Bettina Network's Blog - Table Talk at a Bettina Network Home - Page 16

…AND THEY LAUGHED AT HIM! – MY PRESIDENT

September 26th, 2018

I watched as my president took the stage and looked so confident.  He looked as though he was ready, able and knew he would successfully take on and make an overwhelming speech for this crowd which was not his own, but he was the United States President.  He’d done this multiple times to thunderous applause and this would be no exception.  The smug look on his face; the arrogance of his stance; the assuredness of his expression said it all.

He started with how great he was as president of the United States.  He didn’t list his accomplishments he just said they were better than the accomplishments of any other administration in U. S. history.  …..And they laughed.

I didn’t laugh.  My mind went back to all I had witnessed of his accomplishments and how he has affected my life.

I went back to Charlottesville, VA and the neo-Nazi’s, the White Nationalists, the KKK and others coming down that mountain with tiki torches re-enacting Crystalnacht.  The people in that United Nations building knew all that.  Their countries had been negatively affected by the actual Crystalnacht and what happened after.  The United States came to the rescue of more than one of those countries when Hitler reduced them to violence, viciousness, and years of a horrible existence.

This U. S. President and my family are forever intertwined in my mind.  I remembered my grandmother while listening to the laughter. I never met her.  She was taken, before I was born, to one of Hitler’s Concentration Camps where she worked under extreme conditions and finally was killed in the most barbarous way with her body thrown into a ditch so we have no grave nor gravestone for her.  I can only keep her alive in my mind with imaginary conversations I wish we had been able to have over the years.  And today I am standing, listening to  this U. S. President, who called the people, really good people, who re-enacted Crystalnacht, all of those neo-Nazi’s, White Nationalists and others, who acted violently against those who protested against that for which they stood.   This president in front of all of these world wide diplomats talked and they laughed at him.

This U. S. President went on talking and expounded the Nazi doctrine adapted for the United States called “America First”.  A movement initiated by the neo-Nazi’s and fairly successful in America.  A movement started in small ‘cell’ groups to get this doctrine accepted across the United States as one stage in their plan to bring back Hitler’s Germany, reincarnated in the United States.  This president talked positively about that America First campaign and they laughed.

I thought of all the pain and suffering of the little children in these United States, who had experienced some awful things in their own countries which made them and their parents flee.  After months of experiencing everything new and negative as they traveled to reach the safety of the United States arrived to what they had never been able to conceive nor thought possible – being taken away from their parents – their safe harbor – and put into American Concentration Camps so their parents, legitimately or not, could be prosecuted and ejected from the country to which they came seeking refuge.

I heard again, in my mind, people talking about these Concentration Camps for children as though they were summer camp – as though they were private school equivalents – and I watched in my mind all of those children suffering the pain of separation from parents who promised them safety and couldn’t produce it for them because of this U. S. President and his administration. And the background for my memories was the laughter.

Listening to that laughter, I thought and saw again the image of this president selling out the security forces of  the United States while speaking on a platform in Helsinki making clear statements that he trusted Vladimir Putin and Russia, but not the FBI – the CIA – the National Security forces of the government which he was standing there representing as its president.

Having been a victim of sexual assault I stood there remembering how awful that was and remembering the  19 plus women who made even worse charges against this president and in spite of that he was still elected – by who?  Who could be so callous, so cold, so unbelievably vicious as to push forth such a person as leader of America?  And here we were as I listened to the laughter and thought of my pain and the pain of so many other women.

I see an America where a president who has bragged about sexually assaulting women as though he had reached some great level of achievement appointing others to top positions who have done the same thing and turning over to them different parts of the governing of the United States.  I thought of William Shine – a man this president appointed after he knew of the substantial way Mr. Shine supported Roger Ailes, president of Fox, throughout Mr. Ailes sexual assault against many women trying to make a living inside and outside of Fox television.  By this time I was standing there shaking because the realization hit that Mr. Shine was only one of many such sexual predators and enablers of sexual predators with whom this president associated, had as his close friends and who he appointed to serve in this United States Government.  And through those thoughts came the laughter.

So many sexual assaulters in high places and now possibly another being elevated to become the second such person on the United States Supreme Court.  This time, a man accused of sexual assault who claimed, as his defense, that he really did not engage in sex with anyone throughout high school and many years thereafter, didn’t drink and worked very hard at his studies.  It is too much to comprehend.  My mind is totally blown that this is how low we have been brought and still they were laughing.

So much more of this ugliness has happened during this President and his family’s ‘reign’ over these United States, but my mind can’t comprehend anymore.  My reaction to the U. S. President and the comments he made as an introduction to and throughout his talk at the United Nations was to walk out.  Why are they still sitting and laughing and not walking out with me, beside me, for me, around me?

And as I reached the door I could hear the laughter still ringing in my ears.

Will we ever………………

______________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

______________________________________________________________

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

 

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Bettina Network Educational Institute, Bettina Network Hedge Schools, Breakfast Table Talk, Charlottesville VA, Donald Trump, Immigration, politics, racism, Refugees, sexism, Sexual Assault, United Nations | Comments Off on …AND THEY LAUGHED AT HIM! – MY PRESIDENT

Look at what we are doing! Join us!

September 25th, 2018

We have had many valued guests over the past 35 years we have been in business.They are always very discerning people and we are looking to add more like them so we are letting you know about our new movements in the hopes you will call to either add your home and talent to Bettina Network and Bettina Hedge Schools and/or you will call us when you travel to use our services.

We hope you will  become one of those who cares about where you stay when traveling and are always searching for knowledge, wisdom and a greater understanding of the world. We combine both! A concept we originated and for which we have high hopes.

To Bettina Network, inc. we have added:

BETTINA NETWORK HEDGE SCHOOLS

which are elegant accommodations, with an emphasis on diversity, and includes serendipitous learning for those who travel with Bettina’s!

Bettina Network Hedge Schools took  a very old concept, dusted it off and updated it in such a way that we are deep into lifelong learning.

Hedge School Families share their histories, experiences, learning and wisdom when you choose to stay with them when you travel.

Hedge School Facilitators travel Bettina Network and turn up in the most unexpected places.  They bring an added layer of learning as the HSF specialize in many different areas of learning and doing.

Instead of depending upon serendipity, some guests ask to stay in a home with a particular emphasis – with a concert pianist; sculptor;  academics in different fields —which means, for example, you can improve your knitting by staying with a family of expert knitters; a chef with whom you can cook; a priest and more.

Some facts on Bettina procedures

Someone from Bettina Network, inc.spends the night in every home before it is taken into Bettina’s and offered to you.

We get to know the family with whom you will be staying and we keep up with our homes on a daily basis.

We send out a “Guest Questionnaire” to everyone who stays in a Bettina Home and our return rate is 90%. That tells us – usually in great detail – the experience of a guest and keeps us aware in another way of what is happening in Bettina Network homes.

We accept cash, checks, credit cards – OR – we invoice your company.

We invite you to look to Bettina Network, inc., when  looking for a place to stay for those special guests who are traveling to give a lecture; to collaborate on a research project; to be a tourist; those giving a performance in an extraordinary music event, or etc.

And don’t forget Bettina Network’s blog

www.bettinanetwork.com/blog

The blog is thought provoking with contributions from members of Bettina’s Lifestyle Community.  Once you become a member of this incredibly diverse community, we invite you to write articles, send pictures, float ideas, try out your latest research on a great audience – which, as of today, includes some 2,000 to 3,000 people per day coming to read the blog.

Given our resources, we have information, news, and ideas you won’t find anyplace else.Join our little group, add your voice and use our services.

Bettina Network, inc – P. O. Box 380585 – Cambridge, MA. 02238

phone: 617 497 9166or toll free: 800-347-9166 within the U.S.

bettina-network@comcast.net      https://www.bettina-network.com

Sincerely,

All of us at Bettina’s

Bettina’s Menu of Events – a benefit for members of Bettina’s Lifestyle Community!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Bettina Network, inc.
P. O. Box 380585
Cambridge, MA. 02238
phone: 617 497 9166 inside and outside the U. S.
toll free phone: 800 347 9166 inside the U. S.
web-site: bettina-network.com
email: bettina-network@comcast.net

_________________________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

______________________________________________________________

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

 

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Bettina Homes, Bettina Network Hedge Schools, Bettina Network Info, Bettina Network NEWS, Bettina Network's Lifestyle Community, Facebook, marketing, Press Release, Press Release from Bettina Network | Comments Off on Look at what we are doing! Join us!

Get Out of that Trump Base – NOW!

September 24th, 2018

Who do you think you are – all of you claiming to be supporters of Trump because you don’t like the direction in which this country is going and you want Donald Trump to change it.  That is your wish, followed by your vote.  That was also my wish – and it was a thinly veiled wish of someone who was hiding his racism and sexism from himself and everybody else with platitudes up the kazoo.

Mafia – Sleaze – Bigotry – Sexual Assault – Sexual Abuse – Sexual Harassment – Getting rich on our backs while making his friends super rich and those working so hard to support him and his friends moving into the area of destitute.  I just lost my job, thanks to Mr. Trump’s wonderful, great, glowing, expanding economy which will make more billionaires,  more middle class out of jobs and shortly more homeless as a result.

This is what you have wrought and continue to give strength to in this country. What is wrong that we can’t see and build and flourish in a country with as many resources as the United States?

What are our children seeing?  What values are we bringing to them voting our bigotry instead of a higher set of values which I must have been taught at some point in my life.  Although when I look around at my peers and my church I can’t figure out when that happened.

Our children had the example of Barack Obama – an African American man.  Not one scandal in his entire time in office. An exemplary president.  So you showed our children over 8 years what African Americans are like through this African American president. That scared the life out of me.  I don’t know why, but it did.  I had to put a stop to what I saw about to happen.  Today, watching Trump I must have been temporarily insane.

And now you are showing them – children born some 15 years ago through those coming up now – what it is like to have a White – Northern European ancestry president.  I read one of your blogs months ago about the example and what our children were seeing and it scared me.

We should be scared about sitting back waxing eloquent about this man who lies, cheats, steals, assaults women, apparently has ties to and has laundered money for the Italian, the Russian, the Eastern European mafia. Do we really think he is going to listen to and be like anyone else when that has been his history?

How do you think that is going to strike our children growing up?  Will they choose to be like this president and adopt his morals, his values, his way of being?  Or are they going to think they have to look up to African Americans because their own White ancestry is so flawed and corrupt?  Power corrupts and we have certainly misused and abused power.

Ever stop to think of that?  At this point – my disgust is such I wish they would follow African Americans. I can’t believe I am really writing this.  I don’t even know out of which brain or life this is coming.

In a society without such a long history of bigotry we could have an excellent president of one color and a corrupt president of another color and those judgments would not be made by our children along the color/race line, but along the character line.  But in America we have a heavy history of bigotry and it has grown stronger during Donald Trump’s presidency.  The intentional re-enactment of Crystalnacht – that time in Germany which heralded so much pain, agony, blood shed, death and more – under this Trump Presidency with Donald Trump himself giving a speech holding up those who participated in and organized that scene scorched  our lives and cannot be wiped from our memory.

And now today you have the horribleness – with your children watching – of a president who admitted and bragged about sexually assaulting women before he was elected, during his campaign and and after and we voted for him anyway – so we now have this president acting out his lifestyle and beliefs, just in case we told ourselves things would change once he was elected president.

What changed in this country after the election of Donald Trump?

