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Facebook Exchange With Fundamentalist Friend About Trump's Love Of God
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Facebook Exchange With A Friend More Interested In Trashing Dems Than Impugning Trump
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Where's Jesus' Birth Certificate?
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Desmond Tutu Has A Few Words For Moscow Mitch's Senate
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EnochTheWatcher Made This Meme For Me, Accompanied By The Message, "Praise Jesus"
Alan: Thank you EnochTheWatcher for providing opportunity to set the record straight.
Best Pax Posts About Trump's Cruelty, Mendacity And Seduction Of "Conservative""Christians"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/08/best-pax-posts-about-trumps-cruelty.html
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/08/best-pax-posts-about-trumps-cruelty.html
When "Christian""Conservatives" Renounced Reason In Order To Believe Trump Would Be...
Great "Religious Right" Cartoon: "Satan Himself Comes Disguised As An Angel Of Light"
"Dear White Conservative, I See You"
"The Sermon On The Mount" As Envisioned By "Christian""Conservatives"
Evangelicals' Satanic Surrender To Trump: Bend Over, Clasp Ankles, Apply K-Y
"Evangelical Support Of Trump Will Be An Indictment Against Its Validity," Fr. Richard Rohr
Why "Christian""Conservatives" Are Losing Their Souls
"Christian""Conservatives" Are Neither Christian Nor Conservative
"The Deepening Crisis In Evangelical Christianity"
Support For Trump Degrades Christian Witness
Evangelicals' Lack Of Faith Is The Greatest Threat To The Church
Cartoon: American Evangelicals Join The Last Supper
Corrupted By Grifters And Charlatans, Evangelicalism Has Devolved Into A Hate Group
Absolutism As A Last Ditch Defense Against The Challenge (Threat?) Of Kindness
"Thoughts And Prayers"
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Facebook Exchange With Former Bernie Supporter, Current Democratic Antagonist
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David Leonhardt: Trump's Tax Law &"The Triumph Of Injustice" (Bonus: "Backwoods Arkansas")
"The Rich Are Different"
(They sodomize you while you pay for the K-Y)
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“The most vocal proponents of the view that ordinary workers — not wealthy shareholders — suffer from high corporate taxes are … wealthy shareholders,” Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman write in their forthcoming book on the American tax system, “The Triumph of Injustice.” |
They’re right about that. For decades, wealthy people, free-market economists and many politicians have argued that cutting taxes is good for the economy. Experience has shown otherwise. |
Sometimes, the economy has boomed after tax cuts. More often, though, it’s done poorly after a tax cut (the early 2000s) or boomed after a tax increase (the 1990s). On the whole, there is no reason to believe that tax cuts are a smart strategy for accelerating economic growth. |
If anything, the evidence suggests that low taxes on the affluent create extreme inequality, which ends up hurting the economy. That’s what happened in both the 1920s and in recent decades. Since the 1980s, every tax that disproportionately affects the wealthy has declined sharply: top-end income taxes, investment taxes, the estate tax and the corporate tax (which shareholders effectively pay). And since the 1980s, economic growth has usually been disappointing, while middle-class income growth has been even more disappointing. |
For the sake of economic growth, it’s time to raise taxes on the wealthy. My column today goes into more detail on the new book by Saez and Zucman. The headline fact from the book — and the subject of a chart that accompanies my column — is pretty shocking: Last year, for the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest American households paid a lower total tax rate than any other income group. |
Trumplandia |
I enjoyed Monica Potts’s essay in the Sunday Review section, about the depth of support for President Trump in rural Arkansas. But I disagreed somewhat with the conclusion: that using government to combat inequality is a bad strategy for Democrats trying to win over these voters. |
To be sure, most rural white voters are now loyal Republicans. The question for Democrats is how they can lose less badly. And polling suggests that emphasizing economic populism — including higher taxes on the rich and government programs for the middle class — is an effective approach. It’s also not clear to me what the alternative is. Democrats certainly won’t win over these voters by focusing on religious or cultural issues. |
But I encourage you to read Potts’s piece, if you haven’t yet. My longer take on the politics of populism, from December, is here.  Evangelicals' Satanic Surrender To Trump: BendOver, Clasp Ankles, Apply K-Y |
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Borowitz Report: Trump Sees New Polls And Orders Ukraine To Investigate Elizabeth Warren
Trump Sees New Polls and Orders Ukraine to Investigate Elizabeth Warren
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—After looking at the most recent polls for the Democratic Presidential race, Donald J. Trump has ordered the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Senator Elizabeth Warren.
