August 4, 2014

God talks to Bundy now? Why am I in this handbasket and where are we going?

August 4, 2014

Oh, Freddie is really gonna hate the SS and NSA like all the rest of the Bagger Ignoratti!

Because nothing says terminal dumbassery like:

Freddie, the original Patriot© poster:

Read as I spew how I'm gonna kill on Facebook (alleged to be set up by the CIA) because...

Well, Freedom!

Freddie's first Like:

Follow me on Twitter, (set up by Homeland Security) to hear me tell you how I'm gonna kill Obama and all those libruls!

Freddie's second Like:

Be sure to listen to my dumb criminal plans from my wireless devices! I'm sooo hot, you're gonna love me!

It'll be just between you and me and a few thousand towers and some satellites! It's Top Secret!

Freddie's third Like:

I'll keep paying to be surveilled, then whine about it! How dare they do what the contract I signed onto said they'd do! Tyranny!

Freddie's best friend. What friend? No, make that his fourth Like:

I'm leaving my cam running on my computer and cell phone, so my image will be sent out to the world at large! Day and night with the lights on, too! Only real Patriots© can see me!

Freddie's mother. No wait, she doesn't come down to the basement. So it's his fifth Like:

Listen to my mail voice threatening people, but it's okay since I set my Caller ID to Anonymous! I'm gonna flame away! You'll never take me alive, ya low-down dirty copper!

Freddie's girlfriend. Nah, just kidding. Freddie's sixth Like:

Take that you dirty spies! I'm so clever, you can't catch me! It's not like Google saves stuff, right? Uh, am-i-rite?

Agent Mike:

Hehehe! I just love The Idiocracy! Now I'm calling for pizza delivery!

August 4, 2014

Yup, that you are... Into The Wild:

August 3, 2014

'Despiciable!' 'Obama!' 'Slander!' 'Patriots!' Really? C'mon, Liz:

Stop punching yourself!

August 3, 2014

And although he admits the GOP wouldn't reform immigration laws, it's still Obama's fault.

Excuses from the criminal mind:

'Just look at her! What did she expect? She made me rape her!'

And:

'He shoulda known I was gonna rob him! It's not my fault.'

And the 'simply not follow the law' ruse is another lie they are telling.

Obama is following the law on children at the border signed and reauthorized by Bush before Obama got into office.

Yet it's illegal if Obama obeys it?

What's dangerous is the media making his words viral.

The initial meeting of the one-term only conspiracy was that no matter what PBO did, they'd ignore his authority, and they full intended to impeach him right after he was elected in 2008. Now GOPs put impeaching him in state platforms.

They said they had to destroy his legacy.

Which means they want to destroy the ideals and people the legacy benefits and the changes they elected him to make.

If America stands by and lets this travesty happen, as they did in 2010, and doesn't vote the GOP out of office, we're done both as a nation and as a relatively free people in the world.

August 3, 2014

I'd read Brautigan's 1967 poem 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,' but

didn't quite buy it at the time. How much the world has changed since then is stunning. We are lured into such a model of existance from every direction, with positive and negative views.

It was made into tv series which I'd never seen in 2011. But it was in the UK. And it was for entertainment, although Wikipedia describes it as a documentary series. What I found there is critical of it, but still interesting.

Just putting the whole thing here for the DU to read, Wikipedia is not copyrighted. There are a lot of links following the text:

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (TV series) is a 2011 BBC documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis.[1] The series argues that computers have failed to liberate humanity and instead have "distorted and simplified our view of the world around us".[2] The title is taken from the 1967 poem of the same name by Richard Brautigan.[3] The first of three episodes aired on Monday 23 May 2011 at 9pm on BBC2.

Episodes

Love and Power

In the first episode, Curtis tracks the effects of Ayn Rand's ideas on American financial markets, particularly via the influence on Alan Greenspan.

Ayn Rand was born in Russia and moved to America in 1928. She worked for Cecil B. DeMille, where she received inspiration for what would later become The Fountainhead. Later, she moved to New York and set up a reading group called The Collective where they considered her work. On advice from a friend, Greenspan (then a logical positivist) joined The Collective.

When published, although critically savaged, Rand's Objectivist ideas were popular and influenced people working in the technology sector of California. The Californian Ideology, a techno-utopian belief that computer networks could measure, control and self-stabilise societies, without hierarchical political control, and that people could become 'Randian heroes', only working for their own happiness, became widespread in Silicon Valley.

