So heartwarming, what an exemplary person who lived to serve others, and kept giving long after passing. A beautiful example of conscious living, both ecological and spiritual.
Today’s ‘good people’ post is a bit shorter than usual, because … Filosofa forgot that it was Wednesday, and last night I spent a few hours preparing what I thought would be this morning’s post. And then, as I was setting it up on the schedule for 3:00 a.m., I saw the calendar and … oh sh*t … it’s Wednesday! I considered going with my original post, making my apologies, and doing the good people post later, or tomorrow, but … I know you guys count on it and in today’s environment, we all need to be reminded of the humanitarians who walk amongst us. So, it is a bit short, but it is heartwarming, I promise you!
Dale Schroeder lived his entire live in Ames, Iowa. He was, as his friend Steve Nielsen described him, “… that kind of a blue-collar, lunch-pail kind of a guy. Went to work…
A Virginia man woke up to learn his creation had ended up onstage next to President Trump. After a whirlwind 24 hours in the spotlight, he needs to set a couple of things straight.
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The seal of the president of the United States, left; and the altered seal used at a Turning Point USA event on Tuesday.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times; Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
What happens when you are yanked into a national news story whose main characters include a set of golf clubs, a double-headed Russian eagle and the president of the United States?
You laugh in bewilderment, field questions from reporters, reckon with hateful messages and misinformation and, ultimately, embrace the spotlight in a whirlwind 24 hours that involves a call to your local police, just to be safe.
At least that’s how Charles Leazott handled it. He woke up Thursday morning to find that a spoof presidential seal he created last year on “a lark” to vent his frustration with President Trump had ended up onstage next to the president himself.
It set off a national media rumpus. Somebody was fired. And Mr. Leazott was caught in a burst of viral fame.
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Charles Leazott
He said he came across his creation in a news article while he was scanning Reddit and drinking coffee, as one does.
In his spoof presidential seal, which he sold on merchandise online, Mr. Leazott, a graphic designer and video producer in Virginia, made a number of substitutions, some subtle and some not.
The traditional bald eagle was replaced with a double-headed one, inspired by the Russian coat of arms, and the arrows and olive branch in its talons were swapped for golf clubs and a wad of cash.
The motto “E Pluribus Unum,” Latin for “Out of Many, One,” was replaced with “45 Es un Títere,” Spanish for “45 Is a Puppet.”
And the shield across the eagle’s chest was changed to include several instances of the hammer and sickle, a Communist symbol associated with the Russian Revolution.
“This is the most petty piece of art I think I’ve ever designed,” he told The New York Times on Thursday. “This was every petty, little thing I could think of to needle him because he was driving me bananas with his politics.”
Mr. Leazott at first had asked that his last name not be used because he was receiving hateful messages, but it was hard to stay anonymous for long. “That decision was pretty much made for me,” he said.
He was quickly outed by online sleuths who found his name and photos. “Some news organizations were contacting me saying we know your name, we are going to run it,” he said.
“I am the guy who created the altered presidential seal projected behind Trump,” he wrote. “It’s been a weird day. AMA!”
As his story took off, he struggled to keep up with misinformation.
Several news outlets incorrectly reported his age. (He is 47.) He was described in headlines as a former Republican, a term he said is not entirely accurate. Records show he has voted regularly in Democratic primaries and general elections since at least 2008. He said he has voted for both Republicans and Democrats, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And, yes, Hillary Clinton got his vote in 2016.
“Like many people I was caught up in a post-9/11 America haze and wasn’t thinking as critically as I maybe should have,” he said on Reddit, explaining his decision to vote for Mr. Bush. “I was also in my late 20s. I’m 47 now. Older, wiser and almost overwhelmingly more informed.”
And while he said he now most closely aligns with Democrats, he pushed back against efforts to categorize him in black-and-white political terms.
“There seems to be no room for nuance anymore,” Mr. Leazott said on Friday. “Everything is binary. One of the first questions many reporters asked me both yesterday and today — almost the first question they ask is, ‘Are you a Democrat or Republican?’”
