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Archive for the ‘Donald Trump’ Category

TRUMP FINDS HIS ROY COHN

Monday, March 25th, 2019

It is tragic what is happening in and to the United States of America. This was once a strong, respected, acknowledged world leader. It is now a country with a “president” who lies, cheats and manipulates – all for his own aggrandizement, without thought for anything else – and a structure in place to support him. That was very clear when Barr’s press release came out.

It was actually clear long before, but we have been trying to postpone that day of reckoning which is going to come and soon.

Barr turned up at a signing in the White House – very unusual for a United States Attorney General, especially since he had a starring part of that signing. He initially stood a bit apart as he totally backed, tota and way beyond what was necessary, Donald Trump and his ‘national emergency’. This was not a national emergency. This was Donald Trump pushing this country to a breaking point because he wanted something to honor his father and all of the KKK and White Supremacist who called for such a wall decades ago – even into the 1920’s. They called for a wall with “steel slats” – the same kind of wall Trump called for when he began to seriously push his wall agenda. A memorial to White Supremacy.

The recent Trump rant about John McCain had nothing to do with John McCain. It was Trump letting those around him know what he would do to them if they didn’t do his bidding and they got the message. For those who didn’t get the message he described the carnage that would result from any attempt to tell the truth about his activities with Russia and/or any attempt to remove him from office.

Donald Trump went on a rampage a few weeks before the Mueller Report came out to let all of those around him know exactly what their fate would be at his hands if they did not exonerate him. And they got the message. Has there ever been a time when Republicans in Congress have been so quiet?

The New Zealand murders came right after Trump’s comments about what he would do and the violence that would happen; as did the Pittsburgh murders come right after Donald Trump proclaimed that he was not a Globalist. The bombs being delivered to prominent Americans also came right after Trump made another such threatening declaration.

When Barr was appointed Attorney General, it was clear Roy Cohn had arrived in the form of Barr and was going to do everything he could to support, shore up, clean up Donald Trump – and he did. The threesome of that time in history which wrecked much havoc on these United States – Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump – their protege – have returned and their protege has shown he learned his lessons well and is taking what he was taught to a new level – this is just the beginning.

It was quite unusual raising lots of questions for Attorney General Barr to visit the White House right at the time the Mueller Report was being delivered to him. After that visit Donald Trump and his tweets were silent and he went off to Mar-a-Lago quietly, with his friends and supporters and was not heard from again until he returned to the White House and the deed was done. Clearly, he has control over his tweets and they are done for a reason to create the affect he has been creating.

These United States have been seriously divided almost from its beginnings. Today, we are trying to say this serious division is new – not true. There has been the good and the bad. Those who saw the possibilities and wanted to move in the direction of greatness and goodness as a country and those who were overfilled with greed and power needs who simply wanted what they wanted and if that destroyed everything so be it if they could walk away with what they thought would satisfy those needs.

We have tried to cover up that history, but today it has come home to roost. There are too many diverse people now living, working, raising families in this country for it to be allowed to go back to the filthy past that has hung out here so long.

It is time for these United States to be what its past has promised and to leave behind the sin, the degradation, the filth, the destruction of human life, the self-centeredness and self-aggrandizement which has always brought this country down and has brought it to a place of not fulfilling what could have been its destiny.

When Donald Trump was “elected” president it was with all of the ugliness showing. He had already built Trump University and had ripped off hundreds, if not thousands of people in the process to line his own pockets. During all of the time he was running for president of these United States that and more was in the news with the very ugly details of how people looking for a better life scrimped, saved and denied themselves to pay money to Trump University so they could have a better life only to discover they were in worse shape after they enrolled than before because Donald Trump and his University were ripping them off, not providing them with that bright and shiny future of which they dreamed and which his marketing and advertising promised.. And that is only one such example of Donald Trump ripping off the American people.

White America, do you really need to be better than so badly that this is what you are willing to do to maintain that role and position in this society? Have you no shame? No God? No ethics? A horrible character who allows you to live in this filth created for you by Donald Trump and those who support him and those who went before to clear a path for him? You have no idea how great it is to be free! To live a life of freedom! To be one of instead of better than! It is an incredible feeling, life, way to be.

Millions of people voted for Donald Trump for president. Yes, Russia was a part of his being elected president – they provided the denouement – but also yes – millions of Americans voted for him. The same millions who moved against Native Americans? The same millions who moved to enslave Africans? The same millions who brought Africans over in slave ships to be sold as so much cattle – using the same ships in which they put product they were selling and delivering to other countries and returning from those countries with human beings they had stolen from African countries to sell to Americans? The same millions who saw Native American children, by the thousands, ripped from their families to supposedly be “acculturated” into American Society, but most of whom were never heard from again? And today we are seeing the same thing repeated with thousands of children coming to the United States from other countries and being treated as though they are sex objects and being raped and/or sexually or other ways abused by their captors who have put them in chain link prisons – who have humiliated and demeaned these children for no reason other than the depravity of those in charge and who have ripped even weeks old babies from their mothers to satisfy the needs for superiority of those doing such and the depravity of he who has ordered such to be done? “Suffer the little children to come unto me for of such is the kingdom of heaven”.

The same millions voted for Donald Trump who wrecked havoc across this country for decades trying to intimidate African Americans by being a part of one massacre after another, after slavery ended, as they saw African American families putting their lives together and building communities in places like Oklahoma and other areas? Their anger at seeing such resulted in unspeakable massacres of which our school children know nothing because that history is deleted in our school systems.

The United States has a lot from which to be redeemed and instead we are turning to someone like Donald Trump who lives and works in the mould of the worst of American history. We thought, when Barack Obama was elected, that we had made the collective decision to leave all of that behind. Clearly, that was a wrong thought, because what is showing is that those who were in charge throughout all of American history tainting everything that could have been beautiful are still in charge tainting everything that could have been beautiful.

The press release from Mueller’s Report was written by a man who was officially told, by his employers, of his conflict of interest and who refused to recuse himself. He had a mission and with his press release he carried out that mission. He was not going to be part of a diverse society. He, apparently, wants to give lip service to the goodness that could be America and do his part to make sure that other part, that gross part, which we all share as human beings, would be the part to take over and make sure he and his would still be in charge, wrecking havoc on everything and everyone else. From the dregs of humanity come your oppressors, cleaning themselves up but still instantly recognized.

To people like Barr and Lindsey Graham I say – my God neither sleeps nor slumbers. People like you crucified my Jesus and yet what happened was not the destruction of my Jesus nor of why Jesus came to earth, but the fulfillment of many of those promises. Millions followed – great edifices were built in his honor – ethical systems were created from his teachings – the efforts of the Barr’s, the Grahams’ (both Lindsey and Franklin and their followers) were dispersed. They try to come back periodically and while they succeed on some level for a brief period of time, they simply bring into being by their failure and their notoriety and people finally seeing the sin and flaws they cultivate in themselves, the exact opposite of what they claim to be working to achieve. Self-aggrandizement is their goal – power, money, the feeling of being better than is their goal. Reaching for that goal ultimately is their destruction. Hitler committed suicide, they say, in a dirty, filthy bunker scared out of his mind.

We are today the people who walk in darkness, but shortly, the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf will hear.

It matters not what Scripture you read or which religion you follow or if you follow none – it is not possible to be human with all that means and not see what is happening in these United States. To go along with it says more about you than anything else you do, think or claim to believe.

The Germans went along with Hitler. Average, ordinary people because they wanted someone or something to blame for the mess they allowed and helped happen in their lives. They wanted to be better than and what they received in return for those wants was a time spent in hell. Today, however, as most Germans look back at that history, you don’t see statues in memorial to that time in German history. You don’t see plays being performed to laud those actions. You don’t see people adoring Hitler for what he wrought or because they needed to keep that history alive and in front of them and their children. You see a people trying to make amends for a temporary aberration in their history. We have yet to see that in these United States. We have had many Hitlers-types who we adored. We still fight for and demand the right to worship at the altar of our statues and memorials to slavery as we created it for generations in these United States. We still have a form of slavery in the way we hold dear to sex trafficking and our enslaving of women and children for such purposes.

We have lauded them all and tried to make them our saviors – Donald Trump is just the most recent.

How long – O Lord!

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_________________________________________________________

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

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Bettina Oracle Speaks

Wednesday, March 20th, 2019

Well, for once you did not call me – I am here because you need to think seriously about what is happening in your world before the worst degradation, oppression, horribleness takes you by surprise.

I am here because John McCain, who recently joined us, has something he very urgently wants to say to you and he asked if I would be his “transmitter”.

From McCain:

“I have been watching and listening to what is happening amongst you. My concern is that you are defending my reputation without realizing that the insults hurled my way are not about me. Nothing on earth can hurt or harm me. Even my reputation is now cast in stone. It will stand – the good, the bad and the indifferent.

Instead of trying to defend and protect me, please see and understand what this is really about. Use this example to look carefully and clearly and understand what is in front of you.

To Lindsey Graham: I know you wanted to say something in my defense. I know it was painful for you to keep quiet and I know you think that by keeping quiet to get yourself re-elected you think this is the best way you have to counter the evil in the world and the evil which is now so close to you.

Please don’t! You are jeopardizing your eternity and your life. Live it standing firmly on your own two feet as an independent individual and everything you want will happen. The way you have chosen will only bring you and the rest of the world horrors beyond your imagining.

To the rest of you: Donald Trump isn’t fixated against me. He didn’t make his anti-John McCain comments because so many months after my death he is still spitting out insults against me because of some kind of emotional need. Donald Trump made those anti-John McCain comments because he was testing Lindsey Graham. He needed to make sure Lindsey Graham was loyal to Donald Trump to a fault. He wanted to insure that Lindsey would do whatever he was asked by Donald to do and so Donald put him to the test. If he could viciously insult a dear and old friend of Lindsey’s who could not defend himself in your world so you could see and hear that defense and Lindsey kept quiet and let those insults stand, then Lindsey could be trusted and was now loyal to Donald Trump. That is what those supposed insults were all about. Before Donald Trump used any of his resources to back Lindsey’s re-election, he wanted to make sure Lindsey was in the Donald Trump camp and would do whatever Donald Trump asked Lindsey to do.

Please think clearly as this all unfolds. It has reached the point of your world being engaged in major sin. It has reached that tipping point where all of you will either be engaged in promoting the world the way Donald Trump sees it or you will stand up for the goodness that is in you but you and Lindsey have to find the strength to stand.

Lindsay Graham can break this part of the pattern by finding the strength within himself to stand tall and speak the truth. He knows what those insults were about. This is his moment and his immortal soul will either live or die on this hill.

If you look at this pattern you will see why so many others are keeping quiet. They have had their own period of testing and they wanted what was offered if they pledged their loyalty to Donald Trump. You will see what is being done to them and the heavy load they have been carrying. They, like Lindsey, want the power they have as Congressmen. They, like Lindsey, are trying to justify the price they are paying to maintain themselves. Some believe they are doing this for family and country.

To compromise your eternity for a few more years in Congress is not worth it, Lindsey. You have so much more in front of you if you find the strength to stand tall and tell the world what is happening to you and why. Accept this and your life is over.

I could have caved as a prisoner and gone home to live a quiet life without having gone through the pain and agony of the prison life and violence and personal agony that I suffered. I didn’t realize and didn’t think about what the stands I took would mean to my eternity. I have been able to look back at all of it and put it all in perspective and I had no idea the greatness that would come from the way I chose to live my life. I just did what I thought was right.

May you, Lindsey and all of you have the courage to live your lives choosing the right path and making decisions which will benefit you, your families and the rest of the world – and to you Lindsey, you know exactly what you must do. Don’t let that weakness of yours send you hurtling into a life of sin

Your friend always – who will be standing by your side.”

More Bettina Members Comments!

Wednesday, March 20th, 2019

I was heartsick as I watched television news as the New Zealand massacre unfolded. I could not believe we were in that space once again.

I turned on television news to watch young people in their massive demonstration about Climate Change. What a disappointment. A fantastic huge demonstration of such dedicated youth and not one word or picture or anything about what was happening outside my window.

I remembered a couple things – when there was some news out there that Trump wanted to block he had ways to distract and block. Was the New Zealand massacre set up to distract these young people’s demonstration which Trump has worked hard to keep from surfacing? It would take something massive to keep those young people off the television news and it was found. Since the start of that demonstration I’ve seen nothing of the work and actions of thousands of young people – only the New Zealand massacre. Were Muslims used to distract from this powerful day of demonstrations?

The second thing I remembered was Trump asking someone he was interviewing if he would kill for him. The news commentator thought that was strange, but put it down to Trump’s “derangement.” That was either Trump’s “derangement” or Trump having blown past the ethics and morals which would have kept him from doing the Khashoggi thing to his joining his group of fascist, dictator ‘friends’ who he has shown he clearly admires and now has shown he can keep up with ‘mafia speak’ to cause murders in his realm?

My thoughts are constantly with the New Zealanders who had to endure the slaughter. I don’t know how I can help, but something will show itself and I will respond.

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This world has been created, managed and brought along by males. Some white, some pink, some yellow, some brown, some of many colors. All share lives on this planet which are mostly about satisfying their male egos’ and no matter how large or how small they are led first by sex and then all kinds of violence and everything else follows. It is time for a change. Even television shows are about sex and violence in one form or another and getting worse. There is so much more to life, but we don’t seem able to experience anything beyond various forms of sex and violence.

Life has so many other components, possibilities, excitements – isn’t it time for all of you out of control males to sit down, sit back and just stop the BS. It is time for another kind of world order to emerge – one which has caring for others its first concern; which puts others first; which is interested in building bridges not walls; which looks at business as a way of supplying what we all need not as a way to make billions so we can isolate ourselves and show the world our greatness which we gained at their expense?

We need to be a safe place for the poor to get out of poverty; to do everything we can to educate all of us; – and my writing this is so foolish. As you read it I can hear the comments – “a pipe dream, a romantic, an idealist, where did he come from”. It is so sad what we have done to this planet and it is getting worse. It was such a beautiful place – it is no longer.

Problem is, I don’t see any way out. There are too many Donald Trump’s in this world and more coming. We have so screwed ourselves with most of us just alive doing whatever until we die without any thought to the fact that we are all wasting the beauty of life because we have gone after weakness rather than strength and have redefined our values to satisfy our current existence instead of changing our current existence to be of good character. I doubt that we even know of what that consists.