“What Elizabeth Warren and her crooked kids have been doing in Ukraine is a disgrace,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn. “This is maybe the biggest scandal in the history of our country.”
After Jim Acosta, of CNN, pointed out that there had been no reports of any involvement in Ukraine on the part of either Warren or her children, Trump responded, “You bet there’s been no reporting, because you people are even more crooked than she is.”
Trump brushed aside an official statement by the Ukrainian government indicating that Warren’s children had never set foot in the country. “That is because the Warren kids are basically spies, and everyone knows that spies are invisible,” he said. “You people are so dumb.”
Concluding his remarks, Trump said that he would wait for the results of the Iowa caucuses before urging Ukraine to investigate Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
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The Horror...
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More Than You May Care To Know About Men And Women
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Conservatism And Liberalism
Alan: The above meme is so true, it is astonishing we are not continually conscious of the fact.
Note well.
In contemporary American politics, the truly dangerous idiots are "all" conservative...
... armed to the teeth, and itching for a fight.
... armed to the teeth, and itching for a fight.
How The Values Of "Strict Father" -- Or "Indulgent Parent" -- Control Our Political Views
(Short Form)
(Short Form)
"Strict Father" And "Nurturant Parent": The Two World Views That Determine Our Political Values
(Long Form)
(Long Form)
"The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism"http://paxonbothhouses.blogspo
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The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism
The hard, central "fact" of contemporary "conservatism" is its insistence on a socio-economic threshold above which people deserve government assistance, and below which people deserve to die.
The sooner the better.
Unless conservatives are showing n'er-do-wells The Door of Doom, they just don't "feel right."
To allay this chthonic anxiety, they resort to Human Sacrifice, hoping that spilled blood will placate "the angry gods," including the one they've made of themselves. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/harvard-study-45000-americans-die.html
Having poked their own eyes out, they fail to see that self-generated wrath creates "the gods" who hold them thrall.
The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism
The hard, central "fact" of contemporary "conservatism" is its insistence on a socio-economic threshold above which people deserve government assistance, and below which people deserve to die.
The sooner the better.
Unless conservatives are showing n'er-do-wells The Door of Doom, they just don't "feel right."
To allay this chthonic anxiety, they resort to Human Sacrifice, hoping that spilled blood will placate "the angry gods," including the one they've made of themselves. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/harvard-study-45000-americans-die.html
Having poked their own eyes out, they fail to see that self-generated wrath creates "the gods" who hold them thrall.
The Evangelical Persecution Complex(Projection's Finest Hour)
Almost "to a man," contemporary "conservatives" have apotheosized themselves and now -- sitting on God's usurped throne -- are rabid to pass Final Judgment.
Self-proclaimed Christians, eager to thrust "the undeserving" through The Gates of Hell, are the very people most likely to cross its threshold.
Remarkably, although they are prone to believe all manner of Trumpeted nonsense, none of them are tempted to believe in their own spiritual peril. The Pharisees Are Always With Us.Here's What They "Look Like" Today
![Image result for pax on both houses, quintessential free lunch]()
Almost "to a man," contemporary "conservatives" have apotheosized themselves and now -- sitting on God's usurped throne -- are rabid to pass Final Judgment.
Self-proclaimed Christians, eager to thrust "the undeserving" through The Gates of Hell, are the very people most likely to cross its threshold.