Our public language is now gutter talk – even on prime time television.  As a sexual assaulter he has appointed his friends to high, medium and low places in his government who are also sexual assaulters and he will continue to do so and rub his power to do so in our faces while corrupting our children.  How do you think our children will turn out? Upstanding citizens – great values – strong positive characters – knowing that lying is wrong and the truth is that on which we stand?  Or will our children replicate the values of this American president – lying, cheating, stealing, assaulting women as his right, lying about it and advising those he appoints with the same proclivities to “deny, deny, deny” bragging about their misdeeds, lying to all around to cover what they are doing under the guise of doing what’s best for you, their friends and the country?

How do you feel now America?

It is past the time for this President to go – taking his vice President with him, his family and all of the people he has appointed to office – none of whom can be trusted to be honest, upright, law abiding citizens of this country.  Or is this an environment in which we are comfortable and want to continue to live because lying, sexual assault, cheating, being extremely hypocritical, doing what we can to pull the wool over the eyes of those around us, manipulating everyone all the time because we intend to help him make off with this country’s  family jewels? Do we really believe we have a pearl of great price left to us by this president for our work on his behalf?  Bite into that pearl and it will quickly crush all in our mouth.

Isn’t it time to cut and run in the opposite direction before the slim and muck of that enlarged, deepened and fouled up swamp gets out of its banks and coats the entire country?

Who is writing this?

I am a very furious man – furious at myself for having supported Donald Trump in his run for the presidency – furious at myself and my family for lying about why we were voting for him – furious at this society which encouraged my racism and sexism which I have passed down to my children – furious at the lack of a good role model for us all – and mostly furious at all of us for not having recognized goodness when we had such a family in the White House.  Why didn’t we recognize such – the color of his skin stopped us from seeing the beauty of his character.  You Bettina folks would say – God forgive – I got that at one of your breakfast sessions and I reacted against you viscerally.  I am not there yet.  May not ever be because I seem to need to follow such values – they shore me up and keep me sane.  After watching this president I have to change that to say Trump’s values shore me up and keep me superior to all of you.  I know it is time to say God forgive! Maybe one day!

____________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

______________________________________________________________

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

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Get Out of that Trump Base – NOW!

A CALL TO LOVE

September 22nd, 2018

by: Marceline Donaldson

My name is on this writing because it is time for all of us to come out of the shadows of shame and into the light with our truth. We have been attacked and are being attacked, apparently to shut us up.  Trying to destroy Bettina Network, inc. and me is keeping some few people busy.   However, we shall go on as long as we can.

Nothing you do –   nothing that others do to you – nothing in your life as you have lived it should be in even a small bit of shade.  Nothing should be pushed into that corner of your memories where you shove those things of which you are ashamed.  Clean them out!  Bring them out into the open.

Shame is what has allowed sin to fester and grow into the slime and horribleness that is showing all around us.  The most effective part of sexual abuse and sexual harassment and sexual assault is the shame which has been dumped on the victim by the victimizer and the society.  Isn’t that one large reason why it is so hard to recover from abuse, harassment and assault?

Society’s message is – SHUT UP – we don’t want to know what happened to you because it does not enhance the mythology we have created around this society for generations.

It is time for that message to be – OPEN UP, PLEASE.  We want all of this awfulness to come out into the light of day.  We want to know what happened to you.  We want you to know we love you, we understand, we are here for you as you work towards healing.  WE SUPPORT YOU.

To all victims of sexual abuse, harassment, assault, please share what happened to you we want to take a part of what you have gone through into ourselves to share that part of your life which we should have been there to help you with.  We are so sorry we were busy doing other things with other priorities that we could not be your support.

WE ARE HERE NOW!

HOW?

This “COMING OUT” – this “OUTCOMING” of Christine Balsey Ford needs to be a coming out for all women.

Her hearing needs to be the second stage of Congressional Hearings on the sufferings of women inflicted by men all over these United States.  In her case it is a coming out by telling the truth about someone who is a Republican Political Operative and was trained to be such to attain to and acquire glory and money and reputation in his field.  He needs to be saved and CHRISTine can offer him the opportunity to look at, hear and address his values before it is too late for all of us.

The Congressional Hearings need to be the beginnings of hearings by many groups around this country holding open hearings to which women are invited and supported in telling their stories and shining light into those dark corners we have kept musty, damp, full of all kind of germs which infect the soul.

Those hearings need to be held in an environment free of bullying, threats, and all the other uglinesses that were characteristic of Congress as exhibited during the hearings held to hear what happened to Anita Hill.  The conditions under which she had to suffer to be able to do the job she enjoyed, was qualified to do and which she did very well were replicated in those hearings.  That was not our finest hour.  Everything said about her carefully excluded her qualifications for the job she was doing and the incredibly efficient and substantial way she did her job.  The shame of those hearings even went to the Republican Congress people hiding and not allowing corroborating witnesses to appear.

The focus in all of these cases is on sex.  While sex is used as the weapon against women, it is really about power, control, greed and a sex drive completely distorted in ugly ways to serve bullying, over-aggressive, insecure males.

It is no accident that these happenings in Congress very much parallel and reflect what is happening in the Catholic Church.  The priests who have been sexual predators and those higher up in the Catholic Church trying to cover the sins committed very much reflect the Congressional people now trying to stifle, submerge, crucify and destroy CHRISTine.  Those same needs and urges are behind the way sexual predators in high places are handled by Congress and all the other “big dogs” in this society.

The thousands of children in the Catholic Church who were the victims of such sexual predatory priests are replaced in this society by women – their mothers, sisters, aunts, cousins.  And very soon, if we do not act to stop all of this, those women – as they have been in the Catholic Church –  will be replaced by our children.  That has already happened in the immigration area – Donald Trump and his administration are replicating the Nazi Concentration Camps with Immigration camps being designed to house children.  And those children will soon and are currently becoming the object of sexual predators.  Rape of the children is not uncommon in the structures Donald Trump has designed and which are coming to pass.  We have heard only the beginnings of such as the stories leak out.

Either we act now or this society is consigned to total corruption. Evangelical christians claim Donald Trump is being used as their gods instrument to bring about his view of the world.  It looks more like their god is named Satan and for him Donald Trump is doing an excellent job.

Regular weekly Congressional Hearings need to be set up to follow the hearing in which CHRISTine tells what happened to her and the planning for that needs to start NOW.

State Legislatures need to organize to take up from the U. S. Congress hearings in their areas where women are invited – supported – and where their stories are given wide national coverage as are the hearings being held in the U. S. Congress on a weekly basis and laws need to be drawn up from those hearings which allow and support us as we put sex out of the picture and acknowledge the humanity, the love, the work we can do together as a society without all of the power, control, greed tactics which are now structured into all of our institutions.

Universities need to take up the banner and hold such hearings for what happens on their campuses.  Sexual attacks, rapes, sexual abuse, sexual harassment needs to be outed in their hearings as well so our college campuses can be about the business of sharing knowledge and maybe even a bit of wisdom instead of shoring up their sexist and racist structures as their administration tries to figure out how to suppress women from coming forward to talk about what happened and is happening to them on these campuses, because that currently is looked upon as a failure of the school and a blot on its reputation so those in charge suppress and thereby provide fuel for the continuation of such attacks and uglinesses against women and against the souls of the men who are guilty of such attacks.

And lets not ignore churches, synagogues, temples and all religious groups because there is a very fine line between religious fervor and sexual passion, which very few know about and study, but which can ravage and destroy or change a religion in short order – from where it started to what it becomes after giving way to such emotions incorporating the way to hide and camouflage them in its structures and destroy those who come forward to speak their truth.

At the same time, there needs to be structured into each institution a way for the men to be treated for what they were raised to believe was their god-given right – superiority over the entire universe.  Treatment to relieve their male ego, which today needs to parade itself around in such a way as the current Republican Congress is giving us a premier example hoping we will follow.

The GOP Congress is out its bullying and its need to exercise control – to destroy to prove its manhood even if that means destroying democracy in the process.  Total destruction is what this white male ego has wrought on this society.

Who wants this democracy anyway.  It only stifles their ability to move back to what they consider the greatness of America, to the time when “White” men in this society were slave owners – “Make America Great Again” came from that wish trying to become a fact of life today in these United States.  Sex trafficking and all the other forms of human slavery still alive and well and protected by our structures are all thriving. These followers of Donald Trump want to go back to being those who could pass laws such as the Chinese Exclusions Act of 1882 to protect their superiority – the first act passed by Congress restricting immigration into the United States.  And that was passed after we horribly abused the Chinese living in these United States as no better than slaves who were conscripted to build our railroad under inhumane conditions and more.

That is the act Donald Trump wants replicated to keep brown and black people out of this country.  He even wants to go into other countries to do the same for their governments.  That is who we will become if we don’t act now.  We have inched up to this place and now the forces of evil are breaking out all over since we elected that champion of evil as president.  Who has he hired as his White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications and who will probably replace General John Kelly as White House Chief of Staff?  William Shine –  Roger Ailes’ former head of Fox right hand man and co-president of Fox News and before that Senior Producer of Hannity & Comes.  He was the man who spent his career covering up Roger Ailes’ sexual abuse, harassment and assault of women. He is the man now preparing Brett Kavanaugh for the testimony he will give at this hearing being planned and they have spent hours each day in that endeavor. He is the man who is programming Donald Trump when he goes out to give speeches and who programs and controls the White House’s face to the press and more.  How low are we going America!

Maybe these hearings need to continue first by hearing from all of the women who have brought charges against the current president of these United States – Donald Trump.  Certainly that is an “oversight” area legitimately dealt with by Congress. A legitimate continuation of Congressional Hearings after the one set up for CHRISTine would naturally flow from that and then on to welcoming the women who have such stories to tell about others in Congress.  If these hearings are blocked by the Republicans in Congress I am sure others can find a way for such hearings to happen.

We need to recognize that the conservative evangelical christians lobbying Congress and providing money to individual congressmen are the Protestant equivalent to the Catholic bishops, archbishops, and above who have worked mightily to hide and therefore allow the continuance of the sex crimes which happened on their watch and on the watch of those who went before.

It has been clear to me for some time that to reach out to befriend a male creates a problem for both you and he.  He doesn’t know what to do if he is not attracted to you sexually – because friendship is not something he knows about nor is a friend without special privileges someone he can be.   He assumes that offer of friendship has a sexual component.  That does not describe all men, but it certainly describes the majority.  That is a very sad – no, very tragic comment to make because that is what maintains and continues this system of misogyny defined as “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women”.  A human being turned into an object which can be used, abused, shamed and then cast away or better yet kept around as an example and symbol to keep other women walking the trail of tears instead of being able to walk in her truth.

Once a date has been set for the hearing of what happened to CHRISTine, another date needs to be immediately for the next hearing, inviting women who have been sexually abused, harassed, assaulted by the president of the United States.  A group needs to be constituted for the next hearings to pick up after those are finished to go on until the problem is solved, stopped and redirected.

AMEN?

_____________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

________________________________________________________

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.
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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

 

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in American Corporate Businesses, American Oligarchs, Catholic Church, Christine Balsey Ford, Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump, NOW, Pope Francis, Press Release from Bettina Network, racism, Religion, Sex Trafficking, sexism, Sexual Assault, Trump Concentration Camps, William Shine | Comments Off on A CALL TO LOVE

Truth Telling on the Christine Balsey Ford/Kavanaugh problem

September 20th, 2018

I wanted to get this to you before you published the responses from Lifestyle Members, but I have to work to make a living so some things take a back seat.

I see the responses and they are very to the point.  My contribution is this:

When Diane Feinstein received the letter from Christine Ford she did exactly what she was supposed to do.  She gave it to the FBI.  They took the letter, redacted it and put it in the Brett Kavanaugh background file.  All the comments dumping on Diane Feinstein about sitting on the letter from Dr. Ford are misplaced.

After the letter was put into Kavanaugh’s file it was accessible to the White House and I am sure they knew the letter was there and read it – which explains why there was such a rush to get Kavanaugh through the process before anything would happen to bring that letter to light.

