Chaos and the Anti-Thread

[Dreamtimer]

I agree, Maggie. I could never make it in politics 'cause I'd get bashed or refuse to bash.

I had to deal with politics in the Episcopal church, which tore apart our parish. I've never been more disappointed in leadership. Families were hurt because of politics and that church has yet to have a regular priest. My son was a child at the time and he's grown now!

We're no better than middle schoolers and we need to get past this crap and grow up.

I go back to Pinker (psychologist) periodically because as a species we really have advanced even though it's hard to grok in day-to-day life.

[Maggie]

I go back to Pinker (psychologist) periodically because as a species we really have advanced even though it's hard to grok in day-to-day life.

Yes, I do think we have developed as a species. There is no way to engage IMO in the world political/economic game without "living and dying" by the rules which are ugly, are brutal and kept in play because they seem true to those involved IMO. It seems we could just create a different way but we'd have to see things in a whole new light FIRST IMO. We know that feeling of what would be wonderful. Now IMO we need to dare expect it.

I was reminded of Charles Eisenstein today. I love his thinking.

In the story of Interbeing, life is a gift. The world and everything in it is a gift. We did not earn our lives. We did not earn the sun; it is not thanks to our hard efforts that it shines. We did not earn the ability of plants to grow. We did not earn water. We did not earn our conception nor our breath. Our hearts beat and our livers metabolize all on their own. Life is a gift.

What about all those things that did come to you through hard effort? You worked hard for your money perhaps, for your status, for your healthy body. OK, but from where comes your capacity to work hard? From where comes your creativity, your strength, and your intelligence? Did you earn these too?

When we apprehend these basic truths, gratitude comes naturally. Gratitude is the knowledge of having received and the consequent desire to give in turn. It is primal. All beings including human beings have an unquenchable desire to pour forth their gifts. That is why if you are in a situation where your gifts are not valued, not received, or not useful, you will want to leave that situation, that job or relationship. No matter how much you are being paid, no matter how scared you are to leave the relationship, you’re going to want to bust out and develop and express your capacity to give to the world in service of something you care about.

All beings are thus. That is why we should be living in a world of incredible abundance. The fact that modern society has constructed conditions of such pervasive scarcity is an impressive achievement! So much talent, such a rich world. How is it that so many live in insecurity, anxiety, and deprivation? Not even the wealthy are exempt from the fear of it.

Nature is fundamentally abundant, even profligate. I am writing this at my brother’s farm. The birds sing all day, pouring forth their song as a gift to the world. Yeah I know about attracting a mate and marking territory, but come on, do they have to sing that much to do that? It is as if they are bursting with the desire to give their song, just like you are. You were born for it, whatever your song is, you were born for it. Do the wild black raspberries here have to taste that good to attract animals to eat them and poop out their seeds? And don’t you have that urge too, to do it better than necessary for the grade, for the boss, for the market? Don’t you have to yearn to make art of your work? Don’t you have the urge within you to create something beautiful, to expand your capacities to their full potential and express them in service to something magnificent?

You are not alone. Imagine what the world would be if each person were liberated in this desire. Imagine what the world could be if we could sweep away the conditions that conspire to stunt and suppress our gifts. These conditions are political, they are economic, they are ideological, they are relational, they are psychological and they are spiritual. For civilization to transition into an age of the gift requires transformation on every level.https://charleseisenstein.org/essays...g-in-the-gift/

[Fred Steeves]

I'm thankful for people like Jimmy Dore, Kyle Kulinski, Tulsi Gabbard and Joe Rogan, for keeping things real and level headed for the Left in this age of Captain Chaos' uncanny ability to activate their lizard brain at will. In this particular case, here's Kyle keeping things real and down to earth concerning this new found love affair with the FBI. Strange days indeed...

The whole 6 minute bit is pure gold, but the pertinent part here begins at the 4:14 mark for those with limited time.

It's weird because in the age of Trump a lot of people who are nominally on the left love the FBI, and they love the CIA, because they think like: "Oh, I think they're against Trump, so since they're against Trump we're gonna default align ourselves with them, we're gonna defacto be aligned with them".

And, my response to that is no, do not form an alliance with guys like James Comey, do not form an alliance with guys like Robert Mueller. They don't like you, they don't agree with you they have been undermining you"!

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK3gBt7HIZo

[Emil El Zapato]

lol...that was good. Of course, it is as true as true gets. But lefties are kind of like Fundamentalist Christians...They don't f*cking care that Trump is an atheist, philanderer, thief, and Chief-of-all-Hypocrites. He's gonna demand that we have prayer in schools and close all abortion clinics (Which, of course, he isn't and I wonder how many abortions that m*therf*cker has paid for). If it takes a Mueller to take down that scumbag...well that's okkkkk...

[Dreamtimer]

"Enemy of my enemy" is a pretty old dynamic. It happens in politics all the time. I would like to believe that our agencies were above politics and are only being politicized now but that would just be naive.

It's been happening since before I was born.

[Dreamtimer]

Nate Sliver writes:

I’ve been thinking about President Trump’s tactics during the partial government shutdown.

The way Trump has played his hand so far on the shutdown has a lot in common with how bad poker players tend to cost themselves money. The analogy to poker [is related to] Trump’s overall strategy toward the presidency.

In general, the strategic goal of poker is to put your opponent to tough decisions.

As a corollary, good players play in such a way as to avoid putting themselves to tough decisions. Bad players, conversely, tend to paint themselves into corners.

Trump...didn’t have a lot of good choices on the shutdown.