Rand entered into an affair with Nathaniel Branden, another married person in The Collective, which she proposed to justify in terms of her value of "rationality", and with the approval of his wife. After several years, the affair ended violently and it was revealed to the rest of The Collective, which broke up. Rand ended up alone in her New York apartment, although Greenspan continued to visit.

Greenspan entered government in the 70s, and became Chairman of the Federal Reserve. In 1992 he visited the newly elected Bill Clinton. He persuaded him to let the markets grow, cut taxes, and to let the markets stabilise themselves with computer technology, to create the New Economy. This involved using computer models to predict risks and hedge against them, in accordance with the Californian Ideology. However, by 1996, the production figures had failed to increase, but profits were nevertheless increasing; and Greenspan suggested that it wasn't working. After political attacks from all sides, Greenspan changed his mind and decided that perhaps the New Economy was real, but that it couldn't be measured using normal economic measures, and so the apparent boom continued.

In 1994 Carmen Hermosillo published a widely influential essay online, "Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace",[4] and it began to be argued that the result of computer networks had led to, not a reduction in hierarchy, but actually a commodification of personality and a complex transfer of power and information to companies.

Although the Asian miracle had led to long-term growth in South Korea and other countries Joseph Stiglitz began warning that the withdrawing of foreign financial investment from the Far Eastern economies could cause devastation there. However, he was unable to warn the president, being blocked by Robert Rubin, who feared damage to financial interests.

The 1997 Asian financial crisis began as the property bubble in the Far East began to burst in Thailand, causing large financial losses in those countries that greatly affected foreign investors. While Bill Clinton was preoccupied with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Robert Rubin took control of foreign policy and forced loans onto the affected countries. However, after each country agreed to IMF bailout loans, foreign investors immediately withdrew their money, leaving the tax payers with enormous debts and triggering massive economic disasters.

After his handling of the economic effects of 9/11 Alan Greenspan became more important, and in the wake of the Enron scandal he cut interest rates to stimulate the economy. Unusually, this ostensibly failed to cause inflation. It seemed that the New Economy was working to stabilise the economy.

However, in reality, to avoid a repeat of the earlier collapse, China's Politburo had decided to manage America's economy via similar techniques to those used by America on the other Far Eastern countries; by keeping China's exchange rate artificially low, they sold cheap goods to America, and with the proceeds, had bought American bonds. The money flooding into America permitted massive loans to be available to those that would previously be considered too risky. The belief in America was that computers could stabilise and hedge the lending of the money. This permitted lending beyond the point that was actually sustainable. The high level of loan defaulting led ultimately to the 2008 collapse due to a similar housing bubble that the Far Eastern countries had previously faced.

Curtis ends the piece by pointing out that not only had the idea of market stability failed to be borne out in practice, but that the Californian Ideology had also been unable to stabilise it; indeed the ideology has not led to people being Randian heroes but in fact trapped them into a rigid system of control from which they are unable to escape.

The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts

“In the 1960s, an idea penetrated deep into the public imagination that nature is a self-regulating ecosystem, there is a natural order," Curtis says. "The trouble is, it's not true – as many ecologists have shown, nature is never stable, it's always changing. ”

This episode investigates how machine ideas such as cybernetics and systems theory were applied to natural ecosystems, and how this relates to the false idea that there is a balance of nature. Cybernetics has been applied to human beings to attempt to build societies without central control, self organising networks built of people, based on a fantasy view of nature.

Arthur Tansley had a dream where he shot his wife. He wanted to know what it meant, so he studied Sigmund Freud. However, one part of Freud's theory was that the human brain was an electrical machine. Tansley became convinced that, as the brain was interconnected, so was the whole of the natural world, in networks he called ecosystems, which he believed were inherently self-stable and self-correcting and which regulated nature as if it were a machine.

Jay Forrester was an early pioneer in cybernetic systems, who believed that brains, cities and even societies live in networks of feedback loops that control them, and he thought that computers could determine the effects of the feedback loops. Cybernetics therefore viewed humans as nodes in networks, as machines.

The ecology movement adopted this idea also and viewed the natural world as systems as it explained how the natural system could stabilise the natural world, via natural feedback loops.

Norbert Wiener laid out the position that humans, machines and ecology are simply nodes in a network in his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, and this book became the bible of cybernetics.

