Space Oddity

Astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield makes the first complete "music video" from space, singing David Bowie's "Space Oddity" from the International Space Station!  Very cool.   

the latest lie

Well, shocker!  One of the latest "scandals" is total bullshit.   Read below.

How many times have Republicans pulled this shit?  It's obvious they cannot win on merits because they just keep on creating fake scandal after fake scandal.  

What does it say about our "democracy" when one of the two major parties uses every tool of deception it can find to fabricate lies and distractions?  They just cannot play fair at all.  Bastards!  (They are probably proud of this behavior.  After all, we keep falling for it.)

Read the snips below and read the entire story here. 

The Latest Lie:  IRS Targeted Conservatives

by Dave Johnson

The corporate media is blasting out the story that the IRS “targeted conservative groups.” Some in the media say there was “IRS harassment of conservative groups.” Some of the media are going so far as claiming that conservative groups were “audited.”

This story that is being repeated and treated as “true” is just not what happened at all. It is one more right-wing victimization fable, repeated endlessly until the public has no choice except t believe it.

Conservative Groups Were Not “Targeted,” “Singled Out” Or Anything Else

You are hearing that conservative groups were “targeted.” What you are not hearing is that progressive groups were also “targeted.” So were groups that are not progressive or conservative.

All that happened here is that groups applying to the IRS for special tax status were checked to see if they were engaged in political activity. They were checked, not targeted. Only 1/3 of the groups checked were conservative groups.

Once again: Only 1/3 of the groups checked were conservative groups.

Conservative groups were not “singled out,” were not “targeted” and in the end none were denied special tax status — even though many obviously should have been.

From last week’s House hearings on this:

Rep. Peter Roskam, R-IL: “How come only conservative groups got snagged?”

Outgoing acting IRS commissioner Steve Miller: “They didn’t sir. Organizations of all walks and all persuasions were pulled in. That’s shown by the fact that only 70 of the 300 organizations were tea party organizations, of the ones that were looked at by TIGTA [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration].”

Bet you didn’t see that blasted all over your TV news that night.

Click here to watch the video clip of this. It’s worth it..

snip

What Did Happen?

Here’s the story. After the “Citizen’s United” decision allowed unlimited corporate money into elections there was a flood of applications to get special tax status that allowed an organization to hide its donors from the public, and in some cases even be tax-exempt. But the rules say that political groups can’t get this special tax status. The IRS has to check out applications for tax status to see if it is really a political group trying to sneak in to a special tax status.

Because they were flooded and couldn’t check out every applying organization, the IRS group looked for things in the applications that “flagged” an organization as a possibly a political group. These flagged applications were then passed along to specialists to look deeper and determine if they were legit or not.

snip

So What Was The “Wrongdoing”?

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) has issued a full report:Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review that looked into the accusation that the IRS “targeted” tea party groups that were applying for special tax status for extra scrutiny. The report is not all that long. You should read it. (Apparently most the people you are hearing from in the media haven’t read it.)

According to the report, the swamped IRS group involved in this came up with ways — “criteria” — to identify groups that really needed to be checked further because it was possible they might be engaged in the kind of political activity that would exclude them from getting the special tax status. (The rules for what constitutes political activity that would keep a group for getting special tax status are, to say the least, not clear. See the PS below.)Some groups were chosen to receive the required scrutiny because they had “political-sounding” names. Some of the “political-sounding names” included the words “tea party.”Others included “We the People” and “Take Back the Country.” (The IG report does not disclose if or which other “political sounding names” were also used as criteria.)

And the other problem was that the scrutiny these groups received involved some “unnecessary, burdensome questions.”

That was the extent of the wrongdoing. 

snip

This is not the first time the Obama administration was taken in by false stories originating at right-wing propaganda outlets before the real facts were known. Van Jones had to leave the Obama administration after Glenn Beck accused him of being a “communist” and other right-wing sites accused him of being a “9/11 Truther.” Shirley Sherrod was fired from the Department of Agriculture after the Breitbart (the same website that had showed the doctored ACORN videos) posted doctored video that made it appear she had made racist remarks — even though the full video later showed the opposite to be true.

The great Brad Blog tells these stories, in IRS ‘Scandal’ Appears Nearly as Phony as Shirley Sherrod, Van Jones, ACORN ‘Scandals’,

… if you listened only to the corporate media, you — like the Obama Administration — also probably thought that the phony, trumped-up “scandals” that led to the inappropriate firing of USDA official Shirley Sherrod, the cowardly firing of White House green jobs adviser Van Jones and the outrageous federal defunding of ACORN were also the unhappy result of an endemic culture of corruption by the Obama Administration, the Democratic Party and its insidious political apparatchiks.