The reaction has been largely positive, he said. Critics of Mr. Trump have hailed him as a hero. He said he has been inundated with requests — “more than I can count” — for merchandise on his online store, where he sells shirts, posters, mugs and other items emblazoned with the seal, as well as other anti-Trump messages.
But he has also received a number of hate messages on Facebook and Reddit, he said, so he warned his local police department on Thursday as a precaution.
In an email on Friday, Mr. Leazott seemed overwhelmed: “My quote of the day,” he said, “is ‘AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.’”
“There are a couple of lessons that I hope progressives have learned from all this.
Firstly, I hope progressives have learned that we’re never going to manipulate our way into progressive reform. Truth is the one and only weapon we have. Trying to use a deceitful narrative to manipulate toward a desired end is something establishment loyalists do, but if progressives try it it will bite us in the ass every single time. If we try to manipulate the establishment away, we’re pitting our fledgling manipulation skills against manipulators who have generations of mastery in that field under their belt. You’re never, ever going to manipulate desired ends out of an establishment that is teeming with master manipulators. Truth is the only way.
Secondly, I hope that progressives are beginning to see that you can’t collaborate with the establishment to defeat the establishment. The oligarchic empire isn’t going to cooperate in its own destruction. Believing that you were going to be able to use an empire lackey like Robert “Iraq has WMDs” Mueller to bring the Executive Branch of the US empire to its knees was very foolish. If there’s any strength left in what remains of America’s progressive movement to effect real change, that change will come solely from grassroots populism, and it will be met with extremely forceful opposition from the Democratic establishment. If what you’re doing isn’t giving Nancy Pelosi literal night terrors, it’s worthless.”
By Caitlin Johnstone
July 30, 2019 “Information Clearing House” – The Robert Mueller hearing on Tuesday was widely regarded as a humiliating disaster, not just by critics of the establishment Russia narrative, but by mainstream Democratic pundits. We haven’t seen a US official look so befuddled and disorganized during a congressional hearing since that time John McCain started babbling gibberish at James Comey, and he had a tumor eating his brain.
“A frail old man, unable to remember things, stumbling, refusing to answer basic questions,” tweeted liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore after the circus had ended. “I said it in 2017 and Mueller confirmed it today — All you pundits and moderates and lame Dems who told the public to put their faith in the esteemed Robert Mueller — just STFU from now on.”
“Much as I hate to say it, this morning’s hearing was a disaster,” tweeted virulent Russiagater Laurence Tribe. “Far from breathing life into his damning report, the tired Robert Mueller sucked the life out of it. The effort to save democracy and the rule of law from this lawless president has been set back, not advanced.”
“On the optics, this was a disaster,” summarized NBC’s Chuck Todd.
As you’d expect, this widespread sentiment is shared by Trump himself, who told reporters after the hearing that “We had a very good day today.”
A frail old man, unable to remember things, stumbling, refusing to answer basic questions…I said it in 2017 and Mueller confirmed it today — All you pundits and moderates and lame Dems who told the public to put their faith in the esteemed Robert Mueller — just STFU from now on
It is entirely possible that the Democrats and their allied media outlets handed Trump a re-election in 2020 with their nonstop fixation on a fact-free conspiracy theory that was doomed to failure, and many progressives have been pointing this out.
“This whole setup has done more damage to the Democrats’ chances of winning back the White House than anything that Trump could ever have dreamed up,” former MSNBC host Kristal Ball said after the hearing. “Think about all the time and the journalistic resources that could have been dedicated to stories that, I don’t know, that a broad swath of people might actually care about? Healthcare, wages, the teachers’ movement, whether we’re going to war with Iran?”
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“It’s a self-soothing fantasy that makes people like Hillary Clinton and her allies feel better, but in reality all of this stood to help Trump, which is why from the very beginning I thought that this was such a disaster,” journalist Aaron Maté told CGTN America’s The Heat regarding the Russiagate conspiracy theory.