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With New Zealand, has this administration taken its first steps into murder to be able to join the fascist nations developing very quickly around the globe? Did we have to prove our “manhood” and have done so with the “mafia speak” that brought about the New Zealand massacre?

It looks as though sex trafficking, pedophilia, the opioids – the new kind of drugs by prescription until addicted are all now in place and arms of this new mafia being created world wide with the United States president one of those doing the creating, promoting, managing. By tweet is a powerful way to create this kind of institutional structure.

________________________________________________________

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If you prefer your gift go to the Foundation, make your check payable to Bettina Network Foundation, inc. The money we receive for the Foundation currently is going to support the Wells Fargo Boycott.

_________________________________________________________

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.co


Mafia Speak: The necessity for loyalty within Trump’s circle: The fast moving growth of a mafia within the U. S. Government!

Sunday, March 10th, 2019

We complain about the rapid accumulation of 99% of the wealth within the United States economic system being available to only 1% of the population and we talk about Capitalism to Socialism to Fascism, but we don’t get into the particulars of how that is happening.

Clearly, if we did not have a mafia within the U. S. Economic System trying to take over we would not have a billionaire class. We have a very thriving Billionaire Class structure which is growing dramatically fast and dictating who will and who will not join them.

The kind of investment needed to create such a group; the “loyalty” demanded to keep it going and growing; the flagrant violations of the U. S. Constitution to keep the way clear for the mafia structures needed to replace the structures sustaining the U. S. Republi; the pressures to give up the Republic and take instead the structure of the more fascist-authoritarian governmental structures necessary have taken time and several administrations. With the Trump Administration we have finally arrived at that point where it becomes clear that we are barreling ahead into a government which is fast becoming a criminal enterprise headed by a man whose privately owned company could best be described as a RICO organization.

There have been many examples along the way, but the press has either been reluctant to make the call and do the investigative reporting to bring to the public the structures within which they are now living or they do not know and only see such things in the rear view mirror. And that makes sense since the role of the press is to report the news – to report what has happened.

The examples are becoming increasingly ‘in your face’ and they are being immediately ‘normalized’ as just the way we function today.

The latest example was extraordinarily blatant – and that was the sentencing of Manafort. It was an incredible example of “Mafia Speak” – right out front expecting the public and press to gloss over what was done.

A Prelude to the First Mafia Speak: (Setting the stage)

In the context of the original trial, Judge Ellis attacked one of the witnesses – Rick Gates – by testifying instead of maintaining himself as the judge – “…Manafort could not have been paying that much attention to what you (Gates) were doing. If so, he (Manafort) would have known how much money you were stealing from him.” That comment was apparently an attempt to turn the original trial, as much as possible, away from Manafort – to give him some breathing room and allow any juror listening to be persuaded in Manafort’s favor. That said there is Mafia Speak coming.

First Mafia Speak:

  1. The judge said – right before pronouncing the sentence on Paul Manafort – “You are not before this Court for anything having to do with colluding with the Russian government to influence this election.”

That was a very strange comment for a judge to make. Normally, a judge stays within the confines of the hearing in front of him, he does not wander off as Judge T. S. Ellis did to an unrelated and totally out of context comment which he apparently had a specific reason for doing. That reason became clear as the day progressed. Judge Ellis set up what followed and allowed the mafia “Don” to make his point later in the day for the public to be brought along in the way he wanted the public to go. The “Don” said he was “honored” by his people.

Second Mafia Speak:

2. After the hearing and sentencing when Paul Manafort’s attorney, Kevin Downing, went to the microphones outside the courthouse to say a few words to the reporters gathered outside, he said: “There is absolutely no evidence that Paul Manafort was involved with any collusion with any government official from Russia.”

Interesting in his comments, they were also outside of what the hearing was about. In addition, both the judge and attorney, who are professionals in the law and who know there is no legal term such as “collusion” – it is Donald Trump’s favorite way to characterize the special counsel’s investigation – Attorney Downing’s comments as well as Judge Ellis’ comments began to sound like “Mafia Speak” – things said at the direction of the mafia boss ‘ Donald Trump.

Reason for the First and Second “Mafia Speak” comments:

3. To close the circle and bring it around to why the Judge and Attorney made those statements, which stood out because of their inappropriateness and un-attachment to the hearing and sentencing – later in the day, Donald Trump made comments about the hearing and sentencing when Reporters shouted questions to him at the White House.

Donald Trump’s comments were “I just want to tell you that his (Manafort”s) lawyer went out of his way actually to make a statement last night, no collusion”. “The judge, for whatever reason, I was very honored by it, also made the statement that this had nothing to do with collusion with Russia.”

The mafia don then completes the circle by coming out with what was supposed to be the denouement comment – the reason for the first and second “Mafia Speak” comments. The three of them – the Judge, who set the table, the Attorney, who brought the food to the table and Trump who sat down to eat what was being served to him, let his capo’s know they had done a great job by commenting on his feelings of being ‘honored’ by what had just been done for him. And clearly, Trump had paid for the table and its settings; the food on the table and was going to enjoy his meal knowing that mafia type loyalty still existed within his organization and with his ‘people.’ That is what James Comey missed in why Trump was asking for “loyalty” from him. Every mafia boss has to know that kind of loyalty is crucial because of the way they operate and the necessity for cover when the circumstances call for it.

That type of mafia control is spreading within the U. S. Government and will be hard to extinguish even after Trump is gone. That mafia structure became very clear to us as we looked at Wells Fargo and tried to decide if we should get involved with a boycott against them.

This is what is happening to your government, America. This is what has happened and continues to happen in your Court System. This is why McConnell has so much power – he is the one making this scenario possible so members of this mafia can function without too many repercussions until the society is better controlled by their mafia governing structure.

Even the seemingly innocuous language is telling. After the judge and attorney went out on a limb for Trump – he thanks them publicly and in the way of the mafia he was “honored by it.”

And now kiss the ring!

________________________________________

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Or you can send a check to Bettina Network, inc. P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 to support this blog! Please make your check out to “Bettina Network, inc.” since the blog income is not the foundation income.

If you prefer your gift go to the Foundation, make your check payable to Bettina Network Foundation, inc. The money we receive for the Foundation currently is going to support the Wells Fargo Boycott.

_________________________________________________________

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.co


Bettina Members Share…

Saturday, March 2nd, 2019

Congressman Jim Jordan accused of ignoring sexual abuse at OSU. see https://www.daytondailynews.com…/congressman-jim-jordan…sex-abuse…/lzfhebNU

I watched the Michael Cohen hearings and was appalled at Congressman Jordan and the way he led the group denouncing Cohen for lying plus as many other uglies he could think of to throw Michael Cohen’s way. Clearly that group thrives on threat, intimidation, abuse. And by the way, isn’t Jordan the one accused in some kind of sexual abuse thing against young athletes? Either he was involved or knew about it and didn’t report it or..? He fits right into the Trump orbit.

Rep. Jim Jordan Is Named in New OSU Sexual Abuse Scandal… https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jim-jordan-ohio-state-700578

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Hearing those who support and defend Donald Trump is showing what is wrong with the United States. I used to get angry when I heard people say – “if you don’t like this country leave it”. Today, I understand the sentiment. Maybe we should have a bigotry test to move out and keep out those White Supremacist and assorted others. They all seem to have given Donald Trump immunity.

Michael Cohen has admitted and is paying for his lies. Donald Trump’s lies make Michael Cohen look like a choir boy. Trump’s supporters seem totally able to attempt to defame Michael Cohen, calling him a liar and denigrating him for his lies and at the same time not even realizing others are looking at the person they are supporting and counting his lies into the thousands. How are they so tone deaf that they don’t see themselves as they are seen by others.

Cohen has no power, except what he had loaned to him by Trump if Cohen used that power to carry out Trump’s wishes. Trump as a liar, however, is dangerous because he does have power over many and much. He is a major, daily, liar whose lies will negatively affect your children’s future as those lies change this republic into a fascist state with Donald Trump leading the nation as he tries to use this country to become wealthier than Vladimir Putin.

Trump followers are saying- some people can lie to us and that is alright because the end justifies the means. What they don’t understand is that the process by which we reach the end totally changes the end we envisioned. That expected end changes and turns the goals we were willing to compromise our moral values and our character to reach into a monstrosity we are amazed has been created. It will be something we neither recognize nor want.

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CPAC BRINGING IN ANOTHER ROUND OF MC CARTHYISM

I’ve read in Bettina Network’s Blog about Donald Trump’s mentors – Roy Cohn and Senator Joseph McCarthy. After reading that, I did some research to see what that was all about. Shamefully, it was not a part of what I learned in school. I am also discovering other such times in these United States which were much worse. I did not learn about the massacres and slaughters in school. For example – I had to go out of my way to read and learn about the Trail of Tears. My first reaction was to deny. Not here – not in my country did or could that happen.

Germany did not want Nazism. They wanted to be better than the Jews and to have someone to blame the results of the war on and they wound up with a major massacre and horrendous event their children have had to endure.

I am now seeing, from the CPAC Conference, that the direction in which the Trumpians are going is to re-create, Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist era. Sorrowfully, that is coming on us very quickly with most of us ignorant about what that era was like.

CPAC and its speakers and listeners are now upping the ante – the “wall” in front of which they can stand and single out who goes in and who stays out – by simply proclaiming who, what policies, what acts are to be despised as “Communist” and who should be destroyed in the process. Joe McCarthy’s hearings and the way he upended this country over the years he was in power is the stuff of legend and history. Read that history and see how many people were destroyed. It is tragic. That is what CPAC is setting up. The White Supremacists – the neo Nazi’s – the KKK – and all the rest have found their common ground to bring about their Nirvana. Nothing is as chilling as listening to their talks at this CPAC conference and seeing the audience response. They are ready to come for the rest of us who don’t walk their path and mimic their speech.

Trump has successfully brought back into the present the United States in which he was mentored. He and his followers are working to restore and maintain Joseph McCarthy’s United States which only existed in McCarthy’s alcoholic fantasies.

This United States periodically returns to such brutality. Trump can do this because that kind of thing is a horrendous part of our history which we deny, deny, deny so we can repeat this again and again. When defeated and saner more humane people take over that past is then buried. This time, we need to make sure that history is not buried, but kept alive and taught in our schools so the next generation is not free to destroy itself and its children.

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Or you can send a check to Bettina Network, inc. P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 to support this blog! Please make your check out to “Bettina Network, inc.” since the blog income is not the foundation income.

If you prefer your gift go to the Foundation, make your check payable to Bettina Network Foundation, inc. The money we receive for the Foundation currently is going to support the Wells Fargo Boycott.

_________________________________________________________

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.co

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The End……….

Thursday, February 28th, 2019

by: Marceline Donaldson

If you didn’t get it before, yesterday was the end of Donald Trump.

If you didn’t get that during the Michael Cohen hearing you got it when Trump left Vietnam hours early with no agreement. You had a premonition that something was up; that all was not right with the fascist leaders’ world when the Russian Lavrov showed up in Vietnam on his private plane from Russia the day before Trump arrived. Something he had to say to Kim that he did not want to chance any intelligence group to hear? He did not have his plane land so he could have a cup of Vietnam tea – no matter how good or how nourishing it could be. Something that obvious does not happen without great consternation as its root cause in the circle of eastern european mafioso leadership.

The few pictures which emerged, even with Donald and Kim shown casually walking together said there was tension between Kim and Donald. but was it a lovers’ spat or permanent split? Or did Kim see himself aligned too closely with someone who will soon be out of office in disgrace when Kim was trying so hard to be one of the power elite of the autocratic world. Nothing said we were in Trump’s end-time louder or longer than that “summit”.

The Congressional hearing itself was amazing. The dynamics more so than the words – although the words had a small sway on what you saw.

The Republicans were acting out for all to see exactly what Michael Cohen was describing as to how he got his talking and marching orders from the “Don”. He got them the way the “Don,” as do most, if not all, of the world’s mafia leaders, communicate their orders to their underlings. And – each Congressman, well except maybe one, the renegade Amash – stuck to their talking points each and everyone of them. It was as if they were just learning English and everyone was repeating what the last one said as they grappled with trying to learn proper English grammar.

And then there was the small interlude with Mr. Meadow, the African slave auctioneer, refusing to acknowledge his racism. Emotions ran high at that point, but I was remembering Mr. Meadows and his racism showing during the tenure of President Barack Obama and weren’t there a few other times when his racism so stood out?

Congressman Meadows claimed he could not be racist because he has nieces and nephews of color. That was so funny I couldn’t stop laughing out loud. Racism does cause a blind spot thus the truth of the statement which screams out from the racists’ mouth “some of my best friends are….” Meadows comments reminded me of Donald Trump, who has Jewish grandchildren. In spite of that connection to the Jewish Community, Trump’s anti-Semitism screamed out loud and called for the violence that followed. I am sure you remember Trump’s proclamation that he is not a “Globalist.” -and – How could you forget that those hearing him, followed his proclamation – his call to action by shooting and killing some 11 plus Jews within hours of Trump’s call to arms. He did not say – kill those Jews and do it in a place where it is clearly understood that it is Jews you were after. He did it in the style Michael Cohen described – in his coded speech and his followers heard and took action.

It was a parallel example to Congressman Meadows indignation at being called out as a racist. To have put a young black woman on display – the way slaves are put on display at the auction market – for her price to be his describing her love of Donald Trump, while she stood silently by. Trump could not be racist because she would not work for Donald Trump if he were because her father is from Birmingham, Alabama. With that comment I was rolling on the floor not being able to stop laughing. Thank God for having given me a sense of humor.

Having been raised in that neighborhood I knew and know quite a few blacks who are ‘racist’ because they want too much to be accepted by (whites), to be different from (people of color), to be equal to (whites) they will do and say whatever is necessary and as they become adults, that need and those actions determine their character. They too live out of the character defining need to be “better than” – even those who look like and are colored like their ancestors. It was clear the young black woman being so paraded – with Meadows calling out to everyone the price he paid for her and what she would have to acknowledge in return for having been purchased by his family on that slave auction block – is well on her way to being one of those with such low character traits.

The rest of the Republicans questioning Michael Cohen were blindingly white. They were all so white – even the two women who spoke trying to tear down Michael Cohen – except for one. Congressman Higgins from Louisiana. That is where I was raised and one thing I know just from my upbringing and exposure and neighbors and family is the person with that color under the skin. The color, which you don’t see looking at those with some colored ancestors who have white looking skin, except when the person is seen under the television cameras.