The comments you are hearing trying to place blame on Diane Feinstein for holding up the letter are Kavanaugh talking points given to Kavanaugh/Trump supporters going on the air  as one of their talking points.  The Senators, knowing about the letter,  could have called for an FBI closer look into Kavanaugh’s background at that point – but instead they pushed hard to get him through the process trying to get him on the bench before that letter hit the airwaves.  And when the letter leaked before they could get through the hearing and vote they sat back and tried to dump some blame on Senator Feinstein.

They now have something else they are hiding and are making fools of themselves because they are pushing to get this done before it all comes out.

I am glad folks brought to your attention the drinking and how that was ignored in the process of past background checks.  It does not matter that we are talking about high school – when Kavanaugh was first vetted that drunkenness would have been very relevant and should have stopped his first nomination to the bench.  Not many high school boys get drunk and attempt rape. That by itself says a lot about the character of the person being vetted.

P. S.  My guess as to why Donald Trump is so low keyed about this – remember ‘Stormy Daniels’ has a book coming out.  It has some juicy sections about Donald Trump and Ms. Clifford does not hold back.  She tells the whole story.  It is a great book and I recommend you all read it to get a better idea of what is happening here.

A couple reporters have read and reviewed it on line.  It should hit the air waves in a few days and Trump can’t afford to be out there talking about sexual assault.  On TV these days he looks as though he is in the middle of a cringe.  Given that book he should be.

______________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

________________________________________________________

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.
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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Truth Telling on the Christine Balsey Ford/Kavanaugh problem

Bettina Network Members Respond to Kavanaugh and more!

September 20th, 2018

Wow! We had no idea emotions were running so high.  Nor did we realize how sophisticated Americans are in their understanding of politics.  We expected outrage from this claim of attempted rape – we did not expect what follows.  Here are some of the responses:

  1. “Is it possible there will be no FBI investigation of this situation with Brett Kavanaugh because the Senators and the president know the risks.  What do I mean?  There is a lot of drunkenness, heavy intoxication to the point of passing out and not knowing what one was doing, and the hint of drugs which has been kept quiet because the boys know the risks to their careers which would not be there if it is only about alcohol – but that is just as bad as drugs if not worse.  There are many and very detailed forms to fill out for the FBI vetting process and I wonder if Kavanaugh was complete when he filled out those forms.  Did he include the kind of drunkenness he and his friends engaged in – if he did why did that not eliminate him from consideration from the time of his first vetting from his first promotion to the bench.  Apparently, the president has no line he will not cross because his ethics and morals are in the tanker – and – it looks as though the Senators on the Judiciary Committee are following him right down that black hole to hell.  Would an FBI investigation reveal all of that and that it was not in his original papers?  Since this heavy intoxication started in high school did the FBI not go that far back and now there are people who will lead them to that truth?  Is that why some possible witnesses are not being allowed to testify in this proposed new hearing?  There was an FBI investigation after the charges against Clarence Thomas surfaced, but there was no heavy intoxication, especially with his friends in wild uncontrollable times and parties so those who vetted him didn’t have to worry about that.  Why did that not stop Brett Kavanaugh when he was first vetted many years ago?  That was certainly an issue that would have stopped other nominations.  The Bush Administrations are guilty of having brought us Clarence Thomas.  They are now equally guilty of having thrust upon this country Brett Kavanaugh.  When will this stop and we pick ourselves up out of this morass – certainly it is going much further under Donald Trump.

2.  We have seen how far the Evangelical Christians will go, embracing a man their Jesus would have condemned.  is that because they understand what these guys are about because they are guilty of the same sexual assault; public drunkenness and more?  I am certainly seeing many at the head of the Evangelical Church doing stuff I found embarrassing and in violation of what they are supposed to believe.  When is this parade of sexual assaulters going to stop?  The end does not justify the means.  Just look at how far we are going to embrace these guys who collectively make the “swamp” look “saved.”

3.  It is clear this Judiciary Committee is afraid of something the FBI could find if they went into another investigation of Kavanaugh.  They will not even let his friend, Judge, be questioned at their rally of the klan brothers.   It is bad enough that in 2018 we have an entire, complete racist/sexist panel on the Republican side that will hear these charges – white males all – are they also WASP males?

4.  It is clear Orrin Hatch comes from a background where inebriation through too much alcohol consumption or even any alcohol consumption is looked at as a sin.  His Church needs to call him home and have him respond to many charges.  He has done nothing but embarrass us for decades.  Are the things we teach only meant to be subscribed to when convenient or are they supposed to be a constant and enduring lifestyle?  To be a part of a political system which embraces the Kavanaugh’s of the world is something we have to do.  To defend the people who have done what this guy has done and to defend him and promote him to sit on the Supreme Court – I don’t understand why Bishop Hatch is one of those and has been one of those out front making sure he has Kavanaugh’s back?  Do you talk one thing and practice another? In the LDS Church you practice what is preached and clearly Orrin Hatch has not and is not doing that.  He has been a missionary, a bishop  and has been past president of the LDS Church.  The height of hypocrisy is his book “An American, a Mormon and a Christian.”  I remember what an incredible affect his books had on me. Bishop Hatch is clearly none of those.  He is a politician willing to do whatever is necessary to maintain power and if that means violating his faith – he has done that seemingly with no regrets and no pull backs.  His role in the Clarence Thomas embarrassment to this country was bad enough.  I thought it was something for which he would atone as he looked back on his role.  Clearly, that is not true.  Just to let us know that was not an accident nor a one time thing he has now regretted he is now an incredible leader in this immorality on the wrong side.  CALL HIM HOME!

5. Did Kavanaugh lie on his FBI forms from the beginning and that is why he and his supporters are trying to make sure the FBI does not re-investigate his background?  And lying also includes not telling negatives which might hurt his chances at being passed through.  One man was passed over because he smoked marijuana or some such thing.  Kavanaugh, from his early days clearly has a background of intoxication over the top.  How did he get through from his very first appointment?  Those were years such indulgences would have made a strong difference.

6.  Public drunkennes is not something we should have approved in an appointee for any bench let along the bench where you are appointed for a lifetime.  How did his early history get passed over?  His attempted rape seems to be the result of his not being able to contain or control himself when drunk.  If he exhibited that from high school is he now in a position to be blackmailed from some of his history when on the bench?  Is that who we are now passing through and defending?  Nothing justifies that kind of enabling by our politicians of our judges who they could very well hold up or blackmail as they needed decisions from his bench.  And, others could do the same.  Not being able to control yourself when drunk should be a primary disqualification and Kavanaugh has clearly shown from his high school days that he is not able to exercise any kind of control when so inebriated.  A lifetime is a long time to go if you started off life with a group of friends where “community” was gained as the result of group drunks.  Is this how low we have come – drunks and sexual assaulters beginning to make up the Supreme Court and liars, cheaters, mafioso and more making up our Executive suite?  No wonder the president calls the FBI a cancer on our society.  A mafia connected person as president would first go after the press so he could act for his mafia group without public attention being called to their raping the public and the U. S. treasury.  The second group to go after would be law enforcement so he could do whatever without being called to the bench for his actions.  Isn’t that what Donald Trump is doing?  Isn’t that what Brett Kavanaugh would help him do?

__________________________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

________________________________________________________

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.
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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

 

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Breakfast Table Talk, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump, Guest comments, politics, racism, sexism, Sexual Assault | Comments Off on Bettina Network Members Respond to Kavanaugh and more!

Nutty and Slutty/Crazy and Confused

September 19th, 2018

by:  Marceline Donaldson

With the Congressional hearing in the 1990’s,  held to smear and destroy the reputation of Anita Hill so they could have someone accused of sexual harassment on the Supreme Court, the nominee was approved by the slimmest of margins.

That “show” provided by Congress, was an incredible education.

In spite of what is practiced in the general society, sexism and racism are so intertwined into our structures of government, it is difficult to know, understand and to educate children about these twin evils and their siblings.  The drama of that ‘hearing’ was an incredible education in sexism and racism.  Those of us who watched, unable to do anything until the hearings stopped for the day or were ended – it was an amazing message.  It told us what our government thought of women.  It put black women front and center, but it made sure the understanding and message was spread that if white women didn’t toe the mark this would also be their fate.

I was such a quiet child.  Spent hours practicing the piano because I was going to be a concert pianist just like one of my piano teachers.  They were all incredible women – and very independent women – but independent in  ways that were acceptable in those days, but for one.  They dressed the way society expected cultured, successful women should dress; they talked, walked, trained those coming up in the way society expected they be trained.  But their very lives gave a different message and I got the message.  My childhood days were my ‘quiet time’.  My adulthood has been one long, loud, excruciatingly painful scream against this life to which I have been consigned.

Jean Coston Maloney, one of my piano teachers, was an incredible woman.  She graduated from Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music and in 1937 from the Julliard School of Music – no mean feat for a black woman,   She was the first African American to perform with a nationally recognized symphony orchestra; she was very elegant; tall, willowy and beautifully dressed.   It was an exciting time for the New Orleans community to have the New Orleans Symphony leave Symphony Hall bringing all of their gear to Booker T. Washington’s High School Auditorium for this concert featuring Jean Maloney playing the Tchaikovsky Concerto. I will never forget the evening nor how I felt as someone who I knew and with whom I had studied be the featured artist.

(why did this symphony orchestra disembark from their home just a mile or so away you ask?  With all the upheaval, money and other inconveniences that caused?  Because blacks were not allowed to perform on the Symphony Hall stages anyplace in the United States in that day and blacks could not attend symphony concerts unless they sat in the very few seats reserved for them in what was called the “crow’s nest”- and paid the same price paid by those who sat in much kinder seats.  So for Ms. Maloney to play with the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra they had to move all of their gear to the local black high school auditorium).

Lucille Hutton was another graduate of Oberlin;s Conservatory and my piano teacher.  She was the one under whom I started by music career and who would not let me touch the piano when I was a small child until my practice showed her clearly that I had the proper hand positions on her coffee table.   I went to these piano lessons all alone on the street car from ‘downtown’ to ‘uptown’  in New Orleans, something no parent would let their children do today.  I was about 7 years old at the time.  Most people knew me or my family and I was never one to meet a stranger.  Ms. Hutton was a well known figure in New Orleans society circles – quiet, unassuming and always dressed the way a regular church going lady should be dressed.

Jesse Dent – the wife of the president of Dillard University was yet another very early graduate of Oberlin Conservatory of Music with a promising career in front of her as a concert artist.  She served on the board of Oberlin for many years and was responsible for people from the Conservatory coming to New Orleans to hear me play.  She was a great pianist, but as the wife of the president, her concert work was limited to her husband’s sphere.  She was a wife and mother and promoter of Dillard and then whatever little time was left her music carried on, but normally only on the campus of the University.  She was a beautiful and well respected personage in her society.

Of the three women, the one whose life was tragic was Jean Maloney’s.  What I didn’t understand until years later, she was the only one who stepped out and away from her expected stereotype and place in society.  She knew who she could become based on her talent and its drive.   The career her talent and presence entitled her to were awesome.   She was determined to follow where her talent led.

Jean Maloney was driven by her talent and drove herself with hours of practice.  Her husband was a well known doctor and the Surgeon General of Liberia – and then they divorced.  She was given an ultimatum by her husband – give up this dream of being a concert pianist, give up your music except when playing for husband and children or within a closed community or I will leave you and the children and neither you nor they will have contact with me again.  Jean Maloney rejected that ultimatum and was going to move wherever her talent allowed her to go and it would have allowed her to go far, but for racism and sexism.  Instead of becoming a great and well known artist, her life ended in tragedy.  The price women and minorities pay for following a dream outside of their stereotype – the oppressive structure in which they must live or be crushed.