“It’s great to see more leftists & liberals recognizing that channelling the anti-Trump Resistance into a stupid conspiracy theory was a massive mistake, but for next time: let’s try harder to voice that when it’s actually happening for 2+ years, not after it finally collapses,” tweeted Maté, whose unparalleled reporting on the gaping plot holes in the Russiagate narrative won him an Izzy Award earlier this year.
It’s great to see more leftists & liberals recognizing that channelling the anti-Trump Resistance into a stupid conspiracy theory was a massive mistake, but for next time: let’s try harder to voice that when it’s actually happening for 2+ years, not after it finally collapses.
Maté can reasonably be described as today’s leading authority on the Russiagate narrative and the arguments for and against it, and he is right not to only single out liberals in his criticism. It is true that there have been plenty of leftists and progressives who’ve continuously opposed Russiagate right from the get go, at least in part for the reasons Maté offers, but it is also true that it wasn’t just liberals who got lost in the conspiratorial haze of Trump-Russia hysteria.
I always get people on the left arguing with me about this, but it’s true. Being involved in progressive circles in 2017 was like watching a zombie apocalypse, with more and more leftists and Berners contracting the mind virus with every shrieking “bombshell” mass media Russiagate report. Maybe in your own small circle you didn’t see anyone succumb to the zombie outbreak, but everyone who interacted with a large and diverse cross-section of America’s true left in early-to-mid 2017 knows exactly what I’m talking about. Not everyone hopped on the Russiagate bandwagon, but many did, likely due in no small part to the fact that Bernie Sanders himself was continuously and forcefully pushing the collusion narrative on American progressives.
But it wasn’t even that they all necessarily bought into the propaganda. When Russiagate first started I pushed back against it hard on social media, especially on Facebook, and during that time I had a few Bernie people (who comprised a majority of my audience back then) admit to me that they knew the Russia stuff was probably fake, but they were helping to push it in the hope that it could hurt Trump. They didn’t honestly believe he’d get removed from office for Russian collusion, but they hoped that pushing for an investigation would help turn up impeachable evidence of corruption, or at least cause him political damage.
What do such people have to show for that strategy now? A new cold war reignited by a president who has been able to escalate world-threatening tensions against Russia with no resistance from his ostensible opposition whatsoever, and a 2020 election that now looks orders of magnitude harder to win than it ever should have been.
Trump just told @seanhannity that Putin was “very, very strong.” I bet he was. How did it feel, big guy? This is the right-wing alpha?! Ha, ha, ha. Sad! Their leader just got cucked in front of the whole world. It was an absolute #Cucktastrophe. #Beta#Omega#TreasonSummit
There are a couple of lessons that I hope progressives have learned from all this.
Firstly, I hope progressives have learned that we’re never going to manipulate our way into progressive reform. Truth is the one and only weapon we have. Trying to use a deceitful narrative to manipulate toward a desired end is something establishment loyalists do, but if progressives try it it will bite us in the ass every single time. If we try to manipulate the establishment away, we’re pitting our fledgling manipulation skills against manipulators who have generations of mastery in that field under their belt. You’re never, ever going to manipulate desired ends out of an establishment that is teeming with master manipulators. Truth is the only way.
Secondly, I hope that progressives are beginning to see that you can’t collaborate with the establishment to defeat the establishment. The oligarchic empire isn’t going to cooperate in its own destruction. Believing that you were going to be able to use an empire lackey like Robert “Iraq has WMDs” Mueller to bring the Executive Branch of the US empire to its knees was very foolish. If there’s any strength left in what remains of America’s progressive movement to effect real change, that change will come solely from grassroots populism, and it will be met with extremely forceful opposition from the Democratic establishment. If what you’re doing isn’t giving Nancy Pelosi literal night terrors, it’s worthless.
The establishment narrative managers are not done trying to herd America’s political left back into the establishment fold. New attempts to manipulate the mind of the American progressive are being workshopped currently, and they will likely be more subtle and devious than Russiagate was. Here’s hoping progressives learn their lesson and grow from it enough to prevent the next manipulation from succeeding.