People who look like Higgins with that kind of color showing when under the “klieg lights” were “passé blanc”. And there was this Congressperson Higgins showing that darkness more clearly than the rest, even in his lack of character. That extreme lack comes from the character built on the constant lie the passé blanc lives with in a society which puts you in a box with those of the same color, but then you have hopped out of your box into another with people of another skin color, originally probably to get a better job for your family to be able to eat, live and have better advantages which are given to those in the other box. Those constant lies one has to tell to stay in that ‘white box” gives your character and the character of your children that certain tinge – which those around you know, but you think is well hidden.

Higgins outed himself with his questions about the “boxes” Cohen was looking through in preparation for the hearing. Higgins knew quite well those were the boxes returned to Mr. Cohen after the government raided his home and office and carried them off. He heard Michael Cohen say that, but it was too good to be able to twist that into something negative to Michael Cohen – something Higgins could claim Mr. Cohen “hid” from the government and he demanded with much self-righteous indignation that Mr. Cohen immediately send off to the government agencies from whom he somehow managed to put something over on by his hiding of those boxes.

We tell on ourselves as humans. All you have to do is look and listen. Mr. Higgins was telling on himself as to who he was – a lifetime of such hiding – or a couple generations of hiding, hoping to move far enough away so he is accepted without fear of exposure.

What also stopped me was the way Mr. Cohen described Donald Trump’s “code” way of speaking and then immediately one of the very white Republicans coming behind to question him showing they were totally immersed in that “code” and were speaking and questioning out of the talking points they so received and were parroting.

What an incredible day. And the denouement at the end learning that Kim Jong Un sent Trump packing early without an agreement. Kim is trying to lift himself up into acceptance as equal by the world fascist leadership community and he can’t do that hanging out with someone who is being thrown out of that “strong man”, “macho”, very “fascist” leaning group.

Good bye Donald!!!!!!!!!

THE WALL: A 1920’s KKK Dream

Friday, February 15th, 2019

That dream, in the 1920’s when the KKK was at its height, was complete with steel slats and it was a very high wall on the Southern border between the U. S. and Mexico.

It looks as though Donald Trump, the illegitimate president of the United States, is doing everything he can to fulfill that dream. Is this his memorial to his father, who was apparently a part of the KKK? https://ahtribune.com/us/2016-election/242-trump-grandfather-pimp-father-kkk.html?fbclid=IwAR073Tg7RDAbs2uIjtiWeDGVC09i5tyRk7BTjBk0LMh_SDjsx6WRpbjWonM

His father’s legacy to Trump was to get him started in the same vein in which he lived his life – by incorporating into his life and work discrimination against African Americans, as in not letting them rent in the buildings father and son built. Trump was started on his racist path early in life and continued on that path throughout his life. As the United States became more diverse, the peoples included in this family’s racism became more diverse and today, apparently includes all of the brown and black peoples of the world.

How fitting that his denouement would be fulfilling the dream of many klansmen of his father’s era by pushing through to build this wall (in their honor?). As you look at the determination and energy and effort Trump has put behind this WALL it had to have a very special meaning to him. All of the trying in todays’ world by many talking heads to make it look as though Trump is working for his base just does not fit.

For his base, he could have moved on and worked for something to give them that was doable. This is a strong emotional commitment which has driven Trump. What could be stronger than doing this for his father? Was the part of the WALL Trump was trying to build to have his father’s name?

AND — a little bonus — because of the timing, Trump could also use this point in time to coverup, distract from, mute and diminish the publicity around the roll-out of Andrew McCabe’s book “The Threat”? Trump’s timing wasn’t perfect but it was close. If McCabe’s book was introduced when it was supposed to be – this weekend on 60 Minutes – without the preview of the 60 Minutes interview with McCabe on the morning and evening Talk/News shows, Trump’s efforts would have perfectly wiped “The Threat” off the news. As it is, he was able to reduce and diminish the coverage of McCabe’s book because of his announcement that he was going to declare a “National Emergency” after he signed the bill. Since most of the newscasters either didn’t know or simply eliminated, for better effect, the fact that this bill has enough votes behind it to make it veto proof, neither the House nor the Senate needed Trump’s signature taking away from him the circus he is creating to throw smoke into all of our faces so we can’t see McCabe and his new book. Is this what is called a ‘two’fer?

FROM TRUMP TO SENATOR LIZ CHENEY

Lying in bed, dozing off I was sharply awakened by this woman doing the most intense racist rant I have seen in a very long time.

Fortunately, I was recording that particular news show so I was able to rewind and watch it from the beginning. I was totally shocked to see that the person giving this racist rant in the most arrogant, smug and self-satisfied way was none other than Senator Liz Cheney – daughter of the ex-Vice President. I kept wondering why she had this super smug demeanor as she ranted on and on after having been asked a question about Donald Trump. Her rant focused on Elizabeth Warren and the fact that Senator Warren publicly acknowledged throughout most of her life, her Native American ancestry. Instead of talking about the courage that took, especially during the time frame in which Senator Warren made her family background public, Senator Cheney was ripping Senator Warren apart. What is there about that which set her off? Should we look into Senator Cheney’s racial background?

When the question about Donald Trump was repeated, Senator Cheney simply continued the most racist monologue against Senator Warren that I have heard in decades. My further shock was that no one called her on it. There should have been outcries from every corner of Congress demanding that she apologize. Not one peep. Today, having heard the backlash against one of the brown women, Ilham Omar, in Congress claiming she made bigoted comments and calling for her to apologize, and at the same time the same people ignoring of Senator Cheney’s comments shows up the claims against others for what they are – political attacks wherever and however you can get them.

I kept thinking I was in a time warp. I didn’t always agree with Senator Cheney, but I had never pictured her just inches away from the likes of the most bigoted of those in public life. One becomes accustomed to people like the Congressman Steve King and just dismisses anything he says. But Senator Cheney, I thought, was better than that. Well – so much for that misperception. Now I understand why Steve King was able to spout his racism and walk away unscathed. He has lots of compatriots who are viciously racist and don’t see anything wrong with Steve King’s racism. He is entitled?

EXECUTIVE TIME a la TRUMP

Maybe most of you don’t remember that far back, to the beginnings of Donald Trump’s illegitimate and illegal presidency, but I do. I remember when he talked about being shocked that the job of the president of the United States was so easy he could do both. He could run the Trump Organization and act as though he was President of the United States.

This was not said by a talking head interpreting Trump’s comments, this was said by Trump himself.

Now we have Trump’s schedule showing massive amounts of “Executive Time”. There have been many talking and poking fun at what that means – watching cable tv seems to be the first comment with the most repeaters, but every time I hear that I remember those comments made by Trump – and I’ve seen that he usually tells on himself and does things up front. Is he running the Trump Organization during his “Executive Time”? Are his comments about the Presidency being a part time job true?

THE NEW WORLD ORDER

I remember where I was when I first heard comments about “The New World Order.” The first time I heard this is was George Bush the Sr. making the comments.

As I look at this ‘Trump/vs the rest of us’ round in this war, it certainly looks like one of the battles trying to bring about that vision of such world governance by the Corporate/Billionaire Group.

From the comments I’ve heard – this New World Order seems to be about the Corporate/Billionaire Group ruling everything (and of course, being very patronizing to those not in their Group) and the diminishment of Government by the people, for the people and with the people. The people being those who do the work to maintain, grow and make life easier for that Corporate/Billionaire Group while dedicating their lives to trying to be like them on almost no money and very few assets.

Not like the traditional slavery in this country because slaves were brought in from Africa and they were very dark of skin. The people doing the todays work that would have been done by slaves in that past era includes those we call “white” along with all of the brown and black peoples of the world. And, some of the people in the Corporate/Billionaire Group are brown – haven’t seen any blacks yet, but they will surface.

Are we moving forward as a world where Cyber Warfare takes over and actual hand to hand and gun and other combat using the traditional artifacts of killing being pushed off center stage, being used to distract from the real war. A way to entertain and occupy the workers of the world so they will stop calling for these impossibles where we all benefit and profit?

We are certainly not fighting over Communism. That went out decades ago if it ever existed. What always amazed me about that was the theoretical definition of Communism seemed to be taken straight from the economic system outlined by Jesus in the New Testament and the people most against that economic system were the Evangelical Christians.

And we are definitely not fighting over Socialism – as you can see from this current beginning stage of the election of the next United States president. That word was introduced by Howard Schulz. Isn’t he one of the Billionaire Group? Beginning the anti-Socialist distraction rhetoric?

And, the biggest joke of all is Capitalism, which we claim exists in the United States, but which actually can’t exist anywhere as long as prejudice against groups exists and is a part of the societies in which we function. We can claim some economic system is capitalistic, but in reality we can’t have a capitalistic system as long as we have such strong prejudices in this world. What we have, in the name of capitalism, is a system which allows theft and other such uglies to be made legitimate, normal and actually a good thing in the systems we call Capitalist.

I wish we could clear our eyes to see the world as it is. One of the roles bigotry plays is to cloud the ability of people to see reality. And those who promote bigotry are benefitting mightily from John Q. Public’s mental illness.

Ed. Note: From several members of Bettina Network’s Lifestyle Community. Hope you learned something from these thoughts shared.


______________________________________________________


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Or you can send a check to Bettina Network, inc. P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 to support this blog! Please make your check out to “Bettina Network, inc.” since the blog income is not the foundation income.

If you prefer your gift go to the Foundation, make your check payable to Bettina Network Foundation, inc. The money we receive for the Foundation currently is going to support the Wells Fargo Boycott.

_________________________________________________________

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

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Trump Talk @ Congress Stirs

Wednesday, February 6th, 2019

A Conglomeration of Comments

by: Bettina Network Members

  • I heard and saw Donald Trump’s talk to Congress, the Supreme Court Judges and so many more and couldn’t keep my mind focused. It has strayed whenever anything about Trump surfaces because what I can’t reconcile is TRUMP – PROSTITUTION – STONE!                                    
  • We have just been through a lot with the arrest and indictment of Roger Stone. Most striking to me was the fact that Roger Stone shared an apartment in New York with a woman who was referred to as an ex-madam, who commiserated with Roger Stone because she remembered what it was like to be arrested by the police. And she talked about knowing Donald Trump, who she considered a friend.
  • Given how close Donald Trump and Roger Stone have been over the years Trump could not help but know about this arrangement and knowing Rogers’ friend he would know she was an ex-Madam. I couldn’t help but take the next step to wonder if the compromat Russia has on Trump is his involvement with prostitution. Not the kind of hanging around in a Russian Hotel peeing on the bed with other prostitutes, but the kind of being a mafia Don where prostitution – the kind which is the selling of women’s bodies – is generally always a part of most mafia organizations’ income.
  • I could be wrong about this, but looking at the history and all else it certainly rings true in my mind. et tu?

The Look of Congress during Donald Trump’s Talk!

It was quite something to see the cameras pan across Congress to show us the look of our government when all are gathered together.

I saw one group, interspersed with many Congress people in white – the women of Congress. However, they were all seated on one side with one group – the Democrats. There were also hijabs sprinkled amongst them and colors from white to brown to black. The features of those seated in the Congressional Seats on the Democrat’s side were from Asian to Middle Eastern to African to Northern European. They were the America we mythologize; the America we sing to; the America we strive to be; the democracy we are and our ancestors were trying to build.

On the other side they were all white; almost totally northern european in looks – features – hair – ancestry; and almost totally male. They looked as though they would be at home in a Russian Parliament where the color is white and the gender is male.

Could that be what and why the collusion? the conspiracy? For white males to continue to dominate they must conspire to keep their countries with white males first and everyone else oppressed under them supporting them?

Elizabeth Warren and her Native American Ancestry!

I have been reading the coverage of Elizabeth Warren and her claim of a Native American Ancestry. It reminds me of the coverage of Rachel Dolezal when she clearly made a conscious decision to move from white to black and has lived her life in a black community ever since. The way the media attempted to pull her apart, to denigrate her, to make her the butt of many jokes, it was clear that Ms. Dolezal had touched a nerve.

Elizabeth Warren and her putting out in the public her family stories about being part Native American and not running away from that, but making it very public shows up the mythology of Affirmative Action. Our response to that says we know Affirmative Action did not work, did not give opportunity to minorities except in token ways, was not something we wanted to continue because we wanted the superiority of white and male to continue unabated. Anything that touches our myths attempting to destroy them must be ridiculed and the people who step out with something showing the lie of the myths by which we live must be either destroyed or made to heel.

The latest news story on Elizabeth Warren and her ancestry is about a form she filled in to attend a Texas School and goodness, she put in the place of race “Native American”. We can now all come running to bring up and make our denial of racism very clear. One can hear the jumps for joy and shouts as she is pilloried for doing such. Why pilloried? Because the media and others can claim that she was trying to take advantage of all of the ‘opportunities and goodies’ and advantages over whites which this society supposedly gives to Native Americans.

All of that sounds like a Trumpian – a lie told to hide a very ugly truth or to distract one from seeing something which would be damaging.

I was raised in a neighborhood which was very ‘integrated’. Quite unusual for these United States, but there are pockets of such here and there. In those pockets you will find people from blonde with blue eyes to very dark with kinky, thick hair. How does that happen? Especially since in this ‘integrated’ neighborhood everyone identified as black. You also had Jews in these neighborhoods because until the 1960’s Jews were considered black.

That happened because early on – even through the 1950’s and 1960’s there were many ‘mixed’ marriages. Marriages between African Americans and European Americans. That happened even during the time when that was against the law and you could wind up in jail. Whites who married blacks would quietly move into the black community and they, from that point on, identified as black because their children were to be considered and it was easier on everyone if that happened.

In our small community we knew those who were white, although that was not a topic of polite conversation.

Given the extreme mixing of Blacks, Irish and Native Americans in the deep south, there are many walking around this country with Native American ‘blood’ – or what we should more properly refer to as Native American roots. – hey Boston!! Check your ‘Irish” ancestry lately?

Since Native Americans were on the bottom of the ladder, not many acknowledged their ancestors if they were Native American. Anything but Native American was a step up. In most families, stories about Native American ancestry were ‘hushed up”. In Senator Warrens family, apparently they were told and passed down the generations.

What we have missed in this Elizabeth Warren story – or maybe we have not missed it because we want to have any opportunity to participate in the denial of our history and our bigotry – it took a lot of guts for Senator Warren to acknowledge her Native American roots in an application which she was filing to be able to move ahead. To know from family history that some part of your ancestry was in the Native American community is whispered about in close quarters not spread in public on application forms because the result would be your denial – with the claim of other reasons – or your not being able to move as far ahead as you would like to go because…… What the press and others want to make of this is quite Trumpian. It is an opportunity for them to pass back and forth in the society the lies about race told in their circles.

