but please talk to one another, as i’m spread thin in so many directions that i may not be able to join in any conversations; we’ll see. for one thing, a long time blogging friend at firedoglake and the Café emailed me yesterday to say that his almost-adult daughter had died, crossed to the other side, transitioned…the night before, so my communications are full with that.
As far as offerings, i’m torn among so many areas: CNN’s announcement of even higher jeopardy for julian assange, the ongoing war-by-other means on the VZ bolivarian revolution, the horrors afoot in immigrant detention centers, and other key subjects that i might need to write up more fully than toss them out in an open menu.
on edit: i changed my mind (a geezerette’s perogative): ‘The nightmare inside America’s child immigrant jails’ wsws.org, 25 May 2018
“A report published Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) details the systematic brutalization of unaccompanied immigrant children captured by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from 2009 to 2014 at the US-Mexican border. Under the Obama administration, methods employed against these youth echoed those practiced by the CIA and US occupation forces at black site torture centers and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.”
thanks for you patience ahead of time. ;-)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
so why aren’t churches, not individual churches or people, but higher up the org chart, other “faith” groups, people on the light side of the farce & all that, or who claim to be, why aren’t they offering unconditional sanctuary to the Anna Franco’s y companyia in our midst? “hey, come into our sanctuary & we’ll do everything in our power to prevent your arrest.” b/c they, w/very few exceptions, don’t perform even a mildly reformist function but are wholly integrationist into the capitalist system. evangelical churches esp are petit bourgeois finishing schools for the proletariat, where the workers can come & learn the value of filling out the time sheet correctly, delaying gratification, and not belching during the boss’s idiotic speeches. the high road to heaven is acting like all the other Christ potatoes around you, with deviance bringing down the cop’s baton or eviction or unpayable medical bills, all a foretaste of the wrath to come for such deserving, unworthy sinners. clichés, fantasies & above all fear make for happy workers. yep, USonians want to supersize everything except for reducing the problem of poverty to the excess of the poor, you know, excess laziness, excess drinking, etc. poor people are such con artists!
43 “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passes through waterless places seeking rest, but he finds none. 44 Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. 45 Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. (Matthew 12.) Not 100% sure what this means but I connect it w/another saying attributed to Jesus about traveling land & earth to make one proselyte & then turning him into twice as much a child of hell as before. ain’t that the truth? Billy Graham (why did the Big Guy spare the son?) is the perfect example of this. get yourself right w/the Lord, clean yourself up, so you can hold down that job at the Piggly Wiggly and finally be a credit to mom, fambly, apple pie, baseball, NASCAR, the flag, Israel, your trailer park, etc. and if you don’t like earthquakes & flammable water to go w/your tornadoes & wildfires, it’s cuz you ain’t trustin Jeebus proper.
part of the problem is that we really are all terrified. just learning a bit about what ICE is up to (or the prisons) scares the crap out of people. and maybe it should. but I bet those kids being raped by ICE thugs get scared too. probably nothing compared to the fear a church has of losing its tax exempt status for attempting unauthorized political interventions.
here’s exactly how it works: so you got a big development project going on in say SW Washington DC. mega freight train co CSX offers $12k to help finish the commercial kitchen in your church, which is cashing in on the development project to the tune of a new building, to keep the work of the lard thriving in DCSW (all 6 or 7 churches in the rather small DCSW region got in on the development deal to get new buildings.) all of this development increases gentrification which increases homelessness which increases the mission of soup kitchens everywhere! see how that works? all hosannas in that new building to the gospel of the kingdom of heaven! we needed a gigantic platform to preach from precisely in order to keep us from ever doing anything to bring in that kingdom. amen. (this church is now partners with Amazon! yippee! buy something from the slaves at Amazon, mention this church’s name & they get one bright dollar from your purchase! religious-minded consumerism will do the trick! for fuck’s sake.)
Matthew 12:43 deals with demons cast out and then returning with greater force than before, analogous maybe with al Qaeda chased out of Afghanistan and then reappearing as IDIL/Daesh. Meanwhile back home in the USA (or Israel) according to the great Biblical scholar Philip Doddridge…
“Their characters were the vilest that can be conceived, and they pressed on to their own ruin, as if they had been possessed by legions of devils, and wrought up to the last degrees of madness.”
“Empowerment” should be seen in the same light as these churches.
And now for a blast from the far distant past… on Mars!
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180525123212.htm
So even if even aren’t exactly over-appreciated in our own time, Wendy, there’s still hope they may read our remains in 4,000,000,000 years!
“Iron-rich rocks near ancient lake sites on Mars could hold vital clues that show life once existed there, research suggests.”
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/28/immi-m28.html
I haven’t the slightest doubt that some of these kids will wind up as inspirations for future episodes of “True Detective” type shows. I wish I was joking. but no, I want to scream.
The doldrums continue. Of course, Barber disappoints. MLK disappointed on exactly the same grounds. The moral argument is exactly Barber’s argument. He will get those who respond to this call. All coalitions must understand that limitation.
All that is required is that it be sufficient to move some substantial electorates. Not sure who does. that this year.
What is clear is that Dems and Trump need to reestablish legitimacy and voters need to make some decisions about what they want.
Glad to see that the rush to war is a a bust.
more tomorrow, but it’s nice to see you, stranger. got communications in RL (email) and over yonder at c99 on my newest diary to handle. still spread too thin. and yeah, rev barber vote vote vote D and other sermon messages…fail.
‘legitimacy’ is in the eye of the beholder, i guess, but the big push for ‘better dems’, purge the bad uns!’ seems to be more of the same rubbish that’s been afoot for a long, long, time. TRNN and by and large, c99% support that point of view, esp. now w/ ‘our revolution’, DSA dem candidates. let’s see: tulsi gabbard and liz warren: 2020! i dunno thd, i do believe it’s past time to become a cynic on the amerikan electoral process. jayzus, they even had ranked voting in lebanon, lol. (yeah, i know, but still…)