THE HEROISM OF MAKING AMENDS

                                      Neville Raymond

Making amends is one of those life-changing things that only our species is capable of to any significant degree.  

A sergeant responsible for the death of one of his men spends a lifetime trying to live down his guilt.  

A drunk driver who kills an innocent child spends her whole life trying to make it right. 

What about doctors who give vaccinations that result in life-shattering injuries?  

We have no idea how many of them there are.  

Or how dedicated some of them are to making amends.  

It is one of the great unsung accomplishments of the medical community in this day and age.

2 = 2 = 4 IS AN ANTISEMITIC CONSPIRACY THEORY

                                                             Neville Raymond

Has anybody heard of DC Councilman Trayon White?  

https://www.thehour.com/news/article/His-anti-Semitic-remarks-touched-off-an-12779261.php

https://www.vox.com/.../dc-lawmaker-anti-semitism-conspiracy-theory-trayon-white

https://www.washingtonpost.com/...remarks.../529a4f82-2c62-11e8-b0b0-f706877db61...

https://www.haaretz.com › U.S. News

Goggle is awash with the fake outrage and indignation he touched off by warning his constituents to be on guard against Big Money monkeying around with the weather.

All the power-brokers and pundits ganged up on him to force him to eat crow - or given that he is black, perhaps we should say, Jim Crow.

OK.  Before we go working ourselves into a rabbinical dudgeon, can we at least get our facts straight?

DOCUMENTED FACT #1  

Weather modification has been around for decades.  

Giant weather modification installations like the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Alaska were designed by the government to engineer the weather.  

Even a simple technique like cloud seeding was used as far back as the Vietnam War.  

In April 2016  MIT Technology Review re-published the following statement - “Within the past decade man has had sufficient success with manipulating weather processes to encourage him to press on toward greater and more precise control.”  

And they were quoting a scientist who wrote that in the MIT Technology Review issue of 1969! 

In 2014, the Navy - in the person of David Walker, Deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for science, technology and engineering - publicly confirmed previous conjectures in regards to weather modification and the projected closure of the HAARP facility.  

It is “not an area that we have any need for in the future” and it would not be a good use of Air Force research funds to keep HAARP going. “We’re moving on to other ways of managing the ionosphere, which the HAARP was really designed to do,” he said. “To inject energy into the ionosphere to be able to actually control it.  But that work has been COMPLETED.”

And just a couple of years ago the U.S. government officially provided a “Notice of Intent” on the pages of the Pasadena Star Classified, brazenly announcing their plan to carry out weather modification in Los Angeles County!  

DOCUMENTED FACT #2

Our democracy is a sham because Big Money financiers control our politicians and shape their policies. 

More than a hundred years ago, a famous spokesman for the People’s Party made it crystal-clear: 

“Wall Street owns the country.  It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street."

A recent Princeton University study found that the average American appears to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy.  

By the same token, monied interests literally spend billions influencing the government and receive trillions in return.  

In the last five yers, the 200 most politically active corporations in the US spent $5.8 billion influencing our government with lobbying and campaign contributions and got $4.4 trillion in taxpayer support - a return of 750 times their investment!    

So what happens when we put Documented Fact #1 and Documented Fact #2 together?  

We are logically bound to draw this unexceptional conclusion.  

Those who use money to control the laws of the federal government can use the high-tech capabilities available to federal agencies to control the laws of nature that  govern the weather.  

Why, then, is it ridiculous to claim that the biggest financial combine of all - the Rothschild/Rockefeller dynasty - can exercise control over what is being done to the weather through the public servants and national security bureaucrats they control, whether directly or indirectly?

Here is the most damning part of the campaign of mockery and vilification that scapegoated DC Council member Trayon White.    

Not a single media outlet took White’s remarks as a cue to open a national dialogue on the scandalous control of our democracy by Wall Street bankers in general, and by trillionaires like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds in particular.

Not a single media outlet took Trayon White’s remarks as a cue to open a national dialogue on the latest developments in the technology of weather modification and what governmental rules and regulations (if any are in place to guard against their on-going abuse.  

But all of them without exception pounced on the man as being ‘anti-semitic' for saying (gasp!) that the financial powers that be can manipulate our meteorological climate in the same way that they control our political climate.

Now if that isn’t just like saying that 2+2 = 4 is a conspiracy theory!

Or worse, that it is an anti-semitic comment!

Hadn’t we better repent of putting two and two together and run to our Rabbi for absolution?!

WELL, IF THAT DOESN’T TAKE THE CAKE

by Neville Raymond 

There’s nothing like the big picture for showing up how small-minded people can be. 

Look at the baker who wouldn’t bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.  
In America we made a federal case out of it!  
Have we lost all sense of perspective?  
It’s not that such an idea lacks legs or that it won’t take us far.  There are no limits to what we can accomplish by refusing to put our skillset to work for people or causes that offend our moral, political, and yes, religious sensibilities.  
But we do have to pick and choose our battles. 

In the scale of things, many things ought to strike us as abominations on an epic, if not a biblical scale.  
It would be understandable if we refused to lay our creative gifts at the feet of those who poison our air, pollute our ground water and exhaust the earth’s ability to renew itself.  
Now that would make a whole heap of sense.  
Imagine if groups of tens or hundreds or thousands of people withheld the fruits of their industry and ingenuity from those who jeopardize our collective health, darken our children’s future and imperil our planet's very existence.  
That might just mark a sea change.

It would be understandable if we refused to place our services at the disposal of those with blood on their hands.  
Now that would make a whole heap of sense.  
Imagine if we forged a group consensus to withhold our labor and craftsmanship from those who routinely offend our core belief in the sanctity of human life.  
Imagine if jewelers refused to make wedding rings, florists refused to make wedding bouquets, caterers refused to cater wedding receptions, photographers refused to visually document the occasion, and priests refused to officiate over wedding ceremonies on behalf of those who choose to send solders to maim and kill brown-skinned people in faraway lands or to militarize cops to shoot unarmed black teenagers like mad dogs on the streets. 

It would be understandable if we refused to serve at the beck and call of those who use their monopoly of money to swindle and enslave the rest of the world.  
Now that would make a whole heap of sense.  
Imagine if we formed a grassroots movement to withhold our time and energy from those violate our core belief in the preciousness of every human life.  
Imagine if we refused to make our clerical help or administrative support or managerial know-how available to those who use their control of the banking system to trap an entire class of people in dead-end jobs, bankrupt entire countries with odious debts, or impose drastic austerity budgets that drive people from Buenos Aires to Bangladesh to destitution or suicide by making it impossible for them to feed, clothe and house their families. 

But to play the boycott card with gay sex?  
That is what we see fit to target with our outrage?  
Not those who batter or rape their partners but those who consensually sleep with partners of the same sex?  

Just think of it.  
Here we could refuse to perform a vast array of vital services for those who use their monopoly power over money, oil and pharmaceuticals to plunder and exploit, prey on and poison our fellow man.  
We could refuse to pick their food, wait on their tables, pilot and chauffeur them hither and thither, answer their phones and emails, clean their mansions, mow their lawns and trim their hair.  
We could refuse to act as their security guards, fight their legal battles, keep their computer systems running, advise them on strategies to get away with murder, and circulate any number of falsehoods and slanders in the mass media to befuddle the majority of people and turn them against their own best interests. 

But heaven forbid!  

All that doesn’t offend our deepest moral sensibilities and cherished spiritual values!  
It doesn’t violate our freedom of expression and trample on our constitutional right to liberty and equality.  
For when it comes right down to it, the one thing that really goads us into making a political stand is two men having sex!