up of people from law enforcement, social service agencies and others to investigate allegations of sexual abuse.

Madigan said her office's findings make it clear that notifying authorities is critical, and pointing to instances when dioceses used personal information about people to discredit them and help them conclude accusations weren't credible. "The preliminary stages of this investigation have already demonstrated that the Catholic Church cannot police itself," she said."

The News-Gazette
Source page (http://www.news-gazette.com/news/2018-12-20/illinois-ag-finds-500-more-catholic-clergy-accused-abuse.html)

Gio

24th December 2018, 13:42

Come on down and visit Uncle Bill !

http://projectavalon.net/Amazon/Bill_Ryan_by_waterfall.jpg

Traveling Ecuador by train | DW Travel Documentary

"The train line through Ecuador is considered one of the most spectacular train lines in South America. A train journey of discovery. The Trans-Andean railroad takes in the infamous Nariz del Diablo, or Devil’s Nose, a mountain with almost perpendicular walls. To overcome this obstacle, the train zigzags to ascend 500 meters in less than 12 kilometers. With steep ascents and descents, it’s no ride for the faint-hearted! The main line along the country’s Andean spine links the coastal city of Guayaquil with the capital Quito. It was finished in 1908, but was mostly shut down after a series of weather-related disasters destroyed much of the Ecuadorian rail network in the 1990s. After extensive restoration, a new cross-Andean service was opened in 2013, following the original narrow-gauge line. It’s 450 kilometers long and runs from the Pacific coast up to the Andean highlands. On its cross-country journey, the train is accompanied by guards on motorcycles who, in the absence of railway gates, stop traffic at every level crossing along the way to let the train pass.

The Tren Crucero, - or "cruise train"- is the centerpiece of Ecuador’s rejuvenated railway. A revamped luxury steam train, it runs once a fortnight and has room for 54 passengers. The most exhilarating stretch of the ride begins deep down in the gorge of the River Chanchán. The train zigzags up the Nariz del Diablo - the "Devil's Nose" - in a series of dizzying switchbacks in which the tracks almost seem to lie on top of each other. Join the reporters for the ride of a lifetime, as the train journeys on to Urbina, the highest station at 3,609 meters above sea level, and along the so-called Avenue of Volcanoes, to the Cotopaxi National Park and onwards to Quito, the world's highest capital."

42:25 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P-iPXsylrk

Gio

24th December 2018, 14:05

And for those so inclined ...

KEITH M. HUNTER ~ "Occult Mysteries, Alien Gods & Real Birthdate Of Christ"

Age Of Truth TV

"British author, lecturer and mythology researcher, KEITH M. HUNTER has been studying ancient mythology and the Bible for years. He has discovered an alternative way - a secret code - to interpret dates in the Bible and the story of Jesus, with the use of numbers, occult mysticism and ancient star constellations. WHAT IS THE REAL BIRTHDATE OF JESUS CHRIST? That is one of the major revelations in this brand new AGE OF TRUTH TV interview. That, a lot of other incredible and fascinating alternative information, when Keith M. Hunter takes the viewers on an interesting journey - a 2-hour eye-opening lecture with a slideshow: OCCULT PHYSICS - WORLD MYSTERIES - FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE. Alternative history, supposedly known to The Illuminati and previously to ancient civilisations, which included Alien/Extra-Terrestrial beings on Earth, according to Hunter.

During the first 1 hour 20 minutes, Age Of Truth TV presenter, Lucas Alexander, will be asking a lot of in-depth hard-talk style questions to Keith M. Hunter, who is joining AOT TV via an on-line connection to England. After that first Q&A section, Keith M. Hunter will be giving his fascinating 2 hour lecture, and by the end of the presentation, Lucas Alexander will be returning with Hunter to ask questions about the controversial claim that Jesus was NOT born on Christmas day, 25 December, but on an entirely different date and month, which Hunter will reveal."

KEITH M. HUNTER WEBSITE: http://www.occultphysics.com

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

- RELIGION: Is the Bible telling you the truth?
- When could Jesus and other Biblical figures actually have been
born? Wrong Holy Days?
- Ancient Star Alignments and Star Constellations.
- Alien Gods and Alien Civilisations.
- The Ancients: Egyptians, Greeks, Sumerians, Mayans.....
- The Calendar System. Looking for codes.
- Numerology and Numbers Numbers Numbers....
- Climate Change Hoax and Global Warming Political-Media scare.
- Flat Earth Theory vs. Hollow Earth Theory.
- Parallel Universes.
- Immanuel Velikovsky´s work. Inspiration and Flaws.
- "The X-Files" & "Clash Of The Titans" & "Knowing". Truth in mythology
entertainment.
- Sin, Gods Wrath and Lust.
- ARCHONS - Demiurge, Demons, Jinns! Evil soul-eating entities?
- The Death Trap "fake white light" vs. Heaven.
- Astronomy & Astrology.

Published on Dec 23, 2018

An excellent informational video to
view/listen to in segments during
the holiday season !

3:24:34 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWa-lpmNon8&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

24th December 2018, 15:40

The original "House On a Haunted Hill" location ...

WOW !
check the article photo (s)

https://images.dwell.com/photos-6328431439726800896/6425039151472709632-large/considered-the-largest-of-frank-lloyd-wrights-experimental-textile-block-houses-in-los-angeles-the-ennis-house-comprises-over-27000-concrete-blocks-stacked-atop-a-concrete-platform.jpg

One of the most impressive homes in America has surfaced on the market after a
nearly $17,000,000 restoration ... Now, it's looking for a new buyer ...

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconic Ennis House Is Listed For $23M (https://www.dwell.com/article/frank-lloyd-wrights-iconic-ennis-house-los-angeles-real-estate-3f532d7f-36e74bf9)

Gio

24th December 2018, 17:56

Thanks Sian ...
Merry Christmas https://www.smiley-lol.com/smiley/noel/sapin/sapin-nouv10.gif

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/3YWRHIJ3MIk/maxresdefault.jpg

Reubin

Hey Bulldog - The Beatles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4vbJQ-MrKo

Gio

25th December 2018, 14:56

The Queen's Christmas message 2018 ...

The Queen uses her Christmas message to call for unity, saying that the "message of peace on Earth" is "needed as much as ever". The broadcast has become a traditional part of Christmas Day and is a rare chance for her to share her personal thoughts with people in the UK and across the Commonwealth. She has read the message across different platforms since 1952.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNZ6vczX3xY

Sky News
Published on Dec 25, 2018

Gio

26th December 2018, 12:22

Meanwhile ...

Donald Trump in 'Home Alone 2'

https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2018/12/maxresdefault-1-640x400.jpg

Santa went that-a-way.

Gio

26th December 2018, 12:34

ONE DAY IN SCOTLAND | The Highlands & Loch Ness

Gabriel Traveler

"A day tour of the incredible Scottish Highlands, boating on Loch Ness and much more."

Published on Dec 26, 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtCPEQZlmks&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

26th December 2018, 14:47

https://www.smiley-lol.com/smiley/maison/television/sdevanttele.gif

Psychological Operations or PSYOP are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals.

http://www.omaghenterprise.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Untitled.png

Were The Beatles a British Intelligence Pysop

On this episode of Rock N Roll Twilight Zone with Richard Syrett....

'Were The Beatles created as a psychological warfare weapon by British Intelligence? Richard speaks with a media scientist, a pop culture critic and a music journalist who discuss the merits of this fascinating and complex conspiracy theory' ...

GUESTS:

Nelson S. Thall is recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the science of communication/media and process analysis. His expertise has afforded him the opportunity to define law terms for the Federal Court of Canada and develop a television series with Dr. Timothy Leary. Bill Gates and Peter Lloyd invited Thall to contribute an essay to the book Webweaving. While a Graduate Student studying at the University of Toronto with Professor Marshall McLuhan, Thall became a McLuhan Protege and served as the President of the Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications from 1990-1995. He has served on the Boards of Directors of Torstar, Stan Lee Media Inc., Peace Arch Films & Entertainment and other publicly traded media companies. He is a lecturer/author and has been a consultant to companies in the United States, Russia, Canada and Britain.

Jay Dyer is the author of Esoteric Hollywood: Sex, Cults and Symbols in Film. He is the host of the JaysAnalysis Podcast/Esoteric Hollywood. He is also a regular contributor to 21stCenturyWire, Soul of the East and the Espionage History Archive. Broaching subjects as wide as satire, metaphysics, film analysis, theology, geopolitics, literature and history, as well as interviewing numerous prominent figures, Jay has authored hundreds of articles already read by millions in just the past few years. Jay is also working with Jay Weidner on a new television series for Gaia based on this unique approach to film.

Dave Gerard is a Unix system administrator by day. His job includes keeping track of exciting new technologies and advising against the bad ones. He was previously an award-winning music journalist, and has blogged about music at Rocknerd.co.uk since 2001. He is the author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts. He is a volunteer spokesperson for Wikipedia, and is on the board of the RationalMedia Foundation, host of skeptical wiki RationalWiki.org. Originally from Australia, he lives in east London with his spouse Arkady Rose and their daughter. Until he reinstalled the laptop they were on, he was the proud owner of six Dogecoins.

34:02 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2qiBiriPg8

Gio

27th December 2018, 15:07

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c1c19dc1fa04b334bab0784/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC122718.jpg

“Let’s savor these last fleeting moments before the election cycle begins anew.”

Gio

27th December 2018, 16:19

The latest stuff ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

***

Why monks had that haircut

There was a lot of thought behind the style — and controversy.

Vox
Published on Dec 26, 2018

5:42 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A505-D4IA_0&t=275s

Gio

27th December 2018, 16:38

Holiday travel woes ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/f4/e6/22/f4e6224b80196091492b726e3791dffc.jpg

***

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/3d/90/0e/3d900e4235a9b88107b983961e9e526e.jpg

Gio

28th December 2018, 02:11

Hey Donald ...

To bad you can't legally deploy the troops you just signed to withdraw from Syria ...
All along the border.

https://twt-thumbs.washtimes.com/media/image/2018/04/05/20180405edsuc-a_s878x550.jpg?05b08a207071a7c1e6d482553e408d92802 80cf0

Below video from early Spring 2016 ...

Bears repeat/reminding ...

Border Wall: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

"People love to pay for things they don't want"

Published on Mar 20, 2016

18:32 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU8dCYocuyI

Gio

28th December 2018, 02:56

Speaking of ...

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2018/12/27/23/7881646-0-image-a-36_1545951831963.jpg

How British amateur photographer revealed Trump's not-so-secret trip to Iraq
after spotting Air Force One flying over South Yorkshire with a zoom lens ...

"An amateur photographer and plane spotter in England was among the first to identify Air Force One as the distinctive blue and white jet airliner carried President Trump and first lady Melania Trump on a highly secret trip to Iraq for a visit with US troops.

It all started with the white contrails in a blue sky.

“I literally stepped out, and I could see a trail coming towards me and thought, ‘Let’s have a look at what’s on the end of that.’ And then I looked through the viewfinder and thought, ‘This is worth photographing, it’s not just a normal airliner,'” Alan Meloy told CNN, describing the sight from his kitchen window in Sheffield on Wednesday morning.
see also

Immediately, Meloy, an IT project manager who has been keeping an eye on the skies for 40 years, knew it wasn’t any ordinary plane.

“I was absolutely amazed when that came past … I knew it was one of the two VC-25s,” Meloy told the cable network. “I had no idea who was on it, in my mind I was thinking, ‘It must be someone pretty important.'”

He snapped a picture with his Canon 7D from about 25 miles away.

There are only two VC-25s in the world, and the modified Boeing 747-200 jets alternate as Air Force One to ferry the commander-in-chief on his travels around the world.

The president’s plane, which typically uses the call sign “AF1,” had already caught the attention of other aviation enthusiasts like “CivMilAir,” a plane tracker in England, even though it showed up with the call sign “RCH 358,” referred to as “Reach 358.”

The call sign is used by the military to designate cargo planes.

Air Force One swept across England at a consistent 31,000 feet.

Meloy posted a photo of the plane on his Flickr account to see if anybody else noticed the aircraft.

Social media users expressed skepticism or simply told him he was completely off target because Air Force One uses a different call sign, Meloy said.

“So all I said was I know what I’ve seen, it’s a VC-25, there’s only two of those in the world — that’s all I can tell you. There’s my photograph,” he said.

Despite Meloy being careful not to spark rumors, his photo caused speculation to swirl that Trump was on his way to Iraq or Afghanistan.

A few hours later, Air Force One touched down at al-Asad air base just west of Baghdad.

Reporters who traveled with Trump were told not to report on his visit until after they had departed Iraq.

Trump even remarked on the lengths taken to keep his trip on the down low.

“If you had seen what we had to go through with the darkened plane, with all windows closed, with no lights on whatsoever anywhere. Pitch black. I have never seen anything like it,” Trump told reporters."

Text source page (https://nypost.com/2018/12/27/photographer-spotted-air-force-one-en-route-to-trumps-surprise-iraq-visit/)

Gio

28th December 2018, 04:03

Bah humbug ... http://www.animated-smileys.com/emoticons/animated-smileys-animals-020.gif

Reuben the Bulldog: There, I Fixed It

Published on Dec 26, 2018

2:36 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9-Jzy3tcdc&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

28th December 2018, 15:07

https://images.askmen.com/1080x540/news/power_money/checking-emails-after-work-is-stressing-us-out-1108050-TwoByOne.jpg

Trump should build his wall with Hillary's emails...
Because nobody can get over them

Gio

28th December 2018, 19:21

Will share this research information here ...

Earth Catastrophe Cycle | SOLAR MICRONOVA

Suspicious0bservers

Published on Dec 28, 2018

A solar micronova satisfies all the catastrophe evidence, including the cyclical nature,
the disaster sweet-spot, AND impactor-like evidence.

Part 1 | https://youtu.be/wvjJqIXYT1w
Part 2 | https://youtu.be/_Cje2LJJKS8
Part 3 | https://youtu.be/Qy99GLyOcHw
Part 4 | THIS VIDEO

D. Vogt: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjBe55XpYzc0HzkK-8lgQtA

This topic will be discussed at Observing the Frontier 2019

20:07 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTUJ7GtEx0Y

Gio

28th December 2018, 20:05

With no doubt - the alternative community has been successfully infiltrated, embedded and diluted.

Eminence Front

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc4vYCbEL6Q

Aragorn

28th December 2018, 20:41

With no doubt - the alternative community has been successfully infiltrated, embedded and diluted.

Eminence Front

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc4vYCbEL6Q

You have no idea, Brother. And the irony of it is that I was already warning this so-called alternative community about that over a year ago, if you remember. We spoke about it on the "Voices of the Forums" video conferences in July 2017.

And here we are. :fpalm:

Gio

29th December 2018, 14:11

An unusual - though timely social experiment ...
Especially for those in the community ...

You Won't Believe This - The Most Dangerous Thing In The World

Teal Swan

"You Won’t believe this... The Most dangerous thing in the world is a subjective point of perspective mistaken as an objective perspective. Teal Swan talks to us about the filters from which we observe life and our personal perspective and how it’s been shaped. This dangerous thing in the world is where much of our suffering comes from and Teal teaches us how to remove these filters."

Published on Dec 29, 2018

17:22 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwrXmJJRp3Y&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

29th December 2018, 14:20

Continuing ...

How Is Train Travel in the United Kingdom? Scotland to England

Gabriel Traveler

Published on Dec 28, 2018

19:40 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKgfbyz9EtA&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

30th December 2018, 14:59

Will pass this quick reminder on ...
Especially during this time of year ...

How to Stop a Cold at the First Sign with...

Dr. Eric Berg DC (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3w193M5tYPJqF0Hi-7U-2g)

Published on Dec 30, 2018

4:00 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K-nq704I8E

Gio

31st December 2018, 12:40

:group hug: Power versus force ...
A new year eve pep talk listen !

Awakening and Loving Our Way Out of the Matrix with Sasha Daygame of Infinite Man Summit

TheAnarchast

Published on Dec 30, 2018

Jeff Berwick interviews multiple returning guest and Anarchapulco veteran, Sasha Daygame. Topics include: Sasha's recent viral videos, fear based propaganda, waking people up by exposing the ludicrousness of their ideas, women are wonderful, men are horrible, the commie takeover of universities, getting to know your self, a higher consciousness, we are all one, the watcher within, love rising, who runs the matrix, the nature of bliss, transcending your own suffering, running from your self, the prison of conformity, if you are suffering you are still in the matrix, following your heart vs living in fear, service to others, change yourself to change the world, profound self transformation at the Infinite Man Summit

Sasha's video: FACT: Men Are Better Than Women (at Some Things) https://youtu.be/oxpX6IQ3GY4

55:21 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZQhXS5lHsQ&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

31st December 2018, 13:51

New ways of understanding ...

Wal Thornhill: The Saturn/Earth Connection and Our Place in the Universe | Space News

ThunderboltsProject

Published on Dec 30, 2018

"In part one of this presentation, physicist Wal Thornhill began his analysis of one of the most significant space discoveries in recent memory. The history and origin of the gas giant Saturn, and indeed the entire solar system, including our own planet is not what we’ve been told. Planetary scientists recently made the astonishing discovery that water in Saturn’s satellites and rings is remarkably similar to the water on Earth. As Thornhill explained, this discovery was explicitly predicted nearly three quarters of a century ago, by the scientific heretic Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky. In this episode, Thornhill outlines his own successful predictions for discoveries in the Saturnian system, including Saturn's moon Titan."

Please note ...
Part one of this two-part presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkPpR8t1qvk

27:37 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fjcPguafug&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

1st January 2019, 04:33

Holly Crap ... https://imgfast.net/users/2911/23/55/04/smiles/262321.gif

Joe Rogan Experience - 2018 Year in Review

Published on Dec 31, 2018

43:08 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ1RAd2A-rs

Gio

1st January 2019, 15:28

Ready Steady Go ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

https://external-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php?d=AQCBCO0aBIcDxPu8&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia1.tenor.co%2Fimages%2F3ddd4 cbd7ba6b19707f32f6214a45a8b%2Ftenor.gif%3Fitemid%3 D13140253&ext=gif&_nc_hash=AQBZPwK1DNfa3iSz

Gio

1st January 2019, 16:03

Life's little stinkers ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/5c/6c/f4/5c6cf4c0c5a6e287a4f7e6350e123106.jpg

Gio

1st January 2019, 16:45

Continuing ...

How Expensive is LONDON, ENGLAND? Exploring the City

Gabriel Traveler

Published on Jan 1, 2019

13:46 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS0TzdyOHqI&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

1st January 2019, 18:00

Old Movie Stars Dance to Uptown Funk

♪ Don't believe me ... :laurel-and-hardy-da
Just watch ♪

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1F0lBnsnkE&fbclid=IwAR2OF4r493CBCKoPWE6WlYKXauuQkctYrSgF64An6 EvATytd14RXDI7VCSc

Gio

1st January 2019, 20:44

A timely talk/discussion ...

Steve Taylor - Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World

LegaliseFreedom1

Published on Jan 1, 2019

"Steve Taylor discusses his book 'Spiritual Science - Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World'. Is it possible that the most profound mysteries of existence can be solved not through science or spirituality alone, but through an approach that combines them both? In this ground-breaking book, Steve Taylor offers a new vision of the world that is compatible with both modern science and ancient spiritual teachings. 'Spiritual Science' reveals Taylor's 'panspiritist' view of reality, one that transcends both conventional science and religion, and answers many of the riddles that neither can fully explain.

The standard model of science has had limited success in explaining many phenomena, including consciousness, the connection between mind and body, altruism, and anomalies such as near-death experiences, psychic phenomena and spiritual awakenings, to name just a few. But from a panspiritist perspective - which sees spirit or consciousness as a fundamental essence of reality - it is possible to make sense of all these things. Drawing on the insights of philosophers, physicists, and mystics, as well as spiritual traditions and indigenous cultures, Taylor makes a compelling case for a spiritual vision of reality; a vision of a sacred and interconnected world, and of a meaningful and purposeful human life. The purely materialist model of reality is taking us to the brink of disaster. It is time to take a wider view before it's too late."

website: https://www.stevenmtaylor.com/

1:04"05 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZKiRWlBsxI&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

2nd January 2019, 13:45

Mor (of a) man...

https://www.trbimg.com/img-5c2cb3cd/turbine/ct-romney-trump-op-ed-20190102-003/1600/1600x900
Then President-elect Donald Trump calls out to the media as Mitt Romney leaves the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in Bedminster, N.J., on Nov. 20, 2016, after a meeting to discuss the secretary of state job. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

Incoming Sen. Romney criticizes President Trump's character in op-ed

"Days away from joining the Senate's Republican majority, Sen.-elect Mitt Romney broadly criticized President Donald Trump's policies and character and argued that the president "has not risen to the mantle of the office."

