Call your congressperson

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

phone on fire

Alan Grayson says it’s very, very close in the House. Your calls make a difference. Please pick up the phone, call (202) 224-3121, ask for your Congressman, and register your disapproval. Say this: “Vote NO on Fast Track.”

A House Democrat on Wednesday accused President Obama of losing touch with the real world, as his administration pushes for fast-track authority to finish a sweeping trade pact.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who opposes the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership and legislation to help finalize it, said Obama lives “in a cloister” at the White House, while Sherman and his fellow lawmakers “are out seeing the real world.”

“We’re in our districts. We don’t live in a cloister where the only people who can get in are the captains of industry and the titans of Wall Street,” he said. “We’re the ones that are standing at the county fairs, talking to whoever wants to come up and talk to us.”

Sherman said living in the White House for the last six years had put Obama out of touch with the common American and that he should listen to the perspective of fellow Democrats who oppose him on trade.

“The president should trust us, his 200 most fervent supporters who, unlike him, have a chance to get out and see the real world,” he said. “We have the same values, but we don’t have the same lifestyle.”

Obama and congressional Democrats have clashed for months over the trade pact, with the fight coming to a head in the push to pass fast-track legislation that would allow Obama to finalize terms of the 12-nation agreement by limiting Congress to an up-or-down vote.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) said it was up to Democrats to defeat the bill and “save President Obama from his advisers.”

With a vote set for Friday that would send the fast-track legislation to the president, House Democrats in opposition are still trying to rally support to block it. Critics of the deal gathered outside the Capitol Wednesday to reiterate their opposition and urge Democrats to hold firm and block the bill.

Dream telepathy research

~ susie

https://youtu.be/GbHQDHaM6eo

I’ve experienced this too much myself for me to even question it. But not everyone has the same experience:

Filmmaker in Residence Ronni Thomas–director of The Midnight Archive–introduces the newest episode of his Morbid Anatomy Museum Presents film series. Entitled “Transmitting Thought: The Maimonides Dream Lab,” this short film introduces us to psychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner’s provocative explorations of telepathic sensitivity and the dream state undertaken in 1960s Brooklyn.

It is easy to subscribe to a set of rules when those rules are set by science rather than religion. But science lives with a bias — that in order for an idea to be explored it must be observable, measurable and repeatable. Yet the irrational is part of our world, especially when it comes to the subject of human consciousness. Current scientific thinking brings an almost religious devotion to debunking anything that appears “irrational” or outside the rules and norms of core science.

But such an approach leaves tremendous gaps in our understanding — especially in questions of ESP, precognition, and other queries into non-physical intelligence. But this was not always the case. For a brief time, from roughly the 1930s to the 1960s, the field of academic parapsychology flourished in the United States. And at the forefront of the field was the American psychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner. In this film, Krippner discusses his research at the Maimonides Dream Lab in Brooklyn, NY in the 1960s. There, he and his colleagues conducted studies that explored the use of telepathy within the altered state of dreaming.

Through numerous experiments, including one with the rock band The Grateful Dead, the Maimonides team produced substantial scientific research on the topic of ‘dream telepathy,’ until the demise of the lab’s funding. Learn what we know — and what we lost — in Transmitting Thought : the Maimonides Dream Lab.

What trade deals look like

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Looks like they’re voting on fast track today. Have you called your representatives yet?

(Washington, DC) – A new ad from the AFL-CIO and USW highlights how the loss of manufacturing jobs due to bad trade policy over the past 30 years has hit African-American populations especially hard in cities like Baltimore. The video makes clear that the battle over Fast Track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is not about politics: it’s about people like former steelworker Mike Lewis.

“One can’t help but be saddened. This was once called the ‘Beast of the East.’ We made the steel that went into the Golden Gate Bridge…” Lewis says in a video message to President Obama, while standing on the decimated site where he proudly worked for 32 years as a full-time crane operator. The dream of economic opportunities disappeared in August of 2012 when Mike and 2,100 of his steelworker brothers and sisters who permanently lost their jobs at the steel plant in Sparrows Point in Baltimore.

The union hall where workers came together for so many years in good times has been a food bank that many rely on to feed their families. The closing of the steel plant and other manufacturing plants started the economic downfall that many in the African-American community have not recovered from.
Continue reading “What trade deals look like” →

Friday roundup

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

* So you know Scott Walker is trying to destroy his state’s higher education system — and doing a pretty good job, which leads me to believe he’ll walk away with the GOP nomination. Because they HATE smart people!

* The RNC and the Koch brothers are fighting over data!

* So it was the CIA who invented the term “conspiracy theory” to marginalize anyone who, you know, caught on.

* Efforts to expand voting rights got a shot in the arm from Clinton’s recent speech.

* OH, and hackers may have hit every federal employee, ever.