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Peace and joy
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Imagine a social system in which those contributing to the welfare of others are rewarded for it, and those contributing more get access to more resources—so that they can serve us better. Such a system would generate ever more welfare, and for more people.
Then imagine an alternative system under which we institute a central force in society with the object to make sure resources are always equally distributed regardless of how they are used and whether they contribute to welfare.
These are the two “ideal” but contradictory systems, the eternal conflict between economic and political means, that have generated our current state of affairs: a mixed system of social meritocracy and utter force.
Today, there are only limited rewards for serving others, often combined with a penalty for gaining access to resources, and a parallel system imposed on this order, in which those with influence but without the intention or track record of serving others can gain and retain access to resources.
This access is provided by the central force instituted to take resources used to serve us from those doing it better–to give to those who have little or poor track record in this service. The outcome is unsatisfactory for proponents of both “ideal” systems, both claiming the influence of the other system corrupts the workings and outcome of our present social order. And they are both correct: general welfare is hampered by the distortions of redistribution and regulation; equality is hampered by both the limited meritocracy and the distorted incentives due to the availability of non-welfare based access to resources.
The solution to the problems in our current state of affairs is to move to one of the ideal systems: markets or state.
The choice depends on what we prefer–general welfare or equality.
Either one offers only limited ability to satisfy also the other ideal, which is why these ideals are in eternal conflict.
I have a huge and very informative article about my recent visit to the Russian Monastery, the main seat of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad! It is a mystical, deeply hidden from the public’s eye place.
This is a large, in-depth article, with many amazing images and my unique higher-dimensional perspective on truth you won’t find anywhere else! You will get an inside scoop, which you also won’t find anywhere else!
This extensive piece was published exclusively for my patrons, but I decided to make it FREE and available to public on LADA RAY PATREON SITE!
“Wanna know how broken and captured Washington is by the Pentagon and the corruption of our nation’s ‘defense’ budget? Well, look no further than the soon to be enacted budget ‘deal.'”
By Jake Johnson
July 27, 2019 “Information Clearing House” – In a bipartisan deal that one anti-war critic said demonstrates how thoroughly “broken and captured Washington is by the Pentagon,” 219 House Democrats and 65 Republicans on Thursday voted to approve a budget agreement that includes $1.48 trillion in military spending over the next two years.
Just 16 Democrats—including Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)—voted against the two-year, $2.7 trillion budget agreement. Largely due to expressed concerns about the deficit, 132 Republicans and Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.) also voted no.
The House passage of the budget deal, which President Donald Trump quickly applauded on Twitter as a victory for the military, comes after the Congressional Progressive Caucus threatened in April to tank the measure in opposition to its out-of-control Pentagon outlays.
But most of the Progressive Caucus voted for the agreement on Thursday, pointing to increases in domestic spending.
“It’s not a perfect deal by any means,” Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), co-chairs of the Progressive Caucus, said in a statement ahead of the vote. “This deal does not address the bloated Pentagon budget, but it does begin to close the gap in funding for families, by allocating more new non-defense spending than defense spending for the first time in many years.”
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Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War, took issue with the latter claim in a series of tweets Thursday.
“You’re no doubt hearing a lot of crowing from Democrats about how the deal they struck with Trump gives more money to ‘non-defense’ spending than to ‘defense,'” Miles wrote. “Let’s be clear that by every measure, save the one they’re using, that’s simply not true.”
“Under this deal, the Pentagon and its affiliated programs will get $1.48 trillion over the next two years. The entire rest of gov’t, including the VA btw, will get $1.30 trillion. That’s $178.6 billion more for the Pentagon than the whole rest of gov’t,” Miles wrote. “So, for the love of god, can we all stop pretending like this is somehow anything other than a continued orgy of unprecedented, wasteful, and obscene spending at the Pentagon.”