"With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable," the Utah Republican and 2012 presidential nominee wrote in a Washington Post op-ed posted online Tuesday night. "And it is in this province where the incumbent's shortfall has been most glaring."

Romney's biting public assessment came as Trump and Senate Republicans faced a new governing dynamic. Republicans on Thursday will cede control of the House to Democrats, who were prepared to oppose Trump on a number of policies and promised a slew of investigations into his actions and those of his aides and campaign officials, particularly with regard to Russia's election meddling.

Trump responded to the op-ed on Wednesday morning, tweeting, "Here we go with Mitt Romney, but so fast! Question will be, is he a Flake? I hope not. Would much prefer that Mitt focus on Border Security and so many other things where he can be helpful. I won big, and he didn’t. He should be happy for all Republicans. Be a TEAM player & WIN!"

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, had criticized Trump before — notably, in a March 2016 speech he called Trump a "phony" and a "fraud" and opposed his bid for the GOP nomination — but later he made peace with the president-elect and even expressed interest in joining his administration.

Romney's rebuke of Trump drew a cutting reply from Brad Parscale, Trump's campaign manager. In a tweet Tuesday night, Parscale said Romney "lacked the ability to save this nation" and contended that Trump "has saved it."

"Jealously is a drink best served warm and Romney just proved it," Parscale wrote. "So sad, I wish everyone had the courage" Trump? had."

The reference to warm drinks seems to be a jab at the Mormon prohibition against "hot drinks," caffeinated beverages such as coffee and tea.

In the column, Romney offered approval of Trump's corporate tax policies and efforts to cut regulations, appoint conservative judges and other "policies mainstream Republicans have promoted for years. But policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency."

"To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation," Romney said. He later added: "With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent's shortfall has been most glaring."

While saying Trump's early administration appointments had been encouraging, Romney added that, "on balance, his conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions this month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office."

In describing a "deep descent" by the Trump presidency in December, Romney cited the departures of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House chief of staff John Kelly and what he called the appointment of people of lesser experience, the abandonment of allies, and Trump's "thoughtless claim that America has long been a 'sucker' in world affairs."

Looking ahead, Romney wrote that he would act as he would with any president from either party in the White House, supporting policies he believes are in the best interest of the country and his state and opposing those that are not. And he said he didn't intend to comment on every tweet or fault.

"But I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions," he said.

Romney, who will appear on CNN for an interview on Wednesday afternoon, will be sworn in as a senator on Thursday. He twice accepted Trump's endorsement for public office — once in 2012 while running for president and a more tepid approval during his latest Senate contest. He later said he would not have taken Trump's endorsement for president had he made the public comments Romney has since rebuked."

by Associated Press/ January 2, 2019
Source: Chicago Tribune (https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-romney-trump-op-ed-20190102-story,amp.html)

Gio

2nd January 2019, 14:47

http://www.animated-smileys.com/emoticons/animated-smileys-animals-020.gif

Reuben the Bulldog: Time To Get Moving?

Published on Jan 1, 2019

5:04 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoyX51LKxJI

Gio

2nd January 2019, 18:19

Musing Morris ...
Cambodian Pyramid, And Our Lost Past ...

Published on Jan 1, 2019

14:17 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvdQiIqSGNU&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

3rd January 2019, 04:18

https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/greensboro.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/6/00/60047563-5892-501e-9963-f7b4223dbda1/5c2d20b390795.image.jpg?resize=373%2C258
This screenshot of a YouTube video taken by Debra Thompson
shows what she believes is a UFO.

Is it a UFO? Multiple people report seeing flying red sphere off SC coast.

"A South Carolina woman says she filmed a possible UFO off South Carolina’s Kiawah Island (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQsSORRSzSE)on Christmas Eve, and other witnesses are stepping forward on social media to report they saw the same “beautiful red sphere.”

“I’m not a nut,” wrote Debra Thompson in a YouTube post with the video. “...I just wanted to know if anyone has had any experiences in the last few days...It really is quite amazing when you see one that seems to ‘splat’ out of another dimension and change into a round shape.”

Kiawah Island is just off the South Carolina coast, about 25 miles south of Charleston.

Thompson says in the video that she spotted the object about 9:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve as she stood on the deck of her home. One five-minute video shows “an extraordinarily bright and beautiful” red ball as it bounces, stops, fades and then grows brighter.

“What the hell is that?...It looks like fire in the sky,” Thompson says in the video. “That’s so weird. It just seems like it’s observing....I don’t think it’s some kid’s toy and I know it’s not an airplane.”

TV station WCBD posted Thompson’s video on Dec. 27 and reported four days later that the station had “received several emails from people who believe they may have also seen the mysterious object” in eastern South Carolina.

Even more people posted sightings on Facebook, including some who say they saw it in Ladson, North Myrtle Beach, Summerville and Edisto Beach, where someone told WCBD a room inside their home “lit up brighter than the full moon at about 6 a.m.”

Thompson says she has also heard directly from witnesses, including one who “saw something strange in the sky last night while driving on the highway.”

Some social media commenters have offered more down-to-earth ideas, guessing it was a drone, a Chinese lantern or a weather balloon.

Thompson has disputed those theories on YouTube and Facebook, saying the object was flying, “not floating.”

“It was dead still that night and crystal clear,” Thompson wrote Sunday. “There wasn’t a sound outside except for some owls. Not even a breeze. This was very high in the sky and it intelligently moved.”

The website UFO-Hunters.com says UFOs have been reported at least twice before off Kiawah Island since 2009, including a 2012 instance in which the object was described as “a very red round light.”

The Charleston Post & Courier reported on Dec. 31 that the sphere is “a phenomenon that turns up in the sky here every so often,” including multiple reports in 2015."

Source:greensboro.com (https://www.greensboro.com/news/north_carolina/is-it-a-ufo-multiple-people-report-seeing-flying-red/article_9283f0dc-5c64-5e71-b4d7-e618776e0755.html)

Gio

3rd January 2019, 20:11

https://s3.amazonaws.com/reader_public/cont_ph_6e25c6e3ea64a3372125e4e0786a9a48.jpg

Life After Facebook: What Would the World Lose ... and Gain?

"In September, a group of high school students in Melbourne, Australia, started a Facebook group called “Subtle Asian Traits.” The teenagers are all first-generation Asian migrants, and they wanted a space to bond over the theme of living in a Western culture with Asian-born parents. The group has amassed nearly 1 million members in less than four months. What began as a place to share memes and inside jokes about Asian culture has become a community where members discuss the racism they experience, their struggle to be bilingual and the parental pressure they face on a daily basis.

It would be an understatement to say Facebook had a tough 2018 — from multiple data breaches to unpermitted data collection and the revealed influence of Russian hackers in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook tested the limits of user trust last year. But if the world’s largest social network went away, we would lose a lot more than the ability to share photos and send messages. More than 1 billion people around the world would no longer be able to connect with others who share their experiences and hardships like the members of “Subtle Asian Traits.”

Recent U.S. news coverage of Facebook has largely focused on the issues of privacy and trust — warning us that the platform could be putting our personal data at risk. Some fear that the network effect — in which each additional member adds value to the platform for its users — could soon work in reverse for the embattled social network, especially among the prized younger demographic. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center …

The percentage of users ages 18 to 29 who deleted the app in 2018 was more than double the proportion of those ages 50 to 64 who deleted it.

The social network’s user growth has also plateaued in the U.S. and Canada, and declined in Europe, contributing to a $120 billion loss in market capitalization in July. As of the third quarter, Facebook had lost 1 million daily active users in Europe compared with the previous quarter. Twitter also saw user decline in 2018 — the company reported losing 9 million monthly active users in the third quarter, though a large portion of that figure comes from the spam and bot accounts it’s wiping from the platform

But much of the world isn’t giving up on Facebook just yet. As of September, 85 percent of Facebook’s daily active users are outside the U.S. and Canada. “Concerns around privacy and sharing data are separate from the function Facebook serves,” says Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab. “The idea of big-tech ethics is more abstract outside the U.S.”

If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, the platform’s groups would be one of its hardest-hit offerings. More than 100 million Facebook users belong to a group of some kind. Anne Gu, a co-founder of “Subtle Asian Traits,” recently told the BBC that a member of the group said being part of the community was the first time she “felt a sense of belonging.” In India, “Breastfeeding Support for Indian Mothers” has more than 80,000 members who support one another through various stages of breastfeeding their children. “Africa Farmers Club” has connected 100,000 farmers across the continent to share production techniques and help grow profits.

But the company’s reach goes beyond the limits of its own platform. Facebook also owns Instagram and WhatsApp — two of the largest social media networks in the world. Instagram hit 1 billion users in June and WhatsApp reached more than 1.5 billion this year. If Facebook goes down, these other companies would effectively go down with it.

On the other hand, the downfall of Facebook could open a wealth of opportunity for several other social media companies currently lingering lower on the totem pole. Public companies like Twitter and Snap might see some gains with a Facebook-size hole in the world, and small messaging platforms like Wickr and Silent Circle could see gains without Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp around. This may be especially true because both companies focus on encryption, something that’s becoming increasingly important in the wake of privacy concerns raised by Facebook this year. For the purposes of pure content scrolling, Pinterest and Reddit might see an uptick in users, and in terms of community engagement, neighborhood app Nextdoor could become the go-to for local organizing and events. “There’s really nothing that special about Facebook except that everyone is there,” says Hancock. If Facebook left the world, he says, people would find another place to gather on the internet.

Several former Facebook employees have tried, unsuccessfully, to create that new place. Jumo, a philanthropic social network acquired by GOOD in 2011, and Path, a now shuttered mobile photo sharing and messaging service, were founded by some of Facebook’s early team members. Question-and-answer site Quora and team organization tool Asana were both started by former Facebookers but are not direct competitors of the company. Some ex-Facebook executives now shun the site, as well as social media as a whole. In 2017, during a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Facebook’s former vice president for user growth, Chamath Palihapitiya, said the company is “ripping apart the social fabric” in societies around the world. The same year, Facebook’s former president, Sean Parker, told Axios that the network is “exploiting a vulnerability in human society.”

Still, if Facebook fails, it would serve as a cautionary tale to many that user privacy must be a top priority. Facebook’s neglect in this area may not ruin the company entirely, but risking the market share drop and PR nightmare that follows certainly doesn’t bode well for business.

In December, the stock market declined by more than 20 percent since Nasdaq’s August high, and technology giants are largely to blame. Facebook fell more than 5 percent, wiping out $28 billion in market capitalization in a single day. But Amazon and Netflix also fell more than 5 percent. Tensions over the U.S. trade war with China, where the government blocks Facebook, are also partly to blame as fear among investors over a global economic slowdown looms large. But when it comes to Facebook, privacy concerns are front and center. Experts caution that the company’s missteps over data privacy are contributing to the worst market decline since 2008, and the total collapse of Facebook could mean a loss of its current $382 billion in market capitalization.

Hancock says the way forward may be to treat Facebook the company and Facebook the platform differently. “Facebook Groups is an amazing space,” he says — and losing the platform means losing the potential of other offerings as well, like Marketplace, Oculus and its fundraising tools. “Still,” Hancock says, “I think we have to hold Facebook the business accountable.""

Source page (http://www.wiredfocus.com/life-after-facebook-what-would-the-world-lose-and-gain-acumen/)

Gio

3rd January 2019, 23:23

Wink wink ...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DwAr4yjWwAIhxNb.jpg

Let the ball busting commence !

Gio

4th January 2019, 15:30

Side of the moon you can’t see ‘is not dark, it’s just far’ ...

https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/china-dark-side-moon.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1236&h=820&crop=1
China's lunar rover leaves wheel marks after departing the
lander that touched down on the far side of the moon.

WASHINGTON — "Despite the name of Pink Floyd’s best-selling album, the side of the moon you can’t see isn’t always dark. But it is far.

So scientists call the area where a Chinese spacecraft just landed the far side, not the dark side.

“The other side sees the sun sometimes. The other side is not dark, it’s just far,” said Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. “It’s a mistake.”

The moon is what scientists call ”tidally locked,” which means the same side always faces us, while another side always faces away, Loeb said. When Earth views a darkened new moon, the far side is lit. When there’s a full moon in our sky, the far side is dark.

Every semester, Purdue University lunar and planetary scientist Jay Melosh demonstrates how the far side gets light using a bright light as the sun and students playing the roles of the moon and the Earth. But students still get it wrong on the midterm, calling it the dark side.

Melosh traces the myth back to a Walt Disney television special in 1955 that talked about it always being dark on the other side of the moon and futuristic astronauts dropping flares.

The term dark side really took off in 1973 with Pink Floyd’s mesmerizing album “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

While China is the first to land a spacecraft on the far side, there have been plenty of detailed photographs taken by orbiting spacecraft. The first grainy pictures came from a Soviet craft in 1959. NASA’s Apollo 8 astronauts saw it first when they orbited the moon 50 years ago."

Source (https://nypost.com/2019/01/04/side-of-the-moon-you-cant-see-is-not-dark-its-just-far/)

Gio

4th January 2019, 15:52

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fartbell.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F10%2FJohn-Hogue-Photo.jpg&f=1

John Hogue Prophecy Special!

From Whitley Strieber's Dreamland

"What will 2019 bring?? Prophet John Hogue weighs in!"

Published on Jan 4, 2019

1:13:10 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7A2x7ScsQU

Dreamtimer

5th January 2019, 03:52

Wow. I used to go to Whitley's site regularly. It's been a while. It's good to see that "The Experience" is still going. I listened to the first few when they started, they were good.

Gio

5th January 2019, 08:17

Wow. I used to go to Whitley's site regularly. It's been a while. It's good to see that "The Experience" is still going. I listened to the first few when they started, they were good.

Yes, it is good to see Whitley's site experience is still continuing to thrive.

Gio

5th January 2019, 08:23

The latest ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

***

Continuing the Pursuit of Freedom...

Max Igan - Surviving the Matrix - Episode 361 - American Voice Radio, January 4th, 2019

thecrowhouse
Published on Jan 4, 2019

54:54 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60U_7p6HQ7g&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

5th January 2019, 08:38

Fool them once ....

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/3e/62/58/3e6258df8ed2653698b339540e525e67.jpg

Gio

5th January 2019, 10:33

Will share this here ...

For your inspection ...

A special extended must read.

https://media.gq.com/photos/5be4618f00057045e6c282a9/16:9/w_1280/Robert-Mueller-GQ-December-2018-lede.jpg

Robert Mueller, the Master Of Silence

"He runs the most disciplined shop in Washington—and speaks through his indictments or not at all. But since Jeff Sessions resigned, he may no longer have that luxury. We talked to the people who know him best to figure out what might come next, and what it all means for Trump."

*********

"Somewhere in the mesosphere of Washington, D.C., where the pale marble declines into the concrete prairie, you will find the newish and largish building where special counsel Robert Mueller is silently drilling down into Donald Trump's White House. Try to imagine the shhh of a combination lock turning on a secure filing cabinet in that anonymous building, the ghostly whisper of papers shuffling between manila folders, the steel roll-down gate ascending so Michael Flynn or Paul Manafort or Michael Cohen can emerge from the mouth of the underground parking garage, their souls now unburdened of incriminating secrets, having disclosed them in the windowless confessional of the special counsel's conference room where, The Washington Post reports, Mueller, a “sphinx-like presence,” does not ask any questions himself, instead sitting in the back and letting his staff work the cooperating witnesses over, like a card player who lets his confederates do the betting.

The fuse on Mueller's investigation has been quietly burning away for more than a year. Soon it will, as the dueling partisans tell it, either explode into another Civil War or fizzle away into nothing at all. In the meantime, we make do with whatever pieces of news slip out. From Mueller, we've seen sober legal filings implicating various members of Trump's team. From Trump, we've been subjected to a series of increasingly anguished tweets. He has claimed that Mueller's investigation is “illegal” and a “Witch Hunt.” Most recently, he forced the resignation of Jeff Sessions and reassigned oversight of the special counsel to a loyalist, Matthew Whitaker, setting up what is likely to be the final stretch of the whole affair.

Rather than punch back, Mueller has maintained his silence. Those who know him are not surprised. Robert Swan Mueller III, now 74 years old, has long been revered by elders of both political parties. He is a throwback to an earlier regime, when, the story goes, Ivy League patricians entered government for the sake of service, not self-enrichment.

“He's the perfect choice,” said Ken Starr, whose memoir, Contempt, looks back on his time investigating Bill Clinton. “I know him from observation to be a person of complete integrity.”

“He is smart, dedicated, patriotic, and self-effacing,” said General James Clapper, the former intelligence chief. “There is no straighter arrow.”

Mueller's differences with Trump are expressed in part by their respective styles: barrel cuffs (Mueller) versus French cuffs (Trump), Brooks versus Brioni, lace-ups versus loafers, button-down collars versus spread collars, muted foulard belt-length ties versus shiny red scotch-taped descenders. One man is aiming for quiet adherence to established norms. The other is trying to stun his prey.

John Miller, who reported to Mueller as an assistant director at the FBI and is now a deputy commissioner of the NYPD, described Mueller's wardrobe as being constructed “so that if you got out of bed at 5:18, knowing that you had to be at work at 6:18 in the morning, and you couldn't turn on the light because you couldn't wake anybody else up, it would never make any difference.” It is a kind of sartorial “no comment,” constructed of blue and gray suits, white shirts, quiet ties.

One day, Miller showed up for work at Robert Mueller's FBI wearing a pink shirt, French cuffs, and a gold watch. Mueller called him out in the morning meeting.

“John, John, John,” he said. “What are you supposed to be?”

“Sir, you told me that we dress like lawyers here.”

“Yes. But not like drug lawyers.”

One can only imagine Mueller's thinking when he introduced into evidence receipts for more than $1 million in clothing purchased by Paul Manafort, President Trump's former campaign manager. Among his acquisitions were $1,500 shirts, $1,000 ties, and jackets made from the skins of ostriches and pythons. Some of Manafort's finery was procured via funds transmitted overseas from a Cypriot shell corporation to the House of Bijan in Beverly Hills. We don't know what Mueller thought about all that because he speaks to us only in court, through the mouths of his deputies and their legal filings. There are no press conferences, no raging tweets, no reply to the president's whining. The quiet is also part of the uniform.

Mueller's silence evokes something that we would all like to believe about the American justice system. He embodies the Boy Scout ideal of the FBI: the absolute fairness of the lawful good, of power without partisanship. Somehow, despite abuses of the law in the agency's recent past, this ideal has persisted. It survived the gross excesses of J. Edgar Hoover and the warping of the Constitution after 9/11, with the FBI rounding up Muslims and working hand in glove with the NSA to conduct domestic surveillance. Mueller went along with some of it, until he didn't. Unlike their CIA counterparts, FBI agents refrained from torturing captives held at Guantánamo. In 2004, Mueller threatened to resign rather than continue the most intrusive forms of domestic surveillance. He did not close the gap between what the FBI is and what we want it to be, but the record shows that he tried.

As our common narrative bifurcates like a serpent's tongue, we cling to the hope that someone is keeping track, that objective truth still resides somewhere, in carbon-copy triplicate, locked in a filing cabinet upstairs. We may decide, in the end, that we do not want to know Robert Mueller; we may even take comfort in the fact that there may not be much of Robert Mueller to know. We need him to remain vague and silent so he can continue to serve as a vessel for our ridiculous hopes—that there is someone in government worth believing in, that the times we are experiencing now will somehow be brought to a reasonable end, and that the story of what happened will be something that we can all agree on.

“Silence is a weapon,” said Ali Soufan, who worked with Mueller on counterterrorism at the FBI after 9/11. “The moment he opens his mouth and says anything about this investigation, it's going to be interpreted politically, as part of the partisan circus. And so silence, by itself, is a statement. He understands the importance of the job that is on his shoulders.”

It should come as no surprise that Mueller wears the clothes of a man with nothing to prove. His father, after all, was a DuPont executive. One of his mother's grandfathers was the self-made president and later chairman of the Lackawanna Railroad. Mueller, who still benefits from multiple family trusts, did what he could to give back. He volunteered to go to Vietnam and returned to the United States a decorated combat veteran.

“Those of us who came back believed we had a responsibility to live a purposeful life, to live a life that does honor to the legacy of those who gave theirs,” said John Kerry, who was Mueller's classmate at St. Paul's, an elite boarding school, and who also fought in Vietnam. The two boys bonded through sports, playing soccer, hockey, and lacrosse together at St. Paul's. “People looked up to Bob,” Kerry told me. “He doesn't brag or boast or showboat. He isn't moved by headlines. He's a Marine. He lives by a code.”