To take that stand in Texas, all those many years ago, was to put the possibility of your future move up in this society on the chopping block in favor of acknowledging and shouting out to everyone that you indeed walked around in this society carrying your Native American ancestry in the open – letting the sun shine in on it because it is a part of who you are. That is speaking truth and living that truth and making your move in your career taking along your total self. Look at how many people and how much custom and bigotry you aggravate and stir up.

Cudos to Senator Warren. May you live long and prosper and may you always continue to walk in your truth no matter the negative repercussions that might come therefrom. There are many of us who support your strength to be able to publicly and constantly acknowledge a family inheritance that many in this society would hide and run away from. The fact that you were acknowledging that inheritance all those many years ago and continue to do so today speaks to your courage, your truth and your character.

PLEASE do not allow the static you are going to receive constantly make you think, even for a moment, of denying your racial heritage – wear it proudly whether it brings you good or ill. In the end you will be encircled by those who appreciate what you have done because they realize and have lived the oppression even from those who do otherwise and hide their ancestry.

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

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__________________________________________________________

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com

BILLIONAIRES UNITE!

Thursday, January 31st, 2019

The only thing Mr. Starbucks’ announcement about the possibility of a run for the presidency of these United States did for most people was to remind us that we have been screwed, raped, pillaged with practically everything taken away from us unless we spend our lives working from dawn to dusk for meager rewards – which will become even more lean as time goes on if they are allowed to continue.

Human beings and greed go together. It is one of the sins with which we are born and if we don’t work at constantly curbing our appetites we will all look like our current billionaire class – unmitigated greed, constantly searching for more, feeling poor unless that more comes into our coffers hourly; working to keep what we have, talking magnanimously about the charity we do and blaming the victim for not having what we have as billionaires. Those others could be in this group but for their laziness, lack of initiative, inability to lead, lack of vision, etc. etc. etc.

Some of us have helped to set up and enhance this system under which we operate; others work to make sure it continues; while still others see the evil, complain about it, speak eloquently about working to relieve the pain of the poor, but do nothing; others teach their children how to maintain within this system without sliding down another rung and others work hard just because that is how they were raised.

A few stories about this part of the societal structure and how it comes about:

  1. Because we have a vested interest in ‘bed & breakfast’ I will start with #Airbnb as an example of how the billionaire class is created – why it thrives – what it is about.

Bettina Network, inc. and Bettina’s Bed & Breakfast, inc. were the genesis for Airbnb. It is a classic example of how bigotry remains, thrives and supports the billionaire class and how the billionaire class supports its own and decides who will be let in. There is a thuggishness to those within and those chosen to enter.

When #Airbnb was founded it was on the back of an African American woman who worked over 20 years developing the concept and growing it by inches because venture capital money was and is not available to minorities or women. That is the most solid block in the foundation of this billionaire class. If they have a creed its foundational stone would be on the refusal to admit minorities or women except as tokens to disprove the rule.

Venture Capitalists sent Brian Chesky and two of his friends to the home of this African American woman to find out what she was doing, how, all the details they could glean. Our feelings about what happened circulate around the fact that they did not have an idea, a vision and saw Bettina Network, inc. from afar. They went into a Black woman’s home and family – put their feet under her table, ate her food and stole her business plan and vision. And – they knew nothing about bed & breakfast before that – they didn’t ‘find’ her through their own machinations or investigations or search for places to stay, they were sent by Capital Network in Central Square in Massachusetts to look at what she was doing as something they might steal and copy.

They were not graduates of Ivy League schools nor had they attended Ivy League schools and they had practically no business experience. Their experience consisted of brief times spent as entry level admin people. What they showed was their lack of character and their willingness to steal from someone else with all of the character traits that go along with that – and they did that in spades. Once established they even lied about their beginnings and where the idea for Airbnb came from.

What they created was a structure which incorporated their racism, their greed and more. It is clearly visible in the business they brought about for all to see.

Their racism structured into their corporation? It is entrenched and has many forms within the structure of Airbnb. The most obvious spits on the work of the civil rights leaders of the 1950’s and beyond. The Thurgood Marshall’s, the Jack Greenberg’s, those who litigated for years to move society to a more integrated place and were successful in that endeavor for a brief period of time. Before their legal work, if you applied to college you submitted your resume, your grades, your references and YOUR PICTURE.

Because it was not always possible to tell the color of a persons skin by their application alone, the picture helped Universities at the time to distinguish between applications and to make sure their entering classes were composed of majority white males and very few others.

That practice was deemed illegal through several law suits filed during the 1960’s and beyond. Universities stopped the practice of requiring a picture to accompany your application for admittance because of those law suits and because that practice was declared racist. That practice is now being turned on its head by Airbnb because to make a reservation at an accommodation through Airbnb one must submit a picture and that picture is more often than not used to determine whether or not you will be accepted as a guest.

Many have been discriminated against and have not been able to get reservations. There have been instances of minorities arriving at a home and being turned away with the owner or person at the house claiming the person engaged in ‘subterfuge’ to get a room. What was the subterfuge that got them turned away? A mixed Asian couple in California was turned away at about 10pm in storm conditions because one was Asian and the other of Northern European extraction. The picture they submitted for their reservation was of the Northern European extraction half of the couple. When the Asian woman appeared she was not acceptable so they had to find accommodations elsewhere. The host family claimed they “cheated” to get the room. That was not an isolated incident. The stories of discrimination from Blacks who tried to get accommodations, had to submit pictures and were subsequently turned down are legion.

It is a corporation structured to bring back that kind of racism from the 1950’s and earlier.

It is a corporation structured to make affordable housing almost unavailable and to bring out the greed of those who come near to use the web site.

It is a corporation which has been used by sex traffickers because it has set itself up in such a way that whoever has a need can use their web site and hide a lot they could not get away with, but for.

It is a corporation which, because of the way it is structured, has been a part of at least one client being murdered.

It is a corporation whose structure has allowed the destruction of many houses and estates in some of the most vile ways, causing the upheaval of neighborhoods with the wild parties that have happened in homes which were supposed to be used as a room or an estate for the night.

Investors put 1.2 billion dollars of investment money into Airbnb in promoting some of this society’s worse traits. It will soon go public and if that is successful we will have a corporate structure carrying on what many of us have tried to eliminate from this society for generations – and so it goes.

Isn’t it striking that the three people who started Airbnb and wound up with substantial venture capital money are people who showed themselves to lacking in good character, ethics, and more. Isn’t it striking that those character traits are what has handicapped this country to the point of finally seeing us wind up with a Donald Trump as president? A man who epitomizes exactly what Airbnb is about?

2. Let us move on to another such company founded and structured around questionable morals and character. – Take a look at Facebook. The vision of twins who engaged Zuckerberg to code their business idea. That however wound up the property of Zuckerberg who carried the idea into a corporate structure which is today wrecking havoc on this society in very gross, immoral and unethical ways.

What we are now trying to do is right this wrong which will not be possible because the corporate structure of Facebook has become too strong. It is being credited with being majorly responsible for the election to the presidency of Donald Trump, with the destruction of the privacy guaranteed to the citizens of the United States by the Constitution, with using private conversations and back and forth between family and friends as a front when in reality it sells every scrap of information it can glean to the marketeers and advertisers and others for 20 pieces of silver.

Take a look and analyze most of the corporate structures which have come up and have brought their owners billionaire status and see how they have used the backs of tens of thousands of people to attain their goals and have left the society stripped almost bare with a path for those without character, without good morals, without honesty.

Take a look and analyze and you will find they are all either northern european descendants – some middle easterners – ……

These are two of the most graphic examples, but there are many others.

Most notably, what has been happening and continues to happen is the groups of people looking around the world for up and coming corporations or LLC’s or neighborhood gatherings whose structure and ideas they can steal; that they can get funding for because those doing the developing could not – mostly because of their color and sex.

Because of our experience with the theft of our idea and work by what became Airbnb we have come across many. The stories were all eerily similar and nothing was done about any of it. Look furiously – not within yourselves – but at what others are doing which looks successful – find venture capitalists to fund your stealth and move on into the billionaire’s club. Once you get there all will be forgotten and those who do remember the unethical road you took will soon be dead so just hang on and you will become one of the racist, sexist corporate structures in this society which maintains who we are without any of those others moving up to challenge our superiority. It may happen temporarily, but the business class has insured that this move to open up this society making it more diverse will not last. Remember Martin Luther King, Jr’s sacrifice? How much of what was achieved by so many has been reversed seriously by those now moving up?

And it is not limited to the United States. In other countries where people of brown and black complexions have begun to move up in these corporations – they are swiftly removed and replaced with a whiter skin person with a penis. We have heard many of those stories. Stories that parallel what has been happening in this country for generations. Remember Madame C. J. Walker? Think about all those others, people of color and women, who struggled so mightily with others, white, male, etc. reaping the rewards for their labor, their vision, their imagination.

And what happens now?

A note from Marceline Donaldson: My garden has been torn up – literally the garden in front of my house. My business has been upheaveled! I have been threatened! and so much more. but I am old and neither sickness nor death fazes me so none of that scares me nor does it make me drop the struggle.

What does move me to a furious state is to continue to see this and to know that my children will have to undertake this same struggle when I thought my work and life would make theirs easier. My grandfather worked his entire life to change this society so his children and grandchildren would have a better life and would not have to dedicate so much of their lives and times to this struggle; so did my grandmother; so did my mother; and so have I. My children deserve better and so do your children. I have not paid nearly the price others have paid trying to bring about basic change.

Watching the young people coming along behind the disaster that was Donald Trump thinking they are going to make basic change is heart breaking – the system looks stacked against them. All I can do from my perch is to wonder when and how they will be taken down and replaced with Northern European – very white males and our young people made to pay for their arrogance of thinking they can make such basic change. If they could, the color of our total billionaire group would not be white, male, with some middle easterners – Saudi Arabians – thrown in and one or two African American men and a woman or two. That billionaire group – those who will totally control tomorrow look like Donald Trump’s cabinet and all those other groups where color is absent and women are practically extinct.

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__________________________________________________________

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com

_________________________________________________________

Bettina Oracle Speaks

Tuesday, January 29th, 2019

The end of Donald Trump: Illegitimate President of the United States

You folks need to stop bothering me and take care of your business. If you don’t, the next generation will simply have to repeat this scenario which has been repeated for generations without resolving anything. Learn a bit of history, your own history and you will be appalled at what you see – if you have any goodness left in your genes.

You are riddled with liars, murderers covering for each other, persecutions of innocent children, and so much more. The Jews of Hitlers Germany have been replaced by the Children of the United States who are being slaughtered with guns in your streets and in their schools and the Children of Immigrants, who are being put in Concentration Camps and are now being murdered. Those children who have have come to your country – some with their parents, some without – seeking asylum and refuge from so much evil. Their skin is brown and black and your bigotry won’t allow for that. Too many such colors in these United States already.

You need to be full of integrity, good character, working to eliminate poverty, homelessness, BIGOTRY – which is the genesis of all of your society’s ills. You need to stop allowing the likes of Donald Trump who is taking from his evil twins in history and ripping children from their parents; making slaves of those in prison who have suffered under massive incarcerations to do the bidding of the evil institutions in this world of yours and so much more. And no, Trump did not start all of this, but he is the inheritor and chief propagator of the evil coming through today. And to end this, all it takes is moral courage and who amongst you has that? You are all called, but who amongst you answers the call? This is still happening today after thousands of years of such history because only a few answer the call. The rest of you raise up those few and feel that your work is done because of that raising up and acknowledging those heroes. Interestingly, your heroes are never raised up in their own generation. That happens only after they are safely dead.

OK! So you want to know what is happening?

Roger Stone was indicted – did you notice how swift that happened with all of the charges against him not in that court document of indictment? Have you noticed the rumblings of major change? Are you beginning to hear many voices raised to call out the evil? Evil doubles down when those rumblings start.

What do we see: We see Whitaker having stopped the Mueller investigation by declaring to them they will not be allowed any more indictments. Stone is the last and he slipped through by a fluke. No indictments allowed against Donald Trump, against Jr., against Jared Kushner, against Steve Bannon, against Ivanka Trump, against Eric Trump.

Mueller can’t step up to the microphone to tell you this. There are enough bread crumbs along the way, however, for you to see this yourselves.

All of this must be settled and ended before or shortly after Barr takes on the post of Attorney General. He will clear Trump using the foundation set by Whitaker, a man who has been promised much, but who will be dumped on and pushed aside after his work is done – without his promised rewards. If he is lucky, he will leave with a loaf of bread, but no butter. Maybe as he sees his expectations so dashed he will step up to the moral plate and attempt to bring about something else – but he does not look like a soul who is destined to be a great hero.

All bets, in your society, are on the Democrats coming through in 2020 and taking over the government so the United States does not have to step up to the plate and deal with its sins. That is the way taken by lazy souls who want, but don’t want to give or risk. Cover-up is whats going on. Isn’t that what went on with Nixon? And his sins don’t begin to compare to the Trump Family Criminal Enterprise. Didn’t the Trump followers just blatantly take the sanctions from one of the wealthy, prominent Russians in their last days? And who will go against that and set it right? No one, so far.

What always amazes me is the ability of human beings to see themselves as ‘different from’, better than, – Trump may have treated those others badly, but I am going to be treated differently. All of my dreams will be realized because Trump promised me that…………..

And Khashoggi? Does Trump walk away having done a major work in covering up and taking the Saudi prince out of the spotlight? Did that give you a peep under the rug to see who is really working the gears and producing the results? It is definitely not Putin, although all media has anointed him as the one to whom Trump is beholden.

Trump and Putin are beholden to a mafioso who is so big in this world he makes the Italians look like thugs on the street and the Irish not far behind and lets not even begin to talk about the African American and other mafia.

You are going to be witnesses to how the clean-up ends. You can watch it with clear eyes or you can let the mythology replace reality. What mythology? That which was put into place to insure the rich get richer; the evil don’t pay; the thugs realign and move off into the sunset with new partners to get richer in tomorrows world. And the rest of you? Passing your lack of moral courage on to your next generation to preserve them in that struggling middle to upper middle class so they can pass the lack of moral courage you inherited on for many more generations.

So you asked – so I’ve said!