Howard T. Odum

Howard T. Odum and Eugene Odum were brothers who were both ecologists. Howard collected data from ecological systems and built electronic networks to simulate them. His brother Eugene then took these ideas to make them the heart of ecology, and the hypothesis then became a certainty. However, they had distorted the idea, and simplified the data to an extraordinary degree. That ecology was balanced became an unexamined and unscientific assumption.

Buckminster Fuller

Meanwhile, in the 1960s Buckminster Fuller invented a radically new kind of structure, the geodesic dome which emulated ecosystems by being made of highly connected, relatively weak parts. His other system based ideas inspired the Counterculture movement. Communes of people considering themselves as nodes in a network, without hierarchy, and applied feedback to try to control and stabilise their societies, and used his domes as habitats. These societies mostly broke up within 3 years.

Also in the 1960s Stewart Brand filmed a demonstration of a networked computer system with a graphics display, mouse and keyboard that he believed would save the world by empowering people, in a similar way to the communes, to be free as individuals.

In 1967 Richard Brautigan published the poetry work All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace which called for a cybernetic ecological utopia consisting of a fusion of computers and mammals living in perfect harmony and stability. This part of the documentary appears to borrow from, or the arguments closely echoed, in Andrew Kirk's 2007 environmental history of the California appropriate technology movement and Stewart Brand, "Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catolog and American Environmentalism".

By the 1970s new problems such as overpopulation, limited natural resources and pollution that couldn't be solved by normal hierarchical systems had arrived. Jay Forrester stated that he knew how to solve this, and applied systems theory to the problem and drew a cybernetic system diagram for the world. This was turned into a computer model, which predicted population collapse. This became the basis of the model that was used by the Club of Rome, and the findings from this were published in The Limits to Growth. Forrester then argued for zero growth, to maintain a steady state stable equilibrium within the capacity of the Earth.

Jan Smuts

However, this was opposed by many people within the environmental movement, since the model didn't allow for people to change their values to stabilise the world, and they argued that the model tried to maintain and enforce the current political hierarchy. Arthur Tansley who had invented the term ecosystem, had once accused Field Marshal Jan Smuts of the abuse of vegetational concepts. Smuts had invented a philosophy called holism, where everyone had a 'rightful place', which was to be managed by white races. The 70s protestors claimed that the same conceptual abuse of the supposed natural order was occurring, that it was really being used for political control.

At the time, there was a general belief in the stability of natural systems. However cracks started to appear when a study was made of predator-prey relationship of wolf and elks. It was found that wild population swings had occurred over centuries. Other studies then found huge variations, and a significant lack of homeostasis in natural systems. George Van Dyne then tried to build a computer model, to try to simulate a complete ecosystem based on extensive real-world data, so as to show how the stability of natural systems actually worked. To his surprise the computer model did not stabilize like the Odums' electrical model had. The reason for this lack of stabilization was that he had used extensive data which more accurately reflected reality whereas the Odums and other previous ecologists had "ruthlessly simplified nature." The scientific idea had thus been shown to fail, but the popular idea remained, and even grew as it apparently offered the possibility of a new egalitarian world order.

In 2003, a wave of spontaneous revolutions swept through Asia and Europe. Coordinated only by the internet, nobody seemed to be in overall charge, and no overall aims except self-determination and freedom were apparent. This seemed to justify the beliefs of the computer utopians.

However, the freedom from these revolutions in fact lasted for only a short time. Curtis compared them with the hippie communes, all of which had broken up within three years at the most, by "the very thing that was supposed to have been banished: power." Aggressive members of the group began to bully the weaker ones, who were unable to band together in their own defence because formal power structures had been prohibited by the commune's rules, and even intervention against bullying by benevolent individuals was discouraged.

Adam Curtis closes the piece by stating that it has become apparent that while the self-organising network is good at organising change, it is much less good at what comes next; networks leave people helpless in the face of people already in power in the world.

The Monkey In The Machine and the Machine in the Monkey

This programme looked into the selfish gene theory which holds that humans are machines controlled by genes which was invented by William Hamilton. Adam Curtis also covered the source of ethnic conflict that was created by Belgian colonialism's artificial creation of a racial divide and the ensuing slaughter that occurred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is a source of raw material for computers and cell phones.

William Hamilton went to Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of the Congo while the Second Congo War was raging. He went there to collect Chimpanzee faeces to test his theory that HIV was due to a medical mistake. Unfortunately he caught malaria, for which he took aspirin, which caused a haemorrhage and he died. However, his selfish gene theory lived on.