Many of those who praised Mueller did not see themselves as part of the resistance. They sounded principled and impartial when they told me that they did not care whether Mueller sent Trump to the clink or completely exonerated him. Regardless of the outcome, they would have confidence in the resulting report, whether or not it was made public, so long as it was Mueller's signature at the bottom. Their belief in Mueller is not a reflection of any belief in the president's guilt so much as a belief in the Constitution, due process, and the enduring power of institutions. It represents the ideal of a government of laws, not men, an ideal so embattled now that it seems to hang on the good name of one man alone."

*********

"In Vietnam, Mueller survived a long hilltop firefight in an area known as Mutter's Ridge, a battle that claimed the lives of 13 Marines. He has never told the story of what happened there; others have had to reconstruct it from the words of his comrades and from citations written up by the Marine Corps when he won the Bronze Star. “The minute the shit hit the fan, he was there,” one of the Marines under his command told Garrett M. Graff, the author of The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror.

Four months later, Mueller was shot in the thigh during an ambush and received the Purple Heart. After his tour, he considered making a career in the Marines and served as an aide to a general. He found that he did not like the atmosphere away from the front lines, and his wife, Ann, was ambivalent about his making his career in the military. They moved to Charlottesville, and Mueller enrolled in law school at the University of Virginia. He passed the bar and became a rising star within the Department of Justice. His work on the investigation of Pan Am Flight 103 led to the conviction of a Libyan intelligence officer. He assisted with the prosecution of Manuel Noriega and approved a deal in which Sammy “the Bull” Gravano would betray his superior, John Gotti, in exchange for a reduced sentence.

In 1995, Mueller made an unusual career move and became a rank-and-file federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia, working homicides. “That decision speaks volumes about his level of commitment,” said Mary McCord, the former head of the Justice Department's national-security division. “If you manage for too long, you get a bit ivory tower. He can roll up his sleeves and do the ground-level work.”

In 2001, George W. Bush appointed him to be the sixth director of the FBI. He took office one week before the September 11 attacks and led the bureau through the tumultuous aftermath. The White House was demanding answers about how the attackers slipped through and was frantic about preventing a second wave, one that never wound up materializing. In multiple hearings, Mueller vigorously defended the bureau from congressmen who wanted to break it up and re-distribute its responsibilities. Internally, he was a hard-charging reformer. He required agents to rotate between bureaus, shook up underperforming managers with an up-or-out policy, and opened 18 new overseas offices. “I credit him for saving the FBI as we know it today,” said Sheriff William D. Gore, who led the bureau's San Diego office during the early aughts.

As a leader, Mueller tolerated the expression of dissenting views and would often reach down into the lower ranks to triangulate what he was hearing. But he had no patience for ignorance, lassitude, or evasion. Lauren C. Anderson, who was then the FBI's Legal Attaché to the U.S. embassy in Paris, told me about a 2003 meeting she had with Mueller and several cabinet members of Tunisia in Tunis, the country's capital. When the Tunisians seemed less than forthcoming about a group of suspected terrorists, Mueller abruptly stood up. “We're done here,” he said. The U.S. ambassador followed. The Tunisians scrambled to hand out the gifts they'd brought to the meeting. “The message was clear,” Anderson told me. “You need to cooperate in full before we'll give you any of our time.”

Among his colleagues, Mueller was known for his diligence, his aloofness from politics, and, perhaps above all, his reserve. John Rizzo, the former CIA general counsel, recalls sitting with Mueller in the agency's cafeteria after a briefing. At lunch, rather than bantering about careers and family, Mueller held himself apart from the group. “He was polite and affable,” Rizzo said. “But he did none of that.” Mueller has spoken about the Marine Corps as a second family, and it is possible that he internalized some of its rules against “fraternization,” the development of personal friendships within a chain of command. “He was not a social guy,” said Philip Mudd, who served under Mueller as deputy director of the bureau's national-security branch. “I wouldn't call him shy—I would call him private. Really private. When we would go to Iraq and Afghanistan, we wouldn't sit around with him at night having beers and cigars and saying ‘Where did you grow up?’ and so on.” Mueller was approachable, polite, and likable, Mudd said, but “he wasn't friends with any of us.”

In one job interview, Mueller is said to have had the candidate stand at attention until he dismissed him. He imposed the same sort of discipline on himself. “People would talk about him coming into work at five in the morning,” said McCord. “Everyone who works with him has to adjust their schedule.” James Comey told Graff something similar: “He drives at such speed that he can burn up people around him.”

Some of Mueller's former colleagues preferred his reticence to Comey's showiness. Even before the controversial press conferences about the Clinton investigation during the run-up to the 2016 election, Comey eagerly sought out the spotlight, weighing in on matters as varied as encryption, the root causes of terrorism, how to be a good listener. Mueller, by contrast, mostly closed himself off from public view. Two commencement speeches, spaced out over several years, recycle the same homiletic calls to adhere to the virtues of patience, service, and humility. “We must all find ways to contribute to something bigger than ourselves,” he told the graduating class of 2013 at William & Mary. “Most importantly, we must never, ever sacrifice our integrity.” Mueller has never said much about his military service beyond remarking “pretty accurate” when watching a war movie while traveling on a plane with his staff, words that come thirdhand, through Graff's reporting. “He won't write a memoir,” Rizzo told me.

As extensively as Mueller has participated in the past 50 years of American history, it may all be remembered as preparation for the terrifying responsibilities of his current job. In May 2017, after Trump fired James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, Trump's deputy attorney general, appointed Mueller as special counsel. It would be Mueller's job to pick up Comey's most important ongoing investigation and provide Rosenstein with the definitive, official answer to the question that has been dogging the country and casting a shadow over the legitimacy of its elected leadership: What exactly was going on between Donald Trump and Russia in the months before the 2016 election? In his letter appointing Mueller, Rosenstein granted him a broad hunting license. In addition to the power to indict, subpoena, and haul witnesses before a grand jury, Mueller could probe beyond Russia into “related matters…that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” He could prosecute anyone who sought to thwart him through “perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses.”

Rosenstein's letter authorizes Mueller to keep digging at Trump until he either finds the root ball at the center of the president's tangled corruptions or satisfies himself that no such thing exists. It is hard to look at the document and not see Rosenstein trying to compensate for what happened eight days earlier, when he wrote a memo to support Trump's decision to fire Comey. Rosenstein was reportedly embarrassed and angered by the perception that he had been used by the White House to get rid of Comey. At one point he is said to have talked about using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. (Rosenstein has denied this.) His choice of Mueller to be special counsel is an understandably frightening one for Trump, or for anyone. “I wouldn't want him after me, let's put it that way,” Sheriff Gore said.

This is how authority is supposed to behave: You do the right thing, for the right reason, in the right way, and you keep your mouth shut about it. It is clear that Mueller couldn't care less—if he is even aware—about his presence in this Men of the Year issue, or about any other form of publicity, for that matter. “One of the ways he's maintained respect is by doing his job and letting his work speak for itself,” Mark Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me. “When you're taking on the task of investigating the possibility that the president of the United States colluded with a foreign country, the very nature of this investigation is historic. It makes Watergate look small.”

*********

"Rizzo said he doubts Mueller will even hold a press conference when his investigation is complete. But when his final report is done—and many sources have this on the immediate horizon, now that the midterm elections are past—the special counsel's silence will likely be broken. The question then will be whether the legendary impartiality with which Mueller is believed to have conducted his investigation will float atop the deadly partisan whirlpool of the contemporary news cycle or plummet to the bottom. At that moment, Mueller will no longer be able to please everyone, and the more aggressive partisans may look for ways to tear him down. One can at least take comfort in the idea that Mueller is not worrying too much about these political matters, which are beyond his control and, at least in his view, temporary. “He said to me once, whatever we put out, make sure it's the truth,” Miller said. “No spin, no coloring, no shading. Even if we were going to get beat up, we were a good agency. We did good work. And that bad story was one day in the newspapers.”

The report, no matter what it says, will be thorough. Mueller's team has interviewed dozens of members of Trump's cabinet and senior staff, along with the author of the notorious pee-tape dossier. He has spent hours with Trump's White House counsel, Don McGahn, whose cooperation was reportedly “extensive,” and turned around the loyalties of Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. He has more than one million pages of documents provided by the Trump campaign. He has requested records from Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and subpoenaed one of Trump's largest creditors, Deutsche Bank. “My gut feeling is that where the rubber will meet the road is the financial part of this,” Gore told me. “All these allegations about individuals in Russia and investments going back and forth—when prosecutors put that all together, it's likely to be the final nail in the coffin.”

“The walls seem to be closing in on some of the key figures,” said Senator Warner. “I hope he concludes as soon as he can.”

What should be apparent to anyone following the Russia investigation is that there is, in addition to everything known about Trump already, some X factor, something that is known to members of the intelligence community but has yet to be revealed to the public. John Brennan, the former CIA director, has referred to X repeatedly, tweeting about what might happen when “the full extent” of Trump's wrongdoing “becomes known” and hinting at times that in 2016 he possessed information about contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians, which he passed on to the FBI. As far as those on the outside can tell, X originated in intelligence gathered by Britain and perhaps some other foreign countries. It has passed from Brennan to Comey to Mueller. Senator Warner, who told me he knows “Mueller a bit but not well,” reportedly joked at a dinner in June that “if you think you've seen wild stuff so far, buckle up.” At the end of Mueller's investigation, the fight will commence in Congress over the size and significance of X and whether to terminate this presidency early or allow it to hobble its way to the finish line. All Mueller can do is unearth the X and bring it to light. He can arm the country with facts for these coming battles. But he cannot fight them for us."

by By Mattathias Schwartz
Source: GQ Magazine (https://www.gq.com/story/robert-mueller-master-of-silence)

* Update footnote: Friday January 4, 2019,
Grand Jury Term in Mueller Probe Extended by Up to 6 Months (https://ktla.com/2019/01/04/grand-jury-term-in-mueller-probe-extended-by-up-to-6-months/)

Gio

5th January 2019, 16:30

Morris has compiled/edited an excellent video/docu on the deforestation
and wildlife in Cambodia ...

https://i2.wp.com/betreed.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/family-photo2017-936-x-1404.jpg?resize=400%2C599

US Ranger And Aussie Wife Defend Cambodian Jungle - Betreed

website: www.betreed.com

Published on Jan 4, 2019

50:22 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT6NJzn4fKg&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

5th January 2019, 17:44

A Dog and his man ...http://www.animated-smileys.com/emoticons/animated-smileys-animals-020.gif
And god bless Mom for looking after me !

Reuben the Bulldog: Back To Work

"A long Christmas break is over and it's back to the daily grind. Reuben is wishing it wasn't so,
since it was so much better with dad and the kids around all the time."

Published on Jan 5, 2019

5:55 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umqe8YIA6ZU

Gio

5th January 2019, 18:25

Gabriel Traveler ... https://imgfast.net/users/2911/23/55/04/smiles/42363.gif

A Tour of LONDON, ENGLAND | This City Is Incredible!

Published on Jan 4, 2019

18:51 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEs7bSggqgQ&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

6th January 2019, 00:22

Continuing ...

Eugene Bagashov: Oumuamua Data Reveals Intriguing Possibilities | Space News

ThunderboltsProject

Today, physicist Eugene Bagashov concludes his remarkable three-part analysis of 'Oumuamua, the mysterious object which is thought to be our solar system's first interstellar traveler. In previous episodes, Eugene has explored several enigmas, including the puzzle of the object's mysterious acceleration as it moved away from the Sun. While this episode was in production, Eugene made a stunning discovery that may provide an essential pathway to understanding 'Oumuamua's trajectory. As Eugene explains, this discovery relates directly to measurements of the interstellar magnetic field.

Part Two of this series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJgpFDU4dwE

Part One of this series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr0LX8VVCHI

Published on Jan 5, 2019

15:09 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3JhEYnsJQs&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

6th January 2019, 22:36

For your entertainment ...

Richard Dolan Show w/ Clif High
on UFOs, Alien Encounters, & Secret Space

Streamed live 1/6/2018

"Richard Dolan is one of the world’s leading researchers and writers on the subject of UFOs and believes that they constitute the greatest mystery of our time. He is the author of two volumes of history, UFOs and the National Security State, both ground-breaking works which together provide the most factually complete and accessible narrative of the UFO subject available anywhere. He also co-authored a speculative book about the future, A.D. After Disclosure, the first-ever analysis not only of how UFO secrecy might end, but of the all-important question: what happens next?"

1:15:07 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBJOJf6XA5o

Gio

8th January 2019, 01:18

A heads up ...

With a 'national emergency,' could Trump use the military to build the wall?

PBS NewsHour

"President Trump has threatened to use executive power to declare a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and obtain funds for a border wall without approval from Congress. But would such a dramatic move be legal? William Brangham asks Elizabeth Goitein of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice how a national emergency is defined and what powers become available after one is declared."

Published on Jan 7, 2019

7:17 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NhcxOUEHXU

Gio

8th January 2019, 05:11

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2Fh_9IBmcyK6Y%2F maxresdefault.jpg&f=1

Feeding time ... :garden:

Stephen Is Back, The Government Is Not

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Published on Jan 7, 2019

9:49 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1vUl8YxP5M

Gio

8th January 2019, 18:34

Forget the Beef ...

Where's the Chicken's !!!

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwksu.org%2Fnews%2Fimages%2F37918%2 Fpeller.jpg&f=1

Jim Unveils a Far-Reaching Conspiracy Theory About Chickens -

The Jim Jefferies Show

"A news story about lab-grown meat drives Jim to ask an important question:
Where are all the actual chickens we’re supposedly eating?"

Published on Jan 8, 2019

(Contains strong language.)

3:44 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJHI4fEy0uQ

Gio

8th January 2019, 19:03

And he surely would know ...

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.atimes.com%2Fuploads%2F2016 %2F02%2FRussian-President-Vladimir-Putin-leaves-after-a-meeting-with-Russian-Orthodox-Patriarch-Kirill-in-2014..jpg&f=1

Russian Patriarch Warns ‘Antichrist’ Will Control Humans Through Gadgets ...
Story here (https://themoscowtimes.com/news/russian-patriarch-warns-antichrist-will-control-humans-through-gadgets-64060)

Gio

9th January 2019, 01:42

How author Brad Meltzer uncovered
the secret plot to kill George Washington

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fshelftalkblog.files.wordpress.com %2F2018%2F12%2Fconspiracy.jpg&f=1

"Best-selling author Brad Meltzer found the story behind his latest book, "The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington," in a footnote. He said he took the surprising information to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis.

"I went to him and I said, 'Did this really happen?' And it really happened. When it happened, George Washington rounded up those responsible. He took one of the main conspirators and he hung him in front of 20,000 people – the largest public execution at that point in North American history," Meltzer said Tuesday on "CBS This Morning." "He brought the hammer down, was like, 'I'm George Washington. Don't mess with me. I'm going to be on the money one day.'"

So how did the story of the plot get lost in history?

"Hanging happened on June 28, 1776. Guess what was happening in the world? The Declaration of Independence. The British were literally there and this gets lost to it," Meltzer said.

The book details an effort to undermine the American Revolution just before the signing of the Declaration of Independence and with British troops about to invade New York City. The plot connects counterfeiters, leading New York politicians and even the future president's own bodyguards. At the time, Washington had private bodyguards, Meltzer said, who were the "best of the best" from his regiments.

"These were the men who turned on him. They were called the lifeguards because they guarded George Washington's life. And I don't care how strong you are — when your inner circle turns on you, it is devastating," Meltzer said.

Through the book, you come to know more about the birth of the counterintelligence movement in the U.S., Meltzer said. Washington launches a secret intelligence subcommittee to uncover espionage, with John Jay in charge. Jay went on to become the first chief justice of the United States.

"He puts into motion interrogations, kicking in doors. And to this day, we all think of the CIA, the precursor being the OSS [Office of Strategic Services], it's actually this moment," Meltzer said. The CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, even has a conference room named after Jay.

In addition, the book highlights Washington's character, as witnessed in the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776.

"What he does is he commandeers all of the boats on the East River, but here's the key moment: he won't get in the boat until all of his men get in first. And his men see what he's doing, he's risking his life for them. Again, what you see is not just the plot against George Washington, you see the depth of his character," Meltzer said.

"We need that in our leaders today," he added. "George Washington brought this country together… by putting his arms around them and saying to his own regiments, 'Don't fight with each other, don't argue [with] each other. We need to be on the same team.' That's where we are today," he said "...

Watch interview segment here (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brad-meltzer-new-book-the-first-conspiracy-plot-to-kill-george-washington/)

Gio

9th January 2019, 17:50

Impossible ?

https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/impossible-burger.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1236&h=820&crop=1

How a veggie burger stole the show at Consumer Electronics Show 2019

LAS VEGAS — "The most impressive product launch at CES 2019 isn’t a drone or smartphone.

It’s a veggie burger.

Impossible Foods unveiled its latest recipe for its famous faux-meat burger, and The Post was on hand to take a bite before it hits a restaurant near you.

And, yes, the Impossible Burger 2.0 made a believer out of this veggie burger skeptic. The new blend is made with soy protein, is gluten- and cholesterol-free, and has significantly less fat and fewer calories than a regular burger.

The surprising part? I could hardly taste the difference from the real thing.

Examining the slider that Impossible Foods gave me, everything looked right. The “meat” was browned and charred, it was juicy when squeezed, and it even smelled like a real burger.

After biting into it, I would have believed it if they told me I was eating a prime 80/20 blend.

“This is the plant-based ‘meat’ that will eliminate the need for animals in the food chain and make the global food system sustainable,” Impossible Foods CEO and Founder Dr. Patrick O. Brown said."

Source page (https://nypost.com/2019/01/09/how-a-veggie-burger-stole-the-show-at-ces-2019/)

Also: Best of the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (https://nypost.com/2019/01/08/best-of-the-las-vegas-consumer-electronics-show/slide-1/)

Gio

9th January 2019, 18:16

Aragorn

9th January 2019, 18:30

Making America Great Again ...

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/49206171_10156424377514022_2778873153663795200_n.j pg?_nc_cat=1&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=9df35031bbe28fb3fa2b2d2f318de0e2&oe=5CBF0B02

Maybe the sign should be amended with the words "... operated by individuals with an IQ above room temperature." :p

Dreamtimer

9th January 2019, 18:33

Until recently I drove a green-colored car. But I never did that. :ttr:

Gio

9th January 2019, 18:43

The future is now ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/03/ef/d9/03efd9e3be2a18c823e85e6022a1d59b.jpg

Gio

9th January 2019, 19:03

What you see is what you get ...

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/62995_113487878713109_2292937_n.jpg?_nc_cat=100&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=6997b797b80d265895e85c2adda7ba6c&oe=5CC3BF3A

Here You Come Again

Dolly Parton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKGguU6knkU

Gio

9th January 2019, 19:19

Speaking of seeing what you get ...

Asbestos Found in Baby Powder. You'll Never Guess How J&J Respond!... #PropagandaWatch

corbettreport

"On this week's edition of #PropagandaWatch we examine a case study in corporate spin as a thoroughly researched and meticulously documented Reuters report is marginalized with a magic two word phrase. Corporate stooges and PR lackeys take note!"

Published on Jan 9, 2019
SHOW NOTES: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=29601

17:13 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR2-Oub5Sm4&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

9th January 2019, 19:57

"President Trump’s Tuesday night address reminded Americans and migrants alike that we’re all in trouble"

https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/shutterstock_10052056jZ.jpg?crop=900:600&width=1910

The Humanitarian Crisis in the Oval Office

"A day before President Trump delivered his first Oval Office address, a Florida prison employee named Crystal Minton was quoted in the New York Times. Hurricane Michael tore most of the roof and fence off her workplace, so the incarcerated were relocated to a Mississippi prison that is a seven-hour drive away. Thanks to the partial government shutdown that has resulted from Trump’s masturbatory wall fight, the corrections officers being sent there to work two-week shifts aren’t being paid for their service or reimbursed for their travel. Minton, a mother of seven-year-old twins, was understandably upset. But then she told on herself, and on many Trump supporters.“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” Minton said to reporter Patricia Mazzei about Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

On Tuesday night, Trump reminded his flock that he wants to hurt the right people. He didn’t appear excited to be giving the address, and subsequent reporting verified that he was pushed to do it. Sounding like a tired lounge act singing to the few fans who still love his old songs, Trump once again marched out a fresh list of immigrant crimes and promised varied nonsense about his mythical border wall. It’ll end sex crimes, surely a chief concern of this president. It’ll help African Americans and Hispanic Americans the most, also high up on his list. The wall will stymie those darn coyotes who smuggle people across the border, the ones who are thriving now thanks to his policies…oh, well, never mind that — did you know that it’ll stop heroin, meth, cocaine and even the Fentanyl that is primarily coming from China? Boy, that’s some wall.