_______________________________________________________

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__________________________________________________________

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com

_________________________________________________________

The Trump Shutdown: OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2019

We have a man who calls himself President of the United States. He is illegitimate, an extreme bully, has covered up many crimes including a monstrous murder for another country and is totally engaged in treason and the destruction of the United States and yet we have not taken him down. He has delayed his own removal and the indictment of others who aided him by closing down the American Government. He knows his time is short so he has taken this grand action.

What will he do next?

His ex-wife claimed, in her divorce papers, that he kept a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” on his bedside table. With that as his reading material, I would guess his next step is to call for a National Emergency. Isn’t that what Hitler did? Weakened Germany with outlandish actions and as a denouement he called a National Emergency and it was all over until six million Jews and others were killed, Germany was totally destroyed – and unlike Trump, Hitler was not a puppet of a foreign sovereign.

Trump has an attorney who speaks for him on television. Rudi Giuliani. How was this attorney chosen by Trump? Could it be Trump saw the press conference Mr. Giuliani called outside the Mayor’s House in New York City with his then mistress to announce he was going to marry this woman?

Inside Gracie Mansion, Mr. Giuliani’s wife was making breakfast for their son totally unaware of what was going on outside or that there even was a press conference or that her husband was going to divorce her to marry someone else. She learned that when a reporter called to verify the story.

Does that way of operating seem to reflect Trump’s ethics and character? Does that clear up why he chose Giuliani and what he expects from him?

Besides hiring Giuliani, Trump has tried many other ways to shut down the Russian investigation by doing many things – he fired James Comey; he fired Jeff Sessions; he hired Matt Whitaker; he hired William Barr and on and on it has gone – mostly unsuccessful. But his greatest action in attempting to shut down the Russian investigation is this grand Trump government shutdown. Will we allow it to be successful? Or have we had enough!

Trump can console himself with what he has done to the children!

Something like what is and has been happening at the southern border of the U S. has a historical ring to it. Remember when, in these United States, tens of thousands of Native American children were taken forcibly from their homes and sent other places never to see their families again? What was the result? The complete and total oppression of Native Americans. They have not recovered from then to this day. An entire generation was taken from them, forcibly. The overwhelming feelings of helplessness and loss and what losing an entire generation of a nation’s children does to that nation is indescribable. Those children who survived and were not killed, maimed or otherwise destroyed just given a new identity, never recovered. Is that the playbook from which Trump has taken a page to decide what to do about immigration from South America?

Don’t you think we have done enough? Don’t you think it is time to stop pretending to fight the program until the job of total oppression is done and then we can abdicate all responsibility by destroying the final organizer -the doer – the bigot – the neo-Nazi – the Trump? He has no idea what lies in his future. He thinks he is going to be enormously wealthy and live out his life traveling the globe after his removal from office. Can he spell Khashoggi!

Pretend Donald Trump is African American! Now lets replay that reality show again and see what happens?

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__________________________________________________________

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com

To Celebrate MLK, Jr?

Sunday, January 20th, 2019

As I look back over my life I am amazed constantly at how, as human beings, we have created such a complicated mess when to live a good life should be a simple accomplishment.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a martyr because he could not live his life ignoring the ills in the society which surrounded him. Most of us live our lives contributing to those ills and making them worse. Our needs are not simple. They grow more complicated as we age in a society which markets hourly with goals to enlarge already out of control egos which we are willing to pay very high prices to satisfy.

I remember Martin Luther King, Jr. from my days as a teen ager. He was not a big hero, he was a young man, studying at Divinity School and doing what he could, with others, to mitigate and change the apartheid which existed in these United States.

A particularly strong memory of Martin King was the time when the Jr. High Choir at my Church went on a trip, driving across the back roads of Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama. Rev. Nicholas Hood was the inspiration behind those trips and we met up at different places with Andrew Young and Martin King. We were about integration and attempting to break down barriers. Amazingly, as I look at my life, that is what I have been doing all of my years on this earth and I don’t see many results from the effort. To try to mitigate evil when it is so strongly entrenched takes more than my life has been able to deliver.

We spent many weekends visiting white churches and always stayed the night in the home of whites where there were young people our ages and on Sunday mornings we sang with them as a part of the Church Service where Martin King preached the sermon.

Our reception in the homes of these white families where we stayed was always warm and welcoming. We ate together, got to know one another and Sunday morning services gave meaning to what we were doing and why. It was truly God’s work. Doing that work, however, you come to know that good is always combined with evil and I saw for the first time what racism was all about.

Having been raised in a middle-class African American community, we were involved in a fairly closed community so our sense of self-worth and who we were was intact. I won’t try to explain that – if you don’t have any idea my sympathy goes out to you.

While I had white friends and white family and the city in which I was raised didn’t make a big deal out of that, but accepted much of that back and forth, it was not what the world in general accepted. Those weekends visiting white churches were about to open my eyes to the evils that existed in this world in ways I could not have imagined.

As we arrived, on a Saturday, in one town where we were to spend the weekend and sing in Church that Sunday morning, we were introduced to the young ‘white’ Jr. choir – our counterparts. At the end of dinner we were split up and sent to spend the night with families who volunteered to be our hosts for the weekend.

While we were getting ready for bed, frantic calls went out from one house to another and the next thing we knew, the ‘white’ families with whom we stayed had swiftly rounded us up and had practically thrown us into the station wagons which brought us and we were speeding down country lanes where we saw Martin King, Andrew Young and Nicholas Hood hanging in effigy from the trees as we passed. We began to realize what was happening when we saw a group of whites coming down the road trying to catch up to us. They were led by an older man with a shot gun. He was not the only one in that crowd with guns. What amazed me was the anger, bitterness, horribleness of their emotions against a group of 14 to 16 year olds – a church group visiting their neighborhood, come to sing in their church on a Sunday morning where Martin King was to preach.

That was the first time I saw racism in its raw form and saw the threat that my very existence posed to all of those people so furious that we dared to think we could sing in their church with their children. Since, as African Americans we didn’t self-segregate, their out of control emotions would force us to with guns and sticks and bricks and bats. Who was their god? It was clearly not God we worshipped on Sundays and met to talk about and study Scripture supporting the structures built to worship God – to learn about Jesus – to worship Christ. Their Churches had the same trappings as the one in which we worshipped – the same kind of cross, the stained glass windows, similar architecture with bibles in the pews, but clearly it was not about the worship of God. They had created a god with whom they could relate with values, a character, and all the trappings we build around religion which worked for them in their need to exist as ‘white supremacists’. The viciousness and ability and need to even murder if that is what it took to maintain themselves as “better than” – supreme over all others – oppressors of peoples not like them was so strong nothing else seemed to matter to them. If they could have caught up to Nicholas Hood, Martin King, Andrew Young they clearly would have hung them instead of the effigies they placed on the road we were driving down.

We were accused of being part of a sex ring. We were supposedly in town and staying with the boys and girls our ages to have sex with them, to morally corrupt them and on and on it went.

As I experienced all of that I experienced a group of ‘whites’ who were so corrupt themselves that they were projecting onto others their sins. I also experienced a group of ‘whites’ who were truly in their church to worship God. In the lives of this last group, they acted out of their belief system which is probably why they were the people who invited us to be a part of their communion. Seeing the evil amidst the good in which they lived and raised their children they were moved to act. At that same moment Nicholas Hood, Andrew Young and Martin Luther King, Jr. were there to help facilitate what they needed to do to bring love, goodness, justice, into the lives of their community.

Since that time I have seen ‘whites’ who live in many radically different ways. Some follow the call of God in their lives and understand they are one with us all. Some follow the call of the god they created and re-create as the need exists to help them live as unauthentic a life as possible, projecting an image onto the world which is very different from who they really are – always hiding the shame they feel -not trying to be perfect, but trying to project a perfect image of themselves – actually living out of their sin instead of living into the authenticity of their beautiful and flawed selves.

The next Sunday Nicholas Hood gathered us together and we studied Scripture while talking about that experience. He was determined to put what happened to us in the context of the Gospels.

Since that time, Martin King walked a long ways on that road and had many encounters with people who came after him the way that group came after all of us because they were so threatened by a Jr. High Choir singing in their Church on a Sunday and staying in the homes of their friends and parishioners some of whom they had known all of their lives, but were still able to accuse of exposing their children to ‘those sex fiends’.

I still see that group of people running down that back country road trying to stop, shoot and kill young teenagers who were such a threat to them and their way of life.

Martin King gave his life to save such people. Donald Trump gave his to make sure such people would live eternally on this earth and be able to wreck as many lives as they can reach and to destroy as much of life as he can reach – including his own.

____________________________________________

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Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com

More from Bettina Members

Friday, January 11th, 2019
  1. I must admit when I first read “Thoughts on Color”, I thought it was frivolous and reaching to make a point. How foolish to put racism into the color one chooses to wear or the color of the car one chooses to drive. Then I saw Donald Trump on his trip yesterday to #TheWall. I was struck dumb for a few seconds. If ever I have seen a “dog whistle” there it was. If ever I thought the wall was about other than racism, Trump’s appearance at the wall in his MAGA Cap brought those thoughts crashing down.

The red MAGA cap was gone. In its place was a white MAGA cap. As I researched, that is not the first time the MAGA Cap’s color has changed. I owe an apology to the person who wrote the “Thoughts on Color” article. It is a powerful way to look at many of the things happening in this society. They range from dog whistles on bigotry to bull horns, all camouflaged with the color one uses.

Given the fact that #TheWall goes back to the KKK, White Nationalists, White Supremacists as one of their projects – made of steel – that they did not complete and have tried through others to bring life back to again – a white MAGA hat conveys the message symbolically, the way Trump’s call to Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails was made. That didn’t take a genius to understand, neither does Trump’s white MAGA hat. His arrogance knows no bounds.

It has been clear from day one with Trump that the presidency for him is all about re-aligning the races and bringing us back as close as he can get to slavery. Trump, in the middle of treason with Russia, has to be concerned about the color of people in the U. S.

Russia is a white country – as are the others with which he is trying to align himself. Kim Jung Un may be basking in glory today, but he needs to realize he heads a nation of people of color and his involvement with Russia et al will be as a minority nation.

Trump changed the color of the U. S. cabinet and every place else in his administration he has eliminated, almost entirely, people of color and replaced them with people today we call “white”. Where he has reach and influence, we have moved from the beautiful flower garden of the Obama’s with its many colors and kinds of flowers to the Trump manufactured and very artificial white flower which looks as though it was produced in a factory producing the same product on its assembly lines day after day. A flower that was designed by a robot.

2. This Wall thing is not a dog whistle it is a bull horn. Go back into your history and look at the parallels. There was the Emancipation of slaves under Abraham Lincoln. That was followed by Reconstruction. After Reconstruction came the reaction which saw the KKK grow into an organization which could march down Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1920’s with tens of thousands of people in white sheets and pointed hats declaring white supremacy, making the country miserable and scared. Donald Trump’s father was one of the people in the white sheet with pointed hat walking with that group of klansmen. He was one the police arrested during the “march” which is one reason why we know Trump’s father was involved with the KKK.

One thing the KKK wanted was a wall on the southern border to keep out people of color – only they were called much nastier names by the klan. They wanted #TheWall to be made of steel. When Trump changed from cement to steel, I think you were right in your blog saying that was a clear message to the extreme bigots of this country. Isn’t that why racism has lasted so long? Because it is overtly and coverly supported by people like Trump with a long line of predecessors, many in Congress, who saw an opportunity and a way to gain power with as much cheating and illegalities as they could muster. All they had to do was to rise up on the backs of all of us – white, black, brown, tan, purple, pink. orange.

Today you can’t call someone the N word without getting into trouble, but you can push to build #theWall and you will be doing the same thing with an excuse and defense against people who will call you racist.

You can let the world know sexism is back and stronger than ever by making sure an alleged sexual assaulter winds up on the Supreme Court. You can have pictures go around the world of the U. S. Cabinet being made up of White Males and the Republicans in Congress being the same with only a 1% difference. That sends out a huge, direct message.

That is what #thewall is all about. Trump even changed the color of his MAGA hat, in case his followers didn’t catch on. That was a more specific signal.

The atmosphere in this country has been changing and it has become very tense with white males feeling their “superiority” threatened, as more people of color move into positions where once an unqualified white male would be hired rather than a more qualified person of color.

We had Mexico – where years ago its borders changed so parts of Mexico would become Texas – remember that piece of history?. The Mexicans who had lived for generations in the areas where the borders were redrawn didn’t leave. Their property and goods were taken and they were thrown out on the streets, but they stayed – what choice did they have – and the work then began by the “ruling class” in this country to make sure the ex-Mexicans were pushed as close to the bottom of the ladder as possible and kept there for generations. Got to keep people around to do the “dirty work”. With those “Texas” brown and black people threatening white supremacy, just by their numbers”, something had to be done.

To be sure some things were done even into the time of Hitler’s Germany. The Nazi prisoners of war were brought to Texas for their incarceration while the war was still going on. African American soldiers, on leave or visiting Texas, or working in Texas, were denied entrance into restaurants and other places because of their color supported by the separate and unequal laws. The Nazi prisoners were picked up on Sundays by the locals who took them to dinner at those same restaurants where the German prisoners of war were welcomed in their native language.

Much upheaval happened and the klan, among other groups, grew exponentially. They could never quite keep those ex-Mexicans down – although they made their lives a living hell most of the time. When you are next in Texas, think of this history as you look around at the substantial Mexican culture you see all around. That culture didn’t pop up as Mexicans came into the United States over the past couple generations, that has been there for quite a few years.

And now along comes Trump. In this time after our modern day equivalent of Reconstruction as Trump and his minions do their job of deconstructing and trying to turn as negative as possible the accomplishments of the Obama Administration, they have reached back into the history of one of our most racist times and come up with #theWall. That unfinished piece of White Nationalism, which they were not able to achieve before they were diminished.

Trump has brought back as much bigotry as he could possibly muster and when folks talk about his “base” they never quite talk about what that means. That means, for those of us who are a little obtuse and did not live that history, Trump’s base means the most bigoted people in this society gravitate to him and his administration because it means a little more time hanging onto their claimed white supremacy and a letting loose of their evil to make life as miserable as possible for the people of color amongst us. Let me note here that this also includes some few lost souls who are not white, but are overwhelmingly lazy, jealous, believers in their own inferiority and more. Even the KKK had those people of color, especially of African descent, who attached to their organization.