Stephen Miles✔@SPMiles42
Wanna know how broken and captured Washington is by the Pentagon and the corruption of our nation’s “defense” budget? Well, look no further than the soon to be enacted budget “deal.” Let me explain. <long thread>
Of course there is one other way you could compare this, simply looking at real numbers rather than numbers relative to a baseline. So let’s do that since we’re 27 tweets in already. 27/
Stephen Miles✔@SPMiles42
Under this deal, the Pentagon and its affiliated programs will get $1.48 TRILLION dollars over the next two years. The entire rest of gov’t, including the VA btw, will get $1.30 trillion. That’s $178.6 BILLION more for the Pentagon than the whole rest of gov’t. 28/
Under this deal, the Pentagon and its affiliated programs will get $1.48 TRILLION dollars over the next two years. The entire rest of gov’t, including the VA btw, will get $1.30 trillion. That’s $178.6 BILLION more for the Pentagon than the whole rest of gov’t. 28/
Stephen Miles✔@SPMiles42
So for the love of god, can we all stop pretending like this is somehow anything other than a continued orgy of unprecedented, wasteful, and obscene spending at the Pentagon. 29/end
William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, wrote for Forbes this week that the budget deal “vastly overpays for the Pentagon.”
“At $738 billion for Fiscal Year 2020 and $740 billion for Fiscal Year 2021,” wrote Hartung, “the agreement sets the table for two of the highest budgets for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy since World War II.”
“The proposed figures are higher than spending at the height of the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and substantially more than the high point of the Reagan buildup of the 1980s,” Hartung added. “And the Fiscal Year 2020 and Fiscal Year 2021 numbers are only slightly less than spending in 2010, when the United States had 180,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, roughly nine times the number currently deployed.”
The sweeping 2020 budget agreement is expected to pass the Senate next week, and Trump has signaled he will sign the measure.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) joined the president in celebrating the increase in military spending, which issignificantly more than the Pentagon requested.
The deal, McConnell said, “achieves the No. 1 goal of the Republican side of the aisle, providing for the common defense.”
As Common Dreamsreported on Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) came under fire from progressives for striking the budget agreement with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Specifically, critics highlighted the deal to suspend the debt ceiling until 2021, a move that could give Republicans power to cripple the next president’s agenda.
“If you really listen,” wroteSplinter‘s Paul Blest, “you can almost hear [Texas Sen.] Ted Cruz yelling on the floor of the Senate that Congress shouldn’t raise the debt limit by one more dollar unless President Bernie Sanders promises to drop his demand for Medicare for All.”
This article was originally published by “Common Dreams” –
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If you know how to live, you will know everything about life and about death. But you will have to approach the positive.
Never make the negative the object of your study, because the negative is not there. You can go on and on and you will never arrive anywhere. Try to understand what light is, not darkness. Try to understand what life is, not death. Try to understand what love is, not hate.
If you go into hate you will never understand it, because hate is only the absence of love. Simply show people love and all is revealed.
So is darkness the absence of light. How can you understand absence? If you want to understand me, you have to understand me herenow, not my absence. Say you are studying this chair, the objective must be clear — not that when it has been taken it away, you start studying it’s absence. What will you study?
I had another post on the schedule for this morning, but when I came upon this on The Jon S. Randall Peace Page, I re-scheduled the other one and chose this for this morning’s post. I think when you read it, you’ll see why.
He remembered growing up when his father pointed out a tree to him, and told him that a black man was lynched from a branch of that tree. At that time, he could not understand how another human being could hate another human being, to the point of killing him.
Harold Henry was born on July 23, 1918 in Ekron, Kentucky. When he was 8-years-old, his family moved to racially segregated Louisville. He was 10-years-old when his father took him to see that tree in which the black man was lynched.
Harold never got to know any black folks growing up. He said, “the schools…
Dale Schroeder lived his entire live in Ames, Iowa. He was, as his friend Steve Nielsen described him, “… that kind of a blue-collar, lunch-pail kind of a guy. Went to work…
1EarthUnited 