It was a concert of Trump’s greatest hits. His re-election could be yours for the low price of $5 donations to his campaign, or in the official-sounding “Official Secure the Border Fund.” Frightened Americans, your safety is but a click away.

The most racist part of all this wasn’t the unjust stereotyping of southern migrants as bloodthirsty rapists, drug dealers and cop-killers. It was the suggestion that building a wall would be a compassionate action.

“This is a humanitarian crisis. A crisis of the heart, and a crisis of the soul,” Trump said of the situation south of the border. Border crossings rose in 2018, but they had already been dropping precipitously since President Obama’s first term in office.

However, what is rising is the number of families with children coming to the border seeking asylum or crossing illegally. Rather than devise a humanitarian solution to this dilemma, the Trump administration decided that separating the families as a deterrent and incarcerating the children would be the best way to go. Women and children are being held in Customs and Border Protection “iceboxes” nicknamed las hieleras, in which conditions are below healthy human standards and may have contributed to the death of a Honduran woman named Roxana Hernández in ICE custody last May.

The deaths of two Guatemalan children, ages seven and eight, in CBP custody late last year didn’t make it into the president’s address lamenting this “humanitarian crisis.” When Trump said the words “America’s heart broke the day after Christmas,” for a half-second I thought he might mention Jakelin Caal Maquin or Felipe Alonzo Gomez, who died on Christmas Eve after being held too long in cramped facilities. Then I remembered all the racist stuff that this president has done and said, and I wasn’t surprised when he began talking about the murder of Cpl. Ronil Singh by an undocumented suspect during a traffic stop. Trump falsely blamed Democrats for the deaths of the children, so perhaps he feels no accountability at all.

The “humanitarian” language was previewed by Vice President Mike Pence on news shows days earlier, and fell just as flat then. Which humans are they talking about helping? Are they trying to protect white people in America, those scared of immigrants but who may be choking to death on pollution or working unpaid federal jobs during the shutdown? Are they trying to liberate people of color who Trump says are being hurt by undocumented immigration, but are denied their discrimination claims by his government? Who is this white savior of a president trying to save but himself?

We are now in the 19th day of a partial government shutdown, which, in two days, will become the longest ever. There will soon be a different kind of march on Washington if he doesn’t get his act together. But his racism and pride make for a toxic mix, and he can’t escape this invisible prison that he has built for himself. His solution to the shutdown has no future, and even he seems to realize it. Trump will go to the border later this week and make a big show of things. But there may even be Trump supporters like Minton who now realize that he really doesn’t care about any human but himself. If we learned anything from that address, it is that he will keep hurting us all."

By Jamil Smith
Source" RollingStone (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-humanitarian-crisis-776650/)

Gio

10th January 2019, 00:31

Hey President Trump ...

I'm coming over ...

http://projectavalon.net/Amazon/Bill_Ryan_by_waterfall.jpg

Changing water to wine (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?105631-An-Avalon-Conference-31-March-2-April-2019&p=1268494&viewfull=1#post1268494)

On the Border

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeuaxvEI9Dw

Gio

10th January 2019, 04:11

Continuing ... :scooter:

HOW EXPENSIVE IS ICELAND? Reykjavik & the Blue Lagoon

Gabriel Traveler

Published on Jan 8, 2019

14:12 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JDZXXB12mk&feature=em-uploademail

Aianawa

10th January 2019, 09:32

Wasnt he in Iceland last year Gio

Gio

10th January 2019, 16:33

Wasnt he in Iceland last year Gio

Very good !

Yes he was on his way through Northern Europe to Greece at that time ...
I believe he usually looks for (and catches) flights
that are deals for his travel plans ...

Curious to see where he might be heading next ?

Hoping soon for New Zealand or Tasmania/ Australia ...

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgabrieltraveler.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2011%2F12%2FKauai.jpg&f=1

Gio

10th January 2019, 17:53

Who knew ...

Surf Girls Jamaica

(Extraordinary People Documentary) - Real Stories Original

Surf Girls Jamaica focuses on Imani Wilmot, an inspirational Jamaican surfer who uses the sport as a means of transforming the tough lives of the women around her, in Kingston and surrounding areas.

Imani has harnessed the power of surfing to empower these women through training camps which bring women together to learn the mindful art of riding waves. This develops self-motivation, entrepreneurial spirit, respect for the environment and a deep sense of community.

Globally, Imani has taken it as her personal responsibility to empower women of colour to have access to surfing and see a place for themselves within the global surf industry."

Published on Jan 10, 2019

16:32 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaTUYaSD-wA&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

10th January 2019, 20:02

Thanks HBO ...

'Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in'! (https://twitter.com/HBO/status/1083030698448076802/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwte rm%5E1083030698448076802&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheblast.com%2Fnew-pope-john-malkovich-hbo-jude-law%2F)

Gone but far from forgotten ... The series will continue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPjW75fIbUo

***

* First Set Pics: See Pope John Malkovich in Action for HBO Series ‘The New Pope’ (https://theblast.com/new-pope-john-malkovich-hbo-jude-law/)

...

Gio

11th January 2019, 15:40

hmm ..

Inside the Mind of Edward Mandell House, Administrator

Originally aired January 20, 2015: Richard Grove of TragedyandHope.com and PeaceRevolution.org joins us on this month’s edition of Film, Literature and the New World Order to discuss “Philip Dru: Administrator” by Edward Mandell House. We examine the man behind the work and how the novel presages House’s time as the power behind the throne of the Wilson presidency.

SHOW NOTES AND MP3 AUDIO: https://www.corbettreport.com/philip-dru-flnwo-23/

***

"Edward Mandell House (July 26, 1858 – March 28, 1938)
was an American diplomat, politician, and an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson. He was known by the nickname Colonel House, although he had performed no military service. He was a highly influential back-stage politician in Texas before becoming a key supporter of the presidential bid of Wilson in 1912. Having a self-effacing manner, he did not hold office but was an "executive agent", Wilson's chief advisor on European politics and diplomacy during World War I (1914–18) and at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. In 1919 Wilson, suffering from a series of small strokes, broke with House and many other top advisors, believing they had deceived him at Paris ... More here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_M._House)

Published on Jan 10, 2019

46:39 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivexO-wxIdY

Fred Steeves

11th January 2019, 16:33

It's been one of my standing pet theories for some time now that there is at least one shadowy "Edward House type" here in the U.S. behind every rising political star, every administration, and most all of their international relationships and negotiations.

The tricky part would be spotting them in real time.

Maggie

11th January 2019, 17:58

Gary Lachman was a musican who played with Blondie and Iggy Pop. He became interested in the occult by way of Colin Wilson who wrote a book which also REALLY influenced me. I bet it influenced many people as did other Wilson books The Occult is almost encyclopedic but very engaging and worth re-reading. In addition Wilson, who died in 2013, wrote over 100 other major books.

GL talks about knowing Wilson

HRr7lsDtQsE

Colin Wilson presents what he considers to be the fundamental ideas in his works in the video below.

The Essential - Colin Wilson
0:00 to 8:22 Introduction

8:22 to 53:00 Notes on Abraham Maslow: The Peak Experience

53:00 to 1:07:29 The Self-image Concept: Conclusion

LH9JlvbDS7E

Here is one tribute

https://secure.i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02759/wilson_2759286b.jpg

It’s hard to believe that Colin Wilson has passed on. In his youth, he claimed that most people die because they lose the will to live, and fall prey to boredom and listlessness. He claimed that, with a strong sense of purpose and optimism, any human being should be able to extend their lifespan beyond normal parameters. And for most of his life, Wilson seemed to exemplify this. Even in his late 60s – when I first met him – he seemed amazingly full of vitality, young way beyond his years, with a full head of black hair, bright curious eyes and an athletic gait. But in June 2012, Colin Wilson suffered a serious stroke from which he never recovered, and eventually died on December 5th last year, at the age of 82.

Colin Wilson was a giant, in many ways. Over six foot tall, with a deep resonant voice and a strong sense of self-assurance, he seemed to naturally become the centre of attention wherever he was. He was an intellectual giant too. Wilson was sometimes criticised for proclaiming himself as a genius, or the most important writer of his generation. ‘Genius’ is a term which is very difficult to define. The best definition I can think of is ‘a person who shows incredible creativity and insight which goes way beyond their education or social environment, and seems to endlessly flow from an unknown source.’ And in these terms, Colin Wilson certainly was touched by genius.

The odds were stacked against him. Born into a poor working-class home in Leicester in 1931, he left school at the age of 16. Most people are the products of their environment, at least to a degree, but Wilson was one of those rare human beings who seemed to be born fully formed, destined to become what they innately are, no matter what circumstances they’re born into. His early life was a struggle against his environment to allow his authentic self – and the role he was meant to fulfill – to become manifest. He knew from an early age that he was going to be a writer, but for the first 8 years after leaving school, he drifted from one menial job to the next, struggling to find time to read, research and plan his books. Eventually he hit upon the solution of sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath, so that he didn’t need to spend money on rent, and could just work part-time in the evenings while spending his days writing his first book, The Outsider, in the British Museum reading room.

Fortunately, The Outsider was a massive success, becoming an instant best-seller. Nearly 60 years after publication, it still seems an amazing book – so vast in its scope and so profound in its insights that it would have been impressive if it had been written after a whole life time of reading and contemplating, rather than by a 24 year old. Looking at it now, the book seems strangely modern, both in style and content – the sure sign of a book which was way ahead of its time, anticipating (and helping to generate) the human potential and new age movements which are so powerful at present. The Outsider is a study of individuals who don’t fit into ordinary life because of their powerful ‘dynamic’ impulse to grow, to open themselves up to new experiences and become more than they are presently are, wider and deeper with a more intense awareness of reality.

From that point on, Wilson followed his ‘destiny’ as a writer with amazing determination and dedication. He was probably the most productive author of the 20th century, eventually publishing 181 books, as well as countless articles and reviews. The range of his interests was amazing too. Possessed with an uncanny ability to absorb and retain information, and then to organise and systematise it, he became an expert in fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology, criminology, paranormal phenomena, ancient civilisations and literary criticism. He was also a prolific novelist, and an occasional playwright.

As Wilson was aware himself, this diversity worked against him, since it meant that he didn’t have a clear identity as an author, and that his ‘serious’ philosophical work wasn’t taken as seriously as it merited. It also meant that other more territorial academics and authors felt that he was trespassing into their domains, and reacted with hostility to his work.

Wilson as an Agent of Evolution

All through his life, Colin Wilson felt a strong sense of mission, a feeling that he was marked out for a special purpose. And I think he was right. I view him, and his work, in evolutionary terms.

Evolution is partly a process whereby living beings become increasingly complex and organised physically, but it’s also – perhaps even primarily – related to consciousness. Evolution is a process by which living beings become more conscious of the world around them, and more conscious of themselves – a process of the expansion and intensification of consciousness. That has held true since the development of the first single celled amoebi three and a half billion years ago, through to bacteria, plants, insects, reptiles. mammals, through to primate and modern human beings. And I believe seers and visionaries like Wilson are part of this process, as ‘agents‘ of evolution. In a sense, they are evolutionary ‘throw forwards’, who experience – slightly prematurely – an intensified awareness themselves, and try to encourage its development in other human beings too.

continued here: https://www.stevenmtaylor.com/essays/colin-wilson-tribute/

Gio

12th January 2019, 07:48

The latest ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

***

"Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site.
This is an actual picture, not a rendering" ...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DwmagBZX4AEbUN-.jpg

Elon Musk shows off SpaceX’s massive Starship test rocket (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-shows-off-spacexs-massive-starship-test-rocket-2019-01-10)

Gio

12th January 2019, 07:57

a 5G totem pole ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c5/7d/b1/c57db19b7f7efae8c0445a21a60ccc15.jpg

Gio

12th January 2019, 08:17

Corruption and the Coming Chaos

Max Igan - Surviving the Matrix - Episode 362 - American Voice Radio, January 11th, 2019

thecrowhouse
Published on Jan 11, 2019

54:42 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID0RL1ChMLE&feature=em-uploademail

Maggie

12th January 2019, 16:04

Wim found God in the Cold.

VaMjhwFE1Zw

palooka's revenge

12th January 2019, 16:28

Wim found God in the Cold.

VaMjhwFE1Zw

YUP... https://theunseenroleofdenial.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-iceman-cometh.html

Emil El Zapato

12th January 2019, 16:42

I wonder if he has ever been geno-typed...he might be 100% Neanderthal...Can a caveman be an ascended spirit... but if he trains others to do it...it's likely not that...

Maggie

12th January 2019, 16:49

I wonder if he has ever been geno-typed...he might be 100% Neanderthal...Can a caveman be an ascended spirit... but if he trains others to do it...it's likely not that...

I don't think anyone could be 100% Neanderthal. Also, his students are varied. I bet he'd be into the genotyping as he is a scientist. But also, how do we know that Neanderthal was not a much more suitable vehicle for spirit anyway? (assuming that your model of ascended spirits is true????). The old lore about that hominem is being dismantled weekly IMO.

This is way back in 2014

Top Ten Myths about Neanderthals

Neanderthals are generally classified by palaeontologists as the species Homo neanderthalensis, but some consider them to be a subspecies of Homo sapiens (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis). The first humans with proto-Neanderthal traits are believed to have existed in Europe as early as 600,000–350,000 years ago, and they died out around 30,000 years ago.

When it comes to behaviours, Neanderthals tend to get a pretty bad rap. However, a plethora of research over the last several years has been breaking down many of the myths associated with this ancient species. Once depicted as barbaric, grunting, sub-humans, Neanderthals are now known to have had the same or similar levels of intelligence as modern humans and their own distinct culture. Here we examine ten myths about Neanderthals, which have now been proven false.

continued herehttps://www.ancient-origins.net/human-origins-science/top-ten-myths-about-neanderthals-001551

Maggie

12th January 2019, 16:56

YUP... https://theunseenroleofdenial.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-iceman-cometh.html

Bumping the subtle post of your blog as it is interesting....

Gio

12th January 2019, 18:22

From the head of the Russian Union of Journalists ...

"I think the journalists and government are still learning to communicate with each other" ...

Russia: Who is sending sheep's heads to reporters? | DW Stories

"Russia's independent media outlets, such as Novaya Gazeta, are coming under political pressure. Journalists have even received death threats, for example in the form of severed sheeps head. But many refuse to be intimidated. After all, a sheep's head in a basket is still better than a bullet in the skull."

Published on Jan 12, 2019

4:01 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itSmkMLQdGU

Gio

13th January 2019, 04:03

interesting title premise ...
Some might argue that the Nazi's survived, and are now part of the supposed Deep State ...

How the World Would Look if Germany Had Won WW2...

From Top5s | Alternate History Mini-Documentary

"It’s a question that has spanned countless hours of speculation among the communities of the Internet, giving birth to fictional films, television series and novels. It is one question that the majority of the world’s population dreads to imagine. What if Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers were not defeated during World War Two and Adolf Hitler’s dream of a Thousand Year Reich came to pass"?

18:45 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qTVMu8JeW8

*
Top5s
Trying out a new 'How The World Would Look' series. Next Episode will be 'How The World Would Look If A Tsar Bomba Nuke (Most Powerful Nuclear Bomb Ever Made) Was Dropped On Manhattan' Let us know if you love the idea of this new series!

Gio

13th January 2019, 06:00

Doh ...
Just another brain fart!

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.teaparty.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F02%2Frino-mitch-mcconnell.jpg&f=1

Mitch Mcconnell, Republican U. S. Senate Majorly Leader

Gio

14th January 2019, 18:52

From the new Broadway musical ... :cloud:

'There is Nothin' Like A Wall'

From Randy Rainbow Song Parody

4:44 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL5CDt_1xcE

Aragorn

14th January 2019, 19:11

From the new Broadway musical ... :cloud:

'There is Nothin' Like A Wall'

From Randy Rainbow Song Parody

4:44 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL5CDt_1xcE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNHWUqjea5I

Gio

14th January 2019, 19:21

Meanwhile ...

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c3cc57baeb70d4872840e07/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC011419.jpg

Gio

14th January 2019, 20:08

Speaking of creating a big mess ...

The Realities Of Trump's Trade War: VICE on HBO Special Report

VICE News

"Trade wars are good and easy to win," President Donald J. Trump famously tweeted.
But how would one really impact everyday Americans?

We traveled across the country and met the manufacturers, people, and competing
forces facing the realities of Trump's trade war.

Published on Jan 14, 2019

27:25 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wjjQ55S4Nc

Dreamtimer

14th January 2019, 21:37

I was literally just wondering if there was a new Randy Rainbow out! My fav is still 'Very Stable Genius'.

Gio

14th January 2019, 21:53

The latest ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

I was literally just wondering if there was a new Randy Rainbow out! My fav is still 'Very Stable Genius'.

Yes the Trump show continues ...

From the new Broadway musical ... :cloud:

'There is Nothin' Like A Wall'

From Randy Rainbow Song Parody

4:44 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL5CDt_1xcE

Meanwhile ...

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c3cc57baeb70d4872840e07/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC011419.jpg

Speaking of creating a big mess ...

The Realities Of Trump's Trade War: VICE on HBO Special Report

VICE News

"Trade wars are good and easy to win," President Donald J. Trump famously tweeted. But how would one really impact everyday Americans?

We traveled across the country and met the manufacturers, people, and competing forces facing the realities of Trump's trade war.

Published on Jan 14, 2019

27:25 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wjjQ55S4Nc

Gio

14th January 2019, 22:18

An excellent cartoon parody of the U.S./China trade war ...
Guess which one is which ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/8f/b7/e8/8fb7e84490b0a6b31abe60470e168ae4.jpg

Fred Steeves

15th January 2019, 00:06

Meanwhile ...

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c3cc57baeb70d4872840e07/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC011419.jpg

Or the Amish homemade butter bought on vacation because it may be a plastic explosive in disguise, or that highly suspicious maple syrup, or... :)

Gio

15th January 2019, 06:25

While Clemson dines on fast food with El Comradeo ...

https://images.tmz.com/2019/01/14/0114-trump-clemson-meals-getty-5.jpg

https://a2.espncdn.com/combiner/i?img=%2Fphoto%2F2019%2F0114%2Fr488813_1296x729_16 %2D9.jpg&w=1140&cquality=40

Stephen Asks ...

Is Donald Trump Working For Russia?

8:42 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O834Nhc_sKM

Gio

15th January 2019, 16:54

Who are We? Why are We Here? What is it All About -
Past life and Soul Therapist Pauline Delcour-Min (https://paulinnedelcour-min.com/)

The Moore Show

Published on Jan 15, 2019

55:03

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iOqS6rOmlc

Gio

15th January 2019, 17:44

Back in Crazyland, USA ... :love2:

ONE DAY IN NEW YORK | This City Is Incredible!

Gabriel Traveler

Published on Jan 15, 2019

19:33 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZUEW0z-_n4&feature=push-u-sub&attr_tag=PZOMsqlx9aF85Uuv%3A6

Gio

15th January 2019, 19:03

Not having to go to the White House !

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c3e12e340a92a5d39a08424/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC011519.jpg

“Wow, I wonder what the losing team got.”

Gio

16th January 2019, 00:22

Don’t expect Trump to go quietly ...

By Ted Koppel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Koppel)
January 14, 2019

https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/TUI6TJRHOQI6PNIDTVQWXVNDAU.jpg&w=600
President Trump's Twitter feed on April 3, 2017. (J. David Ake/AP)

"Ted Koppel, managing editor of ABC News’s “Nightline” from 1980 to 2005, is senior contributor to CBS News’s “Sunday Morning ...

"On July 21, 2016, just hours before he accepted the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump and I sat down for an interview. What he said on that occasion would serve as a remarkably candid foreshadowing of how Trump would handle his relationship with the media in what, on that day, seemed the unlikely event that he would actually become president.

“I don’t need you guys anymore,” Trump told me.

He pointed to his millions of followers on Twitter and Facebook, explaining that the days of television anchors and commentators acting as gatekeepers between newsmakers and the public were essentially over. Without discernible acrimony, Trump trotted out one of the early versions of what would eventually become a leitmotif of his presidency: The media was made up of largely terrible people trafficking in fake news. There was nothing personal in the observation. It was the unsheathing of a multipurpose device, one he used adroitly in tandem with the endlessly adaptable political vehicle provided by social media during the election campaign and now during his presidency.

Is there any reason to believe that what worked for Trump before he was elected and while in the White House won’t be equally effective after he leaves office?"

"There is a disarming innocence to the assumption that whether by impeachment, indictment or a cleansing electoral redo in 2020, President Trump will be exorcised from the White House and that thereby he and his base will largely revert to irrelevance.