I tend to agree with my colleague Perry Bacon Jr. that conceding to Pelosi was Trump’s least-worst option.

The point is that all of Trump’s options stunk, and like in the case of a bad player who limped into the pot with 7-2 offsuit (the worst hand in poker) and then got caught up in a huge pot with a bad hand, it was 100 percent Trump’s fault.

Nor was the shutdown a case where things unexpectedly took a rough turn for Trump.

It’s been obvious the whole time that it was liable to end in political (if not also literal) disaster. Trump was an unpopular president using an unpopular technique to push for an unpopular policy, and he was doing it just after Republicans had lost 40 seats to Democrats in the midterm elections while Trump tried to scaremonger voters on immigration.

I can certainly think of lapses in presidential judgment that were more consequential in hindsight than the shutdown, but not all that many that were so obvious in advance.

Public opinion does have consequences: Sometimes it prevents you from passing unpopular policies, and sometimes you pass them but suffer electorally. And sometimes, it’s both.

If Trump doesn’t believe the polls showing himself and his policies, such as the border wall, to be unpopular, then maybe that’s part of the problem. (There are a lot of ways to be bad at poker, but probably the most common one is to play too many hands because you overestimate your own abilities.) if Trump thinks polls are fake news and if he hires advisers who encourage that perception, that could explain why he constantly puts himself in such politically untenable positions.

There’s something else about those bad poker players that I think might apply to Trump.

Some of them (not all by any means) actually do have decent people-reading skills. They can sometimes suss out, through body language and table talk, whether your hand is relatively strong or relatively weak and make better decisions on that basis. It’s almost never enough to overcome poor strategic and technical play; poker is mostly a mathematical game.

But Trump has no sense for which battles to pick and seemingly little awareness of his own unpopularity and the consequences it has for the presidency. Moreover, although Trump sometimes seems to realize when he has gotten himself into a no-win position, he doesn’t recognize how often his own decisions are responsible for putting him there.

The presidency is a long game, and a much harder one than being a real-estate developer or a reality television host.

[Dreamtimer]

Trump is talking about things happening at the border that are from a movie rather than reality:

An internal Trump administration inquiry has found no evidence to support the president’s claims that prayer rugs have been found at the Mexican border or that smugglers are binding women with duct tape to traffic them, ABC News reports. It’s been noted...that prayer rugs at the border and duct-taped women were featured in the 2015 fictional crime film Sicario in which FBI agents fight Mexican drug cartels.

I wish he'd go back to his reality TV. That's where he belongs.

[Emil El Zapato]

My dispain for the likes of Trump and Putin is not political.

I just have a SERIOUS thing with assh*les.

[Dreamtimer]

I called out both-siderism as BS last year. I'm not the first or only. Here's a clip on the subject:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xtd4tds-I0U

[Emil El Zapato]

you know...I really don't like that guy...but I gotta say...GAWD, yes!! I love the venn diagram thing...it's true...it really is insanely weird...Insanely weird.

[Emil El Zapato]

Thought I would throw this out there: Scuttlebutt is leaning toward Mueller determining no collusion. This is being pushed hard by the Republicans but it is a pretty ephemeral position. My impression is that the 'financial' aspects of Trump's criminality are being pursued to give a solid legal foundation to his crimes. They are black and white. Not grey like the collusion. In the end, I believe it will be obvious but the majority of Republicans will deny the reality and that major caveat would be enough to let Trump off the hook...it ain't gonna happen...not with the sweeper actiion of tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, and outright theft.

[Dreamtimer]

A day in the life...

Everyone and I do mean every single person in that establishment started comparing just what they had to cough up in taxes or just how small their return was going to be if they got one compared to last years. People were going to be short 5k minimum on their refunds. Others were in the hole to the IRS up to 12k. Vacations were being canceled. Repairs and purchases are being postponed. Vehicles are not going to be purchased.

Then the farmers started bitching about who they were going to sell soybeans to. What should they plant? Corn? Soybeans? It’s time to order seed you know? How can I make a profit if I can’t sell what I grow? Is this China shit going to be sorted out soon? Who gives a fuck about a border wall I need fucking laborers. Does that fat orange bastard really know what the fuck he’s doing? 50% of these people voted for Trump, Walker and Duffy. Now granted there were some MAGA hat wearing folks in there and a couple spouted off about staying the course and talking points. My did that go over well. Not.

[palooka's revenge]

Thought I would throw this out there: Scuttlebutt is leaning toward Mueller determining no collusion. This is being pushed hard by the Republicans but it is a pretty ephemeral position. My impression is that the 'financial' aspects of Trump's criminality are being pursued to give a solid legal foundation to his crimes. They are black and white. Not grey like the collusion. In the end, I believe it will be obvious but the majority of Republicans will deny the reality and that major caveat would be enough to let Trump off the hook...it ain't gonna happen...not with the sweeper actiion of tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, and outright theft.

i've discovered my thought wandering down the same road NAP. i'm at the point where I think U are dead on!

and..... thank RICO!! we turned a corner into a brighter light with that one...

[Dreamtimer]

Nicole Wallace recently asked what RICO was on her show. I was like, Huh? She was White House spokesperson for W. How could she not know what RICO laws are?

Perhaps it was just a prompt for explaining the law, but I'm surprised she didn't know.

[palooka's revenge]

Nicole Wallace recently asked what RICO was on her show. I was like, Huh? She was White House spokesperson for W. How could she not know what RICO laws are?

Perhaps it was just a prompt for explaining the law, but I'm surprised she didn't know.

YIKES!!