Remarkably, although they are prone to believe all manner of Trumpeted nonsense, none of them are tempted to believe in their own spiritual peril.
The Pharisees Are Always With Us.
Here's What They "Look Like" Today
Except for "the loaves and the fishes..." but then it was never the intention of "Christian""conservatives" to live like Jesus, just to use his words like bricks to crack the skull of anyone who does'nt understand the political advantage of Pharisaism.
Jesus Rages Against The Hypocrisy Of Religious Leaders: "Woe To You Religious Leaders!"
There are two ways of lying, as there are two ways of deceiving customers. If the scale registers 15 ounces, you can say: "It's a pound." Your lie will remain relative to an invariable measure of the true. If customers check it, they can see that they are being robbed, and you know by how much you are robbing them: a truth remains as a judge between you. But if the demon induces you to tamper with the scale itself, it is the criterion of the true which is denatured, there is no longer any possible control. And little by little you will forget that you are cheating.
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Liberals understand Merton's enjoinder much better than conservatives.
Conservatives spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy looking for reasons not to love the unworthy.
A conservative's joy achieves climax when s/he finds biblical reason to condemn (and preferably damn) "the worthless."
Biblical Literalism And The Cultivation Of Hatred
Conservatives spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy looking for reasons not to love the unworthy.
A conservative's joy achieves climax when s/he finds biblical reason to condemn (and preferably damn) "the worthless."
Biblical Literalism And The Cultivation Of Hatred
"My Gripe With Christianity"
The Christian Doctrine Of Damnation... And The Destruction Of Christ-Spirit
The Christian Doctrine Of Damnation... And The Destruction Of Christ-Spirit
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
!["You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." Jesuit priest Tom | made w/ Imgflip meme maker]()
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton
Why Don't Christians Loathe This Guy Just For Trashing Every American Standard?
https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/09/why-dont-christians-loathe-this-guy.html
https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/09/why-dont-christians-loathe-this-guy.html
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Mexican Grandmother Launches YouTube Cooking Show & It Hits 800K Subscribers In 1 Month
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Brain Pickings: "Lorraine Hansberry On Depression And Its Most Reliable Antidote"
"Lorraine Hansberry On Depression And Its Most Reliable Antidote"
“I am sitting here… feeling cold, useless, frustrated, helpless, disillusioned, angry and tired.”
BY MARIA POPOVA, Brain Pickings
While I stand with Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her exquisite admonition against the dangerous myth of the suffering artist, it has always seemed to me — both from a deep immersion in the personal histories of long-gone artists and from direct experience in contemporary creative communities — that artists are more porous to the world than other people and therefore more vulnerable to suffering. To be an artist is to be a human being who feels everything more deeply, the beautiful as well as the terrible, and builds of those feelings bowers where others can safely and sacredly process their own. Whitman intuited this when he observed that those capable of “sunny expanses and sky-reaching heights” are also apt “to dwell on the bare spots and darknesses.” Tchaikovsky articulated it in his touching resolve to find beauty amid the wreckage of the soul. Nietzsche knew it when he traced the wild oscillations of depression and hope.
Among the artists who plummeted to such depths of darkness while buoying the spirit of their times was Lorraine Hansberry (May 19, 1930–January 12, 1965) — the visionary playwright and civil rights activist, who revolutionized our cultural landscape of possibility and from whom generations of artists and ordinary people alike, including other visionaries like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, drew courage and inspiration.
For all her soaring intellect and trailblazing genius, Hansberry’s heart sank low with alarming regularity. In a diary entry from 1955, penned just as her star was beginning to rise and included in Imani Perry’s excellent biography Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (public library), Hansberry observes her depression with that hollowing detachment so familiar to those who have been severed from themselves by this unforgiving malady:
It is curious how intellectual I have become about the whole thing… [about] what I apparently am. My unhappiness has become a steady, calm quiet sort of misery. It is always with me and when for a moment something or other stirs me from its immediate ravages (thank God that is still possible) — I wonder at its absence.