It imagines that, for some reason, Trump in defeat or disgrace will become a quieter, humbler, more restrained presence on Twitter and Facebook than heretofore. It assumes further that CNN and Fox News and MSNBC, perhaps chastened by the consequences of their addictive coverage of Trump the Candidate and Trump the President, will resist the urge to pay similar attention to Trump the Exile.

Let the record show that Trump has launched the careers of numerous media stars and that expressions of indignant outrage on the left and breathless admiration on the right have resulted in large, entirely nonpartisan profits for the industry of journalism. Why anyone should assume that Trump and those who cherish or loathe him in the news business will easily surrender such a hugely symbiotic relationship is hard to understand.

It is all but inevitable that whoever succeeds Trump in the White House will be perceived by 30 to 40 percent of the voting public as illegitimate — and that the former president will enthusiastically encourage them in this perception. Whatever his failings, Trump is a brilliant self-promoter and provocateur. He showed no embarrassment, either as candidate or president, about using his high visibility to benefit his business interests. Untethered from any political responsibility whatsoever, he can be expected to capitalize fully on his new status as political martyr and leader of a new “resistance” that will make today’s look supine.

The dirty little secret about the United States’ relationship with Trump is that we have become addicted to him. His ups, his downs, his laughs, his frowns are (as the lovely song from “My Fair Lady” once put it in another context altogether) “second nature to [us] now, like breathing out and breathing in.”

When he fails to tweet for even a few hours, Trumpologists search for meaning in the silence. Hours are devoted on cable television, each and every day, to examining the entrails of his most recent utterances. Has there been a day in the past two years without a Trump-related story on the front page of every major U.S. newspaper? How does the president lie to us? Let us count the ways. And we do, endlessly, meticulously.

Do you believe for a moment that Americans are ready to give that up merely because, for one reason or another, Trump has been obliged to reoccupy Trump Tower full-time?

A President Pence would not satisfy that hunger. Nor, for now at least, is it easy to discern within the growing ranks of potential Democratic candidates a man or woman with a matching aura of glitz, a similar degree of shamelessness, a comparable pairing of so much to be humble about with a total lack of humility.

A new president may provide a sense of relief and normalcy. But he or she will not satisfy our craving for outrage. Trump’s detractors are outraged by him. His supporters are outraged with him. He is a national Rorschach test. Love him or hate him, you can’t ignore him. One way or another, Trump will be renewed for another season."

3:16 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMdrX3CXUuI

Source: The Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/dont-expect-trump-to-go-quietly/2019/01/14/d8104e3a-1458-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html?noredirect=on)

Gio

16th January 2019, 18:07

Speaking of ...

The Cult of Baal - Dylan Monroe

Freeman Fly

"Freemasonry is far too serious a matter for any man to assume its villainous obligations without due reflection... bound by the cable tow of Satan to the altar of Baal, there is no place for after repentance" ...Mah-Hah-Bone Edmond Ronayne - Past Master 1879."

*Website and map here (https://www.dylanlouismonroe.com/cult-of-baal.html)

Published on Jan 16, 2019

1:16:52 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-TYgUWUy3A&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

17th January 2019, 00:04

Come together right now ...

PM Theresa May statement outside Number 10 after winning the vote of confidence

The Sun

Published on Jan 16, 2019

THERESA May tonight saw off Labour's attempt to kick her out and trigger a General Election - but now the hard part starts AGAIN.

The PM announced talks with opposition leaders as she attempts to thrash out a Brexit deal which can actually work - or prepare for No Deal.

Mrs May survived this evening's no-confidence vote after the Tories and DUP weighed in behind her to stop Mr Corbyn getting a shot at No10.

She won the support of 325 MPs, with 306 voting against her - a majority of 19.

But she is still no closer to reaching a Brexit deal which Parliament and the EU can accept following last night's record-breaking Commons defeat.

All Tory and DUP MPs voted to keep Mrs May in office, along with Northern Ireland independent Sylvia Hermon - while all opposition MPs voted against her except three ex-Labour independents.

Speaking outside Number 10 tonight the PM begged Jeremy Corbyn to work with her to deliver Brexit - saying it was time for them to work together.

The PM said she was disappointed that so far the Labour boss has rejected calls to find a Brexit plan that MPs can agree with. But she added: “our door remains open”.

Tonight she had talks with the SNP, Lib Dem’s and Plaid Cymru in an attempt to find a way forward through the deadlock.

But the Labour boss insisted that a No Deal Brexit must be taken off the table first.

It comes just 24 hours after her Brexit deal suffered a humiliating defeat last night."

2:44 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3RYYjbcQ4w

Gio

17th January 2019, 07:03

A Cosmic Xplaination ...

Wal Thornhill: Ultima Thule – Another Victory for the Electric Universe | Space News

ThunderboltsProject

"NASA’s New Horizons team has recently received pictures of the most distant object in our solar system ever imaged by a spacecraft. It’s nicknamed Ultima Thule, a relatively tiny body, just 19-miles long, located more than 4 billion miles from Earth in the so-called Kuiper Belt. As we see, like countless asteroids, some moons, as well as the majority of comet nuclei imaged to date, Ultima Thule is made of two distinct lobes which are joined by a thin neck region. Today, physicist Wal Thornhill explains why Ultima Thule is yet another resounding victory for the electric universe hypothesis."

Published on Jan 16, 2019

18:08 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x5_y3IZV_g&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

17th January 2019, 12:04

The latest ...

The Controlled Demolition of Brexit #NewWorldNextWeek

"Welcome back to New World Next Week – the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news" ...

All news items listed below YouTube show-notes

corbettreport
Published on Jan 17, 2019

17:15 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej3NMFH2N3o&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

17th January 2019, 22:42

"A Brief History of Project Avalon" ...

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.mentalfloss.com%2Fsites%2Fd efault%2Ffiles%2Fstyles%2Fmf_image_3x2%2Fpublic%2F 502377-Kraft.jpg%3Fitok%3Do6B-dNW-%26resize%3D1100x740&f=1

Gio

18th January 2019, 06:56

And speaking of Bill (s) ...

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/01/17/16/8652370-6603399-image-m-6_1547741300366.jpg

Billionaires - they're just like us! Bill Gates, 63, is spotted waiting in line
to grab a burger, fries and a Coke at Dick's drive-in in Seattle (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6603399/Bill-Gates-63-photographed-waiting-line-local-Seattle-burger-shop.html)

Gio

18th January 2019, 23:14

The latest ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fs.yimg.com%2Fny%2Fapi%2Fres%2F1.2 %2FH0C7_cGt4_Bb8M6WW96ufQ--~A%2FYXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9ODAw%2Fhttps% 3A%2F%2Fmedia.zenfs.com%2Fen%2Fhuffingtonpost_au_3 34%2F60b7e3d08d86fd67f793dc3cce31e0b3&f=1

Gio

18th January 2019, 23:23

Jasun Horsley - Sex, Occultism and Social Engineering Part One

LegaliseFreedom1

"Jasun Horsley discusses his book 'The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse'. In today's post-truth world, we are becoming inundated with fantasy fiction, alternate truth, fake news, and grossly-oversimplified, wildly-exaggerated conspiracy theories in which cryptocratic power structures and shadowy elites rule our fates. But suppose the truth is both stranger than any fiction and more nuanced and disturbing than any theory? Suppose it is not conspiracy but complicity that creates our world?

Beginning as an investigation into the author's childhood inside a closet aristocracy of so-called 'progressive' British entrepreneurs, 'The Vice of Kings' uncovers a shocking and deeply-disturbing history with links to powerful, high-profile individuals and organisations within the media, entertainment, government, law enforcement, the intelligence services, and more. By juxtaposing disc jockey Jimmy Savile's secret cultural, criminal, and political affiliations in the second half of the 20th century with the life and teachings of Aleister Crowley in the first, it uncovers an alarming body of evidence suggesting that organized child abuse is not only the dark side of occultism, but the shadowy secret at the heart of culture, both ancient and modern."

Website: https://auticulture.com/

Published on Jan 18, 2019

1:07:36 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnU6IgL4YZ4&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

18th January 2019, 23:41

Ocean Ramsey, a shark researcher and advocate, swims with a large great white shark off the shore of Oahu.

https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/great-white-swim-01.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1236&h=820&crop=1

Researcher’s incredible photo with great white shark goes viral (https://nypost.com/2019/01/18/researchers-incredible-photo-with-great-white-shark-goes-viral/)

Gio

19th January 2019, 01:03

Speaking great and white obsessions ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/b8/60/f2/b860f23495f67fc5131f1b1c2e18f34c.jpg

Gio

19th January 2019, 06:25

Some weekend getaway entertainment ... https://www.smiley-lol.com/smiley/maison/chateau.gif

DARK JOURNALIST & JOSEPH FARRELL:

THE ROOTS OF THE SECRET SPACE PROGRAM & THE SPACE FORCE:
NASA CIA VON BRAUN DORNBERGER JFK & GARRISON!

BLACK BUDGET WALL OF SECRECY In this exciting Part 1 episode Dark Journalist Daniel Liszt welcomes back Oxford Scholar and Giza Death Star Book Series Author Dr. Joseph Farrell. They explore the extreme black projects that developed into 'X-Tech' as some blending of the UFO File and the Nazi Exotic Technology Program that became the Roots of the Secret Space Program.

Published on Jan 18, 2019

48:59 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp4eUBKG-gE&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

19th January 2019, 19:36

♪ Ooh, yeah ...
Alright
Here we go again ♪

https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/181130-trump-pelosi.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=618&h=410&crop=1

Give a Little Bit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9coN1xCdNA

Gio

20th January 2019, 06:04

About sums it all up ...

Deal or No Deal Cold Open - SNL

Published on Jan 19, 2019

8:11 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D-PRJuUDoc

Gio

20th January 2019, 21:07

A future U.S. government path to consider ...

https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/shutdown1.jpg?itok=MUJMCFcB

Decentralization Is the Solution to the Government Shutdown

"The partial shutdown with the federal government has helped, perhaps more than any other recent political event, to illustrate some of the biggest problems that come with centralizing an ever-larger number of government activities within a single, centralized institution.

Were the US government more decentralized, we'd not now be facing a nationwide systemic failure that has continues to cripple the private sector in many ways.

Held Hostage by a Shuttered Regulatory State

The federalization of resources and regulatory power over the past century has created a situation in which numerous industries depend on licensing and regulatory approval from federal regulators to function. And yet, thanks to the shutdown, these industries can do little when facing a federal government that imposes mandates, but won't provide the agency "services" necessary to allow agencies to function under those mandates.

For example, As The Washington Post has reported , those areas where the federal government has a large regulatory footprint — such as Alaska — are at the mercy of politicians thousands of miles away.

Most (61 percent) of Alaska is government land managed by five different federal agencies, according to the congressional Research Service. The state’s main industries, including fishing, tourism and oil and gas, all depend on the day-to-day actions of federal workers and regulators.

The fisheries have so far avoided major disruption, despite a few close calls. Most boats are still getting by on licenses and inspections which occurred before the shutdown.

But time is running out. Major commercial boats are required to carry onboard observers to monitor their catch. But when they return from a trip, those observers must be debriefed by the National Marine Fisheries Service — and it’s not holding debriefings during the shutdown.

Alaska is an extreme example, but other states that also have sizable federal ownership of land (which includes most western US states) are also affected. Nationwide, states with coastal states that depend on the smooth-functioning of federal regulation of fisheries and natural resources affected as well.

And it doesn't end with natural resources. With the Tax and Trade Bureau shut down , breweries can't ship beer. That leaves an entire industry up in the air, and small craft brewers are affected the most. As the shutdown continues, more of these workers can expect their paychecks to eventually dry up due to a lack of revenue.

Meanwhile, the FTC, the SEC, and the FCC are all partially shut down .

Some anti-government activists might look at this and say, "great, we don't need those agencies anyway!" But here's the problem: although those agencies' staff members may be staying home, that doesn't mean the private sector is no longer subject to the mandates and regulations those agencies oversee. Private companies still must obtain all the usual licenses and regulatory approvals from federal agencies. It's jsut that federal agencies are no longer available to make approvals or answer questions.

That's hardly something to celebrate.

In short, all the usual federal roadblocks exist to stymie the private sector. Except now, there are even fewer ways to get around those roadblocks. What's even worse is that this problem is nationwide.

Were these regulatory powers and agencies decentralized out of the hands of the federal government, of course, we wouldn't be looking at a nationwide problem. Were a single state to experience a "shutdown" — something that is extremely rare at the state level, by the way — we wouldn't now be facing a nationwide problem in which whole industries are facing crippling regulatory bottlenecks. Problems would be limited to single states. And those states that were prone to shutdowns or other regulatory bottlenecks would see an exodus of industry and capital.

Nor would we be facing a situation in which 800,000 federal employees — nationwide — are currently unpaid. This is a problem that has been made much larger in scope by the centralization of government power.
The Federal Government Has Too Many Issues on Its Plate

Another reason to decentralize is to end a situation in which government shutdowns are more likely due to the broad scope and complexity of the federal budget and federal responsibilities.

In the United States, the federal government's prerogatives have expanded over the past century to include everything from old-age pensions, to highways, to health care regulation, to farming subsidies, and much more. This has all been added on top of the more traditional federal prerogatives of foreign policy. It's only natural then that the likelihood of shutdowns would increase as the number of areas for political conflict increases.

After all, the current shutdown does not come out of only a dispute over of a border wall. It is a larger issue that stems from the fact that the Democrats want to use the wall's potential funding for a myriad of other uses. And, the larger the federal government has grown, the possible targets for government spending has grown ever larger.

Moreover, even the issue of building border walls was not always a federal issue. Prior to the late nineteenth century, state governments were the governments that dealt with the issue of limiting migrants in-flows. Although some conservatives now create ornate legal arguments in attempts to prove immigration — a separate issue from naturalization — has always been a job of the federal government, the actual historical experience makes it clear the federalization of immigration policy is itself a later innovation.

So, we're now left with a federal government where the president and the legislature can argue endlessly over every little thing under the sun. If it's the federal government's job to control and fund everything from cancer research to national parks, then it's only matter of time until we endure a political impasse over one of the countless issues being discussed.

Nor is it just the scope of issues. The sheer size and scope of the United States is itself problematic. The US is so large, and culturally and demographically diverse, that significant disagreements over how federal prerogatives ought to be used are inevitable. A less fragile and more responsive system grows out of a decentralized political system that allows for diversity in policies that affect travel, education, poverty relief, and more. If education policy, for instance, is decided at the state level, then we can be sure we'll never see a federal shutdown over funding of schools. It simply becomes a non-issue at the federal level.

The Solution Lies in Decentralization

The solution lies in removing from the federal government its authority over such a wide range of issues, and to allow diversity and localism in government. This naturally includes welfare programs, public lands, airport security, law enforcement, military land forces, immigration, and the regulatory state.

As it is, American governmental institutions — being so dependent on federal funding and regulatory oversight — are now fragile, bloated, unresponsive, and prone to political bottlenecks. We now see this at work.

The problems we now encounter with the shutdown ought to placed squarely at the feet of those who have called endless for ever greater levels of federal control over state and local communities, while centralizing both financial and regulatory power under within a single institution. Not everything needs to turn into a nationwide systemic problem when the federal government encounters a political impasse. We ought to take steps now to limit the damage the feds can do."

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
Sources page: zerohedge.com (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-19/decentralization-solution-government-shutdown-problem)

Gio

21st January 2019, 04:45

Mooning America ... (https://www.space.com/43069-super-blood-wolf-moon-eclipse-begins.html)

https://img.purch.com/h/1400/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA4Mi 8zNDAvb3JpZ2luYWwvdG90YWwtbHVuYXItZWNsaXBzZS0yMDE5 LWJsb29kLW1vb24uanBnPzE1NDgwNDY2MTg=

Dreamtimer

21st January 2019, 12:02

The moon was beautiful and it was coooooold out!

Gio

21st January 2019, 21:52

Every dog has its day -- even on the runway in Mumbai, India ... (https://nypost.com/2019/01/18/dog-makes-accidental-modeling-debut-at-mumbai-fashion-show/)

https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/rohit-bal-fashion-dog.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1236&h=820&crop=1

I'm Too Sexy

That's - Right Said Fred

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxZp4VEopcE

Gio

22nd January 2019, 07:33

And speaking of ...

"When Kyle Krier's wife let out their black Labrador out in a Kansas field, the dog disappeared. Kyle went all over searching for 'Bo.' Eventually he received a phone call telling him that he had been spotted out and about. But when he found him, Bo wasn't alone. The pet had made friends with another Labrador as well as a goat. The trio all climbed into Kyles car who was only too happy to take the three of them back to his home" ...

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/01/21/23/8814702-6617187-image-m-23_1548114064482.jpg

Homeward bound ! (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6617187/Hilarious-moment-man-reunited-lost-dog-returns-pooch-goat.html)

Gio

22nd January 2019, 08:29

Interesting clip ...

Joe Rogan w/Bari Weiss on the "MAGA" Kids Controversy

"Bari Weiss is an American opinion writer and editor. In 2017, Weiss joined The New York Times
as a staff editor in the opinion section."

Taken from Joe Rogan Experience #1228
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T77uFdw9HJA

Published on Jan 21, 2019

19:38 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T77uFdw9HJA

Dreamtimer

22nd January 2019, 13:26

I've only listened to the first few minutes. I hope folks recall how the President himself has been calling for violence at his rallies:

He'll pay the hospital bill;

In his day 'that guy' would have gone out on a stretcher;

"If I shot a guy on Fifth Avenue..."

I sure hope they recall.

Fred Steeves

22nd January 2019, 14:00

I think that whole "controversy", is a prime example of how people need to look a bit deeper into things before coming to knee jerk conclusions. At first glance is seldom enough to get it right.

Gio

22nd January 2019, 21:19

The latest ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

The Big Lebowski -

"Jesus Scene"

2:53 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdOjVsfuKPs

20 years after it hit theaters....

Jeff Bridges, John Goodman And Steve Buscemi Talk ‘The Big Lebowski’ In Extended Interview

26:50 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNzquU4hjpk

Gio

22nd January 2019, 22:33

Sounds of the Zodiac ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/e2/ae/52/e2ae5296a6b2dd766b6086d339662472.jpg

Gio

22nd January 2019, 22:48

Controlling The Climate Changers - Jim Lee

Freeman Fly

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over, you almost never get it back.” — Carl Sagan The Anatomy of Slave Speak

Published on Jan 22, 2019

1:08:44 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vSIDt98Ih4&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

24th January 2019, 01:45

"Where does the human soul go when it leaves the body at the point of death?
This is one of the greatest mysteries of life, perhaps the greatest" ...

Age Of Truth TV Presents ...

With onscreen commentary from David Icke, Linda Moulton Howe, Jordan Maxwell,
Dr. Rauni Kilde, John Lear, Kerry Cassidy, Max Igan and scientist Ulf Dahlström ...

"MYSTERY OF DEATH: Heaven Or Illusion & Reincarnation Soul Trap"

Where does the human soul go when it leaves the body at the point of death? This is one of the greatest mysteries of life, perhaps the greatest. Every religion has their own philosophy on what happens when we die. Do we really go to "Heaven", and is "Heaven" a real place? Reincarnation of the soul appears to be the most dominant consensus between a lot of the worlds top researchers who acknowledge that human beings have a soul, and that it is consciousness separated beyond the body, the mind and the five senses. If reincarnation of human souls is the truth, could it then be a trap? A soul trap in the Matrix in order to recycle the human soul in order for all soul-beings to stay connected to and slavebound to Planet Earth? Is the Great White Light, also known in religious terms as Heaven, a constructed soul-harvesting karma-wheel factory created by malevolent interdimensional beings, which is mentioned in all the many different holy scriptures during all ages and in the Gnostic writings. If so, what can we do when our soul leaves the body?

IF everything we know and have been told about "DEATH" has been a lie, then confronting this major and very complex topic will test your view of everything and what seems possible, especially the expansion of perception and consciousness.

The show was produced and compiled on location in Budapest, Hungary on January 9, 2019.

Published on Jan 22, 2019

1:08:12 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT4S1lJ06aM&feature=em-uploademail

Dreamtimer

24th January 2019, 11:44

Related to the above post, I was recently listening to Tom Campbell. He was talking about reincarnation in the simulated universe he posits that we live in.

According to his theory, reincarnation is part of evolution. When we embrace love, we evolve. When we embrace fear we devolve. He talks about how anger comes from fear.

The intelligent consciousness which is the universe is trying to understand itself via us and our evolution.

I'm interested in the idea of a soul trap and I still have Wayna Lobo Blanco in my mind.

Gio

25th January 2019, 05:35

Meanwhile at the Doomsday Clock ...

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F66.media.tumblr.com%2Ff63f02a88ec4 fe663228dfcf52a16102%2Ftumblr_nuln7bBXFT1uaabhpo1_ 500.gif&f=1

Washington (AFP)

Date created: 24/01/2019

Information wars endanger civilization, say 'Doomsday' experts

"Information warfare is amplifying major worldwide threats like climate change and nuclear warfare, endangering the future of civilization, US experts said Thursday as the symbolic Doomsday Clock stayed at two minutes to midnight.

The manipulation of facts, fake news and information overload -- along with global warming and flirting with nuclear war -- are all factors that have brought humans as close to destroying the planet as ever, said the non-profit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

"Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention," the group said in a statement.

"These major threats -- nuclear weapons and climate change -- were exacerbated this past year by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting the future of civilization in extraordinary danger."

The clock did not budge from last year, but that "should not be taken as a sign of stability," said Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the group of scholars and international experts in security, nuclear, environmental and science fields.

"It is a state as worrisome as the most dangerous times of the Cold War," said Bronson at a press conference in the US capital, describing the current climate as "The New Abnormal."

"The velocity of information has increased by orders of magnitude, allowing information warfare and fake news to flourish," she said.

"It generates rage and polarization across the globe at a time when we need calm and unity to solve the globe's greatest problems."

This "New Abnormal" is "a state that features an unpredictable and shifting landscape of simmering disputes that multiply the chances for major conflict to erupt," she added.

"We appear to be normalizing a very dangerous world in terms of the risks of nuclear warfare and climate change."

- 'Bad news, indeed' -

Robert Rosner, professor in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, described this "New Abnormal" as "the disturbing reality in which things are not getting better."

"The fact that the Doomsday Clock's hands did not move is bad news indeed," he said.

The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947. Its time has changed on 20 occasions since then, ranging from two minutes to midnight in 1953 -- and again in 2018 -- to 17 minutes before midnight in 1991.

Last year it moved from two-and-a-half minutes before minutes to two minutes, as near as it has ever been to the hour of the apocalypse, largely based on concerns over the possibility of nuclear war with North Korea and "unpredictability" from US President Donald Trump.

Over the past year, the "rhetoric" between North Korea and the United States "has eased but remains extremely dangerous," said Bronson.

Meanwhile, relations between the United States and Russia "remain unacceptably strained."

And on the environmental front, "carbon emissions began to rise again after a period of plateauing," Bronson added.

On tensions with North Korea, former US defense secretary William Perry said the latest talks between the Washington and Pyongyang may have done "nothing" to move North Korea away from its nuclear program.

"On the other hand, and this is a big other hand, it stopped the insults and threats between our two countries, and therefore reduced the chances of blundering into a war with North Korea," Perry said.

Jerry Brown, executive chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and former governor of California, said world leaders are not doing enough to scale back the threat of nuclear weapons.

"The blindness and stupidity of the politicians and their consultants is truly shocking in the face of nuclear catastrophe and danger," Brown said.

"We are almost like travelers on the Titanic, not seeing the iceberg up ahead but enjoying the elegant dining and music."

Brown also took issue with journalists who report on every word the US president utters on social media.

"Journalists, yes, you love Trump's tweets. You love the news of the day. You love the leads that get the clicks but the final click could be a nuclear accident, or mistake, and that is what we all have to be worried about.""

Source: france24.com (https://www.france24.com/en/20190124-information-wars-endanger-civilization-say-doomsday-experts)

Gio

25th January 2019, 16:54

Cutting it real close ...

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fbestanimations.com%2FTransport%2FA ircraft%2Fplane-travel-animated-gif-16.gif&f=1

BREAKING: Drudge Reports Shutdown Agreement Reached

"The Drudge Report blasted out its breaking news siren on Friday, reporting that an agreement has been reached to end the government shutdown.

Matt Drudge’s high-trafficked news aggregator reported that according to a source, a shutdown agreement has been reached, and that an announcement is set for 1 p.m.

“GOVT TO REOPEN ‘TEMPORARILY’,” Drudge added.

The federal government shutdown entered its fifth week on Monday, with President Donald Trump demanding funding for his border wall to reopen the government, and Democrats refusing to allocate any funds towards a barrier.

This story is breaking"…

Source:mediaite.com (https://www.mediaite.com/online/breaking-drudge-reports-shutdown-agreement-reached/)

Dreamtimer

25th January 2019, 17:28

Twenty years ago, I was taking a class. The professor was a cargo pilot. He talked about the close calls he witnessed and how the FAA is hard pressed to keep it all running smoothly.

This was when the system was in full operation.

With a shutdown, we're less safe in a wide array of aspects. People are simply acting stupid to be going along with this shutdown.

Gio

25th January 2019, 18:22

Trump's temporary ...

#3 Weeks till Feb 15 ....

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fimage.rakuten.co.jp%2Futsunomiya%2 Fcabinet%2Fabled%2F02246233%2Fksgnocan.gif&f=1

Gio

25th January 2019, 19:33

Now thats all (temporarily) settled ...

Last Minute Trips - Canada

With Julien & Collin

Waffsicle
Premiered 1/25/2018

Descriptive:

Julien and Collin start a Youtube live video where they not only chat with their audience online, but allow them to join in on the process of seeing where their “dart” will take them.

They each get a dart and they blindfold themselves before literally tossing it at a large map on the wall.

We then are there, LIVE, with 2 destinations in mind. One at each dart point.

They then take a poll from their live audience (via twitter and YT live) and then, in that moment book a LAST MINUTE TRIP to the winning destination.

Most of the time on the trip, the guys don’t know where they are going or what they are going to do from the moment they get off the plane in their new destination. This includes, not knowing where they are sleeping that night… or if there is even a rental car place nearby. This spontaneity and in the moment approach is the point of the show. - They genuinely explore, and check out the town. They run into locals, and learn about what makes the towns awesome (or not awesome). They talk to fans across all their social platforms (Twitter, Snapchat, Skype, Instragam, etc..) and get suggestions from them on things to do or see while on their trip.

23:16 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT_8Nvz16Sc&feature=em-lsp

Dreamtimer

25th January 2019, 19:57

The Mystery of Death video was a good collage of different perspectives. Very enjoyable. Thank you.

Gio

25th January 2019, 23:32

Mueller gets Stone (https://nypost.com/2019/01/25/roger-stone-says-he-wont-testify-against-trump-as-he-vows-to-fight-charges/amp/)...

♪ Come on, come on and surry down ♪

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.dailymail.co.uk%2F1s%2F2019%2F0 1%2F25%2F17%2F8990792-6631785-image-a-8_1548438914260.jpg&f=1

Tricky Dicky/ Roger Stone

Stoned Soul Picnic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MprZXmGK-Ps

Gio

26th January 2019, 07:45

Connecting from the outside in ...

Jim Elvidge - Digital Consciousness: The True Nature of Reality?

LegaliseFreedom1

Part One

Jim Elvidge discusses his book 'Digital Consciousness: A Transformative Vision'. Our reality is not what it appears to be. The latest physics experiments demonstrate that an objective reality simply does not exist. Despite its immense value to humanity, modern science's claim that it can account for the depth and diversity of experience, and in the foreseeable future explain the fundamental nature of reality, goes too far. Modern mainstream science maintains that matter is all that matters, and that the seemingly-solid three-dimensional world of our five senses is all there really is. But the list of phenomena adequately accounted for by the physical sciences is outstripped by those it cannot explain and instead simply chooses to ignore.

The most profound of these is the riddle of consciousness itself. The best hypothesis proffered by mainstream science is that consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon of the brain, a by-product which arises when organisms reach a certain degree of complexity. But what if the opposite were true? What if that which we call matter actually arises within mind, a universal sea of consciousness forming the fundamental ground of reality? Not only does this model reflect ancient spiritual and wisdom traditions spanning the globe and reaching back into pre-history, when unified with cutting edge quantum physics, it forms the basis for an all-encompassing cosmology offering answers to the eternal questions of existence and the deepest mysteries of life.

https://www.theuniversesolved.com/

Jim Elvidge - The Universe... Solved! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzAQC4VYyV8)

Published on Jan 23, 2019

54:27 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SegzSeqHSxg&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

26th January 2019, 21:52

Great story ...

Conservation Officer Rescues Blind Hawk From Busy Road | North Woods Law

"Conservation officer Josiah Towne comes across a young broadwing hawk that appears to be
injured and takes him to a close by natural science center."

Animal Planet
Published on Jan 26, 2019

6:13 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFzB7F3a0ao

Maggie

26th January 2019, 23:54

Thanks Gio for coming back with all your offerings.

Bruce Lipton weighs in on a world of harmony

www.brucelipton.com

Quantum Physics: The Science of Conflict Resolution
By simple definition, the term conflict represents an incompatibility between two or more opinions, principles, or interests. The nature of conflict goes back time immemorial, in the biblical sense, starting with the story of Cain and Abel.

However, the field of science did not officially weigh in on the subject of conflict until the founding of physics by Sir Isaac Newton in the late 1600’s. In defining the mechanisms of the Universe, Newtonian principles separated the spiritual (energetic) plane from the physical realm, and in the process, created a polarity that is still brewing, the conflict between Science and Religion.

Newtonian physics further expanded the realm of conflict by acknowledging that objects in the material realm represented separate discrete entities. For example, the computer and you are two distinct and separate entities that appear to be independent of one another; or for example, the period at the end of this sentence is separate and distinct from the periods at the end of the previous sentence or the end of the following sentence. Newtonian science emphasized that material objects could be separated from one another and studied independently.

In assessing the Universe on this principle, the material world is perceived to be made up of a myriad of individual objects, many of which can display characteristics that make them appear to be polar opposites. In scientific assessments, humans can be separated and studied as independent individuals or they can be collectively assigned into categories. On the basis of racial character, for example, individuals can be grouped into categories representing black, brown, white, yellow, or red populations.

Racial “groups” can be further catalogued based on subjective characteristics of strengths and weaknesses, including traits such as intelligence, physical empowerment, and ethics. It is the perception of “different” amongst the groups that has been the historic foundation for creating and justifying conflict; women vs men, whites vs blacks, settlers vs indigenous natives, Jews vs Muslims, the list goes on.

The culture’s emphasis on “separate” was officially invalidated in 1925 when the world was introduced to a new science, Quantum Physics. The formerly separated energetic (spiritual) and material realms were unified when physicists recognized that material atoms were actually a “condensed” form of energy; physicality is an illusion!

Atoms, comprised of energy vortices, spin and generate “waves” of an electromagnetic field. A useful analogy is to consider the rain drops and the ripples they create in the pool of water illustrated below. Each rain drop represents a spinning atom and the radiating ripples it creates represent the electromagnetic energy waves that radiate from each atom.

The profound point: The ripples from each drop of water across the whole surface of the pool are all interconnected. Likewise, the energy from each atom comprising our perception of matter is connected to the energy waves emitted by every other atom in the Universe! The Universe is a unity of energy where everything is connected and entangled. The Universe cannot be divided into separate elements. All is one! What we define as separate polarizing elements, are in reality a gradient within a unity. For example, black and white are NOT separate entities, they are part of single gradient comprised of a billion different shades of gray.

Newtonian science emphasizes individuality, while quantum physics emphasizes unity. The profound point here is to consider the question, “Do we have the option of choosing one of these opposing views of the Universe’s physics over the other?” The answer is NO for two reasons: 1) Quantum physics has been proven to be the most valid and truthful of all sciences on planet Earth, and 2) Newtonian physics represents a small subset of principles built into the field of quantum physics.

This conclusion is most important in that the “unity” emphasized in quantum physics is the metric by which the Universe works. If we want to live in harmony and health, we must own from the core of our being that we are one with the Universe. We must live with the reality that we are not separate “individuals,” we are *Humans First!

This month’s video is a wonderful example of how the quantum physics universe can be used to resolve the nearly 200-year-old conflict between the proponents of Creationism and those favoring Evolution. Combining these apparently polar opposite philosophies, creates a harmony with which we can all live and enjoy in the absence of conflict!

ThR1wHuk7N4

Dreamtimer

27th January 2019, 11:25

Nice fractal at 3:30. Brief.

Dreamtimer

27th January 2019, 14:36

Christopher Hitchens called the Star Wars System a boondoggle. :);)

The latest ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fs.yimg.com%2Fny%2Fapi%2Fres%2F1.2 %2FH0C7_cGt4_Bb8M6WW96ufQ--~A%2FYXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9ODAw%2Fhttps% 3A%2F%2Fmedia.zenfs.com%2Fen%2Fhuffingtonpost_au_3 34%2F60b7e3d08d86fd67f793dc3cce31e0b3&f=1

Now we have a boondog-wall.

Oy.

Gio

28th January 2019, 07:33

A Cock/Block ...

"In a move that's sure to infuriate President Trump and likely impede negotiations over the border security funding that Trump has demanded be part of any permanent plan to avert another shutdown, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is still planning to postpone the State of the Union by refusing to officially invite the president to give the annual speech on Tuesday" ...

https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/2019-01-27.png?itok=ZiCL3GAK

Pelosi To Block Trump's SOTU Address Despite Government Reopening

"Asked about the SOTU, Pelosi said after a deal to end the shutdown had been reached that she and the president would discuss holding the SOTU once the government had reopened, a cryptic response that many interpreted as meaning that the speech would be postponed, according to USA Today.

"What I said to the president is when the government is opened we will discuss a mutually agreeable date," Pelosi said, adding "I'll look forward to doing that" and welcoming Trump in the House chambers when that is done.

Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, later affirmed that the speech wouldn't be happening on 1/29. And on Sunday, CNN's Jim Sciutto reported that an aide to Pelosi had anonymously confirmed that the House wouldn't consider the concurrent resolution that must be passed to officially invite the president to House chambers, where the speech has traditionally been held."

Jim Sciutto
✔
@jimsciutto

New: Pelosi aide confirms SOTU will not take place this Tuesday. No information about when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might invite President Trump to deliver the address, CNN reporting.
5,425
6:16 AM - Jan 27, 2019

"For his part, Trump has said that he wouldn't look for an alternative venue for the speech. On Jan. 23, he tweeted that no venue would match the "history, tradition and historic importance of the House Chamber".

Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump

As the Shutdown was going on, Nancy Pelosi asked me to give the State of the Union Address. I agreed. She then changed her mind because of the Shutdown, suggesting a later date. This is her prerogative - I will do the Address when the Shutdown is over. I am not looking for an....
98.2K
8:12 PM - Jan 23, 2019

Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump

....alternative venue for the SOTU Address because there is no venue that can compete with the history, tradition and importance of the House Chamber. I look forward to giving a “great” State of the Union Address in the near future!
94K
8:18 PM - Jan 23, 2019

"We imagine we'll be hearing more from Trump on this very sensitive subject in the near future."

Source:zerohedge.com (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-27/pelosi-block-trumps-sotu-address-despite-government-reopening)

Gio

28th January 2019, 08:38

Speaking of Cocky ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/f9/5b/a2/f95ba29709c487100cdfa4c9c9476d6f.jpg

Gio

28th January 2019, 09:43

'Feeling a little appreciated' ...

Wait for it ...

Weekend Update: Trump Announces Deal to End Shutdown - SNL

Published on Jan 26, 2019

5:13 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kki30ka_Kfw

Gio

28th January 2019, 11:14

Noting i live in legal Washington state ...
I was recently gifted with a jar of this substance...
Mine was in the form of a very tasty butter ...
Put it in my tea - And it really effectively works !

CBD goes mainstream as bars and coffee shops
add weed-related drinks to menus

CBD, short for cannabidiol, is a compound found in the cannabis plant, and it's in just about everything.
It's already being added to coffee, cocktails, lotion, pet treats and more.
Some users swear by CBD, saying it relieves their anxiety, helps them sleep and eases their pain.

https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/img/editorial/2019/01/03/105658421-1546547366722cbdcoffeeshop.530x298.jpg?v=154660854 3

"Eric Cahan and his business partners opened an art-filled cafe in Manhattan's East Village on April 10, 2018. Ten days later, Mamacha created a CBD-laced drink to celebrate the marijuana holiday, 420.

Suddenly there was a line out the door.

Cahan and Mamacha's other owners sensed an opportunity. They learned as much as they could about CBD, reformulated their menu and curated oils, tinctures and other products to sell in the store.

About half of Mamacha's sales come from CBD drinks and products, with the other half coming from virgin matcha and coffee drinks. The company now plans to introduce in March a line of "functional elixirs" targeted for specific purposes like sleep, focus and anti-inflammation.

Coffee. Cocktails. Lotion. Dog treats. You name it, CBD is probably in it.

CBD, short for cannabidiol, is a compound found in the cannabis plant. It promises to deliver the calming benefits of marijuana without the high that comes from THC. Companies are adding CBD to just about everything — a trend set to accelerate as regulations ease and consumer interest grows.

Finally legal

Most CBD is now federally legal thanks to the farm bill President Donald Trump signed in December. Companies still aren't supposed to add CBD to food, drinks and dietary supplements, but many are doing it anyway. The Food and Drug Administration has said it plans to continue enforcing this ban but will also look into creating a pathway for such products to legally enter the market.

Some users swear by it, saying it relieves their anxiety, helps them sleep and eases their pain. And forget stoner stereotypes when thinking about CBD. Moms and even pets are experimenting with it. One research firm, Brightfield Group, expects the CBD market to reach $22 billion by 2022.

However, most of our current understanding of CBD is anecdotal — not proven through scientific studies. And because CBD products aren't yet regulated, the quality can vary widely.

"There's a lot of interest and excitement, for good reason, but I think people are pushing it too hard, too fast and are overgeneralizing things," said Ryan Vandrey, a professor at Johns Hopkins who studies the behavioral pharmacology of cannabis.

Clinical evidence

We don't know what exactly CBD interacts with in the brain or the body, but researchers do know that CBD tends to turn down abnormal signaling in the brain, said Ken Mackie, a psychological and brain sciences professor at Indiana University. That's why CBD may help with epilepsy, anxiety and sleep.

CBD and other cannabis compounds tweak systems in the body, a process he compares to lowering the volume. Other compounds, like opioids, ketamine and nicotine, simply turn them on and off.

There isn't much clinical research on the safety and efficacy of CBD. Studying cannabis has been challenging because it's technically illegal under federal law, meaning researchers must overcome a number of hurdles in order to study it. We don't know anything about indications like sleep, anxiety or pain, Vandrey said.

We do know it's safe and effective in treating seizures in children with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome or Dravet syndrome. GW Pharma studied its CBD-derived drug, Epidiolex, in numerous clinical trials. After reviewing the company's science, the Food and Drug Administration approved Epidiolex in June.

The lack of clinical evidence hasn't stopped consumers from trying it — and raving about it.

"It's always nice to have strong proof in placebo controlled trials, but if someone's taking a drug and feeling any benefit, more power to them," Mackie said."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PTDKzatfS4

CBD 101

"The Alchemist's Kitchen in Manhattan's East Village hosted a CBD 101 class for about a dozen adults in December.

After covering the basics, instructor, Zach Clancy, asked for any questions.

"What's the modern history?" "Why has it been popular in the last few years?" "What's a safe dosage?" "What's the safest way to extract it?" "Will it treat my arthritis?"

One attendee said she first tried CBD in California earlier in the year. She said she struggles to fall and stay asleep, but the CBD helped her with both issues. She declined to be named, citing the compound's still-taboo reputation.

The farm bill signed in December legalized hemp. Most CBD hitting shelves is derived from the hemp plant, which contains less than 0.3 percent THC, the psychoactive chemical in weed. Hemp's close cousin, marijuana, can contain upwards of 10 percent THC.

So you can't get high from CBD products if the proper dosage is followed, but the industry isn't regulated on a federal level so the amount of THC can vary.

Doses can vary, too. Some shops recommend six milligrams of CBD when taken as a tincture or added to food. Others recommend at least 30. Again, since there isn't much clinical research on CBD, most of the recommendations are based on trial and error.

As more people dabble with CBD, more people are following the money, worrying some that bad products will enter the market and taint CBD's allure. Or worse, harm consumers.

"There does need to be some sort of regulatory framework for overall product safety and to protect the customer from purchasing products that contain false advertisements or make unsubstantiated claims," said Pamela Hadfield, co-founder of HelloMD, a medical cannabis company, while cautioning against strict regulations that would be "too difficult for most manufacturers to comply."

Trendy right now

Joe Masse, beverage director at The Woodstock bar, added a CBD cocktail to the menu in September. Called The White Rabbit, the drink is made with Bombay Dry Gin, sage simple syrup, honey, fresh lemon juice and 1 milligram of CBD oil.

At first, Masse said he was nervous about putting it on the menu. He worked with a nearby pharmacy that carries CBD oil. Now, the drink is "by far" the bar's best-selling gin cocktail. He hasn't yet decided whether he'll add the oil to any future drinks.

"It's trendy right now, so I don't know how it will be in six months when we redo the menu," Masse said. "A year ago, activated charcoal was popular and now you can't find it anywhere.""

Source: cnbc.com (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/25/cbd-goes-mainstream-as-consumers-dabble-with-the-cannabis-compound.html)

Gio

28th January 2019, 13:03

"By the blackened wall he does it all
He thinks he's died and gone to heaven

Now the tale is told by the old man
Back home he reads the letter
How they are paid in gold just to babble
In the back room all night and waste their time

And they wandered in from the city
Of St. John without a dime" ...

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FrOzSmysKr5Y%2F maxresdefault.jpg&f=1

♪ See the glory of the royal scam ♪

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shXVn0Dw-FA

Gio

28th January 2019, 13:18

Elen

28th January 2019, 15:00

Donald Trump ...

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic6.businessinsider.com%2Fimag e%2F59392691b1bd56a2358b4a1f-2000%2Fkamala%2520harris.jpg&f=1

Meet Kamala Harris. (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna963301)

You know Gio, if he has caused this to happen...he may have done us all a BIG favour. Indeed! Well done Mr. Trump.

Gio

29th January 2019, 14:29

Technology: Distracting, Disturbing, Deceiving, & Deluding Ourselves To Death

“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business"

https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/orwell-and-huxley.png?itok=qci9DGYF

"Something as mundane as using the restroom at work sometimes ends up triggering deeper thoughts about technology – its benefits, deficiencies and danger to our culture. I’ve been using the same restroom at work for the last twelve years. They remodeled the restroom a few years ago with the latest technology – automatic flushers, automatic soap dispensers, automatic spigots, and automatic towel dispenser. This technology is supposed to make things better, but from my perspective the technology just added complexity, glitches and unnecessary complications.

First off, these technological “improvements” did not eliminate any humans from the equation. The housekeepers responsible for the restrooms continued to be employed. Prior to the remodel they would fill a metal bin with individual paper towels and fill the soap dispenser with liquid soap. Now they have to insert a roll of paper towels in the electronic dispenser and a cartridge of soap in the electronic soap dispenser.

Instead of doing this daily, they wait until they are empty before replacing the towels and soap. That means they run out during the day. It must be dozens off times when I’ve washed my hands and put my hands in front of the automatic towel machine and nothing comes out. Then your choice is going to a stall and using toilet paper or wiping your hands on your pants. When it’s not empty, it jams 20% of the time. The automatic faucets stay on too long or go off by themselves with no one near them."

https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/2019-01-28_9-55-22.jpg?itok=X12w-kYu

"The bottom line is this bathroom technology was costly, requires ongoing costs for battery replacement, did not eliminate any labor costs, malfunctions at a far greater rate than the previous manual devices, and provides less service and satisfaction than the non-technological methods.

This led me to ponder whether this microcosm of technological dysfunction and dissatisfaction applies to technology on a much larger scale, as technology has been sold to the masses as the solution to all of our ills and a sure sign we are progressing as a civilization and culture. Technological advances have given the masses the false impression their lives have gotten better, when in reality the technology has enslaved and controlled them while providing a never-ending distraction from reality, critical thinking and the truth.

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

With virtually everyone in America having access to the internet, smart phones containing more computing power than NASA used to launch rocket ships into outer space, and the proliferation of computers even in the poorest school districts, the masses should be far more intelligent and informed than previous generations. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Technology is wasted on people who haven’t been taught to think critically, have been indoctrinated by government run schools to be subservient cogs in the machine, and believe feelings and emotions are more important than knowledge and understanding. The proliferation of social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) has resulted in the dumbing down of human interactions and replacement of discussing issues with virtue signaling, selfies, faux manufactured outrage, and glorifying shallow celebrities. We’re addicted to technology."

With virtually everyone in America having access to the internet, smart phones containing more computing power than NASA used to launch rocket ships into outer space, and the proliferation of computers even in the poorest school districts, the masses should be far more intelligent and informed than previous generations. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Technology is wasted on people who haven’t been taught to think critically, have been indoctrinated by government run schools to be subservient cogs in the machine, and believe feelings and emotions are more important than knowledge and understanding. The proliferation of social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) has resulted in the dumbing down of human interactions and replacement of discussing issues with virtue signaling, selfies, faux manufactured outrage, and glorifying shallow celebrities. We’re addicted to technology."

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"It is incomprehensible our society has embraced technology for amusement, trivialities, and superficial displays of diversion, rather than advancement of knowledge, proliferation of ideas, and cultural progress and enrichment. The works of Aristotle, Socrates, Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Orwell and Huxley are available with one click of your iGadget, but instead the masses choose to play Angry Birds, Candy Crush, and Madden, while worshipping at the altar of Kardashian. So much knowledge and wisdom at your fingertips, guaranteed to make you smarter and 99.9% choose to amuse themselves into a stupor of ignorance.

Are we just a society of intellectual lightweights, driven by emotions and sensitivities? Or is this infinite infantilism designed and implemented by those controlling the culture through their ownership of all media platforms? It appears to be a purposeful deliberate strategy implemented by the ruling class to dumb down the masses through the public education (indoctrination) system, divert their attention and thoughts through modern day electronic bread and circuses, enslaving them in debt, and pillaging global wealth and power through control of the political, financial, and mass media structures. And now they utilize the technology to spy on you and make sure you are not contradicting the establishment narrative."

“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.” ― Neil Postman

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"If the daily machinations, intrigues, schemes, and plot twists broadcast 24/7 seem like an orchestrated reality TV show, it’s because they are. It’s nothing more than an enhanced Truman Show where we are all Truman. The controllers produce the daily disinformation propaganda; superficial story-lines designed to play upon your emotions; plot twists designed to invoke hope, despair, anger, fear, and desire; and a ceaseless mantra that the government, mega-corporations, Wall Street bankers, and chosen “experts” know what is best for us.

They don’t want a citizenry who understands what is going on, how to think critically and question the establishment, or live within their means. They want obedient consumers who believe what they are told by “authorities” and are just smart enough to follow the rules laid down by their superiors. A nation built on illusions, delusions, disinformation and confusion."

“Television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information – misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information – information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.” ― Neil Postman

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"Television has always been an effective tool in keeping the masses under control. Talking media heads, sold to the public as highly intelligent and educated journalists, mouthed their lines, written by invisible men working on behalf of the wealthy ruling class, to sooth the savage beasts known as the masses. Control the message and you control society.

With the advent of the internet, what should have been a vast awakening and enlightenment of the masses, has just been a degradation to the lowest common denominator. Social media platforms have eliminated thought, conversation, seriousness, knowledge, intelligence, and clarity from the public square and replaced it with narcissism, vitriol, virtue signaling, triviality, attacking anyone with a different viewpoint, and self-promotion.

Now that the Silicon Valley social media behemoth corporations have hundreds of millions addicted to amusing themselves to death, they can decide what is acceptable speech and that which doesn’t conform to their left-wing views. Censorship, public shaming, manufactured outrage and destroying those with an alternative point of view is now in the control of a small cabal of extremely rich men.

They use contrived incidents like the Covington High School kids “threatening” a “noble” Vietnam Vet Native American in a blatant attempt to spin their web of deceit. Their technological control over public discourse is a threat to our freedom of speech and to our society. Anyone who thinks for themselves is in danger of becoming an outcast and/or cyber criminal in our new dystopian existence."

“For in the end, he was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in ‘Brave New World’ was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

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Neil Postman published his book in 1985, one year after the title of Orwell’s chilling view of a dark and brutal dystopian future. Postman’s view at the time was Huxley’s Brave New World dystopia had proven to be the more accurate assessment of the future. And he was probably right thirty-four years ago. He accurately assessed how the masses had been trained like Pavlov’s dogs to follow their emotions rather than their intellects.

The average person actually thinks they are informed, when they have been programmed by disinformation peddled by the corporate media at the behest of their oligarch masters. Ignorance is not strength. War is not peace. Freedom is not slavery.

The misleading information – superficial, irrelevant, fake news – is designed to create the illusion of knowledge when, in reality, it leads you away from knowledge. Postman didn’t think the dumbing down of Americans was deliberate. He attributed it to TV entertaining rather than informing.

I believe those in control of the levers of society have made a calculated effort to convince the masses their willful ignorance is actually knowledge. The ignorant are much easier to manipulate and lead down any path necessary to benefit those in charge. Accumulating wealth and power is much easier when the masses can’t think, understand basic mathematical truths, or comprehend reality.

Postman compared the two dystopian visions at the outset of his brilliant tome:

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us."

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

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"Postman was most certainly correct in his assessment of our society in 1985. TV was still the overwhelming method of information and entertainment for the average person. People still had newspapers and magazines delivered to their homes. Cable news had just launched. The internet was not in widespread use. Home computers were in their infancy. Cell phones for every person was a distant dream.

Orwell’s dark future had not materialized, YET. Huxley’s subtler dystopia required far fewer authoritarian measures. The unseen psychological manipulation of the masses, as described and practiced by Edward Bernays and his sycophants, was far more effective in molding minds, designing the culture, and forming the ideas of the masses without them realizing they were nothing but lab rats in a grand experiment. Propaganda works.

Since 1985 the technological control over the masses has deepened and overwhelmed any resistance to its creeping governance of our daily lives. The proliferation of computers, 24-hour cable TV and “smart” phones for the masses has given the unseen manipulators of the public mind, known as the invisible government, the ultimate tools for engineering our minds and deciding what will be perceived as the central beliefs guiding our daily lives.

We have come to love our oppression and learned ignorance, adoring the very technologies enslaving us in trivialities, disinformation, shallow displays of virtue signaling, and eliminating our capacity to think. The masses have passively acquiesced to their oppressors by allowing technology to completely control their lives and form their opinions.

The corporate mass media, through social media platforms, the internet, and TV overwhelm the masses with useless information designed to distract and divert our attention from the subversive actions of the wealthy oligarchs pulling the strings behind the technological curtain. The truth has been and continues to be hidden behind an avalanche of irrelevant minutiae and nonsense, spewing from our Screens.

The purposeful purveyors of this garbage into the minds of the masses play to the lowest common denominator by producing disinformation designed to amuse, provoke fear, confuse, inflame desires, and kindle emotions. They most certainly don’t want citizens thinking critically, questioning the status quo, ignoring their dictates, discussing the real issues and problem confronting the country, or generating ideas which could undermine their control and potentially reduce their vast riches."

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"I think Portman was being somewhat naïve in thinking the dumbing down of society through technological means and government-controlled indoctrination public schools was an accident. As seen in both novels, the controllers knew exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it. The Brave New World method of control has worked for decades, but the propagation of websites appealing to critical thinkers and those questioning the approved narrative has endangered this command and control structure of the Deep State.

That is why our society is now devolving towards Orwell’s vision of the future. Battle lines began to be drawn when Snowden, Assange and other selfless patriots of freedom revealed the level of deception, disinformation, and criminality of the state and those supporting the state. Technology is now becoming the boot stomping on our faces forever."

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"The tyranny being inflicted upon the masses by the likes of Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and other tech behemoths on behalf of their Deep State benefactors is chilling in its depth and depravity. The oppression from the current day Big Brothers through censorship, banning of truth tellers, demonetization of those who don’t conform, and public shaming of dissenters has replaced the soft tyranny of mental manipulation.

The establishment now openly suppresses the truth through their control of all mainstream media channels and outlets. The alternate media is scorned and ridiculed as conspiracy theorists, nutjobs, and Russian collaborators. The level of fake news vomited by Deep State propagandists has reached a new level of hysteria. Dissenting viewpoints are crushed through economic penalties inflicted upon those who dare go against the approved doctrine of the state.

The use of technology to control the minds of the masses has produced unintended consequences which threatens the power of the Party. A true Surveillance State, more comprehensive than Orwell ever conceived, is operating in full view. Trying to lock down the internet has proven to be difficult for the ruling class as more and more critical thinking, pissed off citizens congregate on truth telling websites and stir discontent among the awakening masses."

The election of Trump seems to have been a lightning rod for the discontent to bubble to the surface. There is an all-out technological war being waged between the corporate oppressors and those they are trying to control. The current escalation will surely lead to all out violent war in the foreseeable future.

Huxley’s soft tyranny, where we have been conditioned to obey and never consider revolution, is being replaced by Orwell’s vicious tyranny where persecution, torture and power will be on full display as this revolution begins in earnest. Portman was just early in his conclusion. Huxley and Orwell were both right. The Party doesn’t care about us. They just use us to attain their own felonious needs. We need to break free from the chains enslaving our minds and take back our country by force. Time is growing short. Will we meekly accept the fate of Winston Smith and John the Savage inflicted by the State or will we rise up against the technological tyranny oppressing our freedoms and liberties? The answer will decide our fate."

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“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.” – George Orwell, 1984

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog, (https://www.theburningplatform.com/2019/01/29/technology-distracting-disturbing-deceiving-deluding-ourselves-to-death/)

Source: zerohedge.com (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-28/technology-distracting-disturbing-deceiving-deluding-ourselves-death)

Gio

29th January 2019, 23:47

There there Donald ...

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic2.politico.com%2Fdims4%2Fdef ault%2F4b9526d%2F2147483647%2Fresize%2F1160x%253E% 2Fquality%2F90%2F%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fstati c.politico.com%252Fc3%252F96%252Fc08c3f76474aad526 364cb2aec95%252F150924-kgb-donald-melania-trump-ap-1160.jpg&f=1

♪ Don't Worry Baby ..
Everything will turn out alright ♪

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2dmgYDr8vQ

Gio

30th January 2019, 05:53

Speaking of being cold ... http://yoursmiles.org/tsmile/cold/t09003.gif

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.livemint.com%2Frf%2FImage-621x414%2FLiveMint%2FPeriod1%2F2014%2F01%2F08%2FPh otos%2FUSweather--621x414.JPG&f=1
Chicago on Lake Michigan

What The Hell Is Going On With 'Global Waming?'

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Published on Jan 29, 2019

6:04 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY185b-XGAk

Gio

31st January 2019, 06:07

hmm ..

I Lived Off Alex Jones’ InfoWars Supplements for 5 Days ...

VICE

"After Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube banned Alex Jones and InfoWars from their platforms, the survival of the conspiracy theorist’s site now depends almost entirely on donations from his fans, along with sales of his bizarre-and-unproven wellness products. Without its superfans—or “InfoWarriors,” as Jones calls them—there would be no InfoWars. But why the hell would anybody want to devote themselves to the site—and what’s it like to try to live by Jones’s worldview, from his politics to his devotion to weird, non-FDA approved supplements?

Looking to find out, VICE’s Will Tilghman spent a week trying to become an “InfoWarrior” himself, getting his news exclusively from InfoWars and surviving solely on the supplements and food Jones hawks—from “Ultimate Bone Broth” protein powder to a vial full of “Super Male Vitality.”

Published on Jan 30, 2019

7:26 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tthSwMc0zhg

Dreamtimer

31st January 2019, 09:05

John Oliver’s profile of Alex Jones’ Infowars was very interesting. A full quarter of the show is devoted to selling his products.

“After four days of feeling off-balance and gross...”

Dreamtimer

31st January 2019, 12:45

Gio

31st January 2019, 15:28

The latest ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

***

* Interestingly noted Klickitat County, Washington (https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/70634/im-not-going-to-enforce-that-sheriffs-disobey-new-antigun-lawsrefuse-to-disarm.html) is the county the Eceti ranch dwells within ...

Sheriffs Refuse to Enforce Unconstitutional Gun Grab - #NewWorldNextWeek

corbettreport
Published on Jan 31, 2019

Welcome back to New World Next Week – the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy
that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news

All news items listed below YouTube show notes

17:23 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX4QLyqXwws&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

31st January 2019, 15:49

The minions ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/e5/bb/67/e5bb67b2e5b2d7be2acbee8b18bfe9f4.jpg

Gio

31st January 2019, 16:03

It's about time ...

Ancient W.A.R. in Heaven (pt. 2 of 3: The Usual Suspects) - Joseph Farrell

Forum Borealis

Published on Jan 31, 2019

We move deeper into the mystery of what transpired millions of years ago. Some points touched: What sources is used? How does Farrel's work relate to Sitchin's? Did the Cosmic War have survivors? What was the Tablets of Destiny? Where were they hidden? Why was the wars fought? Who was the factions? How does it relate to modern wars? What's the nature of their technology? Were Pyramids used as weapons? How is acoustic vibrations key? What happened to the top cap stone? What happened to Mars? How is the Moon involved? What's the world grid? Are the elites aware? ... and we pay tribue to both the Gizers and Hoagland.

Part One: Ancient War in Heaven (Pt. 1 of 3: The Annihilation of Mother Tiamat) - Joseph Farrell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzxoyRNLqh0&t=788s)

1:17:31 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJpZ5QOYTbQ&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

1st February 2019, 00:31

From my favorite realtor ...

Enjoy the full video tour of this super cool and spectacular Sunset Strip home - Christophe Choo

Published on Jan 31, 2019

4:04 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llkWx6T4wIk&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

1st February 2019, 05:14

Hang in there peeps ...

♪ And we all rise
From the shadows
From the sober sunrise
Each and every one is gonna be alright
If we stick together for all time ♪

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ffarm5.static.flickr.com%2F4325%2F 36015449252_7f6c99520b_b.jpg&f=1

Chrysalis

Empire Of The Sun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXucw06v54w&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

1st February 2019, 07:33

"What causes this phenomenon" ...

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalgeographic.com%2Fcont ent%2Fdam%2Fanimals%2F2019%2F01%2Fhalf-female-half-male-cardinal%2Fhalf-male-half-female-cardinal.ngsversion.1548858658483.adapt.1900.1.jpg&f=1

Rare half-male, half-female cardinal spotted in Pennsylvania

PUBLISHED January 31, 2019

"Jeffrey and Shirley Caldwell have been attracting birds for 25 years with carefully tended backyard feeders. But the lifelong Erie, Pennsylvania, residents have never seen a creature so wondrous as the half-vermillion, half-taupe cardinal—its colors split right down the middle—that first showed up a few weeks ago in the dawn redwood tree 10 yards from their home.

In fact, they weren’t sure they saw it correctly until it came in closer. “Never did we ever think we would see something like this in all the years we've been feeding,” Shirley Caldwell says.

The anomaly is known as a bilateral gynandromorph. In plain language: Half its body is male and the other half is female. “This remarkable bird is a genuine male/female chimera,” says Daniel Hooper, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in an email.

Gynandromorphs, known as “half-siders” among ornithologists, are rare but not altogether uncommon. They likely occur across all species of birds, Hooper says, but we’re only likely to notice them in species where the adult males and females look distinct from each other, a trait known as sexual dimorphism. “Cardinals are one of the most well-known sexually dimorphic birds in North America—their bright red plumage in males is iconic—so people easily notice when they look different,” Hooper says. (Further reading: This yellow cardinal is one-in-a-million. (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/birds-animals-cardinals-rare-yellow-spd/))

HOW DOES IT HAPPEN?

Hooper says sex determination in birds is a little different than in mammals. In mammals, he says, males have one copy of each sex chromosome (X and Y) while females have two copies of the X chromosome.

In birds, it’s the opposite. Their sex chromosomes are called Z and W, and it’s the females that have a single copy of each (ZW), whereas the males have two of the same (ZZ). Sex cells’ nuclei, including sperm and eggs, usually have only one copy of either chromosome—males produce only Z-carrying sperm, and females produce either Z- or W-carrying eggs.

Gynandromorphy like that in this cardinal occurs when a female egg cell develops with two nuclei—one with a Z and one with a W—and it’s “double fertilized” by two Z-carrying sperm.

The chimeric individual then develops with half of its body as a male ZZ and the other half as a female ZW. If you were to examine a cell from the bright red male side, it would have cells with ZZ chromosomes. If you looked at a cell from the left, it would have cells with ZW chromosomes. This phenomenon happens in birds, many insects, and crustaceans. (Be sure to check out this butterfly that’s half male, half female (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/01/basic-instincts-gender-butterfly/)with colors split down the middle and this half-orange, half-brown lobster. (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/150710-lobsters-maine-animals-science-nation-fishermen/))

Part of what makes this particular cardinal so exciting to Hooper is that it may be able to reproduce. “Most gynandromorph individuals are infertile, but this one may actually be fertile as the left side is female, and only the left ovary in birds in functional.”

We may soon find out. Shirley Caldwell says the cardinal is always in the company of a male. “We’re happy it’s not lonely,” she says. Researchers in western Illinois observed another gynandromorph cardina (http://www.wjoonline.org/doi/abs/10.1676/14-025.1?journalCode=wils&)l several years ago and reported that they never saw it in the company of another cardinal (nor did it—or the Caldwells’ cardinal— ever sing).

In the meantime, the Caldwells get to observe this rare visitor from their kitchen window. They say it likes to feed on generous portions of black sunflower seeds and suet in a pole feeder not far from the lilac bush where it often perches.