Those fake scandals, however, all three of them, were shams. They were eventually identified as such, though only after a great deal of harm to Sherrod, Jones and ACORN had already been done by the Democrats who fell for them and acted out of knee-jerk and cowardly fear to try and contain the perception of “scandal” which was, naturally, helped along by the very loud misreporting of “the nightly news”.

Original.  

One wonders what the next orchestrated lying scheme these bastards will employ? 

This kind of crap makes me skeptical of ANYTHING that comes from Republicans.   But that's why it worked in this case;  everyone is sensitive to IRS abuses, and we are sensitive to IRS over-reach.  Of course, in this case, like so many others, it's the GOP, not the IRS, that is playing fast and loose with the facts and abusing the public trust.

Ted Rall

Ted has another good toon today, and it's got that ring of truth to it.

It's a damn shame that the Dems seem to not have a stomach for impeachment.  After all, if ANYONE deserved to be impeached in the last 20 years it was George W. Bush:  lying us into Iraq; illegal wiretapping; illegal torture; totally asleep at the wheel on 9/11; firing of US attorneys that wouldn't play along; outing of a CIA agent for political gain.  The list is almost endless.  Go here for an almost endless list.

And yet, when the Dems regained the House and Senate in 2006, new Dem Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that impeachment (of Bush) was "off the table."  

Off the table?   What the ...

You talk about your missed golden opportunities, or shooting yourself in the foot?

Republicans don't know how lucky they are, thanks to most Dems having little or no spine.  Or ... maybe they do know, and that's why they act like they do.

state of the universe

And now a few words from my favorite "unknown" comic, Mr. "Under-the Radar" Swami Beyondananda.

I don't know how I missed his 2013 State of the Universe message a couple of months ago.  I must have fallen into a time sink.

Well, the world didn't end on December 22, 2012.  Talk about an anti-climax.  The shift of the ages happened seamlessly, as the Creator hit Re-Start and the Show got renewed for another 26,000 years.

I don't know about you, but I'm inspired.  I'm like, "Start the world - I want to get ON!"

So let's just say the rapture happened and we all got born again without reincarnating.  In other words, the shift has hit the fan.  And if you're not a fan of shifting now, you will be soon.  The planets and stars have done their part.  Now it's time for humanity to shift our karma out of reverse and get our assets in gear.

You probably don't get the Timeless Times where you live, but beings from across the Universe are rooting for us.  Last month, their headline was, "We're Betting On the Human Race."

I know this because I just got back from a trans-universal tour seeking the Key to the Universe (turns out, it's been left unlocked so the joke was on me) and I come bearing a Universal message for humanity:  It's time to shift or get off the pot.

Or, stay on the pot if you need pot to shift you.  Whatever it takes. 

It's time for us to use our intelligence intelligently, and begin thinking like a species - because in terms of global footprint, call us Bigfoot.  And given our big global footprint, we must develop a big global brain and even bigger global heart to weave us back into the web of life.  We don't want to flunk third dimension, do we?

And if we are - as evolutionary biology is now telling us - all cells in the body of a super-organism called Humanity, it's time we gather all good intentions under One Big Intent:  Thrival for all.

I know, I know.  I am proposing a sane world.  I must be crazy.

But I'm not the only one.  More and more humans are going sane, and committing themselves to turning the world into one big sane asylum.  People are waking up and wising up, and the good news is the "evolutionary upwising" gathered esteem in 2012. 

Take the Presidential campaign - please!

In sharp repudiation of the conventional belief that there's no such thing as a moderate Republican, the people of the United States thumbed their nose at convention and actually elected one President.  So there!  No longer high on hopium, a more sober body politic made what they saw was the better choice - positive change in small increments, as opposed to negative change in large excrements.

Speaking of which, the never-ending war on terror ("We're going to win the war to end all wars, even if it takes us forever!") went droning on in 2012, and we now have space-age wind-up toys doing our assassinations for us.  As for success, it's been hit-and-miss, mostly hit.  Because even when they miss, they still hit something, right?

Oh, and in 2012 the climate over climate change got heated up, as reality-deniers faced off against ... well, reality.  So, is climate change real?  Well, I'll put it this way.  I just came back from a terrific vacation in the future.  Spent a glorious week in Tropicanada.

And the gun debate has had everybody up in arms.  Listen, every child in America should be taught the appropriate use of arms as soon as they have arms to raise - hugging.  Hug first, ask questions later.  Come up with your hands out!

If that doesn't isolate the sociopathogens, I don't know what will.