In 1960 Congo had become independent from Belgium, but governance promptly collapsed, and towns became battle grounds as soldiers fought for control of the mines. America and the Belgians organised a coup and the elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, was kidnapped and executed, creating chaos. The Western mining operations were largely unaffected, however.

Bill Hamilton was a solitary man, and he saw everything through the lens of Darwin's theory of evolution. When he wanted to know why some ants and humans gave up their life for others, he went to Waterloo station and stared at humans for hours, and looked for patterns. In 1963 he realised that most of the behaviours of humans was due to genes, and looking at the humans from the genes' point of view. Humans were machines that were only important for carrying genes, and that it made sense for a gene to sacrifice a human if it meant that another copy of the gene elsewhere would prosper.

In the 1930s Armand Denis made films that told the world about Africa. However, his documentary gave fanciful stories about Rwanda's Tutsis being a noble ruling elite originally from Egypt, whereas the Hutus were a peasant race. In reality they were racially the same and the Belgian rulers had ruthlessly exploited the myth. But when it came to create independence, liberal Belgians felt guilty, and decided that the Hutus should overthrow the Tutsi rule. This led to a blood bath, as the Tutsis were then seen as aliens and were slaughtered.

John von Neumann in the 1940s

In 1967 American George R. Price went to London after reading Hamilton's little known papers and discovering that he was already familiar with the equations, that they were the equations of computers. He was able to show that the equations explained murder, warfare, suicide, goodness, spite, since these behaviours could help the genes. John von Neumann had invented self-reproducing machines, but Price was able to show that the self-reproducing machines were already in existence, that humans were the machines.

This had a bad effect on Price, and Price began to believe that these equations had been given to him by God, even though the equations disproved the existence of God.

In Congo, a civil war was ongoing, and Dian Fossey, who was researching gorillas was captured. She escaped and created a new camp high up on a mountain in Rwanda, where she continued to study gorillas. She tried to completely protect the gorillas, which were very susceptible to human diseases, and with the best of intentions, terrorised the local people and became hated.

In 1973, after converting to extreme Christianity, as a last chance to disprove the selfish gene theories' gloomy conclusions Price decides to start helping poor and homeless people all his possessions in acts of pure altruism, influenced and inspired by Christian religion.

In the Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko changed the Congo's name to Zaire and looted millions of dollars and let mines and industries collapse, killed his opponents and stopped a liberal democracy from forming.

While this was happening, at Fossey's camp, Digit, her favourite gorilla had been killed, and later she was too.

Price's attempt to disprove Hamilton's theory had utterly failed, and he comes to believe he is being followed by the hound of heaven. He finally reveals, in his suicide note, that these acts of altruism brought more harm than good to the lives of homeless people.

Richard Dawkins took the equations and popularised them and explains that humans are simply machines created by the selfish genes; and in a sense reinventing the immortal soul, but as computer code in the form of the genes.

In 1994 the ruling Hutu government set out to eradicate the Tutsi minority. This was explained as incomprehensible ancient rivalry by the Western press. In reality it was due to the Belgian myth created during the colonial rule. Western agencies got involved, and the Tutsi fought back creating chaos. Many flooded across the border into Zaire, and the Tutsi invaded the refuge camps to get revenge. Mobutu fell from power. Troops arrived from many countries, allegedly to help, but in reality to gain access to the country's natural resources, used to produce consumer goods for the west. 4.5 million people died.

Hamilton by this point was well-honoured. However, by now he supported eugenics. He heard a story that HIV had been created from an accident with a polio vaccine, which it was thought could have been infected with a chimp virus. This supported his idea that modern medicine could be negative as he thought medicine opposed the logic of the genes. So he travelled to eastern Congo to look for the virus, through the midst of the murder and chaos. He died, and later research disproved the idea that HIV had come from a medical accident.

Curtis ends the piece by saying that Hamilton's ideas that humans are computers controlled by the genes have been accepted. But he asks whether we have accepted a fatalistic philosophy that humans are helpless computers to explain and excuse the fact that, as in the Congo, we are unable to improve and change the world.