"Who knows, maybe we will be lucky enough to see a family in summer!" Shirley Caldwell says."

By Maureen Seaberg
Source: nationalgeographic.com (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/01/half-male-half-female-cardinal-pennsylvania/)

Gio

1st February 2019, 09:25

hmm ...

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/01/31/23/9250164-6655231-image-m-32_1548978097636.jpg https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/01/31/23/9250144-6655231-image-a-42_1548978651370.jpg

Horrifying deepfake video blends Jennifer Lawrence and Steve Buscemi
in latest example of the 'nightmare' technology

An unnerving new video that appears to show Steve Buscemi’s face seamlessly molded onto Jennifer Lawrence’s head is yet another example of the worrying advancements of ‘deepfakes’ videos.

The clip will sound familiar to anyone who remembers Lawrence’s speech backstage at the 2016 Golden Globes – but the words are instead coming out of Buscemi’s mouth.

Horrified social media viewers have been have been sharing the clip of ‘Jennifer Buscemi’ across the internet this week, with many calling it the stuff of nightmares.

The clip was first posted by Reddit user VillainGuy at the beginning of January. It’s since been shared thousands of times.

On YouTube, VillainGuy simply wrote: 'Steve Buscemi + Jennifer Lawrence discussing her favorite/least favorite housewives on the Bravo channel. Trained on my custom model, trying to achieve more detail!'

Over the last year, deepfakes videos have become a growing concern.

Deepfakes are digitally-altered videos that use sophisticated machine learning algorithms to create human masks that are then overlaid on top of real footage.

This past spring, a similar video appeared to show former president Barack Obama calling Donald Trump a ‘total and complete dipsshit.

And, numerous celebrities have been the victims of deepfakes porn, including Gal Gadot and Emma Watson, in which their face has been superimposed to that of a pornstar in a video.

Several sites have taken a stand against these deceptive videos, including Pornhub, Twitter and Reddit, who all banned the AI-generated porn from being posted on their platforms last year.

The latest example is much less malicious, although it’s still left many viewers feeling disturbed in its own way.

Experts have increasingly warned that the technique could soon fuel the spread of misinformation.

Deepfakes hobbyists have used the controversial video-editing technology to create short clips of world leaders, including Trump, Russian president Vladimir Putin as well as presidential candidate and former first lady Hillary Clinton.

Some experts have said the videos could be realistic enough to manipulate future elections and global political as soon as 2020.

A team led by Stanford University scientists has created an AI that can swap the facial movements of a person in one video to the subject of another.

The AI works by first analysing the intricate facial movements of a target, whose likeness will be used in the fake video.

It picks out the target's head tilts, eye motion, mouth details, blinks and learns their typical movements.

The software then analyses these same landmarks on a face in a source video - the one whose movements will be swapped to the target.

After it captures the nuanced facial movements of the source, the AI reproduces them using the target's own, natural expressions.

This creates a strikingly realistic fake clip because the target's normal face movements and ticks are emulated.

The AI learns using an Adverserial Neural Network, a relatively new type of AI that rapidly trains itself to recognise patterns in data.

Two AIs are pitched against one another, one to create, the other to analyse, in a string of millions of back-and-forth adjustments.

This makes the learning process quicker and more accurate than if a human were to analyse each of the AI's attempts.

1:16 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1jng79a5xc

By Cheyenne Macdonald and Annie Palmer
Source: dailymail.co.uk (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6655231/Horrifying-deepfake-video-blends-Jennifer-Lawrence-Steve-Buscemi.html)

Elen

1st February 2019, 10:56

This ought to teach us not to believe even half of what we see and hear...:grin:

Dreamtimer

1st February 2019, 12:08

Unfortunately, people don't believe what's right in front of them that they can see. Then it bites them in the ass.

I guess, like doctors, lawyers and other professionals, we will have to continually engage in 'professional education' and keep ourselves abreast of the latest developments.

When I first saw a still of that I thought it was some weird joke with a strange looking woman. I didn't recognize Buscemi's face. It looks like a soft, older woman's face on a female body.

Gio

1st February 2019, 22:51

For some weekend entertainment ...

This Week On Howard: David Alan Grier, Mark Ronson, and the Newly-Wet Game

The Howard Stern Show

"In this week’s Top Noine moments from the Stern Show, David Alan Grier talks comedy and acting, Mark Ronson arrives at the studio to produce a song for Howard, and Ronnie “the Limo Driver” Mund battles Brent Hatley in the Newly-Wet Game."

Published on Feb 1, 2019

32:46 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41cdwlG6UHQ

Dreamtimer

2nd February 2019, 08:00

My brother loves Howard Stern. I think he would vote for Howard for president. And I wonder what he thinks about the fact that Howard said he wanted Hillary to be president before Obama?

Gio

2nd February 2019, 09:46

'I have seen the face of God' ...

"The World is a business"

And everyone can participate.

JENSEN–It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr. Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality ― one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. (Network script, 1976: 127)

Network 1976

4:41 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jIw22XXSso

Gio

2nd February 2019, 11:54

A millennial ...

Matthew Broussard Stand-Up

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
Published on Feb 2, 2019

"Matthew Broussard performs jokes about his rom-com vibe, dating a woman who is
close to his size and why Queer Eye isn't really a progressive show."

5:46 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW5mwYVtbfU

Gio

3rd February 2019, 09:46

If a tree falls ...
It obviously heard his typing/brain churning ...

David Wilcock: Deep State Tribunals Underway, Tree-Fall Synchronicity

David Wilcock | Divine Cosmos (OFFICIAL)
Published on Feb 3, 2019

The Deep State Tribunals have now begun in several locations, according to various insider accounts. David and Elizabeth Wilcock had a huge tree fall in their yard as they were both writing about this civilization-defining change in their own way.

David gives mission-critical updates about the in-process defeat of the Deep State and the energetic process that goes along with it -- regarding the Fall of Kings. Right as these articles were being prepared, two huge trees fell into their yard, destroying the fence and nearly breaking the windows. David sees this as a powerful synchronicity and affirmation that we are indeed in "the time of times!"

21:45 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmIyTZEN4wU&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

4th February 2019, 12:28

"The Northeast has Punxsutawney Phil as a weather prognosticator. But out here in the Pacific Northwest, we celebrate "The Shadow of Bigfoot Day" which has been correct 96% of the time over a 25 year period. Steven Passquatch did see his shadow this morning. Which does mean at least six more weeks of winter for the PNW!"

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/51500068_2245462302152351_7412139943939538944_n.jp g?_nc_cat=100&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=af31b700ebb80eda0cd92c65548b3dc6&oe=5CB7C1E3

Gio

6th February 2019, 05:56

The latest ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

***

Stephen Delivers The Restate Of Our Union

15:49 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X6MNCkMF9k

Gio

6th February 2019, 06:11

Something (s) will never change ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/53/31/ed/5331ed9156dd33e0e4982d2570288a3f.jpg

Gio

6th February 2019, 06:37

Gio

6th February 2019, 08:44

Only just over an hour ... :hugs:
Glad someone is willing to address this latest nonsense ...

David Wilcock, Qanon, Debunked Prison Barges & The Question Of Loosh

C.W. Chanter

Referenced video here (https://jandeane81.com/showthread.php/9965-The-Cosmic-Emporium?p=842006479&viewfull=1#post842006479)

Streamed live 2/5/2019

1:09:04 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK8J1v4aHYo&feature=em-lbcastemail

Gio

7th February 2019, 00:26

He's on a roll ... http://yoursmiles.org/psmile/orator/p0904.gif

David Wilcock, Edge Of Wonder, Alex Jones v. Joe Rogan

Streamed 2/6/19

1:04:19 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6ruvxaMulk

Gio

7th February 2019, 01:03

God save the Commonwealth ... (https://www.ourmidland.com/news/education/article/Virginia-AG-says-he-wore-blackface-at-college-13594317.php)

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ffarm4.staticflickr.com%2F3614%2F3 339125073_77a5f34a6e_z.jpg&f=1

Sweet Virginia

Tedeschi Trucks Band

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu4toGvFO_w

Gio

7th February 2019, 02:05

Meme ...

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/51849533_1552164041583509_8364416643949920256_n.jp g?_nc_cat=1&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=62d94bfe267f8eb68c6aa0874b261b10&oe=5CE45414

Dreamtimer

7th February 2019, 10:03

That image is awesome. Gotta cut the grass!

Gio

7th February 2019, 20:38

"Truthscumbagery" ...

“Alex Jones” Defends Himself

The Howard Stern Show

“Alex Jones” joins the Stern Show via satellite to protect his identity from Howard,
plug a few products, and sing a new song."

Published on Feb 7, 2019

6:57 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SI49TvLbzg

Gio

8th February 2019, 02:14

For those following this story ... (http://amp.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/3/john-galton-american-anarchist-shot-dead-acapulco/)

Jeff Berwick And John Galton With Lily; Is Acapulco Safe?

TheAnarchast

"Jeff Berwick joins Danny to address the recent murder of John Galton in Acapulco and what that means for festival goers of the famed event, Anarchapulco. Tragically and ironic 2 days before John's death we interviewed him and Lily about their event AnarchaForko an off-shoot event, one of many that celebrate what Anarchapulco has brought to Acapulco. In this episode we play the section of the interview by John and Lily about their thoughts on the safety of Acapulco. This is to my knowledge the last recording of John. Below are several crypto currency addresses belonging to Lily who is in great need of help at this tragic time please consider donating to her."

Published on Feb 7, 2019

14:47 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY_819eG75g&feature=em-uploademail

Gio

8th February 2019, 05:26

Dreamtimer

8th February 2019, 15:30

Gio

9th February 2019, 00:04

Speaking of ... :ireful:

Tuck Buckford Is More Alex Jones Than Alex Jones

"Tuck Buckford is back to knowledge-punch the world with his man head in the latest episode of 'Brain Fight with Tuck Buckford.'"

5:26 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv2RnmQUMhI

Gio

9th February 2019, 00:24

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c5da28e15319c26fa807e03/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC020819.jpg

Some practical centrists who might consider a 2020 presidential run.

Gio

9th February 2019, 00:31

Where is Gabriel Traveler Now?? Travel Update

Published on Feb 7, 2019

8:31 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vacwjT5z0Q&feature=em-uploademail

Dreamtimer

9th February 2019, 06:37

Gio

9th February 2019, 09:06

Yes he did, and even more so on the followup video ...
But apparently he's decided to remove his entire channel content.

Don't know the reason yet, but he was making some serious accusations.

Here is a recent video on his alternative channel ...

***

The Smoking Gun Proof On The Doxxing Blue Avians

Corey Goode is a CULT LEADER!!!!

iamtheonewhoworkshere now
(https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Qj1n3VL5Egiz9jwnRN7TA)
Streamed live on Feb 7, 2019

1:11:10 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=16&v=b6V0eBRE0qY

Gio

9th February 2019, 09:19

Speaking of ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/44/98/fd/4498fdf8cd161490d0c33d03315be1e3.jpg

Aragorn

9th February 2019, 09:50

Speaking of ...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/44/98/fd/4498fdf8cd161490d0c33d03315be1e3.jpg

I was still scrolling down from the previous post, and until I read the captions, I would have sworn they were going to issue a warrant for Erwin Schrödinger. :p :ha:

WantDisclosure

9th February 2019, 10:56

CW makes some important points.
Can you briefly list them for me?

Here is a recent video on his alternative channel ...

I see the channel is named "iamtheonewhoworkshere now."

I rely on "About" tabs to learn about any YouTuber, but he hasn't posted on it.

Who is C.W. Chanter?

Gio

9th February 2019, 11:50

Mary - he is a alternative media YouTuber personality, who uses the "C W Chanter" persona (instead of his real name) ... I believe he hails from the local NYC area (Jersey) and is reported to be a practicing JR (lawyer) ... He has been around for the last few years making videos related to issues pretaining to the interest of the alternative forum community world.

A quote:

"My name is C.W. Chanter and I primarily make YouTube Videos exploring the Worlds of Faith,
Spirituality and the outer fringes of Conspiracy Theory land."

WantDisclosure

9th February 2019, 12:04

I believe he hails from the local NYC area (Jersey) and is reported to be a practicing JR (lawyer) ...
Okay I can relate to that because I have a degree in Legal Assisting myself, and I like the clear thinking of lawyers, provided their heart is in the right place, which I presume you believe about him, right?

Gio

9th February 2019, 12:20

Okay I can relate to that because I have a degree in Legal Assisting myself, and I like the clear thinking of lawyers, provided their heart is in the right place, which I presume you believe about him, right?

I believe so, though sometimes his 'clear thinking' has a tendency to wander a bit too long in video lengths ... :)

Gio

9th February 2019, 12:40

hmm ...

Dreams Die Hard: Jim Kunstler Warns "We're Caught In An Entropy Trap"...

"Somewhere between the fevered Zzzz’s of American Dreaming and the blinding shock of being “woke,” there is a recognition that an awful lot about contemporary life is not working and can’t go on. At the bottom of this discontent is the mistaken notion that the unwind of modernity can be arrested or mitigated by “smart” and “green” this-and-that."

https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/mrz020719-color-1-5-mb_1_orig.jpg?itok=r0ZQsL48

"The disappointment over it will be epic when we discover that the laws of physics override the bright ideas of politicians. America has been blowing green smoke up its own ass for years, promoting oxymorons such as “green skyscrapers” and “clean energy,” but the truth is we’re not going to run WalMart, Suburbia, DisneyWorld, and the interstate highway system on any combination of wind, solar, geothermal, recycled Fry-Max, and dark matter. We’re just running too much stuff at too great a scale for too many people. We’ve blown through the capital already and replaced it with IOUs that will never be honored, and we’re caught in an entropy trap of diminishing returns from all the work-arounds we’re desperately trying.

For all that, there are actually some sound proposals in the mostly delusional matrix of the Green New Deal promoted by foxy front-person AOC."

Revoke corporate personhood by amending our Constitution to make clear that corporations are not persons and money is not speech. Right on, I say, though they have not quite articulated the argument which is that corporations, unlike persons, have no vested allegiance to the public interest, but rather a legal obligation solely to shareholders and their boards-of-directors.

Replace partisan oversight of elections with non-partisan election commissions. A no-brainer.

Replace big money control of election campaigns with full public financing and free and equal access to the airwaves. Quite cheap and worth every penny.

Break up the oversized banks that are “too big to fail.” And while you’re at it, resume enforcement of the anti-trust laws.

Restore the Glass-Steagall separation of depository commercial banks from speculative investment banks. Duh….

Of course, a lot of the proposals above may be obviated when the money system we’ve been using, and its subsidiaries in markets, blows up, taking much of the world’s notional wealth with it, along with our hopes and dreams for replacing the fossil fuel economy with “Green technology.”

The Green New Deal may be an exercise in throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, so let’s just assume that a lot of the “social justice” pander-jive in it will slide down the wall onto floor and make its way to the dumpster. Stuff like: “the right to full employment” (there is no such right), Free college and medicine (doesn’t pencil out with our capital gone, though the current odious rackets must go), “ending the war on immigrants” (how about ending the Democratic Party’s war on enforcing immigration laws?)

There are two kinds of deadly narcissism at work in American culture these days:

techno-narcissism - the belief that magical rescue remedies can save the status quo of comforts and conveniences; and

organizational narcissism - the belief that any number of committees can lead a march of humanity into a future of rainbows and unicorns.

Both of these ideas are artifacts of a fossil fuel turbo-charged economy that is coming to an end. Societies and economies are fundamentally emergent, non-linear, and self-organizing as they respond to the mandates of reality - which are not necessarily consistent with human wishes. Circumstances in the world change and sometimes, when the changes are profound enough, they provoke episodes of flux and disorder.

A better index for our journey into the unknown frontier beyond modernity will not be what is “green” and “smart” but perhaps what is “sane” and “insane.”"

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
Source page: zerohedge.com (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-08/dreams-die-hard-jim-kunstler-warns-were-caught-entropy-trap)

Dreamtimer

9th February 2019, 14:03

Well now that the video is down I would have to recall based on listening over a couple different times including the middle of the night...

What stands out is his finish regarding child separation and pussy grabbing. He calls it out for what it is, evil. He talks of Jesus and the love of Jesus and how turning our backs on the poor is evil. Trump touting getting rid of food stamps is evil.

We should work towards compassion.

For a man with a jewish background he has a better understanding of the teachings of Jesus than a great deal of Christians do.

WantDisclosure

9th February 2019, 14:13

For a man with a jewish background he has a better understanding of the teachings of Jesus than a great deal of Christians do.
I very much relate to that.

I have been visiting a church in my area called Unity. The minister is Jewish and he stated directly one time that he learned more from Jesus than he ever did in Hebrew training.

Gio

9th February 2019, 14:14

Even though i am very familiar with this phenomenal story ...
I am looking forward to seeing this documentary ...

Behind the velvet rope line of Studio 54’s short, sordid life

For those still mourning the death of notorious New York, get ready to OD on nostalgia with A&E’s new documentary, “Studio 54.”

Directed by Matt Tyrnauer with delicious commentary by surviving founder Ian Schrager, the film (10 p.m. Monday) details his business partnership with fellow Brooklynite and Syracuse University graduate Steve Rubell. Together, they turned an empty theater on West 54th Street into the global destination for sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

Studio 54 lasted from 1977 to 1980, but those 33 months were the stuff of legend. “It was the James Dean of nightclubs,” Tyrnauer tells The Post. “It burned very brightly all too briefly.”

Tynauer interviews Schrager and many former club employees as well as designer Norma Kamali and journalist Bob Colacello — all of whom were on the scene. He found many of them on social media, which of course didn’t exist back in the day.

“There’s a network of ex-Studio people,” Tyrnauer says. “This is the one place where we might be thankful for Facebook. They obsessively keep in touch with each other. It was a very formative period of their lives. For something that was so brief, Studio 54 had a disproportionate impact on the people who went there.”

Schrager, a self-described introvert, had an ambition to create the “ultimate nightclub,” and Rubell’s sparkling personality helped him attract the glamourpusses of the day: Cher, Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, Halston, Mikhail Baryshnikov and even a teenage Michael Jackson, who was filming “The Wiz” in New York. Cops outside the club tried to keep the clamoring masses in line while Rubell inspected prospective patrons, one by one. If you were a guy and hadn’t shaved that day, you were out. Rubell called the undesirables “bridge-and-tunnel people” as a way of explaining he didn’t want customers who wore polyester shirts.

As the disco beat of songs by Sylvester and Thelma Houston filled the club and the celebrities poured in, Schrager and Rubell sold discreetly taken photos to the newspapers and a phenomenon was created. Straitlaced reporters with the joie de vivre of a David Brinkley descended upon the club to find out what the secret was. According to Rubell, it was simple. People wanted to be free. They could do anything they wanted at Studio 54 — and often did. The balcony was covered in rubber and hosed down every night to clean up after the patrons. There were mattresses in the basement for those who wanted to hook up.

“They built the ultimate adult amusement park,” Tyrnauer says. “There was a kind of hedonism in the air which contrasted with the city, which was having an economic crisis. It was the last volcanic expression of the sexual revolution.”

And then it ended, with a bang. Police raided the club on Dec. 14, 1978, for serving liquor without a license. Schrager and Rubell attorney Roy Cohn advised them to obtain one-day catering permits commonly used for weddings. “It was emblematic of the kind of corner-cutting, stop-at-nothing-to-succeed mentality that they had,” Tyrnauer says.

After Rubell was quoted in the press for bragging that Studio 54 had made $7 million in its first year and that “only the Mafia made more money,” the IRS perked up and discovered that the dynamic disco duo were skimming 80 percent of the take, a grift partly accomplished by changing the rolls in the cash register during the night. “The idea is you report one receipt and throw out the other one. Skim the money you take in after you take the receipt roll out,” Tyrnauer says.

It was a princely sum, some $2.5 million. Rubell and Schrager pleaded guilty to tax evasion and spent 13 months in jail. The club closed in February 1980 and was sold in May of that year. Schrager, who was pardoned by President Obama in 2017, went on to create a line of boutique hotels we’ve all heard of: the Royalton, Morgan’s, the Mondrian. Rubell wasn’t so fortunate. He died of AIDS in 1989.

“The world changed when Studio ended and Schrager and Rubell went to prison,” Tyrnauer says. “It was the dawn of the AIDS crisis. You can’t have that kind of freedom anymore when we’re talking about sex. Hard to imagine now.”

“Studio 54,” Monday, Feb 11th 10 p.m., A&E

STUDIO 54 - official US trailer

1:36 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=106&v=w99oGMwbTy4

Source: nypost.com (https://nypost.com/2019/02/08/behind-the-velvet-rope-line-of-studio-54s-short-sordid-life/)