“In all of this, in any of this, there’s been no evidence that there’s been any collusion between the Trump campaign and President Trump and Russia. Let’s just make that really clear. There’s no evidence of collusion.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan

Riiiiight

After countless ‘debates” with people about whether or not Putin affected our 2016 election, I decided it was necessary to put all the evidence in one place, Understand that the vast majority of these discussions were NOT with right-wing Trumpsters, but with lefties who either hate Hillary, love Bernie or are Jill supporters. I will leave off the fact that so many of them buying in to the ‘no collusion’ mantra and worse, always flipping it back on ‘but Hillary’ is in and of itself a sign of how successful the Kremlin campaign was. So in an effort to teach those still in the dark, not only to correct wrong opinions but so that we garner enough support to keep this from ever happening again, I pose a list of questions with answers in the embedded links;

So the Russians did not hack Democratic Party emails?

So Trump did not actually, literally invite the Russians to get dirt on Hillary?

So Trump did not say WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” on several occasions”?

So there was not extensive outreach between Trump and Russia?

So the NRA did not meet with Alexander Torshin?

So Donald Trump Jr. did not take a meeting with the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank while attending the National Rifle Association’s annual convention?

So Trump Jr. Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort did not attended the infamous Trump Tower meeting?

So the Putin campaign spending as yet uncounted totals to micro-target specific voters in key areas in the states most vulnerable to being flipped in the Electoral College had no effect? 

So the millions invested in Facebook and Twitter was “just a good investment?

So the ‘harvesting’ of millions of Facebook profiles was just for fun…?

So the thousands of phony Facebook groups spewing Hillary hate and supporting Bernie and Jill never existed?

So the countless websites created in Russia and other Eastern European countries pumping out REAL “fake news” to this day in order to sew discord among the American electorate don’t exist?

So the fake Hillary porn video that was viewed a quarter million times had no effect?

So the attempts to change voter info in key states is a lie?

So the confirmed reports of key Trump regime players setting up meetings with the express purpose of “getting information that can be used against Hillary” never happened?

So there has been no witness tampering?

No matter that every single item here and more has been corroborated and subpoenas, indictments and confessions have already started and that there are at least two ongoing investigations into collusion, money laundering and other high crimes…

So I guess anybody who actually believes facts is stupid…?

So, maybe it’s time to catchup on what is going on… Reading this article and clicking on the links is a good start.

Coping with Captain Queeg at the helm

Our democratic republic has been undermined, in the glaring light of day, on a world stage, by the very individual who has taken a sacred oath to do the complete opposite of those brazen, treasonable acts of trashing our faithful allies and cuddling up to our sworn enemy.

Such blatant treachery has not been committed against this union of American states since the defection of the Confederacy that caused the sacrificial mounds of blue and gray to pile up on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.

That was just last week’s meltdown at NATO and Helsinki. Afterwards, the usual terrified Trumpian toadies were able to hold him down just long enough to kinda read a ridiculous cya-statement in an effort to minimize the perfidy.

Barely was that done, when the head of our intelligence services was surprised in a live interview with the information that that very same, supposed, ultimate protector of the U.S. has invited his “Rasputin” into the midst of the very same political process all of our intelligence agencies unwaveringly charge him with protecting!

At this point, despite brief periods of clarity, we are in the clutches of a raving maniac. To those of you who have the power to do something about this, note that there is not enough room for all of you at the table of the future dictator. Why take the chance that your head will not be among those lopped off by the guillotine?!

*****  *****  *****

So, he’s not a politician;

Obviously lacks erudition.

Forget all the things

That he lacks or brings –

We’re on the road to Perdition!

MARCH FOR OUR LIVES

I admit, I was scared when I got the email- the email that threatened my life and the lives of those around me. For weeks a group of organizers in my community had been planning a local March For Our Lives event. We were getting many offers of, “Can I help in anyway? We need to do something about this.” Even people who didn’t usually step up were offering help. In the back of my mind I suppose I knew that there would be kick back, that we may get hecklers and disrupters BUT I did not imagine the vicious email we would get. I guess because I don’t think of the world in terms of hatred and racism like some do. Here it is, completely un-edited:

“Leave our guns alone, you fucking anti-constitutional anti-American cunts. Niggers and spics kill each other with illegal guns and shitty pistols every single FUCKING day in the hood and you little faggots don’t give a fucking shit about that. Some retard shoots up a school and all of a sudden the whole populace needs to be disarmed so the kikes who run this country can do so without any fear of resistance. You guys think you are anti-establishment, but you are just retarded bootlickers wanting more Americans defenseless and dead. Why don’t you talk about the school shooter this week who was stopped by a security officer with a gun? Why don’t you kikes talk about the broward county sheriffs standing down and sitting around the school while an active shooting is happening? The day of the rope is coming and you faggots will die for what you are doing.”

Ironically, earlier in the morning I had attended an ‘ALICE’ training program at the local school.

ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate) Training instructor led classes provide preparation and a plan for individuals and organizations on how to more proactively handle the threat of an aggressive intruder or active shooter event. Whether it is an attack by an individual person or by an international group of professionals intent on conveying a political message through violence, ALICE Training option based tactics have become the accepted response, versus the traditional “lockdown only” approach.

We, organizers discussed what we should do, should we blow it off, alert the public, contact law enforcement, or cancel the event. We were sure about one thing- we were not going to cancel the event because that meant he had won and we weren’t going to let him win. We also agreed that law enforcement needed to be informed. In the ALICE training I learned that if you see something strange, odd or out of character that you should not ignore it and contact an appropriate party, school services, community officials or law enforcement depending on the circumstances. The biggest debate was how widely we should spread the word about the threat, some wanted to keep it low key so as not to discourage people from coming, others felt we should be honest and upfront with the community and broadcast it through our social media sites. We settled on disseminating the facts to people and allow them to make their own choice.

I didn’t sleep well that night, neither did the other organizers. As I drove through the winding mountain road down into town, I looked at the green, tree rich mountains I loved, I thought of how much I love my family and community and doubted myself, “Was I making a mistake? Should we have cancelled the event? Did I do everything I could to make sure word got out that there could be a danger to people?” And I even, miserably allowed my mind to go: there. You know, ‘THERE’, that place where we think the worst, where our fears rule and our imagination runs amok. Would my eyes see what 1^st responders see at a mass shooting, sights that I could never un-see. Would I not go home again? It was supposed to rain but the sun shone instead and the faint cedar and pine smell wafted through my car vents and I used my mental hand to push those thoughts away and close that door of my mind. If the kids of Parkland aren’t allowing themselves to be intimidated, I sure am not going to let one nasty letter prevent me from protecting my children and grandchildren. Both Hogg and Gonzalez, who refer to themselves as members of the "mass shooting generation," say they've received death threats in response to their efforts in launching the movement. But they aren't letting threats deter them from making progress.

I arrived at our starting destination, the high school, and saw people walking along the streets to gather, more people than usual, street parking was full, folks were carrying home signs; all of them heading to the school. They weren’t afraid and I gained strength from seeing them. John and Bill were setting up the podium. Nan handed me a box of signs, Elizabeth was directing people on where to go. Safeway had donated buckets of flowers for our memorial service. Everytown had sent us a box of signs and a banner.  A group of women had created silhouettes of the 17 lost in Parkland. People cared! They weren’t going to be frightened away and they kept coming and coming. We are a small rural community and we had about 250-300 people show up because, like me, they have had #Enough. Enough of the killing and maiming and the NRA and the cowardice of politicians and the bullying of gun fanatics (not gun owners- gun fanatics- there’s a difference).

We walked and talked through our downtown to our Courthouse Square Park. We laid flowers and a minister spoke words of peace while we offered a moment of silence in memory. Several speakers offered their ideas and plans for solving the gun violence problem, including a young high school senior who has experienced 7 active lock down events in her life. SEVEN active lock down events, not drills. My 12 year old grandson boldly stepped up to the podium much to the surprise of his mother and myself. He opened with “Every morning I wonder, ‘Is this the day?’ Is today the day a shooter comes to my school?’”

Not only did we have one of the largest turn-outs locally I have seen in support of a political issue but we also had a peaceful rally. Is this it? Have we finally had #Enough? Have we finally reached the tipping point when we will no longer listen to the empty, bullying rhetoric of the NRA? Have had enough of cowering politicians? I hope so. I hope this the moment in history when we look back and we know that this was when we put our children before money.

You can read the full coverage in this link from our local paper:

http://www.uniondemocrat.com/localnews/6114552-151/300-march-in-downtown-sonora-to-end-gun

THE WORLD AS IT IS, based on facts, is a pretty scary place. A way to help wrap your brain around that one, so it’s less encumbered by one’s own relative biases, or comforts and discomforts, is to imagine yourself on a spaceship from a civilization with a similar ethnography as the one Gene Roddenberry purposely infused Star Trek with. The ship approaches the Earth of today, and accurately analyzes its entire mechanics on all scales, as well as highly probable outcomes in the near future relative to geologic history. From the ship you analyze everything, from the molecular... to oceans suffocating from floating plastic continents... stockpiled WMDs that can kill most of the planet’s life in a few hours... right down to a police shooting in America, a Trump who is deified by so many... to the collapse of a stable biosphere, wars, tortures, extreme mass brutality everywhere, and mostly sleeping population groups enjoying a very short term bit of pseudo-democratic entertainment.