Amongst the other things he has done, Trump has certainly done an amazing job of bringing back the modern day equivalent to the Supreme Court which kept Plessy v Ferguson around for generations and guarded against anything that looked like it might facilitate a break in the extreme bigotry in which this country has been gripped almost from its beginnings. The Plessy v Ferguson racial apartheid ruling stayed in this country kept there by the U. S. Supreme Court because of the political beliefs of those on the Court for over 50 years. Isn’t that why Conservatives are so adamant about accepting anything Trump does if he appoints the” right people” to the Court? Look at the straight jacket in which the U. S. Supreme Court kept this country because of its own racism and look at how many years and how many attempts were made unsuccessfully to bring about a change. Thurgood Marshall and those who served with him are justifiably celebrated as “heroes”.

To get the Democrats to contribute to #TheWall would be a huge step forward for Trump’s connection to his followers. It would fulfill one of their great needs. That is why his advisers are saying if he caves on this he is finished politically.

Hopefully, something decent gets into his brain which moves him into joining the forces of good instead of the evil to which he has apparently irrevocably attached himself. It has brought him a future, not of hundreds of millions of dollars, but of total disgrace. How much better to stop lying and start living a decent, respectable, God filled life. He certainly isn’t even close to that today. He is moving in the other direction sending his Secretary of State to the Middle East to attempt to dismantle Obama’s foreign policy and turn it into something ugly. What that has actually managed to do is to remind people of Khashoggi and just how low the Trump administration has sunk. His activities in trying to pull down Obama has reminded everyone that Trump’s foreign policy includes condoning and giving cover to murderers who do gruesome things in addition to all of the rest – the adultery, the lying, the cheating, the stealing, the setting up a criminal enterprise in the White House and so much more.

How long is this going on? Will we find relief soon or will this carry on for years to come? Will we be free of bigotry when Trump moves off stage? Or will something or someone else replace him to keep the U S. bigotry within its borders simmering and waiting for another chance to explode? Will the narrative of the United States contain long chapters of the goodness we have wrought and the road we have taken to walk with others to a better life? Or will we forever replicate a government which leads us down the ugly path finally to perdition.

3. Bar (r) the fixer. It is time – actually past the time – for Congress to put on its “big boy pants” and refuse to clear Barr for Attorney General.

As Trump brings ever more disgrace to these United States and moves us back into a morass from which it will take generations to extricate ourselves, we are also seeing and learning about the sins of those who went before and how they are coming home to be repeated.

Barr was a part of the Reagan/Bush disgrace. Some say he was one of the architects who made sure all of the sins of the Reagan and Bush administrations were not revealed to the voting public.

He was a “cover up” artist and he is now being pushed for Attorney General to do the same thing under Trump. Do we see the invisible hand of Bush, Jr. in this? There can be no equivocating as to why Bar (r) the Fixer was nominated. He volunteered for the job of “cover-up artist” and the only thing he will actually do is denigrate the name and reputation of George H. W. Bush. A lot of what happened in the Bush administration as he became president after Reagan has flown under the radar. Bush the Sr. got away with his reputation intact because of the machinations of Barr. With the ascendancy of Barr to Attorney General in this atmosphere and environment, that will no longer be true. Already the stories have started to uncover and dig up what would have been exposed to the Americana voting public and then to the world, but for Barr.

Are we going to allow that to happen again? Thanks to the Bush family we now have a Supreme Court with TWO sexual deviants. One an abuser and one an alleged assaulter. What Bush started Trump is finishing. The alleged sexual assaulter was started on his career which brought him to the Supreme Court by the Bush family. George Sr. and Jr. The alleged sexual abuser was moved into his career as a Supreme Court Justice totally by Bush, Sr. who in the pictures of them together with members of their respective families, Bush Sr. seems very proud to have moved up into society an African American man who could fit into the negative stereotype of African American men and carry that negative stereotype several degrees uglier and further into this society.

Barr brings the Bush family several steps down and negate their reputations. He is the latest star in the – from Bush to Trump saga. It is time for all of this to be acknowledged and stopped. This society has carried a heavy weight for most of its life. It is time for that burden to be lifted, not for more stones to be put on the backs of those carrying this society forward.

It is time for us to move out of the muck, the filth, the dirt we have walked through and take a hot shower to wash off the muck so we can keep on moving forward with respect for ourselves and to gain some of the world’s respect. It is time for us to treat all parts of the world as equals, not as people to whom we respond with noblesse oblige as we have in the past. Trump has been so outrageous and full of evil that he has presented us with an imperative – “shake off the dirt from your feet” and walk into the beautiful sunlight over lush grassy grounds.

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Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com

THE WALL

Wednesday, January 9th, 2019

I know you want other than Trump writings, but this can’t be let pass.

Where does this WALL thing come from and why is it so important the government was shut down because of it?

The thrust of Trump’s life and his administration has had bigotry as its center. He and his are “better than”. His campaign came naturally out of who he is and what he has been about.

So where did this wall thing come from?

In the 1920’s a huge push of the KuKluxKlan was a wall which the extreme bigots of the country wanted because they thought it would keep the brown and black peoples of the world out of the United States. They considered it their territory and a white territory. Anyone different was not welcome because they would be taking the privileges, etc. from them and their family and their friends.

Trump’s wall was initially proposed as a cement wall. The buildings Trump’s companies constructed were built using cement and he bought his cement from an Italian Crime family. That is common knowledge. So, this wall thing could be business as usual.

Now, all of a sudden, he changes his wall from cement to steel. Where does that come from?

During that same time frame – in the 1920’s – when the KKK was making its big push for a wall on the southern border, that big push from the KKK and other such organizations was for a “steel wall”. The goal was to keep out undesirables. They were not trying to keep out “terrorists” they were trying to keep these United States white with everyone else not able to come in and a very high steel wall was what they pushed to get built on that southern border – where the black and brown peoples mostly came from.

Isn’t it interesting that first Trump is turned away from agreeing to sign the bill passed through the Senate which did not include the $5 billion dollar down payment for a WALL that would end up costing at least $25 billion. Then, as he backtracks on that and moves on he is declaring, in that process, that the wall would be a “steel wall” instead of a cement one. etc. etc.

Sorry guys. Guess the Italian mafia didn’t do their marketing and advertising to keep Trump as a customer for their cement. Better luck with the next project. If you align those projects with the history of extreme bigotry in this country and bring your sales pitch into line with that you might not lose business.

___________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

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Project 1 – Estate Sales after the Sale

Project 2 – #WellsFargoBoycott

__________________________________________________________

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

Lessons Learned and Commitments Given going into 2019

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2019

Sent to us by members of Bettina Network’s Lifestyle Community to share with all of you as we start creating yet more history.  May we be conscious of the fact that what we do today is tomorrows’ unchangeable, irreversible  history.

  1.  I have learned so much in 2018.  My first trip staying in one of the Bettina Homes (in Harvard Square) started me thinking, searching and moving in a new direction.  I was particularly struck by what I learned about the Bettina Network, inc., as it struggled to find investors to grow the business only to be blocked by investors sending others to take their idea, their experience gains over years of building the business which showed their ideas to be workable.  It is clear that was about racism and sexism.  Since then I have done my own research to go deeper into what happened and I was able to move beyond what I learned there to begin to understand our Venture Capitalists in these United States.  I was also shocked to see how strong the influence of Saudi Arabia is and has been in the U. S. business community and on who and what projects are funded. I found more than Bettina Network’s ideas stolen and developed into businesses which have become huge.  I have seen how the people who started and built those businesses have been treated and I am appalled at how quietly that has been done.  Individuals in different parts of this country have been destroyed so their business and ideas could be taken and expanded by others chosen for some spurious reasons. It is an example of what happens when Saudi Arabia and white Northern European upperclass men form an unholy alliance to control, contain and ‘rule over.’

What is being set down as the ‘business community of the future’ will look the way Saudi Arabia deems the world should look – white, northern european with Saudi Arabia in the world mix – males who are sort of thuggish looking and acting – and so much more to fill out that stereotype.  Possibly because that is who is hungriest and will ignore ethics, honor, integrity and more to gain their goal?

What is distressing are the few people who are aware of this.  Who is funding the corporations springing up from seemingly nothing to become major corporate players?  What is being required of them?  Why is the theft of other peoples work playing such a large part in this?  Why are those people suffering that theft minorities – particularly African American women?  

We talk about the past and can tick off the names of minorities whose business models and experience were stolen from them, but we do nothing about it except support those who have done the stealing and the names we tick off are from another generation.  We don’t go near those with whom we are currently dealing.  It is right in front of you America.  And as it becomes larger what will you do?  And how will that affect you?  Who will be your leaders – and they will be chosen for you by who?

2.  Immigration is my focus for 2019.  

It is all over everyplace and yet not talked about with its full history in tow.  We cut off bits and pieces so we don’t have to look at a total picture of  the history of immigration in the United States?  Why have we today reached such a point that someone like Trump is allowed to separate and forcibly take children from their parents, even babies from their mother’s arms?  We now know there are children dying in these United States whose parents came from horrendous situations looking for asylum.  These children are being abused, thrown against the wall, slammed and brutalized and more.  How did we get to this place? Why are we allowing this to happen in these United States?

As I read history this is how the United States started.  In the beginning it was not about those on this continent screening others landing on its shore escaping persecution from the countries from which they’ve come.  It was about those people coming to escape that persecution – but it is also about them persecuting those who welcomed them; supported them; helped them get settled; showed them how to grow the food indigenous to these shores and those who were given so much turning around to slaughter their supporters.  Trump has tried mightily to denigrate the name ‘Pocahontas’ in service to his own power and money needs, but it is those like her and so many others whose names and histories we don’t know who gave like she did, who had compassion for those landing here.

After that we began having thousands of immigrants coming to these shores in chains; on slave ships which transported other goods going back to pickup more people in chains from the continent of Africa, and picking them up against their will while forcing them to work as slaves for generations, denigrating them for generations after they managed to break free.  Immigration by force – it was in the hundreds of millions.

Many others came of their own free will looking for a better life and so a formal immigration center in different ports was set up to “process” and “welcome” these.

Amazingly, those who came before in need – the English, Germans, Italians, Irish, and so many more – some coming from religious persecution – were not happy about welcoming their brothers and sisters in need as they were similarly in need just a couple generations earlier.  There was always a group wanting to shut the borders, close the doors and not let those awful, dangerous, terrorist type people into this country.  

Once these new modern day immigrants arrived and were let into the country they suffered bigotry, denial, and had to take inferior jobs.  Doctors and others like them came from other countries and found their credentials worth nothing in these United States because of the colonialism we intensely practiced within our borders so they had to go back to school and re-do their education, internships and practices before they were allowed to pursue their vocation.  In those cases, the colonial mentality prevailed.  We believed there was no medicine as great as that practiced in the United States so you had to re-credential yourself to practice medicine obtaining United States credentials.  Colonialism was and is not dead, we practice it in ever increasing degrees of ugliness and in ever more oppressive ways.  Once in a while that abates, but as we are seeing with this current administration there are strong forces in these United States that do not want that to go away – it serves their purposes for power, control, wealth taken not earned and taken at the expense of so many others.

And todays version of this immigration – where we elect a president whose first words announcing his candidacy is about keeping out Mexicans  because he claims they are “rapists, terrorists….” and worse.  

Concentration Camps are established in which to keep those coming to this country asking for asylum.  Children sleep on cold floors and are subject to all kinds of abuse.

What is wrong with us?  Why do we so continuously insist we are so much better than and we must only let into this country and deal with those we deem “equal to us” and that definition of “equal to” is horrendous and vicious.  

I hope we can find our souls – rescue them from the trash bins and from hell – and begin to be the people we are capable of being who have love, understanding, who are giving and who want to establish the country that it is clear we are capable of establishing without all the trappings of evil we insist on embroidering into our government, our businesses, our lives.

3.  Our best wishes to you for a wonderful 2019.  We follow Bettina Network Foundation because our major interest is in homelessness.  Your blog about banks being majorly responsible for what has happened to so many people that they wind up homeless is something we understand and agree with.  We hope 2019 will some way/some how address that so we can at least mitigate the horrible lives of so many while others have so much it is obscene to see how they spend and live and denigrate the very people whose lives have made their ‘living large’ possible.  You will be our major charitable giving for 2019.  

4.  Greetings to all!  May 2019 bring happiness, love, success, knowledge and especially wisdom to us all as we go about living our lives.  May we live our best possible life in 2019!  

5.  Must we forever repeat the errors of the past which we see and even read about in our books and magazines and see on our television and internet screens daily?  The one emotion this society is fast losing is “empathy”.  We are so throwing empathy out that we have elected a leader who clearly lives his life having discarded empathy for money and power.  As a country, we are bordering on the “disgraceful” edge before falling off a very treacherous cliff which we seem to think will not happen to us – because why?

Ed. Note:  We had many more comments to share from members of Bettina Network’s Lifestyle Community.  The above 5 brings together most of them.  Keep sending and we will keep publishing – Your opinions; your recipe’s; your ways of living; your business developments; your scientific achievements or ideas you want others to know about.  Share in 2019 what you are about, have learned, are doing, are exciting about – we will keep printing.  Share also your ideas as to how we can move forward getting ‘news’ to others.

What do we consider “News”

“News” is – the facts of what is happening in the world.

“News” is – your opinion and thoughts of those facts and people and events.

“News” is – how you live your life – how you love – your religious feelings and inspirations – your arts, crafts, creativity – and so much more!  

We need you to help us develop what is “News” and in what forms will we share that with others around the world.

Our wish for you for 2019:

“May God bless you and keep you;
 May God’s face shine upon you,
And God be gracious to you;
May God’s countenance be upon you, with you,
And give you peace, love, and the restoration of your faith forever more.” __________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

Project 1 – Estate Sales after the Sale

Project 2 – Wells Fargo Boycott

__________________________________________________________

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com

Donald Trump and Gay Folks!

Monday, December 31st, 2018

A series of articles to look at, give a partial analysis and outline of Trump’s base and what it cam expect of him.  We are starting with that portion of Trump’s base which are those who are very anti-gay, homophobic, are sure gay folks are trying to convert their children, destroy Christianity and the values they claim to hold close to their hearts and so much more.  You know the rhetoric and you know that portions of Trump’s base overlap.  It is very true that those who are homophobic have other bigotries against other groups which overlap, but this article addresses itself to the anti-gay community portion of Trump’s agenda.

Trump has tried to satisfy them by attempting to ban transgender people from serving in the armed forces, throwing out of the armed forces those transgender people already serving and more.