To be sure, much of Hansberry’s depression was rooted in the dissonance of her being a gay woman (“what I apparently am”) in a heterosexual marriage that was a great creative and intellectual partnership but not her great love. Even so, depression is an illness in which we can never speak of causality — only of contributing factors, of which there are always many, both psychological and physiological, present in varying degrees and intricately intertwined. But beneath the particulars of any life, there beats a common heart of experience, which Hansberry channels with devastating candor. From the pit of another depression, she writes to her husband:
I am sitting here in this miserable little bungalow, in this miserable camp that I once loved so much, feeling cold, useless, frustrated, helpless, disillusioned, angry and tired. The week past that I spoke to you about was the height of all those things to the point where I didn’t care too much a couple of times whether or not I woke mornings.
In a redemptive passage, she turns to nature for the most reliable, perhaps the only, salve:
Hills, the trees, sunrise and sunset — the lake the moon and the stars / summer clouds — the poets have been right in these centuries darling, even in its astounding imperfection this earth of ours is magnificent.
Perhaps she was thinking of the poet Keats — another artist of towering genius, whose spirits often sank to unfathomable lows — who a century and a half earlier found kindred solace in his own experience of depression and the mightiest remedy for a heavy heart; or perhaps of Whitman, who pondered what remains when the world has lost its sheen and answered: “Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”
Complement this fragment of the thoroughly inspiriting Looking for Lorraine with Jane Kenyon’s stunning poem about life with and after depression, then revisit poet May Sarton’s cure for despair.
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Video Of Turkey's Trump-Sanctioned Atrocities Against Uncle Sam's Allies, The Kurds
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Seth Meyers' A Closer Look At Rudy Giuliani Associates' Arrest As Impeachment Support Rises
Seth Meyers' A Closer Look At Rudy Giuliani Associates' Arrest As Impeachment Support Rises
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Seth Meyers Closer Look: "Trump Releases Damning Ukraine Memo"
Trump Releases Damning Ukraine Memo Amid Impeachment Inquiry
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The Daily Show's Trevor Noah: "Chaos Unfolds After Trump Gives Kurds The Cold Shoulder"
"Chaos Unfolds After Trump Gives Kurds The Cold Shoulder"
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Seth Myers'"A Closer Look": Trump Pressured Ukraine to Meddle in the 2020 Election
Trump Pressured Ukraine to Meddle in the 2020 Electio
Seth Myers'"A Closer Look"
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John Lennon's Last Interview: Nine Hours Of Conversation Three Days Before He Died
John Lennon's Last Interview
Nine Hours Of Conversation Three Days Before He Died
Nine Hours Of Conversation Three Days Before He Died
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/john-lennon-the-last-interview-179443/
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John Lennon
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lennon
![Image result for john lennon, new york city]()
John Lennon
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lennon
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/entertainment/2013/10/09/on_john_lennons_birthday_performers_at_tribute_concert_announced/lennon.jpg)
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Peace And Justice Activist Mary Rider Recites Poem At Plowshares Celebration In Raleigh, NC
Plowshares And The Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base: 25 Years For Trying To Save The Planet
https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/03/plowshares-and-kings-bay-naval.html
https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/03/plowshares-and-kings-bay-naval.html
Friend Mary Rider gave a superb poetry reading at last Friday's gathering of war resisters and Christian pacifists in Raleigh, North Carolina. (A YouTube link to Mary's declamation is below.)
The purpose of Friday's gathering was to honor the lifelong peace and justice work of Mary and husband Patrick O'Neill of the "Kings Bay Plowshares" movement
"Plowshares And The Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base: 25 Years For Trying To Save The Planet"...
See MoreThe purpose of Friday's gathering was to honor the lifelong peace and justice work of Mary and husband Patrick O'Neill of the "Kings Bay Plowshares" movement
"Plowshares And The Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base: 25 Years For Trying To Save The Planet"...
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