The way women – especially black women were taken down by this society when they showed the kind of independence shown by Jean Maloney is one of the cruelest things I have seen and I have seen a lot in this life.  The horror of those take downs – they were not explicit, but camouflaged, unbelievably cruel and a part of the institutional structure of these United States.  You – women and minorities –  and those around are led by this society to turn the blame of the society’s racism and sexism on oneself, turning the victimizer into the victim, instead of where it should really be placed – on those who benefit.  That was clear from Donald Trump’s apparently heartfelt sympathy towards Brett Kavanaugh with no mention at all for the pain and suffering over many years he apparently caused Christine Blasey Ford.  In Charlottesville it was -“both sides”.  In Washington, D. C. it was all feelings go towards Kavanaugh.

Our leaders could call for a bowl of water, soap and a towel and make a show of washing their hands and not being the culprits involved doing the dirty work.   In this case, that was and is done by Congress in the way they acted when they felt the need to step up and take down Anita Hill.  Not for being a black woman nor for being a woman, but for not knowing her place as a black woman and for stepping out of her stereotype after the society found a place for her where she could be sort of successful, but still within the bounds of who she was allowed to be as a black woman.  Anita Hill thought and acted as though she was on the same level as others around her and that she had the same duty to keep this society, government, and its court system on the right track.

If you think this is not structural, look at how quickly Congress plucked its pattern for action for such an event, as now surrounds Brett Kavanaugh, to take down another woman.  White, this time.  The pattern they plucked from their recent history is what they have set in place to use against Christine Blasey Ford – without the FBI investigation.

Brings back that old saying – if you are quiet when they come for me in the morning and when they come for your other friends in the afternoon, they will come for you in the evening when there is no one around to help, protect or save you.

Anita Hill was concerned about the appointment of a man unworthy of being a Supreme Court justice being nominated and on the verge of being confirmed.  A man who the “big dogs” wanted because he was a replacement for Thurgood Marshall and the kind of replacement who would bring back into the society the image, stereotype, personhood of the kind of black man who they thought should have been appointed and who should rightly serve on the Supreme Court, if indeed there was a need for a black man to be in that spot.

The way society was moving that had to be, so they made sure the character, image, background, morals, values of a Thurgood Marshall was replaced by someone who would keep blacks in bondage and in ‘their place.’

Clarence Thomas is who they could see as the person for ‘successful blacks’ to imitate.  Clarence Thomas would be the person young black children would idolize.  Clarence Thomas is who teachers would hold up as an example of greatness in African Americans and therefore Clarence Thomas would uphold the negative black stereotype; make sure blacks moved not an inch, but inched backwards away from equality in this society and back into the foot shuffling, head scratching, over-sexed image this society carefully constructed for blacks to fit into for generations.

Anita Hill’s ‘crime’ was the fact that she wanted that horribleness to be corrected and reality to show through and this society move in the direction of a whole, equal, educated, respectful society it seemed to be walking towards.

For that she was put in the dock, so she could be characterized as ‘nutty and slutty’, but with far more words and images than I can describe in this short piece and Clarence Thomas was held up, patted on the back, encircled by whites who patrolled the borders of racism and sexism to make sure it would continue into the next generation and Anita Hill was cast aside and totally discredited.  She was allowed to survive, but with a reputation and characterizations which others in the following generations could pull out, learn from and not imitate.

and then, along comes Christine Blasey Ford – white woman.  Doing in this society and to this society what Anita Hill tried to do. Simply to tell the truth about her experience with Brett Kavanaugh which questioned his fitness to serve as a Supreme Court justice.  Not the first one to question his fitness, but one whose story and experience could not be ignored.

Instead of being characterized as ‘nutty and slutty’ – which was taken by Republican Congressmen at the time as the best line of attack against Anita Hill because it rolled out and re-enforced the negative stereotype of black women, Christine Blasey Ford is beginning to be and will continue to be characterized as ‘crazy and confused’.  And in the mix are the same men who led the charge against Anita Hill.  They are still present in Congress and now taking the role of ‘elder statesmen’ passing along to their younger comrades the way the system works and the tools it provides to them to destroy this woman, smear her reputation, give a lesson to other white women as to their place in this society and as to what will happen to them if they overstep and cross the line challenging the greatness of sexism and its place in the world.  Their message is crucial to their comrades – destroy this woman or all hell will break loose. The next thing you know all women will be ‘outing’ all of us who have sexually abused, attacked, harassed them and will demand that we stop or be removed and not allowed to enter the hallowed halls of economic and financial success in this society.  These women  will want pieces of that success and will want us to clean up our act and not have a group to run off the side of the cliff to atone for our sins.

What we need to stop and take a good look at is the numbers of white men who have and are engaging in sexual harassment, abuse, assault all over the society and demanding their right to so engage against women of all colors, shapes and sizes.  Most horrible is the fact that they have now been strong enough to elect as their leader in these United States a chief of sexual assaulters – a man so arrogant and sure of himself and his way of acting with women that he brags about his success and his methods.

It is time for this to stop.  My grandparents and great grandparents and many generations before them spent their lives fighting racism and sexism because they didn’t want me and my children to go through and experience the kind of pain and agony that was their lot.  I picked up the fight and have done and am doing the same thing for the same reasons, but my children and my grandchildren will experience sexism and racism as the main theme that negatively affects their lives.  But look at us.  We are still in the muck.  Still oppressed.  The oppression has changed and become much more sophisticated, but this so called ‘hearing’ is exactly the same theatre Anita Hill was put through and the Orrin Hatch’s of the world are planning to produce and direct as the kind of theatre that they think will take down Christine Blasey Ford and at the same time stop tens of thousands of women in their tracks who are seeking equality and trying to move this society into a place of equal acceptance.

And Orrin Hatch?  Bringing down his Mormon faith or opening it up for people to see what it is really about?

Fat chance that basic change will happen here!  This is the society which elected a self-proclaimed sexual abuser, sexual assaulter, sexual harasser as its president and is clearly having its Congress people and their supporters come out with guns blazing to  attack women, to oppress them even further and maintain their control spreading as much pain, depression, and more on all so they can claim superiority in their small corner of the world.  This does not bode well for the future.  Now what!

_________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

________________________________________________________

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.
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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

 

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Breakfast Table Talk, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump, Guest comments, Jean Coston Maloney, racism, sexism | Comments Off on Nutty and Slutty/Crazy and Confused

Brett Kavanaugh for Supreme Court?

September 17th, 2018

If you ever wondered why there is a #me too movement and if there is a need for a #me too movement – here is your answer.

The United States has a president who is the sexual abuser and sexual assaulter in chief.  Why?  He has some nineteen plus women accusing him of sexual abuse and sexual assault and in spite of that and in spite of having admitted to and having bragged about such behavior for all to hear he was elected president.

He has now appointed someone who has a sexual assault charge against him and what will be Donald Trump’s response?  His history and his mentors say he will go after the woman making the allegation – and so will many Congressmen and women as they think it is to their advantage to do so.  I have already puked every time I see Orrin Hatch comment on Clarence Thomas and on the current scenes where he excoriates those who seem to think women are something above being an object who is there as a man’s convenient depository for his sexual needs – whether she consents or not.

The United States Supreme Court is becoming a group of people with growing numbers of sexual assaulters on the bench.  If Trump has the ability to appoint more who knows how many we will wind up with.  So much for the trustworthiness of their decisions.  If you ever wondered why and how the Supreme Court of the United States could have ruled in favor of separate and unequal in the 1880’s and why the rulings against the American Japanese stood until recently – here is the beginnings of your answer.

And – let’s not start or stop with Donald Trump.

There is Clarence Thomas – appointed by a Republican – George Bush Senior.

That was an interesting appointment.  The Bush family comes across as trying to be on the right side – for the elimination of racism and sometimes even sexism.  However, the appointment of Clarence Thomas belies all of that and in the process ‘outed’ people like Orrin Hatch and even Joe Biden.

To decide to appoint an African American to the United States Supreme Court was a great and glorious thing for George Bush, Sr. to do.  To have that appointment go to Clarence Thomas screamed out loud to everyone and showed just how racist a move Bush Sr. was making and the message he was sending with that appointment.  And that message was heard loud and clear.

There were and are many African American men and women who could have been appointed.  When one appoints one like Clarence Thomas that says to the world you are doing the form thing, but making sure the content is flawed because you really don’t want to bring about change in the society to the point where racism will begin to abate.  In fact, the appointment of Clarence Thomas simply increased the racism and sexism in this society and reinforced stereotypes.  That was not a ‘dog whisper’ that was a megaphoned message.

And now we have the choice of Brett Kavanaugh who is flawed on so many levels and who is quite clearly someone who can continue the corruption of the United States society and government which we have seen  ongoing before Donald Trump, but which has intensified dramatically since Donald Trump was elected.

The Republican Congress has shown just how low they have gone with this appointment by their reaction and their planning and support of those who refused to produce records which normally would have been produced for such an appointment so the man’s history could have been clear.  Little bits and pieces have been pried loose to show – if you hadn’t already guessed – that this was a case of hiding the negatives so the appointment would go through.  And now come the charges of sexual assault.

And so the story continues.  The morality of the United States is once again on display without anything in the middle to hide from the world who we are and what we are about.  And where are you John and Jane Q. Public?  Going along with the program because your white privilege is being preserved and protected and you John Q. Public going along because your male superiority will not be breeched but will be pushed forward as one of the things these United States supports and makes sure is neither breeched nor lessened?

With this, I can no longer say – God forgive!

_______________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

________________________________________________________

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.
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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

 

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump, politics, racism, sexism, Sexual Assault | Comments Off on Brett Kavanaugh for Supreme Court?

Breakfast Oatmeal with Bananas Foster Sauce

September 14th, 2018

A great breakfast which is nutritious and also satisfies your taste for sweet, exotic but not white and sugary.

1.    You need to find ORGANIC Steel Cut Whole Grain Oats.  Nothing less!

2.    For 3 to 4 people measure one cup oatmeal into a lovely glass Corning pot or something equivalent.  No metals please.  An attractive pot in which you can serve the oatmeal would be special.

3.    Add two cups water and stir putting the pot over low heat.

4.   Add one scant teaspoon himalayan salt – one heaping teaspoon organic ceylon cinnamon (if this is hard for you to find try Frontier Co-op) – using a rasp, grate about 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg from whole organic nutmegs – two heaping teaspoons organic turmeric – 1/2 to one teaspoon organic ginger using a rasp to grate whole ginger into the oatmeal.  Preferably – you should use amounts to your taste.  The above is what we use.

5.  Cover the pot and let it simmer for about 20  to 30 minutes or until it looks done – stirring from time to time.

6.  Some people use three cups water, but that makes an oatmeal too soggy for our taste.  If you like that consistency then by all means use three cups water.

If you like that “bite” with your oatmeal add several dashes of cayenne pepper.  You can also add cayenne pepper to the Bananas Foster sauce.

For the Bananas Foster sauce to go over the oatmeal:

Melt one stick organic butter – salted or unsalted is your choice as long as the butter is organic.

Add organic turbinado sugar to the melted butter and stir a bit – not too long.  The amount of turbinado sugar is to your taste.  We use a cup full.

Add organic ceylon cinnamon, freshly grated organic ginger, freshly grated organic nutmeg to the pan and stir again

Add either cream or water – also depending upon your taste.  Some people can’t do without cream and some find cream too much for this dish.  Try both and draw your own conclusions.

Stir and let simmer a few minutes until the sauce looks right.

Add organic bananas sliced on the diagonal and simmer again until the bananas are heated through and a little limp.

