Publictakeover's Weblog

Anise & Eucalyptus Snuff

Keeping An Eye On Things at Target

Don Duce

www.nytimes.com/2021/01/31/us/trump-election-lie.html

Gary Lewis

Posted this today on Facebook.

Real Change

Half measures availed us nothing.  We stood at the turning point.  We asked His protection and care with complete abandon.

This is a passage I hear often, sometimes more than once a week.  It describes a moment of crisis.  It speaks of desperation, of a life and death moment of decision.  “Complete abandon” is also unambiguous:  it means, “With everything we’ve got.”

This is what we preach in AA:  total surrender to God.  Life by unrestrained faith.  It’s the last alternative for people who see only death as an outcome to their way of living.

Yet it’s very difficult to sustain this perspective on one’s life.  Step Eleven:  Continued with prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, seeking only knowledge of his will and the power to carry it out.

…  You wanna know what kills me?

In multiple comments to reporters, Mr. Trump sought to deflect attention from his actions and tarnish Mr. Biden, a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

“What Biden did is a disgrace. What his son did is a disgrace,” Mr. Trump said. He later added, “If a Republican ever did what Joe Biden did, if a Republican ever said what Joe Biden said, they’d be getting the electric chair right now.”

How does Trump ever get the energy to carry on with this charade day after day, year after year?  These people without any spiritual focus want to clutter up the landscape of the public consciousness with a trivial awareness of themselves and their own lying actions.

Test Draft

This is a test to draft a blog post on Word Press, which I haven’t been able to do successfully for 6 months, even though I’ve sought help from their tech support.

So hopefully, that is all behind me now.  They tried to tell me it was  because Internet Explorer required the cache to be cleaned all the time, but that doesn’t make sense to me.

It’s July 5th, and I’m in New Paltz.  Spent the day painting the railing on the front porch.  I just picked the paint out of the garage, and I’m not sure it’s the right color to go with the earlier coats from previous years, but it could be.

Yesterday Rolfe and Lillian were over for hotdogs and hamburgers and they brought their 3-week old pet chicken, Penguin, with them.  She was the life of the party.  Lester had a very exciting afternoon chasing Penguin around on the front deck.  It might have  been his all-time most exciting day ever.  At one  point, Penguin walked along the railing of the deck and hopped onto my shoulder.  I was afraid she would peck me in the eye, but she didn’t.  Tom took some pictures of us.

In a few days is our trip to Newfoundland.  Going to be quite a car trip.  I’ll miss Lester.  I hope it’s easy to get along with the Blynn’s.  We’re planning to stay with them for at least two nights in Nova Scotia.  I’m already dreading the feeling of coming back from that trip.

Last night I had a dream about Weil, where I was working with some younger partners and there was some kind of metaphysical aspect to our relationship.  Things changed, then, and I wound up somewhere like Grand Central station, in a small cafe on an upper floor.  It felt like being in the concourse of Veterans Stadium.  Nothing much seemed to happen, but I felt like I was looking for someone.

Tomorrow I need to buy paint, go to the dump, and then take Loretta over to see Rolfe and Lillian’s new greenhouse.

End Endless War

END ENDLESS U.S. WARS — NOW!

Tuesday, March 19 marks the 16th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Despite a formal withdrawal of troops in 2011, this, U.S.-led military operation was renewed in 2014 as Operation Inherent Resolve and continues in Iraq to this day.

To date, the Iraq War has resulted in:

• Some 200,000 civilian deaths and
• Over 50,000 combatant deaths
• At a cost of $2.4 trillion through 2017 alone

That money could have been used to fight poverty, protect our threatened environment, and educate our people. Instead, Washington has used it to destroy lives and enrich war profiteers including Amazon, L3 Communications, Raytheon, and General Dynamics.

Join our citywide coalition of social justice groups to:

• Oppose endless war and militarism,
• Expose the intersection of the Iraq War with many forms of oppression, and
• Build power and work together.

We will meet at 26 Federal Plaza, march past several military recruiting offices along Chambers Street, to the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), where students, many of them economically disadvantaged, are regularly targeted by recruiters to join the armed forces.

We’ll be reminding people of the damage that has been done in their name, educate people on how it relates to other struggles for social justice, and urge students to refuse further militarization and join us in making a world we want to live in.