Would you want to take a one-way plunge down to Earth?

All this shit in the world has been repeating itself in history, in ever greater scales as ever more habitats grow populated by the “cutting edge” of our species. This world is a tough one even for me to warp my brain around. The planet is challenged by so many threat-vectors, and on so many scales. Local stuff of ancient and classical histories, through the Middle Ages and closer to our times, have now grown exponentially onto the global platform... the platform of the biosphere.

We have an oligarchy that essentially is only concerned with short-term gathering of wealth and power. It interacts with whatever human-forces lets Climate Change go on the backburner, and whatever forces that will consume rather than preserve, and that includes weapons to whomever is the latest, one-minute enemy of our enemy. It also interacts with religions that help suppress critical thinking at voting time, and that includes public educations that fast track kids into willing consumers and players.

And in all that, for we surely do support both Israel and the near-caliphates on the Arabian Peninsula, nationalistic movements are springing up into political power all over Europe in response to economic pressures and the xenophobia-Racism that seeks the common suspect, any enemy except oneself . Emotional, irrational empathies and antipathies are enculturated into the brains of children in a group-specific manner. KKK good old boys hanging parties sure is an example of this.

Islamic State, in an odd axis with Saudi Arabia, is the elephant in the room. They are like Jehovah’s Witnesses on crack cocaine, of a type that ferments for a while until the insanity becomes so violent that its sword slices off the heads of everyone on the planet who won’t submit to the poison.

Thankfully, Canada just kicked 3-term Harper out. Which means that NATO may behave a bit more rational now.

But mass media journalism is now nothing more than entertainment... but taken so seriously by too many people.

With all these vectors of tough stuff hitting us below the belt, what do we do? Where do we focus our intelligence so that the result is the necessary adaptation to this immensely complicated anthropogenic pressure that is forcing us to either survive and thrive, or to explosively and then slowly go extinct. Extinction of our species would likely not occur overnight. It would happen in ever more painful globally spreading scenarios of death and destruction. Are we seeing that now? One of the things to remember about an ecosystem’s collapse is that some of the species will spike in population in spite of (actually, to an extent, because of) what could be interpreted as deep and destabilizing trauma attacking that population group from all sides. And that has a lot to do with exponential growth within a closed system... that system being our biosphere.

How will a rational civilization evolve out of that?

And for me personally, there is an additional edge. I am a product of the country which more people in the world hold up on a pedestal for social solutions for a world in crisis than any other: Denmark. Bernie Sanders often states that. But you know what? In the middle of the most civilized nations of the world (Denmark, Canada and the USA) where I lived through all the stages of my childhood brain development, I was intelligently ritually tortured by ALL my primary caretakers, with the name of a religion and its imaginary god as justification for expressing sadistic conformity upon children.

So my words here should be taken in the same way as coal miners from another century would respond to seeing some dead canaries in their underground world. And I see my sister’s suicide also in that light. She died as an expression of the toxicity in her Danish environment, both current and past. She died due to the toxicity of the religions still extant in Denmark that cultivate such conditioning in people who will respond with antipathy to the suffering of someone who’s not quite in the same group. Local politics denied her appropriate help, and through her childhood on two continents, never once did anyone (including whatever most would consider *good* in religions) intervene with a religion’s perverse authority over the bodies and minds of children. And Agnes took her life right after seeking the comforts and advice of the Danish Catholic priest, who then occupied a piece of the land Agnes bought and died on. Dietrich Timmermann, with whom I’ve had dozens of intense conversations on the matter, died in 2013, but I hold the Catholic Church and many other religions egregiously responsible for her lifetime of suffering and premature death. Her life is only a microcosmic view of religion’s toxic impact upon children and adults.

So, if you were on board the USS Enterprise, with Picard at the helm absorbing the analysis of planet Earth, would you ask him for a one-way ticket down to the planet here?

This is my last photo of my beautiful sister, Agnes, our collective and innocent canary, warning of a deadly toxicity in our environment. She commuted to her work as a teacher in Copenhagen, from the farm she'd bought with two ex-nuns. Pay attention to her death, world.

*

Agnes Lorentzen
1954 (Roskilde) - 1995 (Haraldsted)

Originally a posted from a Facebook NOTE; a small part written in 2011, and fully in 2015, exactly on the 20th commemoration of her suicide. What is expressed above, which is far bigger than her and the author, is more relevant to today's world than ever.  Below are some of the comments from its Facebook posting.