Pour the bananas foster into a beautiful pressed glass bowl with a silver ladle for serving.

Put individual servings of oatmeal in a soup bowl or two handled broth bowl and cover with the bananas foster sauce.

A little bit of heaven!

If you are not from New Orleans you can substitute cherries, strawberries, blueberries, etc. to this sauce instead of bananas.  It is a lovely change and an exquisite taste no matter which fruit you add.

Enjoy!

And remember – this is an unbelievably healthy dish and way to start the day with a minimum of work and a maximum of taste and elegance.

___________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

____________________________________________________________________

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.
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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

Tags: , ,
Posted in Bettina Network Blog, Bettina Network Educational Institute, Bettina's Cookbook, Cayenne Pepper | Comments Off on Breakfast Oatmeal with Bananas Foster Sauce

Peanut Butter Popcorn Bettina Style

September 11th, 2018

What a great discovery!  You won’t believe the fantastic taste of this popcorn!

First – buy organic popcorn.  There are several brands, but it must be organic.

Then you will need an air-popper.  This helps because you don’t need oil for the dried corn to pop.

Then use the measuring cup that comes with the air popper – or use about 1/2 cup dried corn into the popper.

Turn it on with a bowl in front to catch the corn once it has “popped”.

While this is happening melt 1/2 stick organic butter (salted or unsalted, your choice).

Into the melted butter put two large tablespoons organic peanut butter which you ground yourself or purchased from the store and ground it in the store.  No store bought/store prepared peanut butter even if it is organic.

Stir the butter and peanut butter together until the peanut butter has melted into the butter and pour this onto the freshly popped corn.  You can make the sauce ahead and let it come to room temperature while you pop the corn.

Mix the sauce you just made with the popcorn until they are thoroughly mixed together.  Add organic himalayan salt and cayenne pepper to taste until everything looks totally mixed and all of the popcorn is covered.

Instead of cayenne pepper, I add several good splashes of tabasco sauce, but not everyone has that kind of taste.

Best if eaten freshly made, but you can eat it hours later and it still tastes amazing.

This is also the best laxative I have ever taken.  Amazing what it does for your bowel movements the next day.

Enjoy!

_____________________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

____________________________________________________________________

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.
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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Bettina's Cookbook, Cayenne Pepper, Popcorn, Recipe, Tabasco Sauce | Comments Off on Peanut Butter Popcorn Bettina Style

Tides Restaurant

September 9th, 2018

Tides Restaurant & Pub – 2B Wilson Road – Nahant, MA. 01908 – (781) 593-7500

Open for lunch and dinner at 11:30am.  Closed Thanksgiving and Christmas

website:  http://www.tidesnahant.com/home.html

***********************   ***********************

We just returned from a fantastic trip to the Greater Boston area and decided to visit Marblehead, MA. and just chill driving along the shore, stopping wherever the spirit moved us to stop.  It was one of those days which draws you to the area – sun, warm, some wind – but not a lot.

We passed Marblehead and were driving along sometimes seeing the water and sometimes passing houses thinking we were moving away from the coast.  We saw a couple walking their two dogs as we neared a dead end and stopped to ask for their recommendation of a place to eat.  Their suggestion was “Tides” – a restaurant we passed just minutes before.  They were sort of hesitant to suggest Tides because they knew the previous owners and didn’t know what was happening at Tides in todays’ world.  They cautioned us that it might not still be a great place to eat, but from past experience, before ownership changed, they said it was  really fantastic.

Amazingly, it was an encounter with New Englanders who fit the stereotype.  The “new owners”  bought the place some 20 years ago.  CHANGE is hard in this part of the world, but after having dinner at Tides we understand why.  When you find a really fantastic place you don’t want it to change – just stay the same because how do you improve on perfection?

 

We sat on the sun porch and had a glorious meal.  The menu said “don’t feed the birds”, but as soon as we sat down a sea gull joined us and so we had five for lunch instead of four and that great seagull helped to make our meal.  He entertained us in ways he had apparently learned paid his benefactors back for their generosity. The restaurant was surrounded by rock outcroppings, sand and the ocean splashing against the rocks.  With that accompaniment to oysters, shrimp, clams, lobster, haddock we were in heaven.  We felt as though the fish had just been caught by the owners next door bringing it immediately into the restaurant to fulfill your order. That was our narrative – which is not true – but the location and the porch brought us to that imaginary happening.

Next time we will bring bathing suits because we were sitting right next to a public beach.  On a holiday weekend the beach was sparsely populated so we know it is a great place to sun, swim, and paddle around whenever we go, with some certainty that we won’t be tripping over half-nude bodies lying side by side.  It looked as though that very beautiful beach was peopled by the neighbors – people who lived close by.

The food was substantial, well cooked and seasoned just perfectly – well except for one of us who brings her Louisiana hot sauce in her pocket book for times like this.  Each plate was enough for two so we brought our left-overs home and warmed them up for dinner the next evening.  What a memory that brought back.  We wondered if we could move next door and eat at Tides on a regular basis.

The wait staff was exceptional and they appeared whenever we looked around, sometimes anticipating what we were about to ask.  Dessert was hot fudge sundaes.  As we ate our dessert the smacking sounds  should have  embarrassed us, but it just made the desserts taste better.

All in all we recommend Tides whenever you are in the North Shore area.  It is worth the stop or even if you have to drive a few miles out of your way – it is worth the drive.

There was a Keno Contest going on when we arrived and we were told they offer full service lottery in addition.  As we waited for a table mesmerized by the view, the hostess told us about their Drink Menu – cocktails, 30 ice cold draft beers, a wide variety of bottled beers and a large wine list. People in the bar were watching a game and we were told they have over 20 HD TVs!  That was all very nice, but we weren’t interested – the beach, sitting on that incredible sun porch, talking (and feeding) the sea gull which adopted us with really great food was what captivated us.

We will return!

___________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

__________________________________________________

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.
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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

Tags: ,
Posted in Restaurant Review | Comments Off on Tides Restaurant

A Collection of responses

September 9th, 2018

1.  Trump is clear about that this immigration thing is about racism.  Isn’t his wife an illegal alien?  Didn’t she come into this country and worked without the proper papers?  Isn’t he married to two immigrants?  The difference being they are considered “white”?

2.  Trump has discovered something even Hitler didn’t try.  Control the United States by using children.  This is his first attempt.  When is he coming for your children when he needs that kind of leverage to get what he wants.  His association and friendship with the dictators of the world who oppress their own people is beginning to show.  These may be children from “brown and black” countries today, but tomorrow?

3.  What is Trump using the children to hide?  His establishing another arm of the military?  We will have the army, navy, air force and Trump’s own personal section of the armed forces beholden to Trump, loyal to Trump, doing what Trump tells it to do.  Take  heed America this is going to get very, very ugly and very, very soon.

___________________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

___________________________________________________________________

Posted in Bettina Network Blog, Blog Response, Breakfast Table Talk, Donald Trump | Comments Off on A Collection of responses

Love and Sex – A reader adds comments

September 8th, 2018

Thank you for that blog.  It struck me for some time that we are being led by a group of white men who seem to have sex on their minds and we suffer the consequences because love is required of leaders.

What does it mean that our president – Donald J. Trump – has been accused multiple times of sexually abusing and assaulting more than a dozen women and his reputation goes far beyond that if you go back many years.  That kind of appetite generally will also turn to greed, jealousy, and many other emotions that destroy and will not build up and Trump is showing that he is into destruction of this society as quickly and completely as possible.  This is not new for him because he showed us that in the way he ran and built his Trump Organization.  Why?  Because it will give him worldly goods beyond his imaginings and will give him power over many who want the same thing.

Is he about building up an American Oligarchy the way Russia has an Oligarchy?

As far back as the 1980’s it was clear that Trump was beholden to the Russia and Eastern European mafia.  Take a look and it certainly looks as though his billions were created by those relationships.  And, just think of what he can now acquire as he opens the doors to this country’s treasury and assets to those with whom he was financially related from the ’80’s until today.

Everyone is saying he is beholden to Putin and Russia?  He is actually beholden to the Russian Mafia and is an asset of the Russian and Eastern European mafia’s.  Apparently he didn’t meet Putin until all of this running for the presidency occurred and the Russian mafia did what?  Loaned him to Putin to achieve Putin’s goals?

What a difference it makes to have someone as president who is into love instead of sex.  I don’t like to make comparisons, but when I saw John McCain’s family during his funeral remembrances I don’t think I have seen, in one family, such a coming together of the world’s people.  It was beautiful.  I wish we had more of that.  It was family trying to live a life of love rather than controlled by sex and all such an emphasis entails.

Apparently, McCain tried to bring along those with whom he worked.  His relationship with Lindsey Graham shows that.  He brought along Lindsey Graham and now Graham has resorted to who he was before his close friendship with McCain.  The need for power, recognition, importance can lead to such ugliness.  That is so very sad.  I remember Graham before McCain and he was a flake – racist – sexist – and I could throw in a few more negatives, but if you are that old you should also remember the news coverage of where Lindsey Graham was coming from during those days.  And then he changed and became someone we all began to respect.  That has stopped now that McCain is dead.  He has reversed course and has once again become the man he was back then.  He looks as though he has been working hard to become Attorney General and it also looks as though Trump has promised him the spot to get Graham to be one of his supporters who Trump can bounce around for whatever he needs.  That is so sad!

As I read your article on Love and Sex – how different this world would be if we had that movement towards love.  If we could see each other in that light instead of in the light of sex – which is where we move immediately.  Try to be friends with someone because you have much in common, it could be a great friendship, but the outside world would see it in terms of sex.  We have not been able to rise above how we describe the animals.  Tell someone you love them and it immediately takes on a component of sexual attraction.  What is wrong with us that we have not developed beyond such a place?

The world of love is so superior to the world of sex that it is unimaginable how we are able to maintain ourselves on the lower level of sex and not be able to rise above it when there is this incredible place we could be.  All of our religions tout love.  However, most also have these warnings and judgments against sex except how they define it and how we have tried over the generations to legislate sex – such a waste.  I had not thought before reading your article that this need to reduce love to sex and then control sex had to do with inheritance and who owns and inherits what.  Power – greed – corruption all come into play as we have ruined many lives with our nonsense.

If we could somehow get out of the muck and mess to which we consign ourselves and see another way of living what a great world this would be.  People like Donald Trump would have to re-work their ethics and themselves because they would be odd person out and never in a position to become dog-catcher let alone anything else.

Games like this op-ed thing would not be played – there would be no need.  Who wrote that op-ed piece?  Either Donald Trump or Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, who saw it as a way to raise himself up above his peers and position himself to be able to rise when he got out of the Trump Administration.  He has given himself an excuse and a cover for his being there in the first place.  After Gary Cohn left, he had to do something – and so we have this op-ed.  He won’t admit to it, but he will quietly circulate it when he is ready to be employed elsewhere to shore himself up to a higher place and overcome the negativity he has acquired as a part of Donald Trump’s cabinet.  I could be wrong – but in this guessing game that is my choice.

__________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

__________________________________________________________

 

 

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in American Corporate Businesses, Bettina Network Educational Institute, Bettina Network's Lifestyle Community, Donald Trump, Guest comments, Kitchen Table Talk, Steven Mnuchin | Comments Off on Love and Sex – A reader adds comments

In Memory of Francis Albert Dynan

September 2nd, 2018

by:  Frances Maloney

It is written of Mary of Magdala, that, after the disciples had returned to their homes, Mary lingered like a humming bird before the silent face of the tomb, weeping.  “And as she wept, she bent over into the tomb and saw two angels in white sitting there, one at the head and one at the feet where the body of Jesus had been.  And they said to her, “woman, why are you weeping?”  She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they have laid him.”