We will not say much about Donald Trump in his teens because those are tender years and can be the background for the direction in which a person travels, but could also be just experimental and a passing phase.

When we get to Donald Trump in his 20’s, however, we see a person beginning to show his values and to set his life’s path.

One of the people Donald Trump met, who became his mentor, was Roy Cohn.  Roy Cohn was a prominent New York attorney with an awesome reputation for bullying.  He was, at the time, a very famous attorney in these United States and not always for the best of reasons.  At the end of his life he was disbarred for many reasons like – particularly reprehensible conduct, and his ethics were called into question and so much more.   Cohn’s clients included several of New York City’s mafia, who he defended along with a large and impressive roster of clients.

Roy Cohn connects – Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, the Rosenbergs, Roger Stone, Joseph McCarthy, and many more.  A surprising confluence of people.

For the purpose of this article, that which is right out there about Roy Cohn is that he was gay and he died of AIDS.  He is the person most responsible for helping Donald Trump move from his father’s businesses in Queens, New York to Manhattan.  In the process Donald Trump and Roy Cohn were extremely close.  If you could not find one you called the other and that person could tell you where to go or call to find the other – they were that close.

They spent evenings together over candlelight dinners at Club 54; once Trump married, Roy Cohn spent many evenings having dinner with the Trumps at their condo in Trump Tower and that in spite of the fact that Roy Cohn did not think Ivana was the person Donald should have married.  

Donald Trump was in the middle of the male gay community which surrounded Roy Cohn.  He was accepted as one of the boys and his relationship with Roy Cohn was common knowledge and also accepted.

Donald Trump was one of Roy Cohn’s most important clients.  If you did anything with Trump that would or could have resulted in a legal battle you had to deal with Roy Cohn, but Trump rarely, if ever, paid Cohn.  And if you went to Trump’s office during that time there would be a large picture of Roy Cohn on his desk.

We could go on for pages about Donald Trump’s relationship with Roy Cohn, but the point of this article is that during that time and for many years after Roy Cohn’s death, Donald Trump was in the middle of a very sophisticated gay group in Manhattan in which he was totally accepted.  According to some he provided an apartment, at Roy Cohn’s request, to one of Cohn’s friends who was dying of AIDS so he could live out his shortened life in relative comfort and Trump did just that – giving up a condo in Trump Tower – for free.

With that background, where does this hatred of people who are gay come from?  Where does this doing whatever he can to limit access to the gay community of the many things previously granted them as equality – like gay marriage?    The question becomes – why does Trump’s background and relationships  show that he would do the exact opposite?  Why did he have a mentor who was very gay and in the middle of a gay community bringing Trump into the middle of that community in a very public way?

At no time has Trump acknowledged that lifestyle, nor has he said anything about that personal history.  He did not come out, for example, to say that “at one time I was very supportive of the gay community, but in xxxx year I discovered my fault and reformed – turned my back on that history and all of the people with whom I had a close association and friendship and now have decided that homophobic is what I really am and have cut off associations and friendships with any and all gay people except those who have recanted, turned their lives around and are now straight.”

From where in his soul does this close association and friendship with many gay males come from – people with whom he had an extremely close relationship – to make him today able to move his campaign to take an active homophobic stance on many issues; to talk about people who are gay in very negative and subhuman terms; to go after those who are transgender to keep them away from serving in the armed forces and in many other ways.

More to the point would be – how and why do the people who really are homophobic and whose agenda is to rid society of everyone who is gay, transgendered, etc.  have simply taken Trump at his word.  Even knowing this background and history, they have never questioned any of this background.  What is going on here that they believe that he, without political campaigns to win,  would continue to act to make sure this gay group of people are clearly oppressed and not equal to the rest of society?

Surely they have had at least a passing thought that when Trump has no more campaigns to win he would then govern in such a way as to bring the gay community into equity with the rest of society and the goals of the homophobic community destroyed and turned against them.

Anything else makes no human sense.  To say God is using Trump makes even less sense because in my many decades of reading scripture God does not involve me and mine in any evil that God moves to eliminate.  God takes the evil hitting me and turns it into good.  God does the work and humanity benefits.  God upheavals and me and mine are playing God as we see fit.  But this part of Trump’s base has many excuses as to why they are supporting Trump because they believe, in the long run he will act in the interest of and promotion into society of their anti-gay, homophobic, anti transgender beliefs and life actions.

We believe that is nonsense and we believe something else is operating here and we believe we know what that is about.

Take a look at Bill Cosby and the evil he inflicted on dozens of women with his corrupt actions.  Look at how many years and how much pain and suffering and hard work it took to expose Bill Cosby and bring him to justice.  Why was that?  Why did so many people for so long support Bill Cosby in spite of what was showing right in their faces up close and personal?

For many, many decades television, books, and much more of media coverage portrayed Bill Cosby as this loving father and great man.  He received all kind of awards – not based on who he was, but based on his media persona – which many believed and would not let go of even in the face of facts which proved otherwise.  It took decades before it began to seep into the world’s conscience that the Bill Cosby on television and all of those Cosby family books and other kinds of media that circulated was created fiction and not the real Bill Cosby.  The real Bill Cosby was the person going to Court who was finally proven to be the sexual predator that he actually was and not the great, kind, with it father he portrayed in many media settings.  The kind of father we all want and many of us don’t have.  It is extremely difficult to give up on that kind of dream.  And the kind of dream Turmp portrayed – great business executive, incredibly successful giving others and maybe one day us the opportunity to follow in his footsteps.  That is like giving up on the lottery for those so addicted.

For many years, Donald Trump has been portrayed on television as this great business mogul with all of the trappings to create a romantic figure to get us to tune in year after year.  We have in mind the man created by good writers, camera people, directors, producers, in books ghost written for him by others.  We have not been able to believe and to take down the man so constructed for us by the media to see the real person who is the real Donald Trump.  The media is now doing its best to show us that person, but many are resisting because Donald Trump is putting himself in front of the public as the created, romanticized person who actually exists only on television and not in real life. 

Don’t you think it is time to look carefully and scrutinize this man the way many had to scrutinize Bill Cosby to see who he actually was and to look away from and put in the fairy tale books the Bill Cosby and Donald Trump created as marketing tools to sell all kinds of products to the average American citizen?

And don’t you think, given those two examples of human beings turned into almost monsters by their media persona and how far we have had to go to expose them as other than that romantic image – that we should give lots of thought to what we create and watch and give credence to in the media because clearly that is now roiling our society by the way it has seeped into our consciousness and affected decisions in real life and in how we make choices for ourselves and others?  

__________________________________________________

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Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com

Start writing or type / to choose a block


Bettina Network Lifestyle Community Members Speak!

Wednesday, December 26th, 2018

We are having a wonderful holiday.  Hope your holiday is full of love, family, friends and so much more.

Many members of Bettina Network Lifestyle Community sent us bits and pieces for Bettina Network Blog.  They also sent financial contributions to keep us going so we feel well fed both materially and in the soul with what looks like the success of Bettina Network, inc.

What follows are some of what we received to go in the blog.  It would be even better if all of you sent full blown articles on whatever topic you want information published – political, historical, scientific, literature-your short stories-poems- expositions.  Whatever you want to share.

Before we start sharing we would like to remind you that Bettina Network Oracle said some months ago that children would start dying – murdered by Donald J. Trump and his Administration.

Into this happy season comes the tragic and vicious news that Donald Trump – the illegitimate president of these United States has started killing children and the pace will accelerate.  Where do you stand and what are you going to do about this? Trump wants to scare the brown and black people of the world away from the borders of the United States.  What better way than to put those who arrive, after experiencing horrible trauma and an extremely difficult trip looking for asylum, into American Concentration Camps.  Moving them through a “cold box” to jeopardize any resistance they may still have left to illness, while exposing their children to sexual traffickers and so much more.

We get the news of their children’s death at the hands of a liar, thief, sexual assaulter, murderer, mafia don etc and there is no uprising in this country?  We were quiet through the first death we knew about – although you will soon hear of many more – from the past – not those dying today.  That is also a part of this holiday season.

Are you going to take the road of Germans – the middle class Germans – who kept silent, went about their daily lives as though Jews were not being slaughtered and turned into slaves by Hitler or are you going to make sure the same thing does not happen in these United States?  It was the ordinary citizen who allowed Hitler to rise and wreck his evil.  Not willing to jeopardize their middle class economic position to take a stand against the evil which stared them in the face.  As long as it wasn’t one of their family?

From the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community:

  1. ” Is one of the reasons Trump is so enamored of Russia and Putin the fact that Russia is a white country?  And one of the few such places left in the world?  Is that what makes him drawn to the particular fascist dictators he shows a complete attraction to?”
  2. “Donald J. Trump sent out an order to withdraw United States troops from Syria. He did that while on the telephone with Erdogan or shortly thereafter.  Erdogan’s first choice was that Trump send Methullah Gulen to the Turkish prison island. – so he could be imprisoned and possibly killed there? Trump did everything he could to comply, but his power as president did not extend to his being able to do that – although he did try.  We heard the figure of $15 million tossed around as payment for the deed.  Trump could and did comply with Erdogan’s second choice – to withdraw U. S. troops from Syria.  Why would he allow himself to be complicit in this cover-up? Trump was clearly looking for some way to distract the world from Mohammed bin Salam’s involvement in the brutal and vicious killing of Khashoggi and to begin the process of putting Saudi Arabia on a positive footing with the world as he managed to wipe the story out of the media.  To do that he needed Erdogan to stop telling the media about the details of the killing and to not provide the proof the rest of us needed to bring some kind of justice for the killing.  This pulling the U. S. troops out of Syria solved that, we have not heard one word from Erdogan about the tapes, the killing nor anymore details about what he and his knows about what happened.  That has not been brought into the world’s view for action. Trump’s indebtedness to Saudi Arabia and his beholdeness to MbS was partially satisfied.”
  3. “Trump is a man who does not think!  He is not dumb, stupid nor all of those negative adjectives.  He is a man who, instead of thinking and feeling has substituted  manipulation, shrewdness, insults to and intimidation of others in his path – particularly those he has to address as President of the United States.  The worst I have seen of anyone was the performance Donald Trump made in front of the rally after the hearing on the Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Blasey Ford sexual assault allegations which moved his people to vote for Kavanaugh.  Was that because they did not believe Blasey Ford?  Or was that because of the fear such a performance raised in them of Trump doing the same thing to them and their political and public destruction imminently following.  What was tragic was the fact that Trump’s performance did not destroy Trump, it scared his people into falling into line and doing his bidding. That speaks volumes for the ethics, morals, character of those in politics and those supporting them in these United States.  Truthfulness, integrity, honor, – none of those things apply anymore.  Manipulation to gain power and control over to do the kind of scumbag actions which have been carried out by this president are what holds the day.  The United States Government has become a criminal mafia headed by the mafia “Don” – Donald J. Trump.  In fact, I am beginning to think the mafia, as we have known mafias, is several steps above Trump in the way it operates.”
  4. “The elegance, thoughtfulness, grace, compassion of the Obama Administration has been replaced by the cruelty, viciousness, untruthfulness, cheating and sexual abuse by almost all those in this current administration.  Every time someone is appointed, one of the first scandals that comes out is of that persons past scandalous involvement in the sexual assault, abuse, denigration of women – white, black, pink, green, purple women.”
  5. “I am constantly stunned at the similarities between Trump and Hitler. Trump folds his arms in front of himself when seriously speaking around the table – so did Hitler.  Hitlers messiah complex was strong and evil – so is Trump’s.  It has pushed Trump to come out with his need for absolute control – he showed that in his call to take troops out of Syria without consulting anyone.  His Messiah Complex is right at the peak of being the destruction of Western Civilization.  Hitler blamed the Communists  for everything – Trump blames the Democrats whether it is true or not and he pushes that song with his Republican Congress following his lead.”
  6. “I know many of us make parallels to Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler.  I would like to remind all of us, including Donald and Melanie Trump that Hitler ended in a fulthy bunker alone except for the woman who lived through him, got her identity from him as well as her self-worth and called it love.  This was the face of evil.  The United States is becoming the country which has supplanted that history by attempting to recreate it.  Hitler ended his reign by committing suicide.  Before he did, however, he was manic about his need to kill as many Jews as quickly as possible.  The United States’ killing spree has just begun.  Are there those who are going to stop this madness or are we going to let our passive bigotry lead us into a pretense to be helpless in the face of it and let it go on until we have reached the point where White Supremacy is no longer threatened by the Black and Brown peoples of the world.”

_________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

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Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com

A Trumpian Sonnet

Monday, December 24th, 2018

How have I sold you out?  Let me count the ways –

I sold you out to the depth and breadth and height

my soul could reach striving for and needing great wealth,

control, supremacy over all.

You were the means by which that greatness within the

circle of dictators could be acquired and attained.

My life, from its beginning to its end, has always been about the ideal

situation that would make me better than anyone else ever with

the world acknowledging my greatness.

My reach for the top of power,

money, supremacy of my whiteness

is all that motivates me. 

I have not lost my saints – there were never any there for me by

my life’s choices.

 I wanted to be free to make my own choices

without the handicap of society’s ethics, morals, character which had

constraints that would not allow me the freedom I needed.

My freedom and supremacy uber alles and on my own terms

are beliefs to which I hold and have always lived by.

In my childhood faith I was a god and resented those around

who did not acknowledge such.

In my adulthood, I am god – at the top of the mountain talking only

to a friend who has been there counseling me forever taking his

advice and suggestions.  

He wants world control and asked for my help – which I freely gave.

I didn’t even mind the intense heat and sulfur smell which seemed to

always surround him. 

Through my smiles, tears, through all of my life I have wanted to

be the one he chose – so now I walk into his house with those

like me and we shall, for an eternity, be together.

____________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

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Project 1 – Estate Sales after the Sale

Project 2 – Wells Fargo Boycott

_______________________________________________

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com

MISSISSIPPI BURNING – EVIL STALKS AND WINS!

Wednesday, November 28th, 2018

by: Marceline Donaldson

It gets harder to write these articles.  Once upon a time we wrote about so many wonderful things which helped improve life; made everything brighter, easier, more elegant.  Today, we are so enmeshed in the evil that has become part of the everyday life in these United States that nothing else comes up.  The evil that is loose in the United States of America has wiped out everything else – unless you are a part of bringing the evil empire about.

You can go ahead with other things.  They did so in Hitler’s Germany.  While Jews and those who stood up for goodness, mercy, equality, love, caring, kindness were murdered in the most vicious ways and others were put into a horrendous form of slavery, there were those others out celebrating – living life as though everything was fine; paying attention to those everyday things that make for a life amidst denial.   My question – how can you continue to move ahead taking advantage of what is available to you while ignoring what is happening in your own country, which seems to be steadily on the road to making Hitler’s Germany look like a walk in the park on a sunny day.

In other articles – a few years ago – we predicted Donald Trump’s march taking the United States into Hitler’s Germany and you all let it happen.  Look around at the morass in which you are now living and sinking and doing normal everyday things.  Maybe you need to read or re-read Hannah Arendt’s book – on the banality of evil, the middle classless that supported Hitler and his cohort’s evil which was spewn  around the world.  It is certainly proving true today in the United States.

After tear gassing immigrants, the “president” of the United States went to a rally in Mississippi where many were paid to attend and make like they were just loving Trump and others were there because they actually were loving and cheering on this evil and in that environment Mississippians went on to elect Hyde-Smith as its senator.  This was not simply about a political loss or win – this was about evil winning or losing.  In Mississippi, one more time, evil won.  Evil brought into being the memories of public hangings – of people being dragged behind trucks until dead because they dared to vote.  What is horrendous in all of this for me – the country was Democratic when that happened and the good guys trying to stop all of it were Republicans.  Well, today – look at who is driving the evil.  I left a long life of Republicanism as I experienced that Political Party turning into something that would destroy every good value we hold.  That used to be what we thought of the Democrats when they were in league with the KKK, White Supremacist and every other “movement” where the votes could be had cheap and in bulk.

A man who is a murderer, who backs heads of government who murder their own in gruesome ways for getting out of line, a thief, adultery, sexual assaulter by his own admission and braggadocio, and so much more on that evil side of the ledger, this man arrived and called Mississippians to vote for one of his strong unequivocal followers – one who didn’t deviate one inch from his gospel.  Watching Trump and Hyde-Smith walk down the steps of the airplane which delivered Trump to Mississippi to do his bit to get her into elected government was like watching satan and one of his anointed.

You think that is extreme?  Unbalanced? Mentally off?

What was mentally off was our thinking that the United States was on its way to “becoming” – this “city on a hill” which has been shown to be nothing but Mississippi burning with the smell of sulphur all around.

History says there has been no change.  I registered to vote as a Republican.  I was precinct chair of my area in Wayzata, Minnesota.  I was elected to that position by my friends and neighbors.  Wow! That was special.  Well, one day Ronald Regan declared he was running for president of the United States.  Horror began to strike in me because while he articulated the United States as that city on a hill, he clearly had an extreme racist view and following and program to be elected president using racism, sexism, and as much bigotry as he could summon – albeit in a very elegant way.  How did you know that was about to happen?  How did you know he pre-saged the coming of Donald Trump, who is anything but elegant?  Regan announced his candidacy for president of these United States in Mississippi.  That was more than what we call a “dog whistle” – and the “dogs” came running.

What did I see in Minnesota?  Into the precinct caucus meeting came a slew of Texans.  Being from the south, I recognized that Texas accent all around.  Who were they?  How did they all turn up in my caucus at the same time?  Where did they work?  What brought them to Minnesota?  And what did I experience?  Talk in the caucus meeting was about how shocked they were to see this n—-r woman as precinct chair.  And that was followed by all kinds of racist remarks. Who was in that caucus meeting listening – the very proper, top of society Minnesota citizens.  They didn’t object; defend; become insulted by; insisted the people doing the name calling and ugly very racist rhetoric to stop – they  quietly proposed that we elect someone else, “more appropriate”, as chair.  For the rest of that meeting I was treated as a non-entity.  I was neither seen nor heard.  My personhood was totally denied.  If I had anything to say someone else would start a conversation on another topic and direct it to another person who would respond.  It was beyond dehumanizing.  I should have been amazed to hear the very normal, mundane, quiet way they did that, but by that time I had been a part of so much of that – it seemed normal and it was normal.  It is still normal today.  Many people experience the same thing on a day by day basis without any intervention and it continues until they either leave or accept their non-human status in whichever group they are trying to function.  Their “friends” in the group go along with that kind of treatment, but once outside the group they are “friends” again and acknowledged as fully human and fully a part of that friendship group. Sick!  All of us!

That bothered me, but not as much as you would expect.  I knew I had friends in the area – didn’t we eat together; talk together; enjoy life and shared our children back and forth?  Not really!  My even living in the area was a problem, but not one that came out so that I could see and hear it until the Texans showed up.  I have a history of being that sort of African American woman who is always in the wrong place at the right time.  Look at where I live today and the stories I have to tell about that!

When I bought a home in Wayzata and arrived to take ownership and live in the neighborhood, I found the pond with sculptures outside the house, which was one of its charms, all marked up with graffiti  put there by the children of the neighborhood – the seven, eight, ten year old children – those who were the same age as my children and who would be their classmates in school.  They heard horrible things about this incoming neighbor and felt free and angry enough to resent our appearance in “their” neighborhood and so set about doing whatever they could to destroy the house before we could take it over and live next door.  One of the many deliberate handicaps you must overcome when out of your oppressed group.  These were not “ghetto”, wild, untrained, no manners children.  These were children of the upper classes in that neighborhood and in this country.

Their parents were all sweetness and light and very apologetic.  They had many excuses for what their children had done – none accurate, the story was substantially cleaned up – but they had the children come and clean up their “mess.”  That didn’t do the job – it cost me quite a bit to have professionals come in because the damage was deep – no one offered to pay the bill, they just pretended everything was fine and their children had cleaned up what they destroyed.  I didn’t ever go out that door again nor look at that pond.  I just let it go wild.  I wanted to create great graffiti art all over the house and destroy as much of it as possible and then live quietly in the neighborhood, but that fantasy was always in my head, never intentionally acted out.

Life didn’t get better!  I lived in two worlds, but it wasn’t anything any different from my life before moving into that house in Wayzata.  I was born living in two worlds so I knew how to traverse the terrain – painful, horrendous, confusing terrain, but just by being born that was my lot.

What my neighbors didn’t realize was that all of their talk was brought right back to me, by their friends,  so when I saw them in Church, had dinner in their homes, had many discussions on many levels with them, I also heard what was said when I was not around because being a part of those two worlds meant I was not “walled off” in a black community where what they were saying and doing was as though it happened in a foreign country where me and mine didn’t speak the language.

Why am I going into all of this?  Because I think it is time to tell my story.  It is time to get out of me and into you all of the horror through which I have lived because you wanted to maintain your claimed white supremacy and white privilege.  I want you to know what that has cost me and mine.  We have paid an especially high price because we didn’t stay in our “black neighborhood”, didn’t marry our black brothers and sisters, have lived in a very “diverse” community for a lifetime so I know the ins and outs that have been kept away from that black community – I know why they were kept 20 years into the past so economic parity would not be an issue, which is probably the major reason as to why it has been kept separate.  You can’t take advantage of, oppress, and live such a life if the people you are destroying are aware on an intimate basis of who you are and what you are about.  It has been roughly like going through a very painful operation without anesthesia with no recovery, just more operations.

And no, I don’t hate you, I have too many English, Irish, Scottish, and every other kind of ancestor lumped under the category of “white” to have hatred for you and my Christian upbringing has put this knowledge of sin and forgiveness into my life – but my journalist family background added to that the need to tell the truth, so that is what you will read in these pages of my journey through this very bigoted society.  The kind of society that  elected a racist woman to Congress because she is supported strongly by a man who is not only proven to be racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, thinks immigrants are to be reduced to the exploitation of near slavery and so much more.  This election should be the celebration of a woman elected to Congress where no woman had been elected in the past, but this woman had to pass the extreme racist test to be so elected and the test that she was indeed not an independent woman, but beholden to and under the influence of men and she did.  Mississippi’s victory over the #meToo movement.  #meToo – we elected one woman to Congress – our picture of our incoming class will not be entirely white and male – breaking up the WASP image.  She did her job and recalled that time of life when we had public hangings of African Americans who voted and so much more of that racism in her education, her choices for her family, her everyday life.

Want to know more – stay tuned, if you can take it.  I’ve lost too much to care if you decide to continue retaliating against me and mine.  My losses because of your white privilege have just gone over the top for the millionth time and clearly that will continue into the next generation.  You have no idea how painful it is to know your children will experience some of the pain you did because of this group of white supremacist and their followers and supporters.  To know that all you sacrificed so your children could live in a freer society will not happen because the white supremacist, the neo-Nazi’s and their friends have moved this society back to where those sacrifices have to be made again and by the next generation.  That has been going on too long and you have excused and made room for such people for too long – the fact that you benefitted also makes this evil  unforgivable and that was also taught to me in my Christian upbringing.  You see, I paid attention in Sunday School and I know that forgiveness does not extend to everything and everyone!

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The Bettina Oracle Speaks!

Thursday, November 22nd, 2018

It is time for all of you to step up to your responsibility as human beings living, working, caring for one another.

That means – when one of you goes far off the rail, it is all of your individual and collective responsibility to make sure the damage that person does is limited and not allowed to hurt, maim or bring others along down into the bowels of hell.

Whatever else you do in this life, that responsibility cannot be shirked without your taking on, experiencing and paying the price for the sins of your brothers and sisters who you allowed to roam free among the shoals of evil that are all around you.

DONALD J. TRUMP – we call you out as a murderer, a thief, a cheat, a liar, a corruptor of others for what you perceive as your own good and it is time for this to stop.  You are the illegitimate president of the United States – a position you attained by lying, cheating, corrupting others and conspiring with those like you to add to the world’s evil so you and those working with you could attain power over others and worldly goods.

You have only a very short time to live and you need to spend that time repenting for how you have spent what started off as a precious life intended to change the world for good, but you were not up to the task so you changed your life’s goals and have brought instead to all of those who hear your voice a misery that they do not deserve.  You have made a pact with evil and are carrying out your promise to that evil being in a way much stronger than you could have carried out what you were put on earth to do for good.

When you agreed to remain silent and back the brutal murderer of Khashoggi your fate was sealed.  Forgiveness is available to all of us.  At that point, in your life and your journey  – forgiveness was taken away from you.  The intentionality with which you forged ahead and carried out your commitment to promote and back the person who committed that brutal murder, which further encouraged him in the path he then took knowing he had your backing, closed the doors to forgiveness, to love, to grace.  In addition to no forgiveness, you shall live the rest of your life without love.  There is nothing so painful as living on this earth without love.

You will walk this earth on hot coals in bare feet for an eternity.  You will see others as you walk, but only a few will be able to see you.  You will see Hitler, Stalin, and all those like them who went before and the pain you feel when you see them will each time overwhelm you.  Any who try to give you succor or comfort will feel so much pain they will back away and never acknowledge you again.  You will meet Roy Cohn again.  You will see him, but he will not be able to see you.  He asked forgiveness before he died so his way as he passes you is not nearly as horrible as your way.  His youth, as one of the oppressed peoples of the world, turned his adulthood into one filled with evil doings, but something came back to him.    – After you took everything you could from him and then rejected and turned your back on him – that flash we all have before death where he saw his life caused him to say “please, forgive me.”  You will also see Joseph McCarthy, but alas he will not be able to see you.  He caused much pain and agony to others unnecessarily, but his brain and soul, adled with alcohol and drugs for most of his adult life, helped to cause much of what he did as he struggled to break free in a long hysterical scream.  But you – you saw, you understood, and you patterned your life after the evil you saw in other people.  The good was never within your ability to understand, but you grasped the evil quickly, almost from birth.

To agree to be a participant in another’s brutal murder is that step forward from which you cannot return and you have taken that step.  You emboldened a child of God to murder, in a horrific way, one of God’s own, who God held close because of his truthfulness and the road which he trod, willingly, to bring others to see, hear and live the life God chose for us all.

YOU REJECTED GOD DECADES AGO (“The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want) when you decided you would want for nothing in this earthly sphere because you would provide for yourself and you would do whatever it took to gain power, control and wealth.  No green pastures for you – cement walls, casino games, roulette wheels, stealing bits and pieces from others all through that time of your life.

Great fountains of your own creation, water gurgling up in your hotels. (God restoreth my soul). When you walk through the valley of the shadow of death you will fear greatly because all of the beauty and goodness and light of that valley will disappear and in its place will be every gruesome monster, pit of fire, hellish horribilius that exists and you will have to walk through it to the other side, which will be even worse.

(Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death  I will fear no evil; for thou, God, art with me)

You created your life.  You continue to destroy and make more difficult the lives of others.  You extend yourself wherever you can if you see a chance to bring another human being into the evil in which you live.  And you do so much more.  That does not happen without a price to pay and you have arrived at that point where it is too late to turn around and to turn away – the price you have set forth for yourself will only grow larger as you continue to walk in the way of evil.

Those who walk with you, (Thou, God, prepares a table before me) hoping for earthly power and goodies in return need to be aware of what they are doing to their lives.  When a woman starts to talk about lynchings and other kinds of evil preparing the path for you to walk with her when you arrive to speak for her in Mississippi has a price tag.  (Thou annointest my head with oil). You have only an empty cup, but the power she seeks, with your help, comes at an incredibly high price – which she is more than willing to pay.  All those who listen to you and her and cheer, also acquire a price tag they have to pay.  All of those kind of things you have done in the past have all been gathered together along with the people you drew into your orbit.

DO YOU NOT KNOW, DO YOU NOT CARE WHAT GOD HAS PREPARED FOR YOU?  DO YOU NOT REALIZE HOW FINITE IS LIFE AND HOW CLOSE TO THE END OF LIFE YOU ARE?  AND AFTER THAT…………………

A voice says “Cry out”

I answer, “What shall I cry out?”

“All humankind is grass and all their glory like the flowers of the field.

The grass withers, the flower wilts, when the breath of God blows upon it

Though the grass withers and the flower wilts the word of God stands forever.”

God is just and continues the chain of tradition that binds generation to generation

God’s love and justice is being established on this earth and God’s peace pervades the world.

“I am the resurrection and the life, says our God

Those who believe in me shall live, even though they die,

And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die….

Have you now known? Have you not heard? God is the everlasting God

God does not faint or grow weary, God’s understanding is unsearchable.

God gives power to the faint and to those who have no might God increases their strength.

Those who wait upon God shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles,

they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

When I think of Khashoggi’s death I think of these words of Scripture………

“unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies it produces much fruit.  ……Yet what should I say?  God, save me from this hour?  But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.  God, I glorify your name.”  Then a voice came from heaven………….

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