When: Tuesday March 19 at Noon.

Where: 26 Federal Plaza, Broadway between Duane and Worth Street in lower Manhattan

This action is supported by:

Granny Peace Brigade
NYC Metro Raging Grannies
Xtinction Rebellion (XR)
Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council (MACC)
NYC War Resisters League
World Can’t Wait
Peace Action/NYS
Vets for Peace/Chapter 34
Green Party of Brooklyn

Still Don’t Believe It

In five minutes it will be 2019. I still don’t believe how pathetically primitive we are!

I creep around all the time looking for nooks and crevices to hide in, where I can be safe from the crossfire of other people–their world views, their visions, their words, their opinions.

I still don’t believe there is no sustained awareness of our collective mind, our unity.

ha ha ha…  We think we’re each as important individually as important can be.

But, not only can no one serve two masters, but no one can even think of two separate ideas—or even visualize two distinct images—simultaneously.

So how do we think we’re going to get anywhere from “Security”  or, “Protecting American interests?”  Peace is not something we can enforce.

If the thing we’re preparing for is war, we’re not going to suddenly find ourselves at peace.  We will only come to peace along the path that follows our persistent vision of peace, confirmed in our minds and wills with every step we take unswerving toward our determined goal:  embracing the earth and our fellow man, scattering our weapons, and teaching peace with our actions, proclaiming peace with our every word.

Faith and Modern Culture

It’s astonishing how old our religions are, for the most part.  Yet what we consider old or ancient really isn’t.  The universe is supposedly between six and twelve billion years old.  Cities and agriculture are supposed to be twenty thousand, at most.  Writing might be between four and six thousand years old.

We’ve had the possibility to construct a familiar place for ourselves here in our wild little world.  But now we’re running up against the boundaries of our self-centered consciousness and nature’s full and seamless integration.  The more we evolve our languages, cities, laws and –ugh-=armies, the more we imprison ourselves outside of the seamless integration of all Being.

Instead of evolving and growing within the web of all existence–and beyond our imaginations–we chain ourselves to a local time and place:  oil, automobiles, television, guns, nation-states and religions.

In Illuminating Islam’s Peaceful Origins, Mustafa Akyol discusses two current nonfiction books, released this year.  Each endeavors to shift the ponderous fixture of contemporary western society’s view of Islam as essentially violent or terrorist to something more peaceful.

It’s a heavy lift.  Akyol is forced to admit Islam’s violent episodes or tendencies, while unconvincingly explaining them away as situational reactions to the temporary geo-political reality of the 8th century.  I’ll have to read the works in question before I make up my own mind:  Prof. Juan Cole’s Muhammed:  Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires and Jack Miles’s God In The Qur’an.

We come to these authors with our questions about history and ideas and faith.  However, faith is something that reaches beyond history or ideas of what is known, demonstrable as fact, truth.  Otherwise, what would be the value of faith.?  Faith takes our consciousness beyond the familiar icons of modern life and culture, and of history and philosophy.

When we stand upon all we know as educated human beings with our grasp of science, history and agriculture, when we look beyond the highest structures of culture and civilization, then we can extend our vision only by faith.  Faith is what we see beyond the total sum of everything we know.

“Unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” – John 3:16

It is useful–necessary– to study history and science and clarify and refine our understanding of human awareness, understanding of culture.  But what we need is an experience that sets our vision beyond all these things.  We can learn about differing views of God in history, but God is the God of the present, and beckons us to know Him ultimately in our experience.  It’s an experience that includes everything we know, and shapes our knowledge into an enlarged view of the present.

“6I am the God of  your father, the God of of Abraham, the God of of Isaac, and the God of of Jacob….  14Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel “I AM has sent me to you.””–Gn 3:6, 14.

So Moses is sent back to the people of Israel, and to Pharaoh to explain what God wants now.  Needless to say, this seems difficult for Moses, because what God wants now isn’t what everybody else is trying to arrange at the moment.

Like us, the Israelites and the Egyptians had their history, their culture, their laws and their economics.  All these forces shuttered their visions to what they already knew and experienced a priori.  But God was to lead them out of the status quo, and that took faith.  Moses had to sell them on the idea that God had a new story, a new reality, a new present for them now.