I am that woman.  And so, I am deeply grateful to Mary Flynn, Katherine, and Suzanne, and to all of you who grieve Frank’s passing, for allowing me to join you in this company of mourners.  Frank and I did not attend Frank’s parents’ funerals, because Frank chose not to go without me, and I wasn’t sober.

Frank was merciful and kind, honest and true, first with himself and with God, then with all of us, indeed with all creatures, great and small.

Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro has provided this prayer for bride and groom that I think was fulfilled in our marriage:

“Dear God,

You have brought this couple together

that they might risk the joys and sorrows of love.

They have said “yes” to You and to each other.

We now ask that you bless them

with love and compassion

righteousness and truth.

Guide them in ways of deep and loving

friendship that they may forever

cherish, honor, uphold and sustain

each other and the divine image

that is our deepest self.”

Ma, that is, Frank’s mother (of blessed memory), taught me to pray, “Thank you, God, for all you have given me, for all you have taken away, and, for all you have left me.

Left me, are vital memories, full of Frank’s spirit and likeness.  For example, one day, when we lived in Ann Arbor, a bee appeared in our apartment.  I was terrorized and called on Frank to save us.  Well, Frank took what seemed like an hour to tackle that bee, amused at my distress.  Anxiety turned to wonder as I watched him carefully collect the bee into the palm of his hand and lovingly escort the bee outside, a sweet man doing a sweet thing.

Like Frank himself, the honey bee

The humble, the lowly honey bee

Needed to feed the earth

Needed to feed the earth.

By his spirit and example, his farmer’s faith and heart of a fisherman, Frank drew me to something better than I had ever known, becoming my personal rock, my personal redeemer.

Remembering the concluding line of a poem by Langston Hughes, as reads, “Yet you never know, when a woman like me is free.”  I testify that I never want to be free from the Love of God, as expressed by my only husband to his only wife.

Frank was patient, Frank was kind

Frank was glad for the well-being

    and success of others, such as

    his brother Joe, who was a

    blessed father and grandfather

Frank envied no one

Frank was generous, unassuming,

    faithful, devoted

Not egotistical, not ‘in your face’

Not rude, never selfish

Frank’s heart was a vessel of gratitude

Frank was slow to take offense,

    harbored no resentments

Frank was merciful and forgave in truth

Frank was moral

Frank was ethical

Frank did Matthew 25:34-36

Frank was courageous and brave

Frank bore all things, believed all things,

Hoped all things

Endured all things.

Francis Albert Dynan nearly died in infancy.  In Vietnam, he was flown around in helicopters packed with explosives.  Surviving these, Frank never missed, for an instant, his work as an instrument of peace, in thought and deed.

Frank and I never parted without desire and hope to behold each other again.

Francis Albert Dynan, how do I love thee?  I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight for the ends of Being and ideal Grace -, and, if God choose, precious, gracious, loving, compassionate man, my Rabbouni – I shall love thee better after death.

Ed.Note:  Francis Jean Maloney served in the United States Army as did Frances Albert Dynan.  They met while serving together in Germany and married.  After several years, they divorced, but in spite of their legal status they remained friends and remained married and true to one another for the rest of their lives.

Francis Maloney came from an amazing family.  Her mother was the first African American to perform with a major symphony orchestra in the United States and her father was Surgeon General of Liberia.  Frances was homeless for a time.  What she experienced and suffered should make all of us think about how we treat those who served these United States.  She is currently on the board of Bettina Network Foundation, inc. and is a tremendous asset to the Foundation and everything it does.

________________________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

________________________________________________________________________

 

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.
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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

____________________________________________________________________

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in African American history, Bettina Network Blog, Bettina Network Foundation, Bettina Network Hedge Schools, Bettina Network's Lifestyle Community, Frances Maloney, Francis Albert Dynan, Memorials, Spiritual Reflection, Who are the Bettina Families | Comments Off on In Memory of Francis Albert Dynan

LOVE and SEX! – The Bettina Oracle Speaks!

August 22nd, 2018

Humans have substantial ways to obfuscate what they don’t want to face. They build institutional structures to hide, deflect, and keep them in rose colored glasses. Truth is not something easily acknowledged even though someplace inside truth stirs.

You are now into a messy presidential situation in the United States trying to do everything except face the truth of who you have become and how you have structured your society, your families, your lives. This has been generations in the making, but todays generation gets to clean up what you, your parents, your grandparents, etc. have soiled.

You preach God is Love, but you act out and create your life around sex. You look at the animals and feel so much better than, but in reality you have created a society which emphasizes and reflects your animal nature and your animal characteristics.

Why do you have so many wars; why do you kill so many people trying to destroy life itself – for nothing; why is there so much jealousy, hatred, rage, greed, and all the rest – for nothing except as a way to pass the time from birth all the while denying death.

You talk a lot about values, character, ethics, truth, love, grace, kindness, generosity and more – all myths in your lives to set aside the Godlike character. Those who have such values are seen as weak to all but a very few and those few pay a high price if they articulate, in a positive way, what they see. What is real and is seen by everyone as great – ‘now there is a real man’ – is the life you are leading based on your animal instincts – catering to sex, power, control, greed – all called sin, and practiced by nearly everyone.

It has been amazing to watch a group of humans build a society – structure a government – set up rules and laws – all based on their animal instincts. Not their higher instincts, not what comes from their claimed belief in a God who holds up love above all – but their lowest common denominator instincts, shared with the animals with whom you also share the planet earth. In humans those lower instincts are so much more intense and destructive than anything the animal world has ever produced – you make historians gasp even though they can’t see nor report on the very same things occurring during their lifetime.

In the society you have and are creating, Love is much lauded. It is raised to the level of a god. God is love – the shorthand way you describe God, your beautiful mythological creation for which many have given their lives and for which you have demanded the life of others claiming you are just and right and good and full of love and those others are evil, greedy, mean-spirited, and need to be destroyed and/or severely controlled. You have taken the lives of many in the name of love but the fact of sex. You have taken and destroyed the children, the property, the everything of those others. You have done all of that to continue and move ahead the system you have set up on this earth not based on God’s love, but based on sex. You refuse to see, acknowledge and change that. You will, however, change one institutional structure for another if it is also based on sex, as long as it has a better mythological structure which will camouflage the reality of who you have chosen to be.

I can hear the protests already. Take a look around at all that you survey. Can you drink the water in the streams; Is the food grown making many ill; are terminal diseases rampant with everyone denying that they know the ultimate cause; are you one of those who claims the illnesses we face in such high numbers really starting in these last two generations were always there only we didn’t have the ability to diagnose them? Do you really believe that or does that myth make you feel better? That list, the result of this sex based system, could go on for pages and still not be complete.

Love is the beautiful part of your humanity. Your animal instincts deal with your physical selves. You describe love, but before you get too far into the description you veer off into a description of sex. The people you hold up, who get you into much trouble and evil are sexual deviants. Your new president in the United States is a hard to ignore example. He has let his out of control sex drive do awful things to himself and to the society. Driven by out of control sex he has so far surpassed the animals in how he exercises his urges and the depths to which he has gone – and will go in the future, if left unchecked.  It is fast becoming mind boggling and mind numbing. How many women have brought charges of sexual abuse and assault against him? And have you raised that up and fought for the women? Or have you let that rest because you recognize and understand that part of this new president? He personifies what is evil in all of you and so he is untouchable. To call him in – to rein him in – you have to rein in your own sex drives and your own base instincts of greed, lying, filth of every kind and so far, in history, that is something you have neither done nor attempted to do – except on a mythological level. What the United States president has done and is doing brings shame on all of those who helped put him where he is. If you voted for him – if you encouraged others to vote for him – if you saw in him a way to manipulate others and used him in that way – any small thing you did to help him rise will have its day of retribution.

The way animals live, their baser instincts occasionally break out and cause very brief moments of trouble, but when translated to human life and structured into human organizations those instincts while essentially harmless in animals and are there for the animal kingdom’s survival, become corrupt, evil, ugly and at times impossible to control until everyone is exhausted from the letting loose of such extreme evil.

Greed is something you have structured into your government, society, friendships. How else do you achieve and maintain a “better than” society? The beginnings of the United States used slavery to structure that “better than” need and requirement into its governmental structures and it has survived to cause trouble even into today.

Some people have obscene amounts of money. They do not look around and share their excess with anyone. They hoard it to overstuff themselves with houses, clothes, wealth, all kinds of wealth – and when they see the homeless, those in need, those who can’t feed or clothe themselves they turn a blind eye and talk to friends blaming the victims for the excesses of those with averted eyes.  Please -don’t try to justify and claim they share by citing their ‘tax free’ contributions which in the end benefit only themselves.

There is enough on this planet for all to live well. However, it is divided in such a way that only a small percentage thrive. In creating that kind of distribution of wealth you act as though you are going to live forever and take all of your wealth with you when you die. Nothing is further from the truth.

You have made yourselves miserable with this society which you have created and claimed it was from God and that the God you worship is a God who is Love! But you made this god male and although his beginnings was in a story set in poverty, in many of your religions his continued existence is in gold, silver, marble statues, incredible structures and edifices which could feed the world’s population many times over.  And the claim you make is that your god instructed you to do this to show your worship of him and your humility before him. Aaaggghhh!

You point to the theology you created around this god, but in the reality of your lives greed, jealousy, sexual assault and abuse amongst the humans is becoming worse as time goes by. You have created systems of government under which you live and systems of economics which gives power to a few and which makes the rest of you constantly strive, miss your life, and continue the super hypocrisy for very little, thinking one day you will be amongst those chosen for that rarefied air of what used to be the millionaires club, but many were weeded out so the new and rarer billionaires club could be formed.

O ye of no faith do you not know – do you not see where you are headed? You now fight depression, addiction, and so much more. Your created systems are destroying you, the planet and everything in your grasp. You are working hard to leave the planet and reach outer space. Are you going to bring all of your baser instincts with you and re-create out there another hell reflective of what you have done on earth?

We see you afraid to love – your solution is turning love into sex – and obfuscating the difference. Writing love stories which are really sex stories to pass along to future generations. Your leaders are almost all sexual deviants. They blackmail each other to get their way by threatening to “out” another persons mistakes – usually always in the sexual area. Why have you done this? We can’t make any sense of what you have created. You create wars to maintain power. You destroy, humiliate, torture, kill and so much more to maintain a way of life which never should have been created in the first place.

So much hope was placed in you and you have defiled and shown that hope to have been a wasted emotion. Why must you translate your animal instincts into your institutions? What is it about you that you can’t function on any other level. Why can’t you see what you have done and are doing? Why do you only regret after you have destroyed everything around you and don’t know how to get it back?

Sex is about procreation. You are attracted to those with whom you can join and multiply. You have changed all of that and created marriage and ‘morality’ laws not about procreation, but to protect property. You have written your probate laws – your wishes acknowledging death and your mortality – to protect property and these probate laws need the marriage laws to work and to keep the lines of inheritance for your property clear.

You have created a society in which it has been and still is difficult for a woman and a man to be friends without sex in the picture. If they find their way to a friendship without sex those around will keep the sexual thing going by assuming they are hiding something. I could go on, but I think you get the picture. The easiest way to ruin someone in your society is to claim they had sex with a person who would cloud the inheritance picture and jeopardize the line of succession for the power, money and property accumulated.

You have spelled out in your laws who can have sex with whom because your inheritance laws can’t be violated. Not just the inheritance of money and property, but you had laws defining who could have sex with whom because the line of “I am better than you” must be kept and that would fail if you crossed color lines – ethnicity lines – religious lines. Those are fringy definitions because those are not real categories, but you have created the category of race and have religions which make it a sin to marry and/or have sex with someone who would dilute the power of a particular race, religion or someone from a particular country which is not seen as one of the power center countries where it is imperative for those “bloodlines” to remain pure.

Some of that is changing – but other such structures are being put in place which are more stringently keeping to your “better than” needs than what you have already established as “law and custom”.  These are the only ones you recognize as having power in your way of life.

You all have the possibility of being so much more than you have allowed yourself to be; you can create institutions based on God’s love instead of man’s sex and other animal instincts and the instincts of what are called the “lower animals”. It is not understandable as to why that is what you have chosen when you could have been so much more. It is the hardest way to live; the most miserable and painful and difficult way. What is it in you that makes you choose that path? Why do you so raise up and honor those basest of instincts?

__________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

__________________________________________________________

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.
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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

Tags: ,
Posted in American Corporate Businesses, Breakfast Table Talk, Guest comments | Comments Off on LOVE and SEX! – The Bettina Oracle Speaks!

We give you a sacred moment in your day!

August 16th, 2018

May your day be full of love, God, and so much more. May it overflow with goodness, wisdom and God’s love.

https://www.facebook.com/ilovemothermary/videos/1103797119712879/UzpfSTEwODcxNTMyMTE6MTAyMDcyMTA3MTg4NDE0Mjk/?source=notification&notif_id=1533744475458243&notif_t=onthisday

________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

________________________________________________

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on We give you a sacred moment in your day!

Bettina Lifestyle Members Respond

August 15th, 2018

ed. note: It is always great to receive your responses. If you have anything to which you want to respond from Bettina Network’s blog or if you just have something to say, please send your comments to us via email – bettina-network@comcast.net.

Person 1. I read your Omarosa blog and it was fantastic. I would like to point out the racism I saw in the news reports as people respond to what is happening. Many, many people start with what has almost become a tag line – “they are so much alike, after all, Trump created Omarosa.” Or some version of that ie “after all Omarosa is a Trump creation, Trump created her.” Variations on that comment have been on several news shows. The bigotry of that is palpable, but the persons making the comment seem so free and sure of themselves in those kind of comments without realizing they are simply satisfying their need to put a black woman in her place and remind others that to them she is really not human – really no different from the way the Trump people disregard the humanity of those they consider not as good as.

Omarosa is not a puppet and Trump is not a puppeteer. She was quite intelligent before she met Trump and will continue to be – from what I’ve seen. Her growth over the years, as I followed her career, has been phenomenal. When she moved out of her early beginnings she moved into a different society, class, culture and must have gone through culture shock. She entered a world where values were very different from those with which she was raised. From a people oriented group where interpersonal relationships were primary and the back and forth was about relationships and values were around all of that into a society where interpersonal relationships are practically non-existent and everyone is ‘striving’ for whatever power, money and control they can accumulate. The values in such a group are very different and probably seemed immoral to Omerosa when she entered. At best, they were very different from those values with which she was raised. She seems to have started out adopting and adapting those ‘new’ values and ‘striving’ for the kind of success she saw around her and in the middle of it something clicked and her values changed to those with which she was raised. My guess would be that she started taping people when that “click” happened. The precipitating factor for that “click” was probably the very ugly and dehumanizing way she was being treated. That is extemely painful to the black woman experiencing it and totally unrecognizable by the people doing the mistreating. When she realized she was “invisible” to most people. That she could move around fairly freely because she wasn’t seen or if she was seen by some her presence was completely ignored.

What shows most strongly in what she is doing, she is out there truth telling and clear eyed about it and very good showing an extremely intelligent human being. That is almost unknown in the circles in which she was travelling and must have been painful. From what I am seeing she has much more integrity than those who surrounded her – those knocking her and claiming her lack of integrity. In the system in which she was trying to be a part and ‘fit in’ she did lack integrity by their standards and their definition of the word. In the system in which she was raised they are probably repeating your comment “You go girl.”

I am happy you mentioned how impressed you were with the way she carried herself and responded to the media. It was self-composed, in control, with no problems correcting people, backing them off, standing strongly in an independent place and her responses were always right on target. I join the chorus – you go girl.

Person 2. I am encouraged by what I am seeing in this United States society. The headlines and the current president are very discouraging, but I have to applaud Trump. The bottom line of what he has done is to create a more open, questioning, more mature society then that which existed before his election. We are not as much dependent upon the “system” because we are seeing the system only works if we are very much engaged and taking responsibility.

Before Trump, it was anathema to talk about people being racist and what that means. In fact, if you brought up the subject of racism or commented on some action of someone which was racist you were jumped on by everybody with the traditional denial that maintains a bigoted system – “that’s not racist, everyone experiences it”. Talk about racism and bigotry was not nice and needed to be kept under wraps. It was something one didn’t talk about anyplace. Now, it is all out in the open and the media talks about racist and racism in practically every news show. News anchors have become quite skilled at talking about and identifying racism and bigotry. There is nothing which creates change and takes out ugly like taking off the blanket and airing it out letting everyone see the windows are open and fresh air is flowing through.

What is especially encouraging for me, in spite of seeing the neo-Nazi’s trying to recreate Crystal Nacht and the KKK, White Nationalists and all the others out there parading – many of those who took part with their tiki torches in that Charlottesville parade lost their jobs because their companies did not want the taint of such clear racists working for them who were also out advocating for the kind of society we don’t want in these United States. That is what didn’t happen as Nazi Germany was getting started. Maybe there is hope for us after all.

Person 3. It is amazing to see the contrast in this country between the present administration and what is happening where elections are being held. I can’t wait for November. We have Donald Trump as president and a White House full of bigots, Nazi’s and such assorted folks. At the same time, as you look around at who is being elected in these contests happening around the country – it is the most diverse group of people I have ever seen. Our politicians going forward will have problems and cause us problems, but they will be doing so representing all of us. All we have to do now is undo the Gerrymandering that happened under the very bigoted Republican Party.

I knew when Ronald Regan went to Mississippi to announce his run for the presidency and even before that when Strom Thurmond left the Democratic Party and took his friends and followers into the Republican Party that the day would come when we would have to face this conflagration. Which way it would go was something I could not see because we could become another very racist society. The move towards Russia that Trump is making is clearly a move towards trying to start a race war to subjugate all of us and to maintain a White Supremacy country aligned with other White Supremacy countries – all led by fascist dictators. That is certainly not the profile of our traditional allies so he had to begin the process of dumping our traditional allies and moving towards others more amenable and trying to maintain their countries as all white, fascist and controlled by their Oligarch’s.

Person 4. You are doing something new and I want to help support you in what you are doing so it is successful and continues and others follow your example. We have a country where corporations are supposed to be “neutral”. They never are because most companies support groups and people moving in the direction of Trump and his people while claiming to be neutral. Billions of dollars go to manipulate all of us. It is always difficult for me to know what is real and what is corporate-hype. However, I feel very much involved with Bettina Network. I use your services when I can and want to know what else I can do to make sure you survive? You don’t claim to be neutral, you just stand up for truth and allow whoever to participate and air their comments. Facebook, among others, claims to give you a grouping of friends of your choosing with whom you create your ‘community’. That is one of the big lies on the internet today. In reality the people you see on your “Facebook Wall” and who you hear from are strangers and people you’ve never heard of before. Your “friends” mostly don’t see your posts if they don’t fit the algorithm – so choosing your friends and your community on Facebook is a myth set up to allow them to market your information not encircle you with your chosen friends. Neutral is not something human beings can be without hurting everyone. Truth telling is stronger, better and beneficial for everyone.

I do not know many places where truth-telling is happening. How are you surviving and paying the costs of Bettina’s Blog? I know from experience it costs money to do the research showing up in this blog – and I know the kind of flak that comes from truth telling. Don’t stop – more companies need to keep watch and put out what they know as truth. Sometimes I think marketing and advertising are great, but most times I realize they have turned us into liars and manipulators and hypocrits for the sake of making a dollar. We need to clear the air so our children will know truth and not be taken in by stories put out to sell products and services or manipulative slants on events to guarantee the corporation will get what it wants and the rest of us suffer. Sometimes I wonder if living breathing human mortals head up these corporations or if they are headed by robots immune to things like the environment, the quality of the food they eat, etc. etc. When cigarettes were such a threat I wondered how those who kept the research which said cigarettes were bad for your health and could cause cancer realized they were also negatively affected by such. They smoked a lot and some died of lung cancer, but nevertheless they kept on going with the mythology which gave them their positions, money, etc.

Keep going – some of us are very strongly behind you.
______________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

________________________________________________________

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.
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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Bettina Lifestyle Members Respond

Omarosa – you go girl!

August 14th, 2018

“Don’t diss me until you have walked in my shoes.”

It should be amazing to hear, see and read all of the press coverage about Omarosa and her firing by the White House, but it isn’t. What should be amazing about it? The fact that she lasted as long as she did even though she was over the area set aside for minorities. To remain for any length of time in such a position in the Trump White House must have taken a lot of will, political skill and knowledge of self-preservation.

We are seeing the racism of those doing the anti-Omarosa reporting come through like spotlights. It is historical.

For example:

– Omarosa was held in the “Situation Room” for some two hours and was taken into that room, one black female, by four white men. I’ve seen that before and it is meant to scare the same way white sheets and pointy hats and burning crosses are meant to scare. However, the only thing we hear the media addressing is the fact that Omarosa recorded the ordeal and what an awful person she is for having done so. Some have even gone to the lengths of claiming that she should be prosecuted for having jeopardized the security of the United States through this act. Does that sound similar to “lock her up”? Is that a clear blame the victim?

It seems to us the only way the national security of the U. S. was jeopardized was by General Kelly using a secure room which should be used for national security meetings, etc. and used it as a setting to intimidate and restrain a black woman in a room against her will. There is no other way to describe what happened to Omarosa during her time in the Situation Room except as a time of instilling fear and intimidation. How come holding an employee of the White House against her will is not worthy of coverage? Unless, of course, this is seen as normal because it is a black woman and because we want to make sure the victim is blamed where race is concerned. No or very little blame has been incurred by General Kelly and his three co-intimidators. Holding someone against their will is generally called kidnapping – “lock him up.”

– And – One needs to go back into the history of the relationship between Trump and Omarosa before reporting how they are the same! That is the most ridiculous claim of all. Let’s paint both with the same brush! Even making the claim that Omarosa, while like Trump, is much worse. Those are flabbergasting charges.

When you look back at the history of their friendship the extent of Trump’s racism didn’t become clear until he was into his run for president. Whenever a black – especially a black woman, works with whites you have to and are raised to turn a deaf eye and ear to a lot of the racism of your friends, co-workers, acquaintances. That is just survival in these United States. Some people handle that better than others. That appears to be what happened to Omarosa, especially looking at the blacks who surrounded her and seeing the blacks who knew the way to attempt to make claims on Trump’s pocket book and power – ie Kanya West.

Looking at the Apprentice TV show, it had a fairly large number of blacks on the show and it was not easy to pick up racism. Not many of the blacks on the Apprentice picked that up – if they did they certainly kept that discovery to themselves. One assumes also that as the star of the show the people picked were chosen by Donald Trump. However, in this ‘dust-up’ we learn and we learn it from Omarosa that Donald Trump did not choose the people who appeared, there was a production company which did that which accounts for the diversity.

– We have yet to hear anyone talk about Omarosa’s composure, her ability to handle the press when they try to demean her in the middle of an interview, how put together she looks always and the way she carries herself.

Maybe we just don’t remember that during the transition period Omarosa was a part of what was happening in Trump Tower and seemed to be the one sitting in the back of the room closely observing the comings and goings. So – when she makes the comment that as president, people will bow down to Trump and be obsequious as they try to share his power (not her exact words, but the sentiment of the famous taping that is playing over and over on news reports) it is more a statement of truth then one of Omarosa bowing down to Trump. She is in the middle and sees people coming and going who once criticized Trump now bowing down to be included somehow – let us remind you of Mitt Romney, Al Gore, etc. etc. people who would not be expected to show up at Trump Tower because of their strong and accurate criticism of Trump. Omarosa’s character and ethics are criticized using that film clip to do the criticizing, but she is simply telling the truth. We don’t want to be faced with the hypocrisy of our leaders – we want that to slide as they become a part of this Trump Administration. That is how the game is played until along comes this black women who stands in front of the camera and articulates exactly what is happening and points out our hypocrisy in that process. She wasn’t puffing up Trump’s ego – she was truth telling.

– What is also clear is the way the press refused to interview Omarosa during her tenure on the White House staff and the fact that no one said she formerly worked at the White House so was the only staff member with any experience on such a staff. That part of her background was enclosed in silence while other parts – which reflect the stereotype of black women – is pulled out and paraded around.

– To look at the entire picture of Omarosa’s life it was clear that we were headed for such a moment as this. A doubly oppressed minority with Omarosa’s family history and her beginnings in fairly poor surroundings, it is no surprise that having been taken up by Trump as she was moving upward on her own steam, aggressiveness, life-history she would praise Trump. Who gave her such an incredible opportunity? To have moved from Omarosa’s beginnings to Senior aid in the White House is an awesome achievement. She was grateful as many are who experience a life beginning of serious and severe oppression.

To her credit, however, Omarosa was not tone deaf. How she conducted herself in what had to be horrendous surroundings in the middle of people who showed themselves to be totally racist and sexist is nothing short of brilliant. That she woke up from those surroundings to take such a clear, strong, stance and came out of it with what she needed to prove what her life was like during her time in the Trump bubble shows who she really is and the strength of her character.

When you compare that to others who came out and felt they had to sign the NDA AND ACCEPT the $15,000 or other figure per month to keep silent speaks volumes about Omarosa, who was offered the same deal and refused it instead, opened the door to the White House for the rest of us to see what her life had been like and what life in the White House is like. Omarosa gave us another pathway to understand what is happening in these United States.

Do you know what it is like to be in a situation and treated in the horrendously negative way she was treated? What do you do? Some would move out, resign and be grateful for the $15,000/month offer.

“Until you walk a mile in my shoes don’t let your self-righteousness cloud your eyes and ears and keep you from learning from my experience. Is your life so pure you can so negatively judge me?”

When you come from Omarosa’s background to double down and try to make a success of where you are because you know those opportunities are not overwhelming determines your daily life and decisions. She was alone in a White House that was very hostile to her yet she stayed and still worked to attempt to open doors for blacks and that in spite of the fact that neither blacks nor whites reached out to her, but instead negatively characterized her, judged her and treated her like a piece of disposable dirt. It is pretty bad and it is a trap from which it is hard to extricate yourself.

Omarosa had to have a sense of justice to tape, write and go out in the front of a storm to confront and expose. She also has to have a strong sense of who she is to go up against all the negative comments about her “lack of credibility.” What lack of credibility. She was rarely covered by the press for anyone to know who she was – lots of assumptions because she was a friend of Donald Trump and backed him even when his extreme racism began to show. That is not lack of credibility.

At one time I would have said that is lack of good judgment. However, seeing what she was doing with her time in the Trump White House and how she documented what they were doing for a future release time I have changed my mind about that. It seems to me Omarosa was taping people and situations during her time with Trump because her way out was going to be to document everything she saw and experienced. To let all of that out in a book which she probably saw as an alternative to the abyss which awaited her whenever she did decide to leave or would be removed from the White House. She certainly has eliminated the prospect of being called a “go for coffee girl.”

Omarosa is a touch stone for a whole lot of blacks. Those still in the Republican Party and feel they are contributing to moving blacks ahead – staying to be able to document history correctly; feeling that they are keeping really horrendous things from happening to blacks inside and outside the Republican Party; being present to document their experience which could be skewered by others if she didn’t. That is just a few – there are many more.

Omarosa is no better nor worse than the black attorney who is called on to represent clients accused of racism – that happens so much it is automatic and to be expected, We see the black attorneys complimented for their work not dissed for allowing themselves to be so negatively abused; women called to diss other women because coming from a woman it is a stronger dissing; blacks called on to make negative claims against other minorities and so much more.

Omarosa is and has been a black woman whites don’t understand; don’t like; don’t want around because she violates everything about blacks and the black experience that they think they know and understand – she can’t be trusted therefore her character and ethics are in question; but mostly she is the foil against whom we see sharply the failings of other blacks, male and female, those who parrot and are promoted by whites to do their bidding in exchange for 20 pieces of silver and a brief time appearing to be considered equal. She uncovers those blacks as they try to put her down and uncovers those whites who desperately want to protect and continue to cultivate “their” black who helps them hold the line against the onslaught of equality.

Put all of the above against what you will hear over the next few days about Omarosa. You can agree or disagree, but this is what we see.
____________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

_____________________________________________

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.
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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in African American history, Bettina Network's Lifestyle Community, Breakfast Table Talk, Donald Trump, Guest comments, John Kelly, Omarosa, racism, sexism | Comments Off on Omarosa – you go girl!

Chinese Students and U.S. Conferences, cont’d

August 13th, 2018

Thank you for the blog in which a member of the Bettina Community wrote about his experiences trying to get a visa to attend a conference.

I have had the same experience of late and many times. Twice this year I applied for visa’s to attend conferences in the United States. The visa’s were not denied, they just didn’t arrive until two days after the conference started. Unfortunately I already had my airline tickets and accommodation reservations so I lost a bit of money. Rather, my institution lost a bit of money.

Last week Trump talked about all Chinese students in the United States were spies for the Chinese Government. I wondered at the time if that is how he is going to try to justify his visa policy keeping scholars out of the United States when they attempt to apply for visa’s to attend conferences.

I would like to add a look into the future at what is beginning to happen which will take care of that kind of meanness of spirit and bigotry the Trump administration is displaying. A change that will be negative for the United States on many levels. Conferences that are normally held in the United States are being put together to be held in other countries. It will take a couple years for that to be felt but it will negatively impact researchers in the United States as well as the United States economy. Not a large part of the economy, but conference attendees from the U. S. will spend money on airline tickets, but everything else will be spent in another country – accommodations – food – entertainment – touristy things, etc. Conference attendees from other countries will not even spend airline ticket money in the United States. All of their expenditures will go to other countries. So, in the long run, while this is really hurtful today, by 2020 that should be turned around and the United States will be on its way to becoming a lesser light in many important research areas through Donald Trump’s use of visa’s to be really mean against those who are not immigrants, nor trying to settle in the United States, but simply would like to attend a conference being held in the United States over a few days or a week or a couple weeks.

That is probably what will happen in several areas where Trump is trying to exert power over other countries. In this case, there are alternatives which will be good for research and collaboration because it will put those from other countries on a more equal footing and gradually they will surpass the United States. In other non-science areas the same thing will happen and you owe it all to your current president and his friends and allies.
______________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

______________________________________________

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.
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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

Tags: , ,
Posted in Conferences, Research and Collaboration | Comments Off on Chinese Students and U.S. Conferences, cont’d

Keep U. S. Conferences White?

August 12th, 2018

ed.note: We are beginning to notice that this Trump/Sessions keeping black/brown people out of the U. S. is not simply an immigrant thing. It is not just about keeping America White by keeping out non-white immigrants, nor is it only about throwing out resident and/or non-white immigrants with green cards who have become U. S. tax payers under as many pretexts as possible. Others are being kept out or their attempt to visit for a brief time, especially for research and collaboration, is made unnecessarily difficult and that difficulty is new – it is not a carry over from past administrations. One person – a member of Bettina Network’s Lifestyle Community has shared his experience with us and it follows.

“I was raised and educated in China till college. I came to the US to obtain my PhD at Princeton and continued as a postdoc at Harvard. In total I stayed in the US for 10 years before returning to China to accept a faculty position in Beijing in 2017. I have maintained collaborations with both institutions.

This year, I planned a 2-week visit to Princeton in June, but my visa application was denied during the interview. No specific reason was given other than “the purpose of the visit is not consistent with the visa type for which you have applied”, which is a standard business/tourist visa. I realized later that what caused the denial was my honest statement that this trip was for research collaboration. In fact, this is never allowed under this visa type. The J-type visa serves this purpose, though it is much more complicated and is usually for long-term visit (e.g., I was under the J-visa during my 5-year post doc).

This is really upset, besides the fact that the visa interview process itself is very uncomfortable and time-consuing: no bags or cell phone is allowed in the embassy, and one has to wait in long queues multiple times throughout the process which sometimes can be quite chaotic. One generally wastes half a day just for the interview without anything else done.

With this application denied (and trip cancelled), I will have to do another visa application for a workshop in mid-July to early-August. It is a special workshop running for 3-weeks, and the purpose is to bring people in the field together in a relaxed setting to promote interactions/discussions and inspire new ideas. Participants are asked to stay for at least two weeks, and I planned to join for the later two weeks. This time, the visa officer questioned why my previous application was denied, and also why a conference takes such a long time. Despite my explanation, he asked me to provide more materials to demonstrate the purpose of the visit, in particular a “conference schedule”. Well, this is not a standard conference no such schedule exists before the workshop actually begins when people start to figure out an agenda. I had to write to my conference organizer for an additional letter (he already wrote an invitation letter for me) to explain the situation.

Upon collecting everything, I resent my application, which is then sent for “administrative processing”. This is not uncommon for Chinese scholars, which usually takes 4-6 weeks. My application was sent in early June so I thought there should be enough time. However, I waited and waited and waited. There was no news before my originally planned travel date (I was wise not to purchase an air ticket). The week after, I realize I can check the status of my visa application online, and found that it is finally issued. By the time I actually received the visa, the workshop was already more than half-way done, and even if I purchase ticket to join it, most participants would already have left (in the 3rd week). As a result, I simply cancelled the trip.

On the visa, it is indicated that the “administrative processing” completed in 4 weeks where my case was cleared, but the visa was not issued until some 3 more weeks later. They clearly didn’t want me to attend the conference. Moreover, the visa could have been valid for 10 years, but mine is only valid for 1 year.

Nevertheless, with the visa finally at hand, I temporarily planned a trip to visit Princeton the week after, though the original 2-week plan becomes 3 days. This is followed by a 2-day visit to Cambridge to attend another conference. The visit is brief due to my other time constraints, but is fruitful. I stayed at a Bettina Network Hedge School in Cambridge, the same place I stayed back in 2011 when I came to visit Harvard for a job talk. Everything is very enjoyable with illuminating conversations at breakfast as well as meetings and gatherings with many of my colleagues and friends.

I am at the airport now to return to China soon. Thank you for the warm and welcoming experience that you offer and I will come back again despite the disgusting experience with the embassy.”
____________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

____________________________________________________________

Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

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. Please also tell us if you want your name as your byline or if you want your article to appear without your name.

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

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Attorney General Sessions, Bettina Homes, Bettina Network Educational Institute, Breakfast Table Talk, Donald Trump | Comments Off on Keep U. S. Conferences White?

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
Bettina's Lifestyle Commnity!

Join us!

Bettina’s Lifestyle Community

Making a difference in this very difficult and changeable world.

Bettina's Lifestyle Commnity!

Join us!

Thank you for subscribing to Bettina Network Blog

If you have comments, questions, suggestions, etc. please send them to bettinanetwork@comcast.net.

Name is required.

Email is required.

Enter a proper mobile no.

It is wonderful having you as a new subscriber!

no thanks