Join the UPwising - Wake UP, Wise UP, Grow UP, Show UP

Here's some good news.  Now is the perfect time to make the shift, and I will tell you why.  Because it's too late to do it sooner, that's why.  I'll put it bluntly. If we humans don't begin rowing together in the same direction, we're going to be up shift creek without a paddle.

Now as you know, there are two kinds of mystics in the world - the optimystics and the pessimystics.  The pessimystics tell us "the sky is falling!"  The optimystics say, "No ... it only looks that way, because WE are ascending."

Personally, I am an optimystic realist.  While many look at the world situation and declare the glass 95% empty, I take the opposite position.  To me, it's 5% full!

So yes, we have an uphill journey.  But otherwise, it's all downhill.

Now there are those who say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, while others swear by the 12-step.  I present here a compromise - four simple steps to make sure we step out in the right direction, mathematically guaranteed to work three times faster than 12-step.

Now, if you remember I presented the same four-step program in last year's State of the Universe.  Please forgive me for serving up laughed-overs, but these four steps that will take us from children of God to adults of God are even more important this year.

They are ...Wake Up ... Wise Up ... Grow Up ... Show Up.

First step, Wake Up Laughing.  As the ancient Foo Ling Masters who achieved Cosmic Comic Consciousness came to realize, life is a joke ... but God is laughing with us, not at us.  The Creator is watching the Comedy Channel, and WE are what's on.  Yes, the world is in serious condition - largely because of our conditioning to be serious.  So instead of having gravity bring us down, we can choose to have levity lift us up.  Hearty laughter makes us go completely out of our head, and puts us right in the heart.  And that brings us to Step Two.

Second step, Wise Up Loving.  To counterbalance all the challenges of being human, we were given the power of love, the universal solvent.  You have a problem?  Dissolve it in a warm solution of love.  Through the power of love, we can metabolize all the BS (Belief Systems) that we mistake for reality.  And the good news is, love is more powerful than fear.  How do I know?  You ever hear anyone singing, All You Need Is Fear?

Third step, Grow Up Giving.  Each of us has been given a special gift just for entering - so you are already a winner!  We are the Creator's creation created to create, so what are we waiting for?  Time to give all we were given to give ...  before we give out.  The more of our gifts we give, the more we grow upward.  So if you're spiritually upwardly mobile, here is my suggestion.  Make a "bucket list" of all the undertakings you wish to undertake before being overtaken by the undertaker.  And then undertake ... and over-give, and you can't grow wrong.

And finally, Show Up Living.  Show up for the Greatest Show On Earth ... it's better than reality TV ... it's REALITY!  A once-in-a-lifetime world win adventure show, where the whole world can win.  It's the Hero's Journey with One Big Hero ... the Human Race.

I've said it before, and it certainly applies now.  If you don't like the current programming, turn off your TV and tell-a-vision instead.  So, I will tell my vision.  I see it now.  The Timeless Times headline that reads:  "How Did The Human Race Turn Out?  They WON.  They Achieved Oneness and Won."

Original.

cult of Dusty

I discovered "The Cult of Dusty" via "The Friendly Atheist".  In this episode, Dusty jumps all over those "Christian" kids who were featured in that sorry video called "The Thaw."

hemp oil men

At this moment in time, most of the "evidence" that hemp oil is a "miracle" treatment for all sorts of ailments is only anecdotal, since it is still illegal, especially in the USA, to grow hemp.  

When we get marijuana reclassified from a "Schedule I" drug to a "Schedule II" drug, we will see an explosion of research.

Here is a relatively recent documentary by Chris Harrigan.

balancing act

Got 7:43?  Sure you do.

1st hemp crop

I wish I could invest somehow in hemp cultivation.  There has to be a way ...

I wish my company was interested in doing some energy research on hemp.  I have gone up and down the authority chain in my company to finally receive a four-word response:  "not at this time."  Which I guess means that maybe at some future time they will research it.  

Frankly, the research is already in.  What we need is some major companies to scale up production, but as long as federal law still prohibits industrial hemp cultivation, progress will be sporadic.

New law allows Colorado hemp crop

SPRINGFIELD, Colo. (AP) - Springfield farmer Ryan Loflin is now watching over one of Colorado's first industrial hemp crops in almost 60 years.

The passage of Amendment 64 in November allows commercial growing, even though hemp, like marijuana, is illegal under federal law.

Hemp is genetically related to marijuana but contains little or no THC, the drug substance in marijuana. Hemp has dozens of uses in food, cosmetics, clothing and industrial materials.

According to the Denver Post , Loflin began planting 60 acres on acreage previously used to grow alfalfa on Monday. He and business partner Chris Thompson also are installing a seed press to produce hemp oil.

Original.

And here is a great site for all sorts of info on hemp - Hemphasis.