Interviews and reviews

In May 2011, Adam Curtis was interviewed about the series by Katharine Viner in The Guardian,[5] by the Register[6] and by Little Atoms.[7]

Catherine Gee at the Daily Telegraph said that what Adam Curtis "reveals is the dangers of human beings at their most selfish and self-satisfying. Showing no compassion or consideration for your fellow human beings creates a chasm between those able to walk over others and those too considerate – or too short-sighted – to do so."[8]

John Preston also reviewed the first episode, and said that although it showed flashes of brilliance it had an "infuriating glibness too as the web of connectedness became ever more stretched. No one could dispute that Curtis has got a very big bite indeed. But what about the chewing, you ask. There wasn’t any – or nothing like enough of it to prevent a bad case of mental indigestion."[9]

Andrew Anthony published a review in The Observer and The Guardian, and commented on the central premise that we had been made to "believe we could create a stable world that would last for ever" but that he doesn't "recall ever believing that 'we' could create a stable world that would last for ever", and noted that: "For the film-maker there seems to be an objective reality that a determined individual can penetrate if he is willing to challenge the confining chimeras of markets and machines. Forget the internet tycoons. The Randian hero is Curtis himself."[10]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_%28TV_series%29

My objections fall in the realms of the environment and human rights. The ecosystem cannot support this as such things are made with toxic materials that not only harm humans but the rest of the planet's life.

IMO, there will be a more stratified society, ruled by a minority who will be priviledged to get the benefits of this technology and those who will be required to work as robots... just like now. And will be discarded as they are now, when their ability to work is over.

I don't see equality coming out of this, and not because I wouldn't want to see persons who want to live that way get a chance. Perhaps their life could help life on Earth survive.

There is another aspect of which Kaku goes into, of post-human cyborg creations that contain data from the humans who are granted such.

They'll have little in common with humans and other creatures by their very nature. They will consume less in terms of food but organize to keep their supply of what they need to live indefinitely at all costs for their group.

In the video Kaku discussed the possibility of living forever in these bodies and the group of scientists, I presume, and all were very young, cheered. IDK if they thought or cared about the potential loss of the spectrum of things that we consider living.

In other words, this may not be benign for all of Earth. But then, look at what we are doing now.

August 2, 2014

I was actually planning to edit one sentence there:

From:

'We've seen him wet with sweat or rain.'

To:

'We've seen him wet with sweat, rain and tears.'

And in that picture there, I think he is summoning the 'god part of his brain' as some call it:



Whether he's really 'praying' to a power outside himself or to find the words to express his belief in his vision of our nation. He always clarifies at the end of official speeches with these words, even though most don't understand:

'And God bless the United States of America.'

Republicans and Libertarians refer to the United States, and not America. Their emphasis is on 'states' rights,' which is their Trojan horse for dissolving the Union that is the United States of America.

Because it's easier to establish more powerful oligarchies that way to be governed by them. That's the real intent of their words.

But what they tell their followers, is that each state has more sovereignty than the federal government. The Tenthers like Rand, Bundy, the sovereign citizens militants** as well as several official GOP state parties that call for secession in their state platforms, and impeaching Obama for not giving into that, base their objection to all federal law from part of the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, a housekeeping measure to protect rights that not enumerated, not to fight the federal government. The Founders were unwilling to give up what they'd fought to create.

And given the year it was ratified after we'd been fighting off British rule, we would not have wanted any of those rights left to them, or other nations such as France and Spain, who had designs on territory.

Our soveriegnty from European rule was disputed for many years later, and attacked in the War of 1812 and the Civil War itself as the Confederacy sought alliances with foreign powers to break the USA up into their fiefdoms.

We have ideological forces working hard to redefine America, into something that negates the rights of well over half of the population, but their followers either don't realize that or worse yet, approve.

And the continuing degrading of the Union and all it ever hoped to stand for, is for that purpose as well. Reagan and then Bush set into motion a strong disdain and distrust of our federal government because it interfered with the oligarch plan. Our sins are many, but we will not escape them by being divided up into Koch fiefdoms. There will just be no one but the powerful in small regions to rule their citizens with no redress. Corporacracy with no limit, all for the profit of a minority.

Oh, and thanks for the compliment. Your style of writing is much different than mine, comes form the heart, but with a loving view that at times I struggle to express. Too many innocents I've known have been destroyed; the battle is ongoing.

**

Maine’s Gov. LePage Offers Feeble Excuse for Meetings with Extremist Sovereign Citizens Group

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2014/07/04/maines-gov-lepage-offers-feeble-excuse-for-meetings-with-extremist-sovereign-citizens-group/

Google search terms 'splc hate watch sovereign citizens' to see many killings have been done people in that cult. The video is a real eye-opener.

August 1, 2014

President Obama: 'I believe in God.'

How To Handle A Heckler

By TheObamaDiary.com - Jul 30, 2014

Found on a link with a negative title, but more information. I don't think Obama characterizes these incidents that way:

President Obama Smacks Down Jesus Heckler By Saying 'I Believe In God'



By Yasmine Hafiz - 07/31/2014

A female heckler interrupted President Barack Obama's speech about the economy in Kansas City, Missouri, on Wednesday by
yelling, "Jesus is the lord of Israel!"*

Unfazed, Obama inquired, "I'm sorry, what are you hollering about?" as the woman repeated her cry. "OK," he said.

As she continued shouting, Obama retorted, "I believe in God, thanks for the prayer. Amen! Thank you."

Before he could go on with his speech, he was interrupted again, this time by the Missouri audience cheering and chanting, "We love you! We love you!"

...As the President arrived at Kansas City's Uptown Theater to deliver his remarks, demonstrators stood outside in protest. Vicki Sciolaro of Leawood came with her family to urge Obama to "do more to protect Israel," according to The Kansas City Star. "It's Biblical," she said. "As Christians, we want to stand with Israel. We’ll stay here ’til we fall over or someone tells us to go home..."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/31/obama-jesus-heckler_n_5639132.html

Perhaps acrimony gets page views, but the 'demonstrators stood outside in protest' phrase does not seem to reflect what is actually going on there. Why does media insist on promoting the idea that every crowd is 'protesting' Obama? For what? Doing his job as the POTUS? Or for being the POTUS?

They seem to be asking for help. They may be misinformed about PBO's support for Israel, which has garnered hatred from those who have good reason to feel Israel has acted with evilly with so many deaths and great suffering.

This thread is not the place to have that discussion, there are forums for that, and this a group about Obama and his supporters. I am expressing my own thoughts for my fellow members in the BOG.

If the group outside thought PBO has not supported Israel, they have been misinformed. He supports all sides in the conflict, and some can't abide his even-handedness, but his job demands that he be. I feel passions can be expressed without being hateful.

I think Obama does 'believe in God,' or else he wouldn't have the faith to keep at the job day in and day out. As Sheshe's thread shows, the 'gates of hell' have been opened on this man:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/110224668

But he still believes in the ideals many Americans want fulfilled. More so than many people apparently do. He is 'a believer.'



In that picture, I see a strong man who is mustering strength by connecting with his 'higher power.' Look at that body language, Obama is preparing for to express his ideals. We've seen him wet with sweat or rain. There is a passion there many can't achieve without a clear vision to keep them going.

Many have been in situations in which one is all alone in fighting for what one thinks is right, and win the day because they called on their belief system or other organized thinking - to bolster them and it worked in the face of despair and fear. I count the actions of MLK, Jr. and others as proof of that.

And seeing that, I recall this poem:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

~ Robert Frost

And also this verse:

"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith..."

~2 Thessalonians 4 : 7, 8

In the words of that belief system, I think Obama would be one of whom is said at the end of his time on Earth:

'Well done, thou good and faithful servant.'

If it plays out as the Bible says, he will continue to be humble and say he was 'only doing his duty.' Humility opens the door to knowledge and achieving greater things, it is not an end in itself.

Whether one is into organized religion or not, there are patterns we follow in life, even if we are not conscious of them. They reflect who we really are.

I see a quality in Obama that I have seldom seen in the realm of politics, of transcendence, and of a person who 'walks the talk,' and it is beautiful to me.

JMHO.

Note: This is the BOG, a safe haven group created by the DU Admins. Please read the SOP.

*This doesn't appear to be the view of the people of Israel, but an American belief. I posted a video in a safe haven for believers on DU, if anyone wants to get a glimpse as to why the woman's claim doesn't hold much water there.

Lurkers, please don't disrespect the SOP of the group there:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12643570

August 1, 2014

A Hug From Tim: "I love you Obama."

TheObamaDiary.com - Jul 31, 2014

‘A Celebration of Special Olympics and A Unified Generation’ at the White House, July 31, 2014

Our President is hard at work everyday!

Note: The BOG is as safe haven group set up DU's Admins.

August 1, 2014

Not publicly. Probably have a private BBQ and dance around a burning